The “Dark Ages” of the Fourth and Third Centuries Bce

Although Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East was a turning point in the region’s history, Jewish historiography rarely marks this event as the beginning of a new era. The fourth (still mainly Achaemenid) and third (Ptolemaic) centuries are grouped together, bounded at their beginning by Ezra and Nehemiah and at their end by the Seleucid conquest of Judea (198 BCE). The reason for this neglect of Alexander’s conquest is the darkness that shrouds Judaism in the fourth and third centuries.

Flavius Josephus provides little information about these two centuries apart from one document dealing with the Transjordanian Jewish principality ruled by the Tobiads in the third century (Ant. 12.4.157–236). From him, we learn that they intermarried with the aristocracies of Judea and Samaria, and that members of the Tobiad family, familiars at the Ptolemaic court, bid for and bought from the Ptolemies in Alexandria the right to farm the taxes of Judea. Information from the Zeno papyri intersects with Josephus. Zeno, the business manager of Apollonius, a financial minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, traveled in Syria and Palestine and traded with the Tobiads. An inscription from the fifth century BCE and the last verses of Nehemiah also mention the Tobiads.

The attentive visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge may spot in room 24 a beautiful, large statue in basalt stone that, according to the accompanying label, represents a “syncretistic, Syrian military deity” (Fig. 1). The statue, from the Syrian Hauran region, circa 100km south to southeast of Damascus, was published in the acquisitions guide of the museum but has, to the best of my knowledge, not otherwise been discussed in scholarly literature. In 1979 the Keeper of Antiquities, Dick Nicholls, described it in a slightly longer, unpublished report to the then director of the museum as follows:

Introduction

Map B VI 18 of the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (the map with the title Die jüdische Diaspora bis zum 7. Jahrhundert n. Chr.) reveals a striking concentration of Jewish settlements in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). As is to be expected, there is a higher density of Jewish communities in the west of Asia Minor than in the east, especially in great coastal cities such as Ephesus, Miletus, and Smyrna. The interior of Anatolia, however, also has a very high number, especially in Lydia, Caria, and Phrygia (see Map 7).

The history of the Jewish diaspora in Asia Minor is a long one, probably starting as early as the fifth century BCE and continuing until the present day. This chapter will focus on the roughly one thousand years between the beginnings of Jewish settlement there and the end of the Talmudic period (or the rise of Islam). Unfortunately, the literary sources at our disposal are relatively scarce: only a handful of references in pagan literary sources, several more in Josephus and the New Testament, and some also in the Church Fathers and in canons of church councils. On the other hand, we have no fewer than some 260 Jewish inscriptions, the overwhelming majority in Greek and only a handful in Hebrew. Because there is no scholarly consensus as to whether or not we possess Jewish writings from Asia Minor (perhaps some of the Oracula Sibyllina and 4 Maccabees), we will have to leave this question out of account. Archaeological remains are not very numerous (apart from the epigraphic material), but some of them are spectacular (see below on Sardis).