Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Vol. 3 - The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

Introduction xvii

the legal documents, their formulae, diplomatics, and language, should be
studied (chapter , text to notes –) and compared with their counter-
parts from other sites in the Roman Near East—the documents from the
Judean Desert and the archives from the Euphrates, from Nessana, and now
from Petra.^10
The last two chapters (chapter : ‘‘The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Dias-
pora between Paganism and Christianity,..–,’’ , and chapter :
‘‘Christian Emperors, Christian Church, and the Jews of the Diaspora in the
Greek East,..–,’’ ) are about the Jewish diaspora. Not that the
Jews are ever out of sight elsewhere in this volume or inRNE.Anexample
is the typical statement in the introductory pages to chapter :

For what distinguished the Jews from all the other groups which came

within the orbit of Graeco-Roman civilisation was precisely the fact

that they already possessed a national religious history, the Bible (even

if not yet quite complete in its canonical form), written in a literary

language entirely independent of Greek or Latin. Existing as a corpus

of literary works, the Bible could be and was translated into Greek in

the Hellenistic period.

It is legitimate to ask if the same holds true for Judaism and the Jews in the
diaspora as for those of Palestine. At any rate in the period discussed in these
last two chapters, in Palestine as elsewhere the Jews, now no longer a ma-
jority, were caught between Christianity and a declining paganism, and the
issues cannot have been fundamentally different from those outside. What is
beyond dispute after reading these two chapters is ‘‘that the history of Juda-
ism in late antiquity cannot be confined to Palestine, for we can see that there
was a very significant Jewish life in the diaspora’’ (chapter , last paragraph).
With this the third and last volume in the series comes to an end, but not
completely; we can trust Fergus Millar not to sit idle when ‘‘there is work to
be done.’’ The publication of articles continues.
We may fittingly end with the traditional Jewish exhortation on finishing
the reading of each book of the Pentateuch: ḤZQ ḤZQ WNTḤZQ, which
can be loosely translated as ‘‘be strong and of good courage.’’

Hannah M. Cotton

Jerusalem

 July 

. Cf. H. M. Cotton, W. E. H. Cockle, and F. G. B. Millar, ‘‘The Papyrology of the
Roman Near East: A Survey,’’JRS (): –.