Bible Books

010

The Jews in the Greek Age

Elias J. Bickerman
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 338 pp., $30.00

Written by one of our century’s most distinguished authorities on Jewish history of the Hellenistic period, this work represents Elias J. Bickerman’s scholarly last will and testament. It appears some seven years after his death. The Jews in the Greek Age attempts an appraisal of the cultural, economic, social and, especially, religious currents among Jews, both in Palestine and the Diaspora, during the period from Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E.^a to the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes in 175 B.C.E. If we compare it with another recent magisterial work on the same subject, Martin Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), we see how much restraint Bickerman shows in his treatment of evidence. He refuses to use as evidence any works composed after the period with which he is dealing and refuses to refer to movements when the evidence for them points to an era after his time frame. Thus, unlike Hengel, Bickerman includes almost no references to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Dead Sea Sect or the rabbis who lived after this period, nor to the apparently extraordinary success of Jewish proselytism, because the hard evidence for all of these comes from a later period.

Whereas Hengel’s main conclusion is that the Greek influence on me Jews of Palestine was pervasive long before the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, Bickerman only rarely points to Greek influence. He argues that real Hellenization began only when the Hellenizing process was taken over by native rulers, such as the Hasmonean kings (152–37 B.C.E.). He argues convincingly that we should not be misled into imagining Hellenization as similar to the modern Europeanization of the East, which became overwhelming only when the industrial revolution accompanied it.

In appraising the literary sources, Bickerman constantly urges caution, because these sources are so few and because, almost without exception, they permit us to see their authors and the era only from a religious perspective. In addition, these sources, as is true of ancient literary sources generally, pay only the slightest attention to economic factors. As for the Jewish papyri and inscriptions, they tell us very little about the Jewishness of the Jews. Furthermore, since the few sources that we do have see the Jews within the framework of Greek civilization, we are unable to take into account the other elements of Near Eastern civilization of the time.

Bickerman makes a number of sharp comments about his predecessors in the field. One example is his statement that the Hellenistic Jewish forgers who claimed that the Greek philosophers had borrowed from Moses “had more historical sense than those German professors who denied the possibility of Biblical influence on classical Greece” (p. 14). Indeed, he strongly suggests that Aramaic, as the common language of the whole Near East from India to Ethiopia, may have facilitated the exchange of knowledge between Greece and the Orient even before Alexander and that such an episode as the Myth of Er, at the end of Plato’s Republic, may have come from an Aramaic source. Moreover, no one has explained why the Greek authors who were so much impressed with Egyptian wisdom could not have admired Jewish wisdom as well. Investigation of plagiarism was a frequent activity during the Hellenistic period in Alexandria. Plato, in particular, was accused of plagiarism in his Republic. So we might well expect an accusation that Plato lifted the celebrated Myth of Er from a Near Eastern source. But despite all that was written about Plato during the Hellenistic period—the most widely read philosopher throughout this era—nothing indicates that such an accusation had been made.

Bickerman remarks that in the first known meeting of Greek and Jew—namely that of Aristotle with an anonymous Jew in Asia Minor in the middle of the fourth century B.C.E.—it is the Greek who is the greatest of all savants, while the Jew is described as a miracle worker. This is one of the very few instances, however, where Bickerman is guilty of a mistranslation. The Greek (as cited in Josephus, Against Apion 1.177) quotes Aristotle as stating that what he is about to say “will seem to you as wonderful as a dream,” but there is nothing to indicate that the Jew was looked upon as a miracle worker. Indeed, Aristotle is so impressed with the Jew’s wisdom that he declares that the Jews are descended from the Indian philosophers. Yet Aristotle gives no indication of a single particular thought or theory that he had learned from the nameless Jew.

Some of the most valuable of Bickerman’s comments are his contrasts between the Greek and Jewish points of view Nevertheless, he sometimes exaggerates. Thus he declares (p. 79) that while one is able to read Homer without believing in Homer’s 011gods, the Babylonian tablets relating the exploits of Gilgamesh or the scrolls of Moses are meaningless to an unbeliever. In reply, we could note how the anonymous author of On the Sublime (9.9; spuriously attributed to Longinus) in the first century admires the Pentateuch without any indication that this admiration was accompanied by belief.

In reconstructing the Jewish religious attitudes of the era, Bickerman makes particularly good use of the Septuagint, Ben Sira, Jubilees and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. He presents an especially valuable discussion of the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the Bible—into Greek. Here he successfully deflates several commonly held assumptions, such as the view that the Septuagint was produced by Alexandrian Jews who no longer knew enough Hebrew to understand the Torah when it was read aloud in the synagogue. This hypothesis, argues Bickerman, is anachronistic, because the custom of reading the Torah publicly with a cycle of lessons is not attested before the second century C.E., Bickerman also challenges the hypothesis that the Septuagint as a translation is unique; actually it is part of a long tradition (undoubtedly oral) of translation of Near Eastern works.

Bickerman comments perceptively about the vocabulary of the Septuagint. He contends that the translators did not intend to, nor did in fact, Hellenize monotheism. However, the very use in the Septuagint of the word nomos, “law,” to translate the Hebrew word “Torah,” suggested to a literate Greek reader the contrast with physis, “nature,” to which it is inferior, at least according to Antigone in Sophocles’ play. Nomos, therefore, suggests a legalistic religion, in contrast to a religion of the spirit. Likewise, the translation of nefesh by the Greek psyche, “soul,” suggests a contrast with soma, “body,” in which the soul is imprisoned, according to Plato.

Only rarely does Bickerman commit an anachronism in his use of evidence. One example is his suggestion (p. 208) that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs show the influence of Greek novels. But the Testaments, according to Bickerman’s own dating, were composed at the end of the third century B.C.E., whereas the earliest Greek novel, the fragmentary Ninus romance, dates from the first century B.C.E. at the earliest.

Bickerman originally included an extensive apparatus of notes to give the sources, both primary and secondary, for his views. However, when revising the manuscript, he decided that the task of updating the notes was so great that he thought it best to omit them altogether. This was a most unfortunate decision, though it is, to some degree, remedied by the extensive bibliography on individual topics compiled by Bickerman’s student, A. I. Baumgarten.

In sum, this is a highly provacative synthesis by a master in the field, remarkable for its hesitancy to go beyond the evidence. It is also noteworthy for a number of memorable and even epigrammatic statements. The most insightful of all is his extraordinary comment (p. 139) that Titus, by destroying the Temple, was certainly the greatest religious reformer in history.

The Jews in the Greek Age
Elias J. Bickerman
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 338 pp., $30.00