Jews and Others
It is thus striking that the legendary common genealogy with which the
Arabs were not supplied from within Graeco-Roman mythology was derived
instead from written Jewish tradition. Moreover, it was to be made explicit,
in far more detail and with the attachment of fateful religious connotations,
precisely by the Jewish writer who, as we have seen, most emphatically as-
serts his distance from Greek culture, from Greek historiography, and from
the typical uses to which Greeks put the past: Josephus.
To do so, he did precisely what a pagan Greek writer would have done:
that is to say he found appropriate starting points within the available cor-
pus of mythological history, and developed these with explicit reference to
the present. In doing this, he was quite clearly influenced by Graeco-Roman
categories of interpretation, of the type mentioned above, and already ap-
plied to Jews. For he quotes in theAntiquitiesa passage of Alexander Poly-
histor, who like Apollonius Molon wrote in the first century..In it Alex-
ander quotes an extract from an earlier writer called Cleodemus or Malchus,
which both uses the name of a grandson of Abraham and Keturah and com-
bines Greek and Jewish mythological history:
All these sons and grandsons Abraham contrived to send out to found
colonies, and they took possession of Troglodytis and that part of
Arabia Felix which extends to the Red Sea. It is said moreover that this
Eôphrên led an expedition against Libya and occupied it and that his
grandsons settled there and called the land after his name Africa. I have
a witness to this statement in Alexander Polyhistor, whose words are
as follows: ‘‘Cleodemus the prophet, also called Malchus, in his history
of the Jews relates, in conformity with the narrative of the lawgiver
Moses, that Abraham had several sons by Katura. He moreover gives
their names, mentioning three—Apheras, Sures, Japhras—adding that
Sures gave his name to Assyria, and the two others, Japhras and Apheras,
gave their names to the city of Aphra and the country of Africa. In
fact, he adds, these latter joined Heracles in his campaign against Libya
and Antaeus; and Heracles, marrying the daughter of Aphranes, had by
her a son Didorus, who begat Sophon, from whom the barbarians take
their name of Sophakes.’’^15As we can already see, Josephus’ procedure depended partly on the proper
names to be found in the text of the Bible. It is therefore unfortunate that we
cannot be sure whether he used the Hebrew original or only the LXX; nor
. Josephus,Ant. I, –, Loeb trans. For a detailed discussion, see C. R. Holladay,
Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish AuthorsI:Historians(), ff.