28 CHAPTER ONEceeded in wresting the tax-farming contract for Judaea from his ineffectual
uncle. (The Ptolemies collected taxes by auctioning tax-farming contracts dis-
trict by district, often to wealthy natives; the tax farmers were then left to raise
what they could. They had to pay for shortfalls out of their own pockets but
could keep profits.) Josephus embroidered Joseph’s exploits and those of his
son and heir, Hyrcanus, with so many swashbuckling details that it is tempting
to dismiss the entire tale as a fabrication produced by an adventure writer.
Nevertheless, the story is not wholly devoid of interest. It suggests that Ptolem-
aic policies created important opportunities for men with capital, even if they
were not exactly members of the traditional ruling classes. The story also por-
trays the Tobiads as Jewish heroes who take a kind of accountants’ revenge
on the Judaeans’ traditional enemies in the Gree kcities of Palestine by exact-
ing taxes from them with special rigor. The Tobiads’ assertive Judaism is strik-
ing in light of their non-Judaean ancestry; but their Judaism is of a peculiarly
modern-seeming secular-nationalist kind. The story portrays Joseph and Hyr-
canus as persistent and unself-conscious violators of Jewish law. And for all
their alleged hostility to the Gree kcities, they are entirely comfortable in the
Hellenic environment of the Ptolemaic royal court in Alexandria, Egypt. The
family’s ease around high government officials, at least, is confirmed by some
papyri written in the 250sB.C.E. concerning the business and political arrange-
ments of one Toubias, possibly Joseph’s father, a large landowner whose pri-
vate army had been integrated into the Ptolemaic forces, and the royal agent
Zenon.^22 Thus, despite the dubious details of Josephus’s story, it introduces
us to an element of the Judaean elite in the process of transformation, in the
form of a wealthy, marginally Jewish but Jewishly well-connected family. This
family had greatly benefited both economically and politically from the Ptole-
mies’ preference for capital-rich subjects and participated in the common
Gree kculture of eastern Mediterranean elite society. Yet it resisted actually
becoming Gree kand, successfully wal king this tightrope, came to play an
important role in Judaean society.
The New WisdomThere are several pieces of Judaean literature that most scholars agree were
composed in the third centuryB.C.E. These works introduce us to a different
segment of Judaean society from that which is the subject of Josephus’s stories.
The priestly and/or scribal circles who produced the literature were no less
affected by the new conditions created by Macedonian rule than Josephus’s
Tobiads were, but they changed at first in more subtle ways. For despite the
ascendancy of people like the Tobiads, the Temple and the Torah remained
the centrally important institutions in Judaea. Scribes now presumably
(^22) SeeCPJ1: 115–30; S. Schwartz, “A Note on the Social Type and Political Ideology of the
Hasmonean Family,”JBL112 (1993): 305–7.