Under the Influence

061

How and why and to what extent Greek culture was absorbed into the ancient Jewish world is not always clear, but that it was is undeniable.

To some extent, the answers depend on whether we study Judaism primarily as a separate culture, developed from its Biblical roots in an unbroken line, or whether we study it primarily as part of the wider cultural and religious history of the Mediterranean and the Near Eastern world. Scholars will naturally respond that both approaches are important. Nevertheless decisions taken at the start of any investigation about which aspect deserves more attention will inevitably color our conclusions. How can the right balance be achieved?

From the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E., Jews lived in a world in which Greek culture carried a certain prestige and offered a route to political influence, first within the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander in the third to first centuries B.C.E., and thereafter within the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. During 062this period—when Alexander’s empire was divided between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, and later when the Romans dominated both the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East—Greek was the language of government and administration. Native elites conformed, at least outwardly, to a Greek way of life and thereby gained access to political control of their own communities. Neither Greeks nor Romans were generally racially prejudiced, but both had a strong cultural prejudice in favor of a Greek way of life, and they encouraged the peoples they conquered and ruled to adopt this way of life.

This pressure to Hellenize came to a head within Jewish society in Jerusalem in the 160s B.C.E. The willingness of even some leading members of the high priesthood in Jerusalem to adopt Greek names—think of the Jewish high priests Jason and Menelaus—attests to the attraction of the dominant culture.

Other Jewish factions, however, claimed that Hellenism constituted a break with the Torah. When the forces of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes defiled the Temple in Jerusalem in 168 B.C.E., it was claimed that this was nothing less than divine punishment for the adoption of Hellenism. This process of Hellenization and the intra-Jewish conflict it produced is described in the Book of Maccabees:

[When the High Priest] Jason came to office, he at once shifted his compatriots over to the Greek 063way of life … He destroyed the lawful ways of living and introduced new customs contrary to the law. He took delight in establishing a gymnasium right under the citadel … Despising the sanctuary and neglecting the sacrifices, [the priests] hurried to take part in the unlawful proceedings in the wrestling arena … For this reason heavy disaster overtook them … (2 Maccabees 4:10–16).

A heroic Jewish revolt against the Hellenizers led by Judas Maccabee culminated in the purification of the defiled Temple and is still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.^a The story is recounted in the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, which are preserved in the Apocrypha.

The Hellenized high priests themselves suffered a special punishment at the hands of the victors. The line of high priests was eventually replaced by the family of Judas Maccabee, thus inaugurating the dynasty known as the Hasmoneans, named for a family ancestor.

At least some of the concerns about Hellenization as a danger to Judaism in the time of Jason and Menelaus may well be the product of propaganda by later Hasmonean priests. Indeed, the right of the Hasmoneans themselves to the high priesthood seems to have been questioned by many Jews. Asserting the illegitimacy of the previous regime on grounds of their enthusiasm for Greek culture would be a natural form of self-defense for the Hasmoneans to use. It is striking that by the end of the second century B.C.E. the Hasmonean Aristobulus I, who served as high priest in Jerusalem from 104 to 103 B.C.E., seems to have been able without embarrassment to style himself a “Philhellene.” In short, the Hasmoneans had themselves become as Hellenized as the regime they had replaced.

Outside of Jerusalem and Judea, Jews rarely treated Greek culture as a threat to their Judaism. On the contrary, the famous Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, in the mid-first century C.E., claimed that the insights of the best Greek philosophers, especially Plato, were in fact derived from Moses. On the other hand, he also mined the thought of Greek philosophers such as Plato to express what he believed to be the inner truths of Judaism.

064

At the end of the first century C.E., the Jewish historian Josephus, in his last work—the treatise Against Apion, in which he defended Jews and Judaism against the slanders of their enemies—continued both to assert (like Philo) the dependence of Greek culture on the prior teachings of Moses and to insist, somewhat illogically, on the ­superiority of Judaism to anything the Greeks had to offer. His detailed account of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.) was written in Greek in the style of Thucydides. In composing his Jewish Antiquities (a history of the Jews in 20 books), Josephus’s model seems to have been Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Both his Jewish Antiquities and The Jewish War were intended primarily for gentile readers, so they may perhaps be atypical 065Jewish Greek writings. Even earlier, probably in the third century B.C.E., a certain Ezekiel, about whom nothing else is known, wrote a play in Greek iambic trimeter verse in the style of the Athenian tragedians, in particular Euripides. In the surviving portions of the text, Moses learns about divine revelation while in the Sinai desert. The drama also includes an account of Moses’ dream about the divine throne on the pinnacle of the mountain:

I dreamt there was on the summit of Mount Sinai

A certain great throne extending up to heaven’s cleft,

On which there sat a certain noble man

Wearing a crown and holding a great sceptre

In his left hand. With his right hand

He beckoned to me, and I stood before the throne.

He gave me the sceptre and told me to sit

On the great throne. He gave me the royal crown

And he himself left the throne.

I beheld the entire circled earth

Both beneath the earth and above the heaven,

And a host of stars fell on its knees before me;

I numbered them all,

They passed before me like a squadron of soldiers.

Then, seized with fear, I rose from my sleep.

We have other fragments of the play, but not enough to provide a full picture of its structure. We can only wish that more of Ezekiel’s tragedy had survived.

A Greek translation of the whole Hebrew Bible was completed in Alexandria, more or less by the second century B.C.E. Some Jews were evidently concerned by discrepancies between the translation and the Hebrew text and began to revise the Greek to bring it closer to the Hebrew. Three of these revisers are known to us by name—Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus—and all three are thought to have worked in the second century C.E.

Turning to more mundane matters, the well-known Babatha archive found in a cave near the Dead Sea in the Judean Desert included Babatha’s Jewish marriage contract of August 7, 131 C.E.^b It describes some of the terms of the marriage as being “according to Greek law and custom.” The precise meaning of these terms is uncertain, but it is evident that those who used it believed such conditions to be appropriate for the union of a pious Jewish bride and groom.

Similarly uncertain is the meaning of the phrase “Greek wisdom,” against which the rabbis issued occasional cautions in later centuries, but they almost certainly had more in mind than the Greek language, since (as we shall see) Greek was used even in religious contexts, such as funerary and synagogue inscriptions, down to the end of late antiquity in the seventh century C.E.

The attitude of Jews toward Greek culture was complicated by the unhappy history of the political relationship between Jews and Rome. The conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 B.C.E. was, from the Roman point of view, only one small step in the spread of Roman power throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond, but for the Jews it inaugurated a rule that was to last for seven centuries by an empire that they came to loathe. At first, the Romans controlled Judea through proxy rulers—initially, the compliant Hasmonean high priest Hyrcanus II, and from 40 B.C.E. through the adventurer Herod the Great and his descendants. Indeed, Herod had conquered Jerusalem in 37 B.C.E. only with the aid of Roman legions. He then set about transforming his capital in specifically Roman style. The Roman architectural techniques incorporated into his magnificent rebuilding of the Temple seem to have elicited nothing but admiration from his Jewish subjects. On the other hand, when Herod decided around 27 B.C.E. to inaugurate the quinquennial games (which included such Roman delights as wild beast fights involving the public spectacle of the deaths of condemned criminals), the Jews protested. As Josephus wrote of the Jews living in Judea, Herod’s games were “an open break with the customs held in honor by them.” Herod held these games only once, an indication that that they were apparently vigorously protested by the locals. (For Josephus’s detailed description of the games, see Roman Spectacle in Second Temple Jerusalem.)

Oddly enough, both Herod and his successors (who included some of his descendants and, from 6 C.E., governors appointed directly by the Roman emperors) preferred to encourage not so much 066Roman as Greek culture, in the fashion standard for Roman rule throughout the eastern empire. For example, Greek rather than Latin was the language in which Rome communicated with her subjects in these regions.

Jews had long ceased to feel threatened by Hellenism. Even after the mid-first century C.E., when the relationship between the Jews and Rome went terribly wrong, ending in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the refusal of successive Roman emperors to allow the Temple to be rebuilt, Jews did not turn against Greek culture or identify it with the culture of the oppressor. Behaving in a Greek fashion did not imply acquiescence to the hegemony of Rome for Jews any more than it did for Greeks in Greece, itself under Roman rule.

Many aspects of Jewish life, of course, remained distinctive. Josephus proudly declared that the constitution of the Jews required that the demands of piety permeate all aspects of their lives. Especially when viewed by Greeks and Romans, however, it seemed that Jews were exceptionally enmeshed in a net of religious taboos that governed the food they ate, their sexual relations and their observance of sacred time (particularly with regard to the Sabbath). This made little sense to outsiders. Greek and Latin pagan writers tended to find such Jewish behavior laughable or disgusting. Seneca censured the Sabbath as unprofitable, claiming that “by introducing one day of rest in every seven, they lose in idleness almost a seventh of their life, and by failing to act in times of urgency they often suffer loss.” Horace laughed at Jewish credulity: “Let the Jew Apella believe it, not I.”

I have already referred to Herod’s rebuilding of the Temple, in which he used the architectural techniques that were being used in Rome in his time to create platforms for Roman fora. Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman world flooded to Herod’s greatly enlarged Temple courtyard. In Herodian Judea, the tastes of the king, like those of the emperor in Augustan Rome, spread to his subjects in modified form. Excavation of the houses once owned by rich Jews near the Temple Mount before the conflagration of 70 C.E. shows the popularity of painting styles that had been current in Pompeii a generation earlier. Jerusalemites were thus no different from other provincials in the Roman Empire, except that Jewish houses adopted 067styles that omitted human and animal depictions popular in Pompeian frescoes. The Jews retained only the ornamental frames .

Similar adaptation for Jewish purposes can be found in the motifs on the mosaic floors of Palestinian synagogues of the fourth to sixth centuries C.E., which include zodiac designs similar to those at many pagan sites. Hebrew labels on the zodiac signs show that these symbols could serve Jewish purposes as well. The Greek dedicatory inscriptions alongside the zodiacs show that the Jews who made them believed that the Greek form in which their offering was expressed constituted no barrier to its acceptability as pious Jewish devotion.

The image of Helios, the Greek sun god, in the center of these zodiac motifs has aroused much curiosity among scholars but is perhaps best explained (given its location) as a metaphorical representation of the Jewish God, Yahweh. Jewish texts dating from Biblical times to late antiquity often refer to Yahweh as fiery like the sun (Deuteronomy 4:24; Daniel 7:9; 1 Enoch 14:18–22). This was an identification made easier for Jews by similar use of sun imagery among fourth-century Christians, as well as by the axiom that any attempts to represent the divine in visual form are by definition only approximations, since God has no image.

Because no Jewish Greek writings have survived after the end of the first century C.E. (except the Septuagint), it is often assumed that Jews simply stopped writing religious texts in Greek around this time and that instead they preferred to express their Judaism in the Hebrew and Aramaic of rabbinic texts. Such an interpretation of the evidence, however, is not very plausible. It is contradicted by the thousands of Greek inscriptions set up by Mediterranean Jews between the second and sixth centuries C.E. For example, a fifth-century epitaph in Greek from Venosa, Italy, identifies the “Tomb of Callistus, child, archisynagogos, aged 3 years 3 months. In peace his sleep.”¹

That no Greek Jewish literature has come down to us from late antiquity is most probably not because it did not exist, but because no one in the Jewish community was interested in preserving it. Every scrap of Jewish Greek literature from late 084antiquity that is now available to us was preserved not by the rabbinic Jewish tradition—which was interested only in writings in Hebrew and Aramaic—but by Christians. Philo, for example, was much used by Christians because his allegorizing pointed the way for Christians who wished to preserve the authority and importance of the Biblical text without taking literally its injunctions to follow such aspects of Jewish law as the Sabbath and circumcision. Christians likewise preserved Josephus’s histories as precious evidence of the background to the earthly career of Jesus. The fragments of Ezekiel’s tragedy were preserved by the Church father Eusebius in his Praeparatio Evangelica, a compilation of evidence from pre-Christian days of the preparation of the world for the coming of Christ.

Neither Eusebius nor any other Christian had any interest in preserving Jewish writings from after the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity; that is why all the literature of the Jewish Greek diaspora has been lost.

Although Hebrew and Aramaic are the languages of the surviving Jewish literature of late-Roman Palestine, Greek was not unknown in this society. For example, a Greek text found in the mosaic floor beside the zodiac at the late-fourth-century Hammat Tiberias synagogue commemorates a certain Severos, from the household of the Jewish patriarch. On the other hand, all the Jewish religious literature—from the Mishnah and Talmud to the midrashim, targumim and piyyutim—is expressed in either Hebrew or Aramaic. Even here, however, the rabbis adopt Greek words for technical terminology in regard to government, seafaring and other areas of life that Jews knew primarily through the “wicked kingdom” of Rome.

This linguistic preference for Hebrew and Aramaic for texts representing their own culture distinguished Jews from most others in the Roman Near East, for whom Greek became the preferred language both for epigraphic commemoration and for cultural expression. Not a few of the most important Greek authors of late antiquity—for example, the neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus (from Chalcis) and the orator Libanius (from Antioch)—came from the region of Syria. The local Semitic language doubtless continued to be used for diurnal conversation in these areas, but it seems that Greek, as the language and culture of the empire, carried the greater prestige.

We end where we began. The question for historians of Judaism is not whether Jews borrowed from Hellenism, but what they did with what they borrowed. To understand the complex imagery of the mosaics on the floors of late-Roman synagogues, we need to know about both the Jewish traditions recorded in the literary texts and the art of the surrounding world. To understand the rhetoric of the rabbis, we need to look at how they presented themselves and at the world in which they lived. The dual world in which the Jews of late antiquity developed their distinctive culture is undoubtedly complex to study, but its fascination lies precisely in this complexity.

How and why and to what extent Greek culture was absorbed into the ancient Jewish world is not always clear, but that it was is undeniable. To some extent, the answers depend on whether we study Judaism primarily as a separate culture, developed from its Biblical roots in an unbroken line, or whether we study it primarily as part of the wider cultural and religious history of the Mediterranean and the Near Eastern world. Scholars will naturally respond that both approaches are important. Nevertheless decisions taken at the start of any investigation about which aspect deserves more attention will […]