POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 35without surrendering that which made it distinctively Judaean. Embracing
elements of Gree kculture facilitated the Hasmoneans’ integration with their
neighbors.^41
Although the author of 2 Maccabees believed Judah Maccabee was en-
gaged in a battle against Hellenism,^42 he was surely wrong, if by Hellenism
we mean the adoption of elements of Gree kculture by non-Gree ks. The
evidence is unambiguous. Even Judah had counted the most culturally helle-
nized Judaeans among his partisans. One of these was an aristocratic priest
named Eupolemus, whose father, John, had led the Judaean embassy to Anti-
ochus III in 200B.C.E. securing the king’s benefactions to the temple and
nation of the Judaeans. John could not have addressed the king if he did
not have some grasp of Gree krhetoric, a s kill necessarily shared by his son
Eupolemus, who in 161B.C.E. led Judah’s embassy to the Roman senate,
which permitted easterners to address it in Greek. Furthermore, in 159B.C.E.,
Eupolemus published aHistory of the Judaean Kings, of which only brief
excerpts survive. This boo kwas composed in the Gree klanguage according
to the canons of Gree khistoriography. The excerpts concern David and Solo-
mon, and one wonders whether the point of the boo kmight not have been to
argue that Judah and his brothers were worthy heirs of the ancients, notwith-
standing their deficient ancestry. It is in any case surely significant that the
earliest Palestinian Jewish boo kto have been written in Gree kwas published
by a partisan of Judah Maccabee at the height of the Maccabean revolt and
may well have been addressed to a mainly local Jewish audience.^43
The Maccabean brothers necessarily acquired facility in the Gree klan-
guage, if they did not have it from childhood, and must have learned, like the
Tobiads before them, how to behave in the presence of royal officials (a point
Gruen missed). In their political behavior in Judaea, too, they depended heav-
ily on Gree knorms, demonstrating that hellenizing pressures came not only
from the eastern Mediterranean environment but from Judaea itself. The en-
graving of the resolution of the assembly convened by Simon in 140B.C.E.
on tablets, and their display in the temple, conform with practices that origi-
nated in the Gree kcities of the later sixth and fifth centuriesB.C.E. In the
same period in Judaea, the public assemblies convened by Ezra and Nehe-
miah produced not inscribed resolutions but oral oaths. When Simon’s son
John Hyrcanus I wished to give material expression to Judaea’s independence,
(^41) This is not a novel point, but it has now been argued with novel force, and in exhaustive
detail, by Gruen,Heritage and Hellenism, 1–40, with extensive bibliography.
(^42) See S. Schwartz, “Israel and the Nations Roundabout,”JJS42 (1991): 23; Gruen’s rejection
of this point (Heritage and Hellenism, p. 5 n. 8) is based on a reductive reading of the book: cf.
M. Himmelfarb, “Judaism and Hellenism in 2 Maccabees,”Poetics Today19 (1998): 19–40.
(^43) On Eupolemus, see C. R. Holladay,Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, vol. 1, Histo-
rians(Chico, Calif.; Scholars, 1983), pp. 93–156.