deserts, tribes and empires 21
from which, according to the biblical account, the Israelites had emerged
in the time of Joshua to conquer the land. Invasion and warfare have
been part of the history of the region ever since.
Each invading culture had left its mark on the Jews by the time that
Josephus was writing his history at the end of the first century ce. Many
aspects of Mesopotamian accounts of the creation of the world are
similar to the stories in Genesis. Egyptian artefacts of all kinds are com-
mon in archaeological sites in the land of Israel in the second and early
first millennium bce. Aramaic, the official language of the Persian state,
had become the lingua franca of all the inhabitants of the fertile crescent
alongside Greek, the official language of the Macedonian kingdoms in
the Near East after Alexander. The rebuilding of Jerusalem by Herod
the Great had incorporated many of the most recent innovations in
Roman architecture, and Agrippa, who ruled as the last king of Judaea
from 41 to 44 ce, bore a Roman name.^30
The influence of other cultures on Jews and Judaism was even greater
in the diaspora than in the homeland. Already by 200 bce there were
Jewish communities in Babylonia and Egypt, and over the next two
centuries many Jews were to be found in parts of Asia Minor (modern
Turkey), Greece and Macedonia, in Cyrene (in modern Libya) and, from
the mid- first century bce, in the city of Rome. The origin of some of
these communities, such as Babylonia and Rome, had been through
deportation of war captives from Judaea, but they were swelled by eco-
nomic migrants and mercenaries, and by an unknown number of
proselytes from the host societies in which they lived. Josephus was able
to tell only sporadic stories about some of these diaspora communities,
such as the adventures of the Jewish brigands Asinaeus and Anilaeus in
northern Mesopotamia in the early first century ce and the travails of
the large Jewish population of Alexandria in Egypt, where political rel-
ations between Jews and Greeks under Roman rule were often fraught.
Josephus reports that on occasion both Hasmonaean and Herodian
rulers intervened with the Roman state on behalf of the political rights
of diaspora communities. By the second century bce Jews in all parts of
the diaspora shared a concern for the welfare of the Jerusalem Temple
and its cult, although individual communities were free to develop in
distinctive local ways without any imposition of control from the
authorities in Judaea.^31
Modern scholars have done their best to make sense of the biblical nar-
rative in light of other evidence in much the same way as Josephus,