The Hellenistic World and Rome
the Syrian region could have absorbed and reacted to the fact of Greek con-
quest. That this was true of the Jewish community of Jerusalem is beyond
all question.^1 Maccabees, written originally in Hebrew, directly continues
the tradition of Old Testament historiography. It has indeed also been ar-
gued that Chronicles and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were also written
in the Hellenistic period.^2 If that is dubious, the book of Ecclesiasticus (Ben
Sira) was certainly written around ..or soon after, and Daniel, in its
final form, in the s.^3
The culture of Judaea and Jerusalem thus exhibits both a profound conti-
nuity with the pre-Greek past and an equally undeniable absorption of Greek
elements.^4 As is well known, the first attested use of the wordhellenismos
comes in Maccabees (.) and refers to the enrolment of the Jerusalemites
as ‘‘Antiochians,’’ the setting up of a gymnasium, and the wearing of Greek
clothes.
We can therefore use Maccabees to pose at least one of the many questions
which can in principle be asked about Hellenistic Syria. By ‘‘Hellenistic’’ in
this sense I mean simply the period from Alexander to the mid-first cen-
tury..By ‘‘Syria’’ I mean anywhere west of the Euphrates and south of
the Amanus Mountains—essentially therefore the area west of the Euphrates
where Semitic languages were used: Aramaic in its various dialects, Phoe-
nician, Hebrew, and earlier forms of Arabic. This begs a question about Asia
Minor (and especially Cilicia), from which Aramaic documents are known,
and a far more important one about northern Mesopotamia and about Baby-
lonia. Should we not, that is, see the various Aramaic-speaking areas of the
Fertile Crescent as representing a single culture, or at any rate closely con-
nected cultures, and therefore not attempt to study the one area without the
others?
The first question is one of cultural identity. Can we observe elsewhere in
Syria, that is, outside Judaea, either the continued survival of a non-Greek
culture or the fusion (Verschmelzung) in Droysen’s sense of Greek and non-
Greek cultures? As I have argued elsewhere, there is perhaps just enough evi-
. F. Millar, ‘‘The Background to the Maccabean Revolution: Reflections on Martin
Hengel’s ‘Judaism and Hellenism,’ ’’JJS (): – ( chapter in the present volume).
. O. Eissfeldt,The Old Testament: An Introduction(trans.) (), –.
. Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryIII, –, –. See also F. Millar, ‘‘Hellenis-
tic History in a Near Eastern Perspective: The Book of Daniel,’’ in P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey,
andE.Gruen,eds.,Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography(),
– ( chapter in the present volume).
. M. Hengel,Judaism and Hellenism: Studies inTheir Encounter in Palestine during the Early
Hellenistic Period(trans.) I–II ().