The Interpretation of the Bible by the Minor Hellenistic Jewish Authors Pieter W
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Chapter Fourteen The Interpretation of the Bible by the Minor Hellenistic Jewish Authors Pieter W. van der Horst Introduction In this contribution, not all minor Hellenistic Jewish authors will be dealt with. Excluded are all pseudepigrapha because they constitute a class of their own and are discussed elsewhere in this volume, as is also Aristobulus. 1 Some borderline cases, like Thallus and Theophilus, have also been omitted either because their Jewish identity is uncertain or because their tiny fragments do not yield much of importance. We have restricted ourselves to the nine authors from whom quotations or excerpts have been preserved via Alexander Polyhis tor in the ninth book of bishop Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica (henceforth PE), written in the first quarter of the fourth century c.E.2 Alexander Polyhistor3 was a prolific writer in the genre of geographical historical periegesis. According to the Suda (s. v. 'AA.E!;av6Qo~ 6 MLA.~mo~, ed. Adler 1, p. 104) he was brought as a captive from Miletus to Rome in the time of Sulla, but regained his liberty in 82 B.C.E.; he died in Italy as an aged man somewhere after 40 B.C.E.4 Innumerable books came from his pen (ouvEyQa'\jJE ~(~A.ou~ OQL'ItJ.loiJ X.QEL'ttOU~, Suda s. v. ), e.g. on the history of Egypt, Babylo nia, India, Crete, Libya, Phrygia, Lycia (Afyu1tnax.a, XaMai:x.a, 'Iv6Lx.a, KQl'J'tLx.a, AL~ux.a, IlEQi ~Quy(a~, IlEQL Aux.(a~), etc. 5 He was not an original and independent author, for most of his work seems to have consisted of 1 On Aristobulus see Borgen, 'Philo of Alexandria', 274-79 (Philo and His Predecessor Aristobulus). 2 Some fragments or parts of them are quoted also in Clemens Alexandrinus' Stromateis. The texts are most conveniently accessible in Denis, Fragmenta, 175-228 (Denis prints the text from Mras' edition of Eusebius' PE in GCS 43, 1, Berlin 1954, but without app. crit.). The historians can now best be consulted in Holladay, Fragments 1. 3 On Alexander Polyhistor see Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien; Susemihl, Geschichte 2, 356-64; Christ-Schmid-Stahlin, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur 211, 400-01; Lesky, Geschichte, 873; Stem, GLAJJ 1, 157ff.; Der Kleine Pauly s.v. 1, 252. The fragments of his historical work have been collected in Jacoby, FGH 3 A no. 273. 4 His pupil, the grammarian Hyginus, had his floruit during Augustus' reign. Alexander must have lived from ca. 110/105 to ca. 35/30 B.C.E .. See Unger, 'Wann schrieb Alexander Polyhistor?', and the same, 'Die Bliithezeit'. 5 He also wrote some works in the field of the history of philosophy and grammar; see Christ Schmid-Stahlin, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur 211, 401. 519 MINOR HELLENISTIC JEWISH AUTHORS excerpts and quotations from other authors. But in this manner he became one of the most important mediators of knowledge of the history of oriental peoples to later Greek and Latin authors in the West. For us he is most interesting as the author of a work On the Jews (Ilegi 'lou6a(wv), which is unfortunately lost, but part of which has been preserved in the quotations made from it by Eusebius of Caesarea in his PE. As in his other works, here too Alexander gives quotations (sometimes lengthy) from or summaries of the works of other authors, in this case Jewish ones. The question of trustworthiness need not be raised when Alexander is quoting poetry; he probably does not alter metrical texts. But when he par aphrases or summarizes prose texts, how reliable is he? The impression is that he has sometimes misunderstood his sources (so that, for example, he makes David the son of Saul), but that in general he has been quite faithful to them.6 However, it should be borne in mind that in the present case there have been at least five stages of possible corruption of the texts concerned: 1. The transmission of the texts between the autographs and their arrival on Alexander's desk. 2. Alexander's partial rewording or rephrasing of them. 3. The transmission of Alexander's text until it arrived in Eusebius' hands. 4. Eusebius' partial rewording or rephrasing of Alexander's text. 5. The transmission of Eusebius' text through the ages during which it under- went manifold corruption. 7 These factors should make us somewhat diffident and prevent us from making too apodictic or definitive statements on the material under discussion ( espe cially as to numbers and dates). Problems of dating and provenance will not be discussed. For most of the authors concerned one could say that their dates cannot be fixed exactly. At any rate it is clear that all of them wrote before Alexander Polyhistor compiled his work On the Jews and after the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. That is to say, they worked somewhere between, say, 250 and 50 B.C. E., most of them probably in the second cent. B.C.E.8 Their provenance probably was often Alexandria, sometimes Palestine, but certainty is impossible in many cases. 9 6 See Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, 16-35. 7 See for the textual history of PEthe introduction to Mras' edition, vol. 1, XIII-LIV, and Holladay, Fragments 1, 9-13. 8 See Holladay, Fragments 1, 4. 9 On Jewish Greek literature in Palestine, see Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus, 161-90 (ET 1, 88-102; 2, 59-71). 520 .