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

The Book of Daniel 

the author of  Maccabees, writing (almost certainly) some time towards the
end of the second century..His work opens as follows:

And it came to pass after the victory of Alexander the son of Philip

the Macedonian, who came from the land of Chittim, that he smote

Darius, king of the Persians and Medes, and ruled in his stead, begin-

ning in Greece. He waged many wars and captured strongholds and

slew (the) kings of the land. He pressed forward to the ends of the earth

and took spoils from a multitude of peoples, and the earth was silent

before him, and he was exalted and his heart filled with pride.^6

We can assume that in Judaea itself Alexander’s passage, from Tyre down the
coast to Egypt, will have made a corresponding impact. The only detailed
narrative reflection of it from a Jewish perspective which we have, however,
is a legend, or perhaps better a religious historical novella, which Josephus
incorporatedinbookofhisAntiquities.^7
We shall return briefly later to the significance of Josephus’ use here of
Daniel, which in fact had not yet been written at the time described inAnt.
. It is more important to stress at this point that the still developing corpus
of biblical works did incorporate a reasonably complete historical narrative,
or series of narratives, relating the impact on the Jewish community of a suc-
cession of Near Eastern empires, going back through the Persian Empire of
the Achaemenids to the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. To go no further
back, the book of Kings contained a historical narrative from the end of King
David’s reign to the Babylonian Captivity. The two books of Chronicles re-
told the story from the time of Saul onwards, continuing to a rather brief
account of the Captivity, and ending triumphantly with the victory of Cyrus
over the Babylonian dynasty (..) and the return from the Captivity:

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia (KWRŠ MLK PRS)—to ful-

fil the word of Yahweh through Jeremiah—Yahweh roused the spirit

of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it pub-

.  Macc. :. The sequence of tenses in this section is not clear, and the translation
is hypothetical. For a basic discussion of  Macc., generally thought to be a Greek version
of a Hebrew or Aramaic original, see Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryIII., –. A
relatively early date of writing, of around ..,isarguedbyS.Schwartz,‘‘Israeland
the Nations Roundabout: I Maccabees and the Hasmonean Expansion,’’Journ. Jew. Stud.
(): –.
. Josephus,Ant. , –; Loeb trans. of , . See, e.g., A. D. Momigliano, ‘‘Flavius
Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to Jerusalem,’’Athenaeum (): – Settimo contri-
buto alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico(), –.