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The Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature In honor of beloved Virgil— “O degli altri poeti onore e lume . .” —Dante, Inferno The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates, which is supported by a major gift from Joan Palevsky. Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context sara raup johnson University of California Press berkeley los angeles london University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Sara Raup, 1966–. Historical fictions and Hellenistic Jewish identity : Third Maccabees in its cultural context / Sara Raup Johnson. p. cm. — (Hellenistic culture and society ; 43) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0–520–23307–7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Third Book of Maccabees—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Jews—History—586 b.c.–70 a.d. 3. Jews—Identity— History—To 1500. 4. Historical fiction—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. bs1825.52.j64 2005 229'.75—dc22 2004008506 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10987654 321 Printed on Ecobook 50 containing a minimum 50% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free. The balance contains virgin pulp, including 25% Forest Stewardship Council Certified for no old growth tree cutting, processed either tcf or ecf. The sheet is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8 To Myles M. and Ruth R. Johnson, my parents, and Erich S. Gruen, il miglior fabbro Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader. No other history does this. History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself. Preface, 1066 and All That Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii part i. historical fictions and hellenistic jewish identity 1 1. Jews at Court 9 2. Josephus 56 3. Patriarchal Fictions 94 part ii. third maccabees: a case study 121 4. Date, Literary Context, Authorship, and Audience 129 5. Historicity and Historical Ambivalence 182 Conclusion 217 Bibliography 225 Index 239 Preface The Greek East in the Roman period abounded in fictions. In Fiction as His- tory: Nero to Julian (1994), G. Bowersock has written memorably of what he characterizes as an explosion in the production of ancient fictions in the Roman empire, beginning in the reign of Nero (54–68 c.e.), and of the par- adoxical character of some of these fictions. Lucian wrote a series of fantas- tic tales that he impudently titled True Histories (Alhqhj ' Dihghvmata). His tales are fabulous, yet they mirror the world around him: “The people of the moon are at war with the people of the sun, but eventually they con- clude a peace treaty that mirrors in its terms and language, as well in the oath that concludes it, the traditional peace treaties of the Greeks.”1 An- other writer, named, curiously enough, Ptolemy the Quail (Ptolemy Chen- nus), composed (as we learn from Photius) an outrageous work known as the Paradoxical History or New History (Paravdoxˇ IstoriJ va, Kainh; Is-J toriva), in which he systematically rewrote the myths of the past, “with a completely straight face and in a pose of scholarly precision,” right down to the citation of a host of wholly fictitious scholarly authorities.2 Yet an - other author, Celsus, whose attack on the false doctrines of the Christians is preserved by Origen, complained bitterly about the attempt of the Chris- tians to pass off a series of obviously fictitious stories as true history—but his attack on the Christians is framed in the form of a fictitious dialogue.3 All this, argues Bowersock, took place beginning in the reign of Nero, when pagan readers first began to encounter the apparently fantastic sto- ries of resurrection and ritual cannibalism contained in the oral and later 1. Bowersock 1994: 6. 2. Ibid. 24–25. 3. Ibid. 2–4. xi xii / Preface written accounts of the life and death of Christ.4 When one studies, how- ever, the writings of a wide variety of Hellenistic Jewish authors, most of whose literary production is generally dated to the second or first centuries b.c.e., one encounters a group of texts whose paradoxical character is strongly reminiscent of the fictions of the Roman period. In fact, the pro- liferation of ancient fictions in the ancient Mediterranean began quite a bit earlier than Bowersock suggests. Far from being the source and expla- nation of the phenomenon, the ambiguous historical character of the Gospels, like that of the classical fictions produced in the Roman period, reflects a more widespread Hellenistic paradox that has yet to be thor- oughly explored. In one Hellenistic Jewish text, the Jews of Alexandria are sentenced to die at the feet of a pack of drunken elephants only to be snatched from the jaws of death at the eleventh hour by the appearance of angels. A charm- ing fantasy—but the author of 3 Maccabees goes to some considerable trou- ble to locate his tale in the reign of a historical king, in the wake of a well- known historical battle, and soberly cites verbatim documents to prove his case. In another, an eyewitness, a high-ranking pagan courtier in the court of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, gives a careful and well-documented account of the translation of the Septuagint in a letter to his brother. It has long since been established, however, that this author, Aristeas, is a wholly fictitious persona; the Letter of Aristeas was written by an anonymous Jew over a century later. A fictional city in Palestine, Bethulia, is threatened by a cam- paign of invasion, described in elaborate historical detail, until the coura- geous Judith seduces the enemy commander and beheads him—thus elim- inating the general sent by one Nebuchadnezzar the Assyrian, who has recently restored the Jews from exile following the Babylonian Captivity(!).5 In an apocalypse attributed to the prophet Daniel, we learn of challenges repeatedly overcome by the prophet and his friends under a series of his- torical kings, one of whom, however, is a wholly fictitious character, appar- ently based on Darius the Great of Persia, named Darius the Mede.6 These examples could be multiplied at length. Such texts persistently combine his- 4. Ibid. 99–143. 5. Nebuchadnezzar was, of course, king of Babylon, not Assyria, and he was re- sponsible for carrying the Jews into exile in the first place; it was Cyrus of Persia who ended the Exile. 6. Not only is Darius described incorrectly as a Mede, but he is said to have con- quered Babylon and placed it under the control of the empire of the Medes (the Medes never conquered Babylon) and to have ruled before the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus of Persia (who ruled some fifty years earlier than the historical Darius). Preface / xiii torical verisimilitude with patent fiction without betraying the least aware- ness of contradiction or absurdity. The mixture of history and fiction in such texts has been variously ex- plained by scholars over the years. Some would argue that the authors of at least some of the more elaborately historical of these texts, such as 3 Mac- cabees or the Letter of Aristeas, set out deliberately to fool their audiences into accepting their works as literally true. Others have argued, with refer- ence to the more outrageously anachronistic of these tales, such as Judith and Daniel, that the inclusion of patently false historical detail was intended precisely as a signal to the reader that these tales were fiction, or novels, similar to the absurdly anachronistic historical novel of Chariton. Yet there has never, up to now, been a systematic study of the use and misuse of his- torical tradition in these quasi-fictional Jewish texts. For what purpose did the authors of these texts deliberately combine history and fiction in their accounts of the past? For whom were they writing? Did they expect their audience to read their works as history,or as fiction? How in fact were these texts read, regardless of their authors’ intentions? In recent years, there has been an increasing tendency to categorize all Jewish texts that in some way blend history and fiction as members of a sin- gle literary genre, “romance.” As a result, texts as varied as 3 Maccabees, the Letter of Aristeas, 2 Maccabees, Esther,Daniel, Judith,Tobit,several tales embedded in the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, the fragments of Artapanus, and Joseph and Aseneth have all been lumped together as belonging to the category “Jewish novel.”7 To be sure, when certain individual characteris- tics of one or another of these texts are isolated, they bear a striking re- semblance to some of the characteristics of the developing ancient novel in its many forms. No one of these texts, however, can be said to be generi- cally identical with any of the ancient novels, nor indeed are they generi- cally identical with one another.The attempt to illuminate the puzzling qual- ity of any one of these texts by press-ganging them all into a single ill-defined genre amounts to a scholarly counsel of despair.It can result only in a meaningless abstraction. Yet, when these texts are examined in relation to one another and in re- lation to other ancient fictions, certain patterns do emerge that may help us to better understand the popularity of Jewish fictions dealing with the past in the late Hellenistic period.To begin with the assumption of a shared genre, however, begs the very question that we are attempting to answer.

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