Hellenism and the Jews

The relationship between Israel and the ancient Aegean, the homeland of Greeks, has been a tumultuous one.

 Some have even seen a tenuous link between the two civilizations as early as the time of the Exodus, if not before. The earliest verifiable contact between the two cultures is in the period right after the Exodus, during the time of the conquest of Canaan and the days of the Judges.

 At that time, circa 1200 BCE, as Israel was entering the Promised Land from the east, another group was invading from the west. This was the time of the mass migration of the Sea Peoples, who are mentioned in Egyptian texts. Among them there was a group called the Peleshet, whom we know as the Philistines. The struggle between the two peoples was a long, drawn-out affair lasting more than two centuries, until the final defeat of the Philistines by David.

But there would be other meetings between the Greeks and our ancestors. However, none was more long lasting than that brought about by the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. Not only did Alexander add Israel to his empire but he also introduced Greek culture throughout the lands he had conquered from the Persians.

Persian rule had been benevolent for our people. In fact, it was the Persians who freed the Jews from captivity in Babylon when they conquered that fabled city under their great ruler, Cyrus, in 538 BCE. Cyrus and the Persians allowed the Jews to return to their homeland in Israel and to begin rebuilding the Temple. Archeologically, the Persian period was a quiet one that did not really grab much attention among archeologists until fairly recent times.

A number of scholars have helped to illuminate the Persian Period. One of the most prominent is Prof. Ephraim Stern, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the head of the university’s Institute of Archaeology and wrote a number of works on this little-known period of the history of ancient Israel. Among these works there is a masterful archeological survey of the period, basing some of its conclusions on the discoveries Stern made while he was director of the Tel Dor excavations in the 1980s.

There is strong archeological evidence of Greek contact with Israel Even during the Persian Period. At sites such as Tel Dor, remains of Greek-inspired statuary has been found, while Greek coins, especially those from Athens, were already the preferred medium for international trade.

But the conquests of Alexander would unleash a flood of Greek influence on the region. There is even an apocryphal story of Alexander meeting with the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. After Alexander’s death and the division of his empire, Israel would seesaw back and forth between the Seleucids of Syria and the Ptolemies of Egypt, until it finally remained part of the Seleucid dominions.

Already Jews were succumbing to the seductive sway of Greek culture. Indeed Alexandria, which was founded by Alexander as an ideal Geek polis, or city, had a large Jewish population that some have said made up as much as a quarter of the city’s total inhabitants. Assimilation was so great among this group that the Tanach had to be translated into Greek. This was the first time that our Bible was translated into another language. The great American Jewish scholar, Louis Finkelstein, has even suggested that Greek philosophical influence, especially the study of logic, played a role in the development of Talmudic logic.

Not all Jews were seduced by Greek culture. Some resisted the strong pull of assimilation, especially when the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, tried to desecrate the Temple in Jerusalem by putting a statue of Zeus in it.

His actions would spark the Maccabean Revolt, which has given us the holiday of Chanukah. But despite our victory against the Seleucids, an even greater danger was looming on the horizon. The legions of Rome were on the march, and they would cast an ominous shadow over ancient Israel.