POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 29needed to be literate in Greek, but acquisition of this skill can have posed
little challenge to a class whose main characteristic had always been linguistic
talent.^23
I have argued elsewhere that the Ptolemies may not have recognized the
traditional autonomy of the Jews. This would help explain the rise of the
Tobiads and perhaps others like them and might also help explain the spotty
evidence for tensions between the high priests and the Ptolemies, as well as
the apparent fact that the high priest, Simon, openly supported the Seleucids
(which may in turn explain why Antiochus III recognized Simon’s authority
over the Jews).^24 Nevertheless, for all their interventionist aspirations, the Ptol-
emies still ruled mainly through local elites, especially in their non-Egyptian
holdings. Thus, the priests and scribes remained empowered, if not as exten-
sively or as exclusively as under the Achaemenids.^25
Despite the essential stability of the scribal and priestly classes in the third
century, things were changing for them. We can see this clearly if we loo kat
the way they transformed the classical Israelite/Jewish wisdom tradition, the
recording of which was one of this class’s chief literary activities.^26 In the earli-
est complete example, the biblical boo kof Proverbs (seventh-sixth centuries
B.CE.?), wisdom is an adjunct of official Jewish piety. Here fear of God is
identified with wisdom, the righteous with the wise. Like the Deuteronomic
history and some of the Psalms, Proverbs supposes that wisdom/righteousness
is the key to prosperity. Though Proverbs has an undeniable worldliness, its
central themes are specifically and conventionally Israelite.
This bureaucratic piety was subjected to criticism.^27 The boo kof Job (fifth
centuryB.C.E.?) had already drawn on Second Isaiah’s transcendental mono-
theism to reject, in a rhetorical tour de force, the traditional Deuteronomic
piety, which supposed that a powerful but immanent God could be counted
on to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. Jewish writers of the third
century produced even more radical revisions of the wisdom tradition. The
author of Ecclesiastes, who came closer than any other ancient writer in He-
brew to producing a Greek-style philosophical treatise, as opposed to the loose
collection of sayings typical of Israelite-Jewish wisdom, went well beyond Job
in taking for granted God’s total withdrawal from the world, the unchanging
(^23) See Dandamaev and Lukonin,Culture and Social Institutions of Iran, 113–16; Naveh and
Greenfield, “Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian Period”; W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein, eds.,
Cambridge History of Judaism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1:115–16.
(^24) See Tcherikover,Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, 73–89.
(^25) This paragraph summarizes my argument in “On the Autonomy of Judaea.”
(^26) For an account of the wisdom books emphasizing their “scribal” character (how many an-
cient books were not scribal?), see L. Grabbe,Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-Historical
Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel(Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International,
1995), pp. 154–62. For criticism of the “scribal” category, see C. Schams,Jewish Scribes in the
Second Temple Period(Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).
(^27) On the bureaucratic character of Proverbs, see J. Blenkinsopp,Sage, Priest, Prophet(Louis-
ville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), pp. 28–41.