Stromateis Book Five. There Were (Now Lost) Books Which Identified the Greeks Borrowed from Judaism

[StephenGoranson]

LC quoted R. Gmirkin, just above, that Hecataeus of Abdera reported in ca. 315 BCE that Moses had, by then, established the "laws." That is, a version of Torah. Before ca. 273.
RG attempted to erase that contradiction, by asserting that Moses had reportedly "established its laws and constitution"--but only orally.
Special pleading?

[austendw]

Gmirkin has a detailed and original interpretation of Hecataeus, but at face value it seems to testify to the existence of some version of the Laws of Moses.

Andrew Criddle

Yep, I know Gmirkin's textual analysis of that passage and I have to say that, when I first read the Manetho/Berossus book, I thought that it was a very plausible take on the passage and Chapter 3 was, for me, the only really persuasive part of the book... But then I'm a sucker for that sort of lit-crit. Having said that, there are issues.

Gmirkin has been pretty negative about the 150-year tradition of biblical literary criticism:

“Such source documents must remain perpetually hypothetical, since they no longer exist as independent entities. This type of source criticism is rarely encountered in classical scholarship […] Rather, most classical source criticism takes place in later periods that are well-populated with texts, so that a given text's antecedents and successors are typically identifiable.”

But Gmirkin’s own literary criticism of Diodorus Siculus is of course subject to the same observation: the reconstruction of the constituent parts is hypothetical. In fact, while I think Gmirkin is definitely onto something when he divides this passage beterrn Hecataeus and Theophilus of Mytilene, but I am not convinced that his analysis of the text in question is in fact absolutely perfect.

One of the (unwritten?) rules of literary criticism is that suggesting that a phrase is out of place in the text, and really should appear earlier or later, is a remedy of last resort, and should be employed only if there really are no other options, which should always to be preferred . Well, Gmirkin employs the misplaced text argument, and I think there is a solution that avoids having to do so. It’s all about the last part (Hecataeus in red; Theophanes of Mytilene in green):

(3.8a) He required those that dwelt in the land to rear their children, and since their offspring could be cared for at little cost, the Jews were from the start a populous nation.

• As to marriage and the burial of the dead, he saw to it that their customs should differ widely from those of other men.
  (3.8b) But later, when they became subject to foreign rule, as a result of their mingling with men of other nations (both under Persian rule and under that of the Macedonians who overthrew the Persians), many of their traditional practices were disturbed.
  (3.8c) Such is the account of Hecataeus of Miletus in regard to the Jews.

Gmirkin notes that the reference to the Persians and Macedonians in 3.8b suggests that this sentence must be later than Hecataeus and so allocates the entire passage shown above in green to Theophanes. But he rightly says that, if that's so case, then the final comment can’t be in the right position. And he therefore proposes that it is misplaced (without suggesting why or how this might be likely in the text transmission) and originally appeared after the first part of 3.8a, thusly:

(3.8aα) He required those that dwelt in the land to rear their children, and since their offspring could be cared for at little cost, the Jews were from the start a populous nation.

• (3.8c) Such is the account of Hecataeus of Miletus in regard to the Jews.
  (3.8aβ) As to marriage and the burial of the dead, he saw to it that their customs should differ widely from those of other men.
  (3.8b) But later, when they became subject to foreign rule, as a result of their mingling with men of other nations (both under Persian rule and under that of the Macedonians who overthrew the Persians), many of their traditional practices were disturbed.

However, I think there is a better solution. Only the reference to the Persians and Greeks can certainly be considered a later addition by Theophanes, not the entire sentence. It could have been added as an explanatory gloss on the “foreign rule” in the original passage by Hecataeus. I’d also modify the translation somewhat because I don’t think the Greek verb ἐκινήθη (from .... was move) warrants the overemphatic (Loeb?) translation “disturbed”. This gives the following reconstruction:

(3.8a) He required those that dwelt in the land to rear their children, and since their offspring could be cared for at little cost, the Jews were from the start a populous nation.

• As to marriage and the burial of the dead, he saw to it that their customs should differ widely from those of other men.

(3.8b) But under later foreign rule, through mixing with foreigners,

• (during the hegemony of the Persians and their conquerors the Macedonians)

many of the paternal customs were modified.

• (3.8c) Such is the account of Hecataeus of Miletus in regard to the Jews.

The virtue of this is that it places the attribution to Hecataeus at the precise end of the quotation without having to change its position. And it is also consistent with Gmirkin’s own characterisation of the two historians’ different viewpoints. He emphasises that Theophanes shares the typical Roman view of Jews as antisocial & wilfully different from other nations. But the picture in 3.8b is consistent with Hecataeus’s more positive view, by presenting a people who did mix with others. The notion that this resulted in their ancestral customs ungoing “modification” is a fairly neutral observation.

Does this significantly change anything? Well, it may suggest that Hecataeus has a somewhat more sophisticated, less stereotypical view of the Judeans than the one Gmirkin presents. Perhaps, after all, we cannot be so sure that Hecataeus knew virtually nothing about the Judea and so made up a totally Greek fairy-tale about its founding. There are two particular issues that come to mind:

(a) Gmirkin suggests that the connection of Moses with the foundation of Jerusalem is, he says, his own invention – derived from stereotypical Greek foundation myths. He says it didn’t “derive from Egyptian tradition since, on the evidence of Manetho, the Egyptians did not consider Moses the founder of Jerusalem or its temple.” This is over-literal. While it’s entirely possible that Hecataeus made the connection between Moses & Jerusalem himself, it’s unlikely that there was only a single Egyptian view on this detail and he may have heard another version of the story. We know that the Egyptians were not consistent on the subject of the founding of Judea itself because while Hecataeus reports that “the Egyptians say that...those who set forth with Danaus, likewise from Egypt, settled … the nation of the Colchi in Pontus and that of the Judaeans” – which is very different from Manetho’s version in which the Judeans are Hyksos foreigners. So the founding of Jerusalem may have been another detail regarding which Egyptians had differing views. If nothing else, I don’t think we can be quite as sure as Gmerkin is as to what Hecataeus made up, what he heard from Egyptians, how much was based on knowledge and how much pure invention.
(b) Gmirkin says that

“Twelve-tribe alliances were a common feature in Greek tradition…It is likely that an idealized Greek amphictyon of twelve tribes was incorporated into Hecataeus's foundation story. The correspondence with the biblical tradition is thus coincidental.”

Yes, well, maybe. But I’m not sure why Hecataeus should have attached this particular element to the Judeans on a mere whim. Is it possible that some notion of a mythical 12 tribes (itself connected to Greek tradition by some other means) was doing the rounds in Judea at this time and that the Egyptians had heard of it etc? It’s impossible to know for sure, but Gmirkin’s assurance that it was just a coincidence is really no likelier than the proposition that it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

Anyway, Jeez, that was a bit of a digression that really side-stepped your question. In any case, nothing in Hecataeus really suggests that Law of Moses signified a complete five-part law book (in exactly the same way that some references to ‘torah’ in some biblical contexts also don’t refer to the Five Books of Moses). And Gmirkin is strictly speaking right that references to the Law of Moses could I suppose mean the law he heard of was reansmitted orally. But equally some of the laws (there are after all three separate substantial law corpora in the Pentateuch) may indeed have been committed to parchment, though perhaps not yet in the precise Pentateuchal context where they appear now.... there are still many possibles. The answer really depends on depends on how compelling we find Gmirkin’s argument that a vast amount of the Pentateuch - myths, narrative and laws – both in terms of broad overarching scheme and precise, fine, details, are directly derived from specific Hellenistic writers.

Another point we shouldn't forget is that in the passages that Gmirkin ascribes to Theophilus, a clear reference to the Pentateuch is scarcely more evident than in the part ascribed to Hecataeus (The final sentence of Diodorus Siculus 40:3,1 could refer to anything) even though it was written some 200 years after the LXX (assuming Gmirkin’s date). So we should be careful not to overinterpret what foreign writers did or didn't say about Judean laws, customs or literary achievements.

[austendw]

I'd agree with all this.

I’m not sure what to say when you say “I'd agree with all this” but also say that you "regard the Gmirkin date as the earliest possible date that the raw materials (identified by Gmirkin - Plato, Berossus, Manetho et al) all became available in the Greek language at the library of Alexandria.”

I’m saying something very different.

When I say this...

the various books - not necessarily yet completed, not necessarily collected and edited together, or perhaps only partially collected in smaller/different formats …may even have been written by and valued by different groups of Judahites and Samaritans, but not by all, so could claim no authority over all of them. Some "specialist" segments of the Pentateuch (eg some purity determinations, the dimensions of the tabernacle) may have only been known to certain sections of society - the scribal elites and priests - and were not universally disseminated. Other segments may only have been known as myths and tales and tales, in competition with other stories (eg Patriarchal origins vs. Egyptian origins) either with higher status, until someone sorted out how to accommodate both.

… I mean that this all happened before the final redaction of the Pentateuch, ie during a period that may have extended back to, heaven help me, even before the Greeks appeared on the scene. I absolutely don’t agree that the raw materials of the Pentateuch only became available in Greek in Alexandria when the Judean (& Samaritan?) scholars notionally came for the scholarly project that Gmirkin describes.

Gmirkin's book "Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible" provides some compelling arguments that the LXX / Hebrew Bible drew upon the Greek laws found in Plato. I have not read this book but the reviews and summaries indicate that Gmirkin has made a detailed study of the law codes from all the various sources available in the ancient world around that time period.

Well, I have read the book, and I've examined some of the proposed parallels and borrowings in great detail on both the Greek and biblical sides, and my biggest difficulty now is finding the time to write detailed (I mean detailed) accounts of where I think Gmirkin goes wrong. I have been working on such issues over the past month (based on years of notes, not written in a very organized way I confess) and hope to pull some of them together and post some of my arguments in the near future.

I am also entirely committed to a detailed diachronic analysis of biblical texts which I think undermine Gmirkin’s notion of a contemporary collaboration of different scholars - which he only ever mentions in a sketchy way and which it is hard to envisage functioning in concrete textual terms. The idea that Gmirkin's narrative of the composition of the Pentateuch could produce son many contradictory passages; that it could account for the additions and modifications and attempts to resolve those contradictions that we find, strikes me as quite impossible. Detailed comparison of how, for example, the various annual feasts are treated in the books of Exodus, Numbers & Deuteronomy reveals a clear progression, sometimes one version amending an earlier version, often with to-and-fro scribal supplements trying to eliminate contradictions, a complex diachronic process that Gmirkin’s theory doesn’t begin to address, let alone explain.

[Secret Alias]

Why is it surprising that very attention was paid to the Jews before Alexandria?

Celsus always identifies them as living in a "corner" (γωνίᾳ) of world:

4.4 But above all these, great was the reformation effected by Jesus, who desired to heal not only those who lived in one corner of the world, but as far as in Him lay, men in every country, for He came as the Saviour of all men.

4.23 In the next place, ridiculing after his usual style the race of Jews and Christians, he compares them all to a flight of bats or to a swarm of ants issuing out of their nest, or to frogs holding council in a marsh, or to worms crawling together in the corner of a dunghill (βορβόρου
γωνίᾳ), and quarrelling with one another as to which of them were the greater sinners, and asserting that God shows and announces to us all things beforehand;

4.25 such individuals are notwithstanding worms, rolling in a corner of the dung-heap (βορβόρου γωνίᾳ) of stupidity and ignorance.

ibid Nor can those among Christians and Jews who are wicked, and who, in truth, are neither Christians nor Jews, be compared, more than other wicked men, to worms rolling in a corner of a dunghill (βορβόρου γωνίᾳ).

4.30 one might mockingly and revilingly say that such men were worms, who did not measure themselves by their corner of their dung-heap in human life (ἐν γωνίᾳ τοῦ ἐν τῷ βίῳ τῶν ἀνθρώπων βορβόρου ἑαυτοὺς), and who accordingly gave forth their opinions on matters of such importance as if they understood them, and who strenuously assert that they have obtained a view of those things which cannot be seen without a higher inspiration and a diviner power.

4.36 Celsus in the next place, producing from history other than that of the divine record, those passages which bear upon the claims to great antiquity put forth by many nations, as the Athenians, and Egyptians, and Arcadians, and Phrygians, who assert that certain individuals have existed among them who sprang from the earth, and who each adduce proofs of these assertions, says: The Jews, then, leading a grovelling life in some corner of Palestine (φησὶν ὡς ἄρα Ἰουδαῖοι ἐν γωνίᾳ που τῆς Παλαιστίνης συγκύψαντες), and being a wholly uneducated people, who had not heard that these matters had been committed to verse long ago by Hesiod and innumerable other inspired men

5.51 for there was a divine hand which fought on their behalf, and whose desire it was that the word of God should spread from one corner of the land of Judea throughout the whole human race (κατὰ τὴν Ἰουδαίαν γῆν γωνίας ἐπισπεῖραι ὅλῳ τῷ γένει τῶν ἀνθρώπων).

6.78 Celsus next makes certain observations of the following nature: Again, if God, like Jupiter in the comedy, should, on awaking from a lengthened slumber, desire to rescue the human race from evil, why did He send this Spirit of which you speak into one corner (τί δή ποτε εἰς μίαν γωνίαν
ἔπεμψε τοῦτο)? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies, and have sent them out into all the world.

ibid Moreover, the advent of Jesus apparently to one corner (Ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ δοκοῦσα εἰς μίαν γωνίαν ἐπιδημία τοῦ Ἰησοῦ εὐλόγως γεγένηται) was founded on good reasons, since it was necessary that He who was the subject of prophecy should make His appearance among those who had become acquainted with the doctrine of one God, and who perused the writings of His prophets, and who had come to know the announcement of Christ, and that He should come to them at a time when the Word was about to be diffused from one corner over the whole world (ὅτ' ἔμελλεν ἐκχεῖσθαι ἀπὸ μιᾶς γωνίας ὁ λόγος ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην).

[Secret Alias]

Why would it be expected that there be mention of an unimportant people and their law as they were from an insignificant corner of the world?

[Leucius Charinus]

I'd agree with all this.

I’m not sure what to say when you say “I'd agree with all this” but also say that you "regard the Gmirkin date as the earliest possible date that the raw materials (identified by Gmirkin - Plato, Berossus, Manetho et al) all became available in the Greek language at the library of Alexandria.”

I’m saying something very different.

When I say this...

the various books - not necessarily yet completed, not necessarily collected and edited together, or perhaps only partially collected in smaller/different formats …may even have been written by and valued by different groups of Judahites and Samaritans, but not by all, so could claim no authority over all of them. Some "specialist" segments of the Pentateuch (eg some purity determinations, the dimensions of the tabernacle) may have only been known to certain sections of society - the scribal elites and priests - and were not universally disseminated. Other segments may only have been known as myths and tales and tales, in competition with other stories (eg Patriarchal origins vs. Egyptian origins) either with higher status, until someone sorted out how to accommodate both.

… I mean that this all happened before the final redaction of the Pentateuch, ie during a period that may have extended back to, heaven help me, even before the Greeks appeared on the scene. I absolutely don’t agree that the raw materials of the Pentateuch only became available in Greek in Alexandria when the Judean (& Samaritan?) scholars notionally came for the scholarly project that Gmirkin describes.

Thanks for clarifying your position. I misread this section and one of the causes of this is that by my comment about "archeological evidence for societal Torah observance" I was actually referring to the archeological arguments put forward by Yonatan Adler's "The Origins of Judaism" and not Gmirkin's arguments.

Now that I understand your position that the compilation of these sources may have been earlier than the Hellenistic period I appreciate that your comments ...

It may be that, already begining to be authoritative in the later 3rd century, it wasn't until the Hasmoneans in the 2nd century that Torah-adherence became a matter of importance and a seen as a matter of social cohension. So much is still unknown about all this and remains difficult to explain with any degree of certainty.

[These] ... offer an opening up of the question of chronology to later than Gmirkin's 274 BCE origin and more in accordance to Adler's findings. I apologise for the confusion on my part but I certainly do agree with the last highlighted comment.

I am still inclined to view that the ambitious project of the Ptolemy's to gather together all known literature (and in some cases to have it translated into Greek) in one single collection at the library of Alexandria may have been a formative impetus behind the LXX/Hebrew Bible as argued by Gmirkin. But IDK. I agree much is still unknown. And any certainty is premature for all competing theories.

Gmirkin's book "Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible" provides some compelling arguments that the LXX / Hebrew Bible drew upon the Greek laws found in Plato. I have not read this book but the reviews and summaries indicate that Gmirkin has made a detailed study of the law codes from all the various sources available in the ancient world around that time period.

Well, I have read the book, and I've examined some of the proposed parallels and borrowings in great detail on both the Greek and biblical sides, and my biggest difficulty now is finding the time to write detailed (I mean detailed) accounts of where I think Gmirkin goes wrong. I have been working on such issues over the past month (based on years of notes, not written in a very organized way I confess) and hope to pull some of them together and post some of my arguments in the near future.

I am also entirely committed to a detailed diachronic analysis of biblical texts which I think undermine Gmirkin’s notion of a contemporary collaboration of different scholars - which he only ever mentions in a sketchy way and which it is hard to envisage functioning in concrete textual terms. The idea that Gmirkin's narrative of the composition of the Pentateuch could produce son many contradictory passages; that it could account for the additions and modifications and attempts to resolve those contradictions that we find, strikes me as quite impossible. Detailed comparison of how, for example, the various annual feasts are treated in the books of Exodus, Numbers & Deuteronomy reveals a clear progression, sometimes one version amending an earlier version, often with to-and-fro scribal supplements trying to eliminate contradictions, a complex diachronic process that Gmirkin’s theory doesn’t begin to address, let alone explain.

I am all for further detailed analysis of the sources for the LXX/Hebrew Bible. And I wish you well in your projects described above. My own studies have in no way been focused within this BCE time period. (Rather in the epoch covering the first five centuries CE).

I will be especially interested to read how you analyse Gmirkin's "proposed parallels and borrowings" from Plato.

[Secret Alias]

The problem I mentioned before, that the Jews were deemed to be an insignificant people in a worthless "corner" of the world, helps explain why there were so few mentions of the Jews in antiquity. When Alexander conquered Egypt he went through the Levant. He didn't care about the Jews nor did most of his contemporaries. Not surprising that they weren't mentioned a lot. They weren't a "kingdom" which could be plundered. They were deemed to be a worthless people with little in the way of anything except "superstition."

[andrewcriddle]

Gmirkin has a detailed and original interpretation of Hecataeus, but at face value it seems to testify to the existence of some version of the Laws of Moses.

Andrew Criddle

Yep, I know Gmirkin's textual analysis of that passage and I have to say that, when I first read the Manetho/Berossus book, I thought that it was a very plausible take on the passage and Chapter 3 was, for me, the only really persuasive part of the book... But then I'm a sucker for that sort of lit-crit. Having said that, there are issues.
....................................................

Gmirkin is not only claiming that the passage in Diodorus Siculus book 40 is only loosely based on Hecataeus. IIUC He currently argues that the portion of the quote in Diodorus Siculus that he does attribute to Hecataeus was a source for (later) Jewish traditions rather than being evidence of (earlier) traditions.

Andrew Criddle

Edited to Add

Im defense of the attribution of the passage in book 40 to Hecataeus see Grabbe

[StephenGoranson]

Thanks, Andrew. Grabbe makes some fine observations.

[austendw]

Gmirkin is not only claiming that the passage in Diodorus Siculus book 40 is only loosely based on Hecataeus. IIUC He currently argues that the portion of the quote in Diodorus Siculus that he does attribute to Hecataeus was a source for (later) Jewish traditions rather than being evidence of (earlier) traditions.

Quite so. I feel that when Gmirkin gets the impression that something is Greek in style (eg relates to the Greek foundation stories) then this immediately becomes clear evidence that the idea was entirely Greek, which excludes other contiguous possibilities. Grabbe arges, in a more nuanced fashion, that Hecataeus may indeed have genuine data about Judea which was "then assimilated to the Greek ‘native constitution’ (patrios politeia) pattern, which explains the Greek colouring of the account." I mentioned the 12 tribes above, which for Gmirkin was a purely Greek idea which, as you say, he seems to argue was the actual fons origens of the Biblical 12 tribes. But why did Hecataeus pick upon this particular Greek notion and arbitrarily (fraudulently even) attach it to his description of Jews? That anomaly disappears if we suppose that Hecataeus somehow heard of a Judean 12-Tribes tradition which resonated with his own knowledge of Greek amphyctionic leagues, and that this is why he included in his account.

Im defense of the attribution of the passage in book 40 to Hecataeus see Grabbe

Thanks for alerting me to that. I actually have the book but haven't read it from cover to cover and didn't know that he addresses Gmirkin's assessment head-on. Grabbe's critique of Gmirkin that I alluded to above makes complete sense to me, but his criticisms of Gmirkin's proposals about the involvement of Theophilus of Mytilene are not quite so successful. But Grabbe is certainly right when he says that identifying Theophilus in connection with this passage is speculative. And that's the problem with this whole issue: Gmirkin's attempt to plot a linear, chronologically precise line of descent for the legends that Greeks and Egyptians told about Judean origins involves plotting a course through a mire of very ambiguous evidence. One route through the morass may look plausible enough, but it doesn't preclude other equally plausible alternatives.

For example Gmirkin goes to some length to show that the "foreigner" element in Diodorus Siculus 40 was derived from Menetho, who told a story about Seth-Typhon worshippers, not Jews. However the evidence is clear that while Manetho reported stories about Seth-worshippers, Hyksos invaders, Jerusalem & Jews, he didn't invent them; he was only transmitting popular Egyptian stories derived from a variety of sources, both written and oral. So the version which appears in Diodoris Siculus 40:3:1ff need not be dependent on Manetho, but could be an independent Egyptian tradition, arising at any time during the trope's long history, which ultimately extends back to the 18yh Dynasty.* While those comments did not refer to Jews, of course, it is clear that when Manetho was using his own earlier Egyptian sources, the Seth-worshipping Hyksos had already been associated with Jerusalem and Judea. So the distinction Manetho (or his source) made between the original foreign Seth-worshipping Shepherd Kings and the later Egyptian Seth-worshippers was probably a minor academic distinction, and legends being what they are, it's hardly plausible that they registered in the popular imagination. This is an important point, because if there is any truth in the notion that the Biblical Exodus was in any way a literary reaction to Egyptian ideas about those maurauding Asiatics and/or their Persian-loving descendants (which is another subject), then there is no reason to insist that the Exodus narrative had to have been dependent on Manetho. Needless to say, the very precise correlations between Manetho and Exodus that Gmirkin describes are actually nothing of the sort: I can see none that are not either misjudged or too loose to be at all plausible.

* from his own footnote on p.174 "26. Papyrus Sallinger (Dynasty XVIII) described the rule of the Hyksos under Apopis (Ra-Apopi) as the period when "Egypt belonged to the Impure" and when the king "served no other god in the entire land but Sutekh" (see G. Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt [New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1967], 269-74). An inscription of Hatshepsut (Dynasty XVIII) described the "Asiatics (who) were in Avaris" as roving hordes overthrowing Egypt and ruling without Ra."

(edited for typos)