A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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WHEN ALEXANDER OF MACEDON defeated Darius III, King of Persia, beside the River Issus in October 333 BCE, the Jews of Jerusalem were shocked, because they had been loyal vassals of Persia for over two hundred years. Josephus Flavius, the first-century Jewish historian, tells us that the high priest refused at first to submit to Alexander because he had taken a vow to remain loyal to the last Persian king but, as a result of a dream, capitulated when Alexander promised that throughout his empire the Jews would continue to be governed according to their own Law.1 In fact, it is most unlikely that Alexander ever visited Jerusalem. At first the Macedonian conquest made very little difference to the lives of the people of Judah. The Torah continued to be the official law of the province, and the administration which had operated under the Persians probably remained in place. Yet the legend of Alexander’s dealings with the high priest was significant, because it illustrated the complexity of the Jewish response to Hellenism. Some Jews instinctively recoiled from the culture of the Greeks and wanted to cling to the old dispensation; others found Hellenism congenial and saw it as profoundly sympathetic to their own traditions. The struggle between these opposing factions would dominate the history of Jerusalem for nearly three hundred years.
Hellenism had been gradually penetrating the Near East for decades before the triumph of Alexander. The old cultures of the region were beginning to crumble and would all be indelibly affected by the Greek spirit. But the Jews of Jerusalem had probably had little direct contact with the Greeks: such elements of Hellenistic culture as did come their way had usually been mediated through the coastal cities of Phoenicia, which could translate it into a more familiar idiom. Jerusalem was once more off the beaten track and had become rather a backwater. It was not on any of the main trade routes. The caravans that stopped at the nearby cities of Petra and Gaza had no reason to go to Jerusalem, which was a poor city, lacking the raw materials to develop an industry. Introverted, its life revolving around the Temple and its supposedly ancient Torah, Jerusalem paid little heed to international politics and seemed more in tune with the past than with the modernity infiltrating the region from the west.
All that changed when Alexander the Great died in Babylon on 13 June 323. The only possible heir was a minor, and almost immediately fighting broke out among the leading generals for control of the empire. For the next two decades the lands conquered by Alexander were convulsed by the battles of these six diadochoi (“successors”). As a crucial transit region, Judaea was continuously invaded by armies on the march from Asia Minor or Syria to Egypt, with their baggage, equipment, families, and slaves. Jerusalem was conquered no fewer than six times during these years, and its inhabitants became painfully aware that the long period of peaceful isolation was over. The Jews of Jerusalem first experienced Hellenism as destructive, violent, and militaristic. The Macedonian diadochoi had erupted into the country as arrogant conquerors who took little notice of the native population except insofar as it could serve their interests. Greek art, philosophy, democracy, and literature, which have played such an important role in the development of Western culture, would not have impressed the inhabitants of Jerusalem in these terrible years. They would probably have agreed with the Sanskrit writer who described the Greeks as “powerful and wicked.”
In 301, Judaea, Samerina, Phoenicia, and the whole of the coastal plain were captured by the forces of Ptolemy I Soter, the “successor” who had recently established a power base for himself in Egypt. For the next hundred years, Jerusalem remained under the control of the Ptolemies, who needed the province of Syria as a military buffer against attack from the north.
Like most ancient rulers, the Ptolemies did not interfere overmuch in local affairs, though they introduced a more streamlined and efficient type of administration that was flexible enough to treat the different regions of their Kingdom differently. Some parts of the province were crown lands that were ruled directly by royal officials; so were the new ports founded by the Ptolemies at Joppa and Strato’s Tower and the new military colonies at Beth Shan, Philotera and Pella. The rest of the country had more freedom to manage its own affairs. The Phoenician cities of Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, and Byblos were allowed significant freedoms and privileges. Greek colonists arrived in Syria and established poleis, modeled on the democratic Greek republics, in such towns as Gaza, Shechem, Marissa, and Amman, which were virtually self-governing. Greek soldiers, merchants, and entrepreneurs swarmed into these settlements to take advantage of the new opportunities in the east, and the local people who learned to speak and write in Greek became “Hellenes” themselves and were allowed to enter the lower ranks of the army and administration.
The polis was alien to many of the most deeply rooted traditions of the region. Hellenistic culture was secular. It depended upon an intelligentsia that was independent of both palace and temple. Instead of being ruled by a divinely appointed ruler or by a priestly elite, the polis kept government separate from religion. Gymnasia also appeared in these new Greek cities, where the young men were trained according to the Hellenistic ideal. They studied Greek literature and underwent a rigorous physical and military training, developing mind and body simultaneously. The gymnasion was the institution that bound the Greeks together in their far-flung empire. It had its own religious ethos. Like the Olympic Games, the athletic competitions of the young men were religious celebrations in honor of Hermes and Heracles, the patrons of the gymnasia. Usually the native people were not allowed to enter the gymnasion; it was a privilege reserved for the Greeks. But the Ptolemies did permit foreigners to be admitted. That was how the Jews of Alexandria came to be trained in the gymnasion there and were able to achieve a unique fusion of Greek and Jewish culture. The Greeks were materialistic and sometimes shocking, but many of the local people found this new culture seductive. For some it was as irresistible as Western culture is to many people today in the developing world. It attracted and repelled; it broke taboos, but for that very reason many found it profoundly liberating.
At first, Jerusalem was not affected by these new ideas. It was not a polis and therefore had no gymnasion. Most of the inhabitants would have been horrified by the idea of Hermes being honored in Yahweh’s city and appalled to see youths exercising in the nude. Judaea was of no great interest to the Ptolemies. The Jews there constituted a distinct ethnos (“nation”), which was ruled by the gerousia, a council of elders which was based in Jerusalem. The Torah continued as the official law of the ethnos, which thus remained what it had been under the Persians: a temple state governed by its priests. The Ptolemies may have appointed a local agent (oikonomos) to keep an eye on Judaean affairs, and, at least in time of war, they would have installed a garrison in the city. But for the most part, the Jews were left to their own devices. Their chief link with the Egyptian government was the tribute of twenty talents that they were obliged to pay each year.
But it was inevitable that Jerusalem would eventually be dragged into the Greek world, which was transforming the rest of the country. During the reign of Ptolemy II (282–46), a Jerusalemite called Joseph managed to secure the job of collecting the taxes of the whole province of Syria. For over twenty years he was one of the most powerful men in the country. Joseph belonged to the Tobiad clan and may have been a descendant of the Tobiah who had caused Nehemiah such trouble. If so, the Tobiads refused to allow their lives to be circumscribed by the Torah; they still liked to make contact with foreigners and would not submit to the more exclusive ethos of the Jerusalem establishment. The Tobiad estate at Ammantis in Transjordan had become one of the Ptolemaic military colonies. Joseph was obviously at home in the Greek world, and he was able to introduce the high finance of the Hellenes into Jerusalem, becoming the first Jewish banker. Many of his fellow Jews were proud of Joseph’s success: a novella quoted by Josephus, which tells the story of his career, clearly delights in his cleverness, chicanery, and skills as an entrepreneur.2 The author praises Joseph for rescuing his people from poverty and enabling them to share in the economic boom that the Ptolemies had brought to the region.
The Tobiads became the pioneers of Hellenism in Jerusalem. They wanted their city to discard the old traditions, which they found inhibiting and parochial. They were not alone in this. Many people in the Greek empire experienced a similar desire to shake off