History of the Jews, Vol. 1 (of 6)

Prosperity, worthy pursuits, and culture inspired the Alexandrian Judæans with dignity and self-respect, and in this they may be compared with their descendants in Spain of a much later date.

The Alexandrian community was looked upon as the centre of the Judæan colony in Egypt, and other Judæan colonies, and even Judæa herself, were glad to lean at times upon this firm pillar of Judaism. Houses of prayer, bearing the name Proseuche, were established in all parts of the city. Amongst them was the principal synagogue, distinguished by its graceful architecture and its magnificent interior. These houses of prayer were at the same time schools of learning, where the most accomplished student of the Law would stand up on Sabbaths and festival days to expound that portion of the Pentateuch that had just been read to the congregation.

But the most brilliant ornaments of the Alexandrian-Judæan world were the distinguished fugitives who arrived in Alexandria during the Syrian persecutions. The most illustrious of these was Onias IV., the youngest son of the last legitimate high-priest of the line of Joshua ben Jozadak.

After his father had been treacherously murdered, on account of his determined antagonism to the Hellenists and his support of Hyrcanus, young Onias fled for safety to Egypt. There he was kindly received by the gentle King Philometor, because he represented a party which looked upon him as the rightful successor to the priestly dignity, and the sixth Ptolemy, hoping ultimately to wrest Cœlesyria and Judæa from Syrian rule, believed that he might eventually rely upon the support of this party.

As soon as Onias, who had now reached man's estate, heard that the wicked high-priest, Menelaus, had been slain by order of the Syrian court, and that Prince Demetrius had escaped from Rome, and had conquered Syria, he flattered himself that he would be allowed to return as high-priest to Judæa. His protector, the king Philometor, had meanwhile become an ally of Demetrius, and had probably put in a good word for his favourite. But when Alcimus was chosen high-priest, and was supported by an armed force, even against the Hasmonæans, Onias gave up all hope of receiving the priestly inheritance of his father, and took up his permanent abode in Egypt.

Onias seems to have been accompanied by a man of great distinction, Dositheus by name, and the two men played an influential part during the reign of Philometor. They were given the opportunity of distinguishing themselves during the disorders arising from the rivalry of the two royal brothers, the gentle Philometor and the violent Euergetes, who was a monster in body and in mind, and who was called, on account of his enormous size, "Fat-paunch" (Physcon), and on account of his diabolical wickedness, "Kaker-getes."

The two brothers, with their sister Cleopatra, who was the wife of her elder brother, claimed the throne at a period when Egypt and Syria happened to be at war with each other. But Physcon, the younger brother, had seized the throne for himself, supplanting the elder one, who fled as a supplicant to Rome. The Roman Senate acknowledged the rights of Philometor, but always greedy for an extension of power, resolved to make use of this opportunity to weaken Egypt. It decreed, therefore, that the north-western province of Cyrene should be separated from the Egyptian kingdom, and placed under the rule of Physcon. But this prince, dissatisfied with his small territory, repeatedly conspired against Philometor, and the two brothers were soon openly at variance. Philometor dared defy Rome, which had taken Physcon's part; but unfortunately his soldiers were unreliable; for the Alexandrian-Greek population, besides having the usual faults of the Greeks, were remarkable for faithlessness and caprice. Still more did Philometor lack commanders. In this hour of emergency he entrusted the Judæan emigrants, Onias and Dositheus, with the command of the campaign against his brother. The entire Jewish-Egyptian population stood by Philometor. The ability of the two Judæan leaders enabled him to weaken Physcon effectually. From that day Onias and Dositheus were held in great favour by Philometor, and they remained commanders of the entire army.

Onias was recognised by the Judæans as head, or prince of the race (Ethnarch). He may have been unanimously elected to that office by his countrymen, and confirmed in it out of gratitude by the king, or Philometor may have taken the initiative, and raised him to this dignity.

In time this office became a very important one. It was the duty of the ethnarch to control all the affairs of the community, to exercise the duties of a judge, and to protect the integrity of contracts. He represented his people at court. The office of ethnarch, which Onias was the first to hold, offered too many privileges to the Egyptian Judæans for them to have objected to it.

As a result, they were now in the fortunate position of having a leader of royal dignity who was able to mould them into one strong body. Their strength was to be enhanced by a new creation amongst them. In spite of the distinction which Onias enjoyed at the court of Philometor, and amongst his own race, he could not forget that, on account of the events that had taken place in Judæa, he had lost his rightful office of high-priest.

During the uncertain state of things in his own country, when Alcimus was raised above the rightful incumbents of the priesthood, and after his death, when this dignity seemed extinct, Onias conceived the idea of building a Temple in Egypt that should take the place of the violated sanctuary in Jerusalem, and of which he would be the rightful high-priest.

Was he prompted to such an undertaking by piety or ambition? The innermost workings of the heart are not revealed in history. To secure the approval of the Judæans, Onias referred to a prophecy of Isaiah xix. 19, "On that day there will be an altar to the Lord in Egypt." Philometor, to whom he expressed his wish, out of gratitude for his military services, presented him with a tract of land in the region of Heliopolis, four and a-half geographical miles north-east of Memphis, in the land of Goshen, where the descendants of Jacob had once lived until the exodus from Egypt. In the small town of Leontopolis, on the ruins of a heathen temple, where animals had formerly been worshipped, Onias built the Judæan sanctuary (154–152). Outwardly, it did not exactly resemble the Temple of Jerusalem, for it was made of brick, and it rose in the shape of a tower. But all the necessary appliances in the interior were on the exact model of those in Jerusalem, except that the seven-armed candlestick was replaced by a golden lamp hanging from a golden chain. Priests and Levites who had fled from the persecutions in Judæa, officiated in this Temple of Onias. The king generously decreed that the revenues of the whole district of Heliopolis should be devoted to the needs of the Temple and the priests. This small province was formed into a little priestly state, and was called Onion.

Although the community looked upon the Temple of Onias as their religious centre, visiting it during the festivals, and sacrificing in its courts, still, unlike the Samaritans, they did not withdraw their allegiance from the sanctuary of Jerusalem, or in any way depreciate it; on the contrary, they venerated Jerusalem as their sacred metropolis, and the Temple as a divine residence. But the wonderful fulfilment of the prophetic words, that "in Egypt a temple of the Lord should arise," was a source of great pride to them. They called Heliopolis the "City of Justice" (Ir-hazedek), applying to it this verse from the prophets, "Five Egyptian cities will at that day recognise the God of Israel, and one of them will be called the City of Heres," but they read Ir-ha-Zedek.

Had Judæa been enjoying a state of peace and prosperity, she would have resented this innovation, and laid an interdict upon the Temple of Onias, as she had done upon that of Gerizim, and the Egyptian-Judæan congregation would have been excluded from the community, as had been the case with the Samaritans. But the desolation of the Temple in Jerusalem was so great, the dismemberment of the commonwealth so complete, that there could have been no valid reason for preventing the accomplishment of a design springing from the purest of intentions. The founder of the Temple was descended from a long line of high-priests, which had its origin in the days of David and Solomon. His forefathers had been instrumental in rebuilding the Temple after the Babylonian exile; he could claim Simon the Just as his ancestor, and his father was the pious Onias III. Later, when the Hasmonæan high-priest had restored the divine service in Jerusalem, in all its purity, the Judæans of the mother-country looked with regret upon the Temple that existed in a foreign land, and the uncompromisingly pious party never could forget that its existence was in violation of the Law. But by that time the Temple of Onias had become firmly established.

Philometor gave Onias permission to build a fortress for the protection of the Temple, in the province of Onion, and placed the stronghold and its garrison under his command. Onias was at the same time military commander of the district of Heliopolis, called the Arabian province; hence his title Arabarch. In Alexandria, Onias was the communal and judicial head of the Jewish population resident there, while in the province of Onion and Arabian Egypt he was commander of the Judaic soldiery settled there.

The complete confidence that this king reposed in Onias and his co-religionists induced him to raise the high-priest to another post of importance. The seaports and the mouths of the Nile were of the greatest moment for the collection of the royal revenues. The taxes here levied on all incoming and outgoing raw materials and manufactured goods made Egypt the richest country during the rule of the Ptolemies, and later, under that of the Romans. Onias was entrusted with the custody of the ports, and the Alexandrian Judæans living upon the sea-coast had, no doubt, the privilege of selecting the officials for the custom-houses.

At this period, Egypt was the scene of an event of the utmost importance in the history of the world, though giving rise at the time to views diametrically opposed to each other. The devotion of the Judæan fugitives to the Law, for whose sake they had fled from their homes in Palestine, may have awakened in the cultivated King Philometor the desire to become acquainted with the time-honored Torah of Moses; or perhaps those Judæans, who were allowed access to the person of the king, so stimulated his interest in their laws, so shamefully reviled by Antiochus Epiphanes, that Philometor was at last eager to read them for himself in a translation.

It is also possible that the insulting libel on the Judæans and their origin, written in the Greek tongue, apparently by an Egyptian priest, Manetho, (who describes the Israelites as being a noted shepherd race in Egypt (Hyksos), expelled as leprous under a leader called Moyses), may have made the king anxious to learn the history of that people from its own sources. Whatever was the nature of the inducement, it was a matter of great importance to the Alexandrian Jews that the sublime Pentateuch was translated into the polished Greek tongue.

We have no particulars of the way in which this work was brought about. Apparently, with a view to lightening the task, it was divided among five interpreters, so that each book of the Pentateuch had its own translator. The existing translation, though through various corruptions it has lost much of its original character, shows by its very lack of uniformity that it could not have issued from one pen.

The Greek translation of the Torah was, so to say, another sanctuary erected to the glory of God in a foreign land. The accomplishment of this task filled the Alexandrian and Egyptian Judæans with intense delight; and they thought, with no little pride, that now the vainglorious Greeks would at last be obliged to concede that the wisdom taught by Judaism was at once more elevating and of more ancient date than the philosophy of Greece. Their satisfaction was doubtless enhanced by the fact that the noble work owed in part its successful termination to the warm sympathy of the friendly king, and that a path was thus opened for a true appreciation of Judaism among the Greeks. It was natural, therefore, that great rejoicings should take place among the Egyptian Judæans on the day of presentation of the version to the king, and that its anniversary should be observed as a holiday. On that day it was customary for the Judæans to repair to the Island of Pharos, where they offered up prayers of joyful thanksgiving. After the religious ceremony they partook of a festive repast, either in tents or under the free vault of heaven, each according to his means. Later on this anniversary became a national holiday, in which even the heathen Alexandrians took part.

But far different was the effect produced by the translation of the Torah into Greek upon the pious inhabitants of Judæa. Not only was Greece the object of their hatred, on account of the sufferings they had endured at her hands, and the indignities she had offered to their religion; but they feared, not unnaturally, that the Law, translated into another language, might be exposed to disfigurement and misapprehension. The Hebrew language, in which God had revealed Himself upon Mount Sinai, alone appeared to them a worthy medium of the Divine thought. Presented in a new garb, Judaism itself appeared to the pious Judæans estranged and profaned. Consequently the day that was celebrated as a festival by the Judæans in Egypt was considered by their brethren in Judæa as a day of national calamity, similar to that upon which the golden calf had been worshipped in the desert, and it is even said that this day was numbered amongst their fasts.

Different as were the points of view from which the work was regarded, judged by the results produced by the Greek translation, there was reason both for the joy of the Alexandrian and the sorrow of the Palestinean Judæans. Thanks to its Grecian garb, Judaism became known to the Greeks, who were the civilisers of the world; and before five centuries had elapsed, the principal nations had become acquainted with its teachings. The Greek translation was the first apostle Judaism sent forth to the heathen world to heal it of its perversity and godlessness. Through its means the two opposing systems – the Judæan and the Greek – were drawn nearer together. Owing to their subsequent circulation through the world by means of the second apostle, Christianity, the tenets of Judaism were fused into the thought and language of the various nations, and at present there is no civilised language which has not, by means of this Greek translation, taken words and ideas from Judæan literature. Thus Judaism was introduced into the literature of the world, and its doctrines were popularised.

On the other hand, however, it innocently led to a mistaken view of the Judæan Law, becoming in a measure a false prophet, promulgating errors in the name of God. The difficulty of translating from Hebrew into Greek, a radically different language, at no time an easy task, was greatly increased at that period by the want of exact knowledge of Hebrew, and of the true nature of Judaism, which made it impossible for the translator always to render correctly the sense of the original. Moreover, the Greek text was not so carefully guarded but that, from time to time, arbitrary emendations might have been introduced. Added to this, the translation was probably used as a guide for the interpreter on the Sabbaths and Holy Days, and it depended upon his taste, learning, and discretion to make what changes he pleased. And, in fact, the Greek text is full of additions and so-called emendations, which later on, in the time of the conflicts between Judaism and Christianity, became still more numerous, so that the original form of the translation cannot always be recognised in its present altered state. Nevertheless the Alexandrian Judæans of later generations believed so firmly in the perfection of this translation, that by degrees they deemed that the original could be dispensed with, and depended entirely upon the translation. Thus they came to look upon the mistakes which had crept into the Greek Bible either through ignorance, inability to cope with grammatical difficulties, or arbitrary additions, as the word of God, and things were taught in the name of Judaism which were entirely foreign or even contrary to it. In a word, all the victories which Judaism gained during the lapse of years over civilised heathendom, as well as all the misconstructions which it suffered, were the effects of this translation.

The great estimation in which this work was held by the Greek-speaking Judæans, and in time also by the heathens, gave rise to legendary glorifications, which were finally, about a century later, crystallised in a story which relates that the origin of the translation was due to the steps taken by Ptolemy Philadelphus, whose attention had been attracted to the value of the Book of the Law by his librarian Demetrius. Demetrius declared it worthy of a place in the Royal Library, provided it were translated into Greek. Thereupon the king sent his ambassadors to the high-priest Eleazar with costly presents, requesting him to choose several wise men, equally versed in Hebrew and in Greek, and to bid them repair to his court. The high-priest selected seventy-two learned men, taking representatives from the twelve tribes, six from each, and sent them to Alexandria, where they were received with great pomp by the king. The seventy-two delegates finished the translation of the Torah in seventy-two days, and read it aloud before the king and all the assembled Judæans. It was from this legend, looked upon till recently as an historical fact, that the translation received the name of the Seventy-two, or more briefly, of the Seventy, Septuagint.

A beginning having been made, it was natural that a desire should arise to render the other literature of Judaism accessible to Greek readers, and so, by degrees, the historical books of the Jews also appeared in a Grecian garb. On account of the greater difficulties they offered, the poetical and prophetical books were the last ones to find their way to the Greek world. These translations gave birth to a new art in the Egyptian community – that of pulpit oratory. Was it, perhaps, customary in Judæa, when the Law was read, not only to translate the portion into the language then in use among the people (the Chaldæan or Aramæan), but also to explain it for the benefit of the ignorant, and was this practice also introduced into the houses of prayer of the Egyptian Judæans? Or was it adopted by the latter because the Hebrew language had become foreign to them? However, whether it was an imitation or whether it originated with the Egyptian Judæans, this custom of translating and explaining obscure verses and portions not easily understood created a new art. The interpreters, with the fluency of speech derived from their work, were not satisfied with merely rendering the original text, but expanded it, adding reflections thereon, and drawing from it applications to contemporary events, and notes of admonition and warning. Thus out of the explanation of Scripture arose the sermon, which, in the Greek spirit of giving to all things an attractive and beautiful form, came by degrees artistically to be developed. Pulpit oratory is the child of the Alexandrian-Judæan community. It was born in its midst, it grew up and was perfected, becoming later a model for other nations.

The charm which the Hellenistic Judæans found in the Biblical writings, now made accessible to them, awoke among the learned the desire to treat of those writings themselves, to bring to light the doctrines contained in them, or to clear up their apparent crudities and contradictions. Thus arose a Judæo-Greek literature, which spread and bore fruit, influencing an ever-widening circle. But little is known of the infancy of this peculiar literature which held, as it were, two such repellent nationalities in close embrace. That literature appears also to verify past experience, that rhythmic and measured sentences are more pleasing than simple prose. There are still some fragments of these writings extant which relate, in Greek verse, the old Hebrew history. This literary activity re-awakened in Egypt the old anger of the Samaritans against the Judæans. These two peoples agreeing in their adherence to the Law, in their recognition of one God, and in their condemnation of idolatry, still retained their old hatred against each other. Although the Samaritans, like the Jews, were forced by the officers of Antiochus to renounce the worship of the God of Israel, yet they did not assist the Judæans to fight their common enemy, but rather sided with the latter against their own co-religionists.

During the religious persecutions many Samaritans appear to have emigrated into Egypt, and to have joined the descendants of their own tribe who had been established there since the time of Alexander. These Egyptian Samaritans had, like the Judæans, adopted the customs and the language of the Greeks which prevailed in Egypt, and now the enmity which had existed between the adherents of Jerusalem and of Gerizim was transferred to a foreign land, where they opposed each other with that furious zeal which co-religionists in a strange country are wont to exhibit in support of cherished traditions. The translation of the Torah into Greek, under the patronage of the king Philometor, appears to have cast the firebrand into their midst. How fiercely must the anger of the Samaritans have been provoked by the omission in the text of the Septuagint of that verse which they looked upon as a proof of the sanctity of their Temple, "Thou shalt build an altar in Gerizim"! The Samaritans in Alexandria desired to make a protest against the translation, or rather against the alleged falsification, of the text, and as some of their number were in favour at court, they induced the mild Philometor to appoint a conference between the two religious sects, at which the question of the superior sanctity of the Samaritan or of the Judæan Temple should be decided. This was the first religious dispute held before a temporal ruler. The two parties chose the most learned men among them as their advocates. On the side of the Judæans appeared a certain Andronicus, the son of Messalam, whilst the Samaritans had two champions, Sabbai and Theodosius. In what manner the religious conference was carried on, and what its consequences were, cannot now be ascertained, the accounts that have come down to us having assumed a legendary form; each party claimed the victory, and both exaggerated its effects. Religious disputations have never yet achieved any real results. The Judæan historians pretend that an arrangement had been made to the effect that it should be the right and the duty of the king to put to death those who were defeated in argument – a statement for which there is no foundation. When the Jewish advocates pointed out the long roll of high-priests from Aaron down to their own time who had officiated in the Temple at Jerusalem, and how that Temple had been enriched by holy gifts from the kings of Asia, – advantages and distinctions which the Temple at Gerizim could not boast, the Samaritans were publicly declared to be vanquished, and according to agreement they were put to death. The Samaritan accounts, which are of a much later date and more confused, ascribe the victory to their side.

This controversy respecting the superior sanctity of Jerusalem or Shechem was, it appears, carried on in Greek verse. A Samaritan poet, Theodotus, praised the fertility of the country round Shechem, and in order to magnify the importance of that city he related the story of Jacob, describing how he rested there; also the ill-usage which his daughter Dinah received from the young nobles of Shechem, and the revenge taken upon them by her brothers, Simeon and Levi. In opposition to Theodotus, a Judæan poet, Philo the Elder, exalted the greatness of Jerusalem in a poem. He extolled the fertility of the Judæan capital, and spoke of its ever-flowing subterranean waters, which were conducted through channels from the spring of the High Priest. The poet endeavoured to enhance the sanctity of the Temple in Jerusalem, which stood on Mount Moriah, on the summit of which Abraham had been about to offer up his son Isaac – an act which shed everlasting glory upon all his descendants.