The Hellenistic period begins in Palestine with the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 b.c.e. The appearance of the Macedonian conqueror did not, however, change things overnight, and certainly not in the sphere of Jewish literature. Such literature continued to be written in Hebrew or Aramaic, though Greek influence may be detected in it here and there. The Greek language gained ground only slowly in Palestine. Palestine came to be encircled by a ring of Greek cities, for it was mainly on the edges of Jewish territory, on the coast and to the east of Jordan, that the conquering Greeks established, one by one, their settlements. Gaza, which was devastated during Alexander's conquest, must have been one of the first cities to be rebuilt on the pattern of a Hellenistic town. At Samaria, which now became Sebaste, a Macedonian garrison was established on the orders of Alexander himself. Perdiccas was the founder of the Greek city of Gerasa in the Trans Jordan. He was undoubtedly one of the first of Alexander's followers to settle a Macedonian population in Palestine. Dion and Pella were presumably founded at this same period. The object of implanting these Macedonian colonies was partly to ensure the loyalty of the local inhabitants and partly to reward the soldiers with grants of land.

But it was mainly during the century from 300–200 b.c.e., when the country was under the control of the Ptolemies, that Greek cities came to flourish in Palestine. In this period there originated Ptolemais (Akko), Philoteria on the shore of lake Tiberias, Scythopolis (Beth Shean) and Philadelphia (Amman) to name only a few.

POLITICAL HISTORY

The beginnings: Alexander the Great

Alexander's breath-takingly rapid campaign of conquest, which in the space of a few years made him master of all the most important territories of the huge Persian empire, is commonly held to have ushered in a new historical era, the Hellenistic age. Though this accepted view has recently been hotly disputed, it is still in fact correct. In this particular instance, what we see is not just the replacement of one ancient empire by another, but the introduction of something substantially new and different. Even though to begin with this transformation remained more of a vision than a reality and had not developed beyond the initial stages, the phenomenon is clearly recognizable: a community of nations inwardly united by the intellectual power of a transnational culture, the dawn of the Hellenistic era.

The origins of this development were not without paradox. To the Greeks proper, the Macedonians appeared a semibarbaric people, for all that the ruling dynasty was acknowledged to be of Greek blood. Only by force of arms did King Philip of Macedonia prevail upon the Greek city states to unite in the Corinthian League (in 338 b.c.e., after his victory over them at Chaeronea). Only with reluctance did they accept him as their commander-in-chief and support his plans for a war of revenge against the Persians, which he saw as a means of forging national unity. When Philip was suddenly assassinated in 336 b.c.e., this plan took on new dimensions. The place of the fiftyish Philip who had already attained the summit of his ambition, the unification of Greece, was taken by Alexander, thirty years his junior.

In Palestine, as in the whole Near East, it was not that the curtain rose abruptly on the new world of Hellenism at the time of Alexander's expedition. The Macedonian soldiers only overturned barriers which were already offering only feeble resistance to the interpenetration of the Greek and Jewish worlds. In some respects there was in the cultural life of Israel no break in continuity between the Persian period and the Hellenistic age. It was just that what previously was only an incipient influence was to become a major force.

From this time on the new ways of life introduced by the Greeks broke upon the Orient. In Palestine, under the favourable auspices of the long period of peace – almost a whole century – which followed the advent of the Ptolemies, the new ways were to flourish. By means of all kinds of contacts, and particularly thanks to the development of commerce, Hellenism infiltrated on all sides in varying degrees.

From an archeological point of view, the penetration of Hellenism was evident everywhere. First in military installations: the immense superiority of Greco-Macedonian martial techniques necessitated the perfecting and extension of the defensive system. Similarly in dwelling places: the settlement of Greek colonists, who brought with them their standards of comfort and the refined tastes of ruling classes who had known the ostentation of Alexandria and the oriental capitals, was at the root of the development of domestic architecture and of the expansion of decorative refinements. The latter used artistic themes of the Hellenistic koinē, like those to be found on funerary monuments.

In the Jewish world of the Diaspora (and also in Palestine), historical and linguistic conditions had, as early as the third century b.c.e., led to the translation of the Bible into Greek. Similar reasons explain the origin of Targums. The problems posed in this connection, however, are considerably greater and more complex than for the LXX.

The word targum signifies ‘translation’ and derives from the verb tirgem meaning ‘to translate’, ‘to explain’, or ‘to read out’ (compare Ezra 4:7); it is a denominative of turgeman (= interpreter) to which an Akkadian origin is generally attributed. In rabbinic usage tirgem is employed to designate a version translated from the Hebrew into any language whatever (y. Kidd i.59a;y. Meg. 1.71c), but targum is used only for a translation of the Bible into Aramaic or for the Aramaic passages of the Old Testament (Yad. 4.5). The professional Synagogue translator was called turgeman or meturgeman (Meg. 4.4). As a literary genre Targum is distinct from Midrash in that it is primarily a translation and not a commentary and, in its strictest definition, a translation intended for the liturgy of the Synagogue.

We now possess Targums of all the books of the Bible, with the exception of Ezra-Nehemiah and Daniel. Until recently the most commonly accepted opinion was that these were late productions, distributed between the fourth and fifth centuries c.e. and the Middle Ages. It was conceded that the institution of Targum itself was pre-Christian; but because of the prohibition upon putting into writing the oral tradition, the texts themselves could not have been anterior to the first writings of rabbinic Judaism (about 200 c.e.).

The first clear evidence of the Greeks beginning to notice the Jewish people, and the Jewish way of life, comes from the last two decades of the fourth century b.c.e. This new awareness was one of the direct results of the eastern world being thrown open to the enquiring spirit of the Greeks, in the wake of Alexander the Great's victorious expedition (Phoenicia and Syria were conquered in 332 b.c.e.). That huge expansion of human and geographical horizons prompted a new departure in Greek ethnographic studies, which had been enriched, since their first flowering in the period of colonial expansion, by developments in philosophical and theoretical thought. Cultural history, science and religion provided perspectives by which the endless mass of newly available fact could be accommodated in theories based on precise concepts, and judged by carefully formulated canons of interpretation. It is in this context that we should consider the awakening of interest in the Jews and their customs. To establish the chronological sequence in which the first Greek authors reflected and wrote about the Jews is difficult, if not impossible, not only because of our fragmentary knowledge of their works, and because our only clues come from brief excerpts, but also because it is difficult to date the works themselves with any precision. Besides, the need to establish such a chronological priority is obviated, or at any rate greatly diminished, when we consider that these first Greek authors wrote about the Jews quite independently of each other – a fact which seems fairly well established.

It is clear that the book of Daniel falls into two quite different parts: Daniel A, chapters 1–6, the book of court stories, and Daniel B, chapters 7 to 12, the book of apocalypses. Because the historical background of B is, as was first pointed out by the neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry (circa 260 c.e.) – whom Jerome quotes in order to polemize against him – unmistakably the period when the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–163 b.c.e.) first persecuted and then outlawed Judaism, the prevailing critical opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which S. R. Driver's commentary entitled The Book of Daniel (first printed in 1900 and repeatedly reprinted) is a good representative, was that the entire book was produced during that period, though it was admitted that what we have dubbed Daniel A made use of older traditions. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, an impressive number of reputable scholars insisted that there was not the slightest reflection of, let alone allusion to, the Epiphanian situation in Daniel A without benefit of midrash, and therefore assigned a pre-Epiphanian date to it. During the third quarter of our century, however, there has been a retreat to the older critical view. That the reaction is a retrogression will, it is hoped, become clear from the following exposition. [There is considerable agreement between it and the commentary of L. F. Hartman and A. A. Di Lela, The Book of Daniel, AB 23 (Garden City, 1978) (who have adopted many of the present author's previously published views), but it was already in the editorial hopper when their volume came out.]

The origin of Jewish–Greek literature can be traced back to the translation of the Hebrew Torah (the Pentateuch) into Greek, the socalled Septuagint. This is the source which nourished the greater part of the literary production of the Hellenistic Jews. Originally the legend of the 70 (or 72) translators who were said to have rendered the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 b.c.e.) – whence too the name ‘Septuagint’ – referred only to the Torah, the first and properly speaking the canonical part of the Hebrew Bible, or rather its Greek version. This traditional story contains at least a core of truth: shortly after 300 b.c.e. the Jews of the Diaspora, especially in Egypt, felt the need for a Greek translation of their Holy Scripture, because obviously only a minority of Jews in that Greek-speaking environment were still capable of reading and understanding Hebrew. However, some scholars are inclined to follow the legendary narrative of the Pseudo-Aristeas letter. The Ptolemaic kings may be supposed to have had a certain interest in the literature of the peoples incorporated into their kingdom (the Jews of Palestine being subjected to the Ptolemaic reign in the third century b.c.e.), so that the initiative for the translation of the Pentateuch might have come from the Ptolemaic court itself.

The literary critic may well conclude that the Greek of the Septuagint, and to some extent the language of subsequent Jewish–Greek literature as well, was rather ‘uncouth’ and in places ‘quite unintelligible’, so that it must have at times appeared somewhat ‘ridiculous’ to a cultured Greek reader.

HEBREW

Apart from final adjustments, the main body of the Hebrew Bible was already complete before Hellenistic times, and it is easy to forget that the latest portions of it were in fact written within that period. Of such portions, however, it is often hard to decide definitely whether their origin was in the Persian or the early Greek period, especially since the setting and subject matter is often Persian, as in Esther and Daniel. Some parts of the prophets, like Zechariah 9 to 14, and more doubtfully other ‘protoapocalyptic’ passages like Isaiah 24 to 27, have been assigned to a Hellenistic date, but even if this is right it may mean the very beginning of that era, a time therefore before its character had yet fully flowered. Some of the biblical psalms may also be Hellenistic; but the dating of psalms is notoriously difficult, and the practice of dating canonical psalms in late (for example, in Maccabean) times is now less widely supported than it once was. Nevertheless it is significant that characteristic ‘late’ linguistic features are displayed by many of the psalms found at the end of the Psalter: for example, the relative še appears only from Ps. 122 on, and then occurs about nineteen times. Since the tradition of psalmody went on and psalms continued to be written after the canonical Psalter was complete, it would not be surprising if some canonical psalms were of Hellenistic date. Finally, one writing which by the main consensus of scholars was written well down within the Hellenistic age is the latest portion of Daniel (8 to 12), coming from the second quarter of the second century b.c.e.

Great and sudden were the changes which the Hasmonean family brought to the character and religion of the Jews. Yet the members of the family never saw themselves as breaking with tradition. Their first revolutionary acts were in response to an unprecedented challenge, the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus IV, and they always took the patterns for their deeds from Scripture. To understand the changes which the Hasmoneans brought, we must consider what most believing Jews then seem to have taken for granted.

To judge by the surviving literature, all believing Jews then accepted as true the books of the Torah and the prophets. The teachings of the prophets kept pious Jews loyal to their God even after the disaster of 586 b.c.e. Their God had not been defeated when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. Rather, their almighty God was punishing them for their sins when he placed them under foreign domination. Prophets taught the Jews that refusal to accept God's sentence upon them would bring catastrophic punishment, as when Zedekiah's refusal to accept the sentence of subjection to Babylonian rule had brought the destruction both of God's Temple and of Zedekiah's kingdom of Judah.

The Jews in their long years of submission were indeed a peculiar people. There could be misguided hot-heads among them, but the nation never rebelled. Even the fall of Babylon did not end the sentence, though one might have thought so on reading Isaiah 40 to 66. Rather, instead of liberating Israel, God gave to Cyrus of Persia and his successors ‘all the kingdoms of the earth’, and though independence and glory would eventually be restored to the Jews, it would come not by their own ‘might and power’ in rebellion, but only through the act of the ‘spirit’ of the Lord.

THE DEUTEROCANONICAL OR APOCRYPHAL BOOKS

It is important at the very outset to define some terms, for the lack of agreement over terminology between Catholic and Protestant works on this subject invites confusion. The books which Catholics customarily call ‘deuterocanonical’ correspond, or very nearly correspond, to what Protestants call the apocryphal books. The term ‘deutero-canonica is contrasted with ‘protocanonical’. Now the protocanonical books are identical with those of the Hebrew Bible of Palestinian Judaism, and are the only ones which the Protestants officially accept. The deuterocanonical books appear in the Greek version of the Bible, the Septuagint. These two ancient collections of sacred writings, the one preserved in Hebrew, the other handed down in Greek, differ appreciably from one another. Apart from differences in the order of the books, and often quite important textual variants, the Septuagint is not a simple reproduction in Greek of the Hebrew Old Testament. It contains several writings which do not appear in the Hebrew canon at all, and these are the ones which the Catholics call deuterocanonical. The adjectives ‘protocanonical’ and ‘deuterocanonical’ applied to the Scriptures were not used before the sixteenth century, and are generally believed to have been invented by Sixtus of Siena (1520–1569) in his Bibliotheca Sacra of 1566. Catholics recognize seven deuterocanonical books: Judith, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and Baruch. To these must be added the Greek portions of Esther and the Greek additions to Daniel, i.e., the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men (called in the older English versions the Song of the Three Holy Children), the story of Susanna and the story of Bel and the Dragon.

GREEKS, BARBARIANS AND JEWS: THE PROBLEM OF HELLENIZATION IN THE EARLY HELLENISTIC PERIOD

A description of the interpenetration of Judaism and Hellenism in the pre-Maccabean period, that is, in the 158 years between 333 and 175 b.c.e., presents us with a twofold difficulty. Firstly, from this period we have only fragmentary and sporadic reports about the Jews in Palestine and the Diaspora. Non-Jewish literary sources are almost completely silent, and, where they do provide information, they are minimally concerned with the absorption of Hellenistic culture by the Jews. Even epigraphic, papyrological and archeological evidence is in the main sparse and often difficult to assess. Furthermore, Jewish literature of this epoch can often be dated only hypothetically, and most often can be used only as indirect evidence of this penetration or of repulsion. It either (at least apparently) says nothing at all about relationship to its Hellenistic environment or, in the case of polemic or apologetic writings, it presents a biased view. Nearly all the Jewish literature available to us from this period is religiously and nationalistically biased. A complete picture cannot be derived from such sources, and we can at best only describe individual situations and developments as they are fortuitously presented to us in the sources.

Secondly, although we can grasp fairly clearly what ‘Judaism’ means, i.e. those belonging to the Jewish ethnos both in Palestine and the Diaspora, their religion, their way of life and their literature, the much used terms ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hellenization’ are less clear and more subject to dispute.

Considerable darkness shrouds the political and social history of Palestine in the early Hellenistic period between the rise of Alexander and the death of Antiochus III a few years after his defeat by Rome, a defeat which began the downfall of the Hellenistic monarchies. The very fragmentary ancient sources available mention the area of interest to us only sporadically in the context of wider politicomilitary developments. We are, therefore, forced to begin our reconstruction from these broader contexts. We gain insight into social conditions only through combining fortuitous discoveries in the field of archeology and papyri which, as in the case of the Zenon papyri, partially lighten the darkness at particular points. Information about the Jews is still more scanty, since legend and history are so closely interwoven in our primary source, Josephus. In some areas, therefore, we can only hope to draw a sketchy and to some extent a hypothetical picture, which may at any time have to be revised in the light of new discoveries. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that within this period, which for us is so obscure, there occurred the first intensive encounter between ancient Palestinian Judaism and the superior Hellenistic culture. This clash left a decisive stamp on later development, and constitutes the significant factor of this epoch.

ALEXANDER'S CAMPAIGN AND PALESTINE (333–331 b.c.e.)

The last decades of the Persian empire had already brought for Palestine and the Jews the troubles of war. The revolt of King Tennes of Sidon (circa 354–346 b.c.e.) had affected Palestine too, for a large part of the coastal plain belonged to Sidon; and it is likely that Judah too suffered during the Persian counter-attack.

The purpose of this chapter is to show that, contrary to the almost universally accepted view, there is no inconsistency between the rabbinic sources regarding the leaders of the Pharisees from the time of the Maccabean revolt and the non-rabbinic sources, such as the New Testament and Josephus. On the contrary, Josephus and the record in the New Testament supplement and confirm the rabbinic tradition with regard to these teachers.

It will be seen that of these teachers some were also heads of the contemporary Temple tribunal, which in the course of time came to be called the Sanhedrin; others were members of the Sanhedrin, but not its heads; still others were not even members of that body. But whatever their relation to the contemporary Sanhedrin might be, all were heads of the Pharisaic schools and tribunals, and indeed of Pharisaism as an organized movement.

Virtually all modern discussions regarding the Pharisees and Pharisaism are based on the premise that there existed only one form of Pharisaism. Doubtless this is because Josephus and the New Testament always speak of the Pharisees as a unit. Yet, as any student of the Talmud soon realizes, there were, in fact, two forms of Pharisaism, differing from each other on basic issues – the one, that which came to be known as the doctrine of the school of Shammai, the other, as that of the school of Hillel. While only about a score of issues are recorded as dividing the Pharisees from the Sadducees, more than three hundred divided the Shammaites from the Hillelites.