The Oxford History of the Biblical World (75 page)

Another source for this period is the Letter of Aristeas, which like the more extensive history of Josephus has been both promoted and reviled as a reliable historical source. The Letter of Aristeas is most often cited as a witness to the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint. It also reports that the second Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, early in his reign freed thousands of Judeans who had been brought to Egypt as slaves by his father. If correct, this contradicts the view that Ptolemaic rule over Egypt’s northern territories was always peaceful and that a considerable number of Jews had voluntarily migrated to Egypt, and in particular to its capital city, Alexandria. But there is good reason to give this report considerable credence. During the several decades after Alexander’s death, when the fate of Syria-Palestine hung in the balance, there were undoubtedly many Judeans who favored Seleucid control, just as many others supported Ptolemaic claims. Ptolemy’s forcible deportation of those who had given aid to his enemy is not surprising, nor would it be difficult to imagine that he actively encouraged some of his supporters to join groups of Jews who had earlier settled in Egypt. Philadelphus’s freeing of members of the former group and their eventual amalgamation into the growing Jewish population of Alexandria is in character with this monarch, who regularly lived up to his epithet (“man of brotherly love”).

It is also consistent with Philadelphus’s intellectual curiosity that he would have given strong royal support to his chief librarian’s request for a Greek translation of the sacred texts, especially the laws, of his Jewish subjects. At the same time, such a version would have been promoted and widely accepted in the Alexandrian Jewish community, among whom knowledge of Hebrew was growing rarer. Although the Letter of Aristeas narrates the arrival from Jerusalem of seventy-two elders as translators, Alexandria itself probably supplied the group responsible for this earliest foreign-language version. As indicated in the letter, this first translation effort covered the Pentateuch, or Torah, only; the term
Septuagint
(meaning “seventy”) was later expanded as other portions of the Hebrew Bible were subsequently translated into Greek.

According to the Letter of Aristeas, the process by which the translators produced their Greek text was a collaborative effort, with the work of individuals and subcommittees revised and reshaped by their colleagues into a finished product. There is little, if any, of the miraculous in Aristeas’s account. Later accounts added details, such as the picture of seventy-two scholars working in isolation and yet producing identical versions. Modern scholars have detected sufficient distinctions in the Greek translations of each of the five books of the Torah to cast serious doubt on the view that the Greek Pentateuch was the product of one group at one time. Nonetheless,
the high quality of this work served as a model for many later translations, both in Greek and in other languages both ancient and modern.

No precise precedents guided these earliest Greek translators. They seem to have constructed their own path, which lay closer to a literal rendering than to a free one. Although their choice of Greek vocabulary and syntax was partially conditioned by the Semitic text they were translating, in general the language they chose was the
koine,
or common Greek, then in wide usage throughout the Hellenistic world. Greek papyri from Egypt form the closest parallels to the language of the Septuagint and point to a date in the first half of the third century for the Pentateuch at least. Most if not all of the translators were bilingual. Such was clearly not the case for their intended audience, and misunderstandings and misconceptions would have arisen on the part of those who read or heard the original or Old Greek version of the Septuagint. Additionally, differing interpretations of the sacred text abounded, and some readers of the Greek, even if ignorant of the Hebrew language, were conversant with interpretations other than those in the Septuagint. These considerations would have led to calls for revising or recasting of the Greek.

But there was a more pressing issue. Even a cursory examination of the Old Greek reveals instances where this text reflects wording at variance with the established Hebrew version that came to be known as the Masoretic Text. Although it would be anachronistic to project the work of the Masoretes, vowels and all, back to this much earlier period, it is appropriate to imagine a Hebrew text close to it, at least in the Torah, at home in Jerusalem. When differences between this text and the Greek version became known, inevitably there would be calls to revise the Septuagint to reflect more closely what was regarded as the authoritative Hebrew, and revisions of that sort are known.

The author of the Letter of Aristeas was opposed to such calls for revision. In his view the Septuagint possessed an authority equal to that of any Hebrew text, even one located in Jerusalem. He makes this clear near the end of his letter, where he describes the Septuagint’s tumultuously positive acceptance by the Jews of Alexandria, using language reminiscent of that used in the book of Exodus to characterize the Israelites’ approval of the law of Moses. The first-century
CE
Jewish philosopher Philo held that the Septuagint translators, no less than the Bible’s original authors, were inspired prophets. Augustine championed a similar view, which to this day is the position of Orthodox Christianity.

It is not surprising that Hebrew fell out of general usage among the Jews of the Diaspora, especially in an intellectual and cultural center such as Alexandria. We might think, in contrast, that the ancestral tongue or perhaps its close kin, Aramaic, held sway against a similar linguistic incursion into Judea. But this was not always the case. Although it is demonstrable that the Semitic languages continued in use among portions of the population throughout the Hellenistic period, Greek was a practical necessity not only for those who wished to succeed in occupations involving trade and commerce, but also for bureaucrats and political functionaries of all sorts. There does not appear to have been any organized reaction against the speaking of Greek as such during the first part of the Hellenistic period. It could not have escaped notice that foreign notions and patterns of thought went hand in hand with the introduction of a new language; but the new idiom might also be useful for expanding
the representation of older, even venerated concepts. And with no outside power actively pressuring the Jews to give up their ancestral ways, the trade-offs probably seemed, at least to those who considered them, more positive than negative.

Before constructing a detailed time line of events and personalities that lead up to the decisive events associated with Antiochus IV and Judah Maccabee, we turn again to the question of written sources and in particular to three biblical books generally understood to originate in and reflect conditions of the Hellenistic period. These three books, listed in order of their familiarity among the general public rather than in chronological order of composition (which is extremely difficult to determine), are Esther, Judith, and Tobit. For modern Protestants and Jews, the designation of at least the last two of these works as biblical may seem puzzling, since they are not among the canonical literature for those communities. But just as all three of these works are authoritative in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities today, they were also highly regarded in many, if not most, Jewish communities during the period under discussion.

Prior to a brief examination of each of these works as individual entities, we should discuss their genre. At least in their finished form, these books are Jewish novels, much like the book of Daniel, to be discussed below. As such, their authors or compilers were not intent on relating actual events of the past, nor did they expect their audience to understand these works as historical. On the one hand, this characterization has a negative result: we do not make use of novels to fill in details of historical narrative or flesh out the meager evidence of historical documents from the ancient world. There was no Queen Esther, the heroine Judith did not live, the exciting adventures associated with Tobit and his family did not occur. On the other hand, we may ask different but equally valid and valuable questions: Who composed these works? What were their purposes and how well did they achieve them? Who was the audience for these works, and how do they (audience and work alike) compare to similar phenomena in the Greco-Roman world? Answering these questions gives us enormous insight into the lives of real people, especially in the Diaspora, even if their names and the particularities of their lives remain beyond our grasp.

By and large, these works address the question of how a Jew (understood here primarily in terms of his or her adherence to the monotheistic faith of Israel) should live, especially when faced with a seemingly endless array of attractions offered by society at large. In the case of Esther, a Jewish queen in the Persian empire, she must put aside concerns for personal safety to safeguard the continued communal existence of her people. Judith must likewise place complete trust in God and risk her very life to overcome the danger posed by an enemy general. Tobit must continue to do what he knows is correct, including burying the dead and maintaining other ritual requirements, even though his only rewards for his good deeds are anguish and animosity. Although these works are fictional, we ought not thereby to regard them as addressing issues of no importance for their audience. Jews of this period would have identified with these stories’ heroes and heroines and would have identified within their own context individuals as villainous as, say, Haman or Holofernes (from Esther and Judith, respectively). And it would not have taken the threat of extinction by
decree or military engagement for Jews to recognize that their own circumstances were dramatically mirrored in these novels.

The dramatic nature of these literary works is one of the keys to their genre. They are filled with clever reversals of fortune on a personal and grand scale; they delve deeply into personal motivation and character development (something largely absent in other biblical material; adding such developments is a major goal of several of the Greek additions to the earlier Hebrew story of Esther), and they are filled with delightful irony of the sort we often seek, but seldom find, in real life. In short, they are literary masterpieces, aimed at a wide audience. Some of the special appeal for this audience can be detected in the elevated and central role played by women. The books of Esther and Judith take their names from heroic females, but even in the book of Tobit women play decisive and independent parts in the narrative flow. Readers are given an opportunity, unparalleled in other biblical literature, to enter into the often anguished minds of the protagonists, from whom they learn that all Jews, being underdogs (for it was not just Jewish females who labored in disadvantaged circumstances), needed to take a stand and that each instance of danger needed to be faced decisively. Ultimate success would come in no other way.

Another characteristic shared by these novels (and the book of Daniel as well) relates specifically to their historicity. They contain what appear to be historical notices that contradict the historical record preserved elsewhere. So, for example, we know of no Jewish queen in Persia, the forces said to have massed against Judith’s hometown come from different periods, and Daniel is replete both with otherwise unknown—and impossible—personages and with a collapsed or convoluted chronological framework. Although some fundamentalists have sought to expand or correct the generally accepted historical record on the basis of their interpretation of these “historical” details, such efforts must be judged misguided when we realize that their authors were not writing history. They were aware that these things never happened and that these individuals never lived, and their audience had the same knowledge. The overall effect was one of irony, and it added both to their readers’ enjoyment and to their enlightenment in terms of moral and theological instruction.

This is not to say that the authors of these works lacked any knowledge of the societies or cultures they were describing. Quite the contrary, they are masterful in their ability to evoke a general sense of court life or travel-adventure or military preparations. But their primary goal in such descriptions was to lay the scene for the novels’ actions, not to prepare a backdrop for a historical account. The genre thus entails limitations as well as possibilities.

The historical sources, such as the Zenon papyri and the narrative of Josephus, present a micro view of the situation in Judea and the rest of Syria-Palestine during the third century
BCE
. From other records we derive a larger picture of struggle between the two great Hellenistic powers that divided up the Near East after Alexander’s death, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Although the Ptolemies maintained their control over the area, which could be conceived as either their northernmost territory or the Selucuids’ southern border, there were no fewer than a half dozen separate military campaigns in this period. Slowly but noticeably the advantage began to shift in favor
of the Seleucids. Aggressive, if prolonged, actions by Antiochus III resulted ultimately in their gaining decisive control of the area by century’s end.

Jews, under the leadership of the high priest Simon (widely known as Simon the Just) and members of the Tobiad family, played an active role in favor of Antiochus III, and they were appropriately rewarded for their support. (Those Jews who had fought alongside the Ptolemies left Judea, finding refuge in Egypt.) Among the specific benefits the Jews received were Seleucid aid in efforts to rebuild Jerusalem’s Temple and to maintain its ritual of daily offerings, official support for the special status of Jerusalem and its Temple (for example, foreigners were forbidden to enter the sanctuary), reduction or elimination of some taxes, and recognition of the right to live according to their ancestral laws. These actions were intended to establish an era of peaceful relations between Seleucid overlords and Jewish subjects. On the whole such mutually desirable results were achieved and sustained during the remainder of Antiochus Ill’s reign, down to 187
BCE
, and the rule of his son Seleucus IV, who governed until 175.