Search results for Ancient history

Summary

Religion in Rome in the republican period was integrated into the political and social structure, in such a way that every group or activity had its religious aspect. The first characteristic of Roman gods and goddesses to strike the observer must be the wide range of different types, all accepted and worshipped as di deaeque. In many ways the categories and vocabulary to be met with in the religion of Rome seem comfortably similar to those familiar from religions current today: prayer, sacrifice, vows, sacred books, even divination. The event which radically changed the nature of the city's religious and political life was the overthrow of the monarchy in the late sixth century. There was a continuing tradition of change and innovation during the period of the early to middle Republic. There were many changes and innovations: new temples and cults, new or revised ceremonies, changes of procedure or of the rules of membership in the priestly colleges.

Summary

The ancient chronology for the establishment of the Republic provides the most satisfactory context for the political developments of the early fifth century, the emergence of the plebeian movement which sought to assert and defend the rights of some or all nonpatricians. The concept of the citizen community was central and found expression in a variety of forms: in the particular character assumed by social relationships between men of different status. The origin and development of plebeian rights may have been the subject of a comparatively strong oral tradition, but one continuously modified and elaborated to suit later political or historiographical preoccupations. Two fifth-century episodes occupy a key role in the assertion of plebeian prerogatives: the First Secession saw the emergence of the plebs as a political force, and the Second Secession, which secured the restoration of the tribunate with enhanced powers.

Summary

There is one reputedly fifth-century document of which numerous fragments survive and which purports to offer important contemporary evidence for Roman social and economic structures in this period. This is the Twelve Tables, the law-code assigned to circa 450 BC. The compilation of the Tables is attributed to two ten-man commissions (decemviri legibus scribundis) which replaced the consulship as the chief magistracy in 451 and 450 BC. To the limited extent that later writers concerned themselves with economic matters they saw early republican Rome as essentially a farming community. Early Rome practised settled agriculture based on a prevalence of comparatively small-scale, privately owned farms which provided the fundamental resource of the great majority of the citizen body. Hence not only does the primacy of the family unit reflect this pattern of economic activity but the entire structure of kin-group classification and the regulation of kin prerogatives show a pre-eminent concern with the transmission of property.

Summary

For about twenty years the Jews of Palestine lived peacefully under the system of government established by Antiochus III after his conquest of the country in 200 b.c.e. (see above, chapter 2). Some of the leading families may for personal or traditional reasons have preferred the Ptolemaic rule, but to the majority it made no difference whether they were governed from Alexandria or Antioch. The son and successor of the conqueror, Seleucus IV (187–175 b.c.e.), continued, during the first part of his reign, his father's wise and tolerant policy and made contributions to the sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. When troubles arose towards the end of Seleucus IV's reign, their causes must be sought in internal tension and strife between various factions or groups within the Jewish community. Already in the third century b.c.e. the antagonism between the rich and influential Tobiads and the Oniads, who held the office of high priest, had disclosed a serious disagreement within the leading Jewish circles as to the attitude towards the problems of coexistence with the surrounding peoples and a certain assimilation of the dominant Greek–Hellenistic culture (see chapter 2).

The first incident in this new series of quarrels among the Jews was the clash between the high priest, Onias III, and the epistatēs or financial administrator of the Temple, a certain Simon. As the latter was unable to secure the post of agoranomos or overseer of the market for himself on account of the high priest's opposition, he turned to the Seleucid governor of the province of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, Apollonius, son of Menestheus, and revealed to him the existence of large funds in the Temple treasury, suggesting that the money might be appropriated by the Syrian king.

Summary

THE SAMARITAN HERESY

Jewish and Christian writings of the Roman period bear witness to the existence of a sizeable non-Jewish yet allegedly Israelite sect in the territory of Samaria. The centre of the religious life of this community was Mount Gerizim and the cities and villages adjacent to it, although its constituents were also to be found elsewhere in Palestine and in a diaspora in the Mediterranean world which extended as far as Rome. These ‘Samaritans’ claimed to be the descendants of the old Israelite tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi, and contended that they had faithfully worshipped the ancestral Hebrew God in their spiritual centre at Gerizim from the time of the Israelite conquest of Canaan to that very day. Their community had had, or so they claimed, a continuous and unbroken history throughout this long period. They further maintained that the true centre of Israelite worship had always been, and always should be, at Mount Gerizim. They thus viewed the religion of the descendants of the tribe of Judah, which had Jerusalem as its spiritual centre, as an aberration of the classical Yahwistic faith. Essentially, what the Samaritan community claimed for itself was what the Jewish community claimed for itself: that it was the Israel of God constituted by the Mosaic legislation and sustained by obedience to its precepts. Ultimately, the issue which separated Samaritans and Jews was the question of the true holy place, Jerusalem or Shechem. Neither community was inclined to grant to the other any consideration which might represent acquiescence in the contention between these mutally antithetical positions.

Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the high probability of the following propositions:

Summary

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.

Summary

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.

Summary

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.

Summary

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.).

Summary

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.

Summary

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.]

Summary

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.

Summary

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.

Summary

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.

Ancient history

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Chronological Table

12 - Religion in Republican Rome

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5 - Rome in the fifth century II: the citizen community

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4 - Rome in the fifth century I: the social and economic framework

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Map 11: The western Mediterranean in the third century

Frontmatter

8 - Antiochus IV

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Bibliographies

17 - The Samaritans

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6 - The men of the Great Synagogue (circa 400–170 .b.c.e.)

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10 - Jewish literature in Hebrew and Aramaic in the Greek era

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4 - The Diaspora in the Hellenistic age

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1 - The archeology of Hellenistic Palestine

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16 - The Targumim

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18 - The growth of anti-Judaism or the Greek attitude towards the Jews

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13 - The book of Daniel

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11 - Jewish–Greek literature of the Greek period

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3 - Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in the Hellenistic age

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9 - The Hasmonean revolt and the Hasmonean dynasty

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Index

Ancient history

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