This literature documents a remarkable attempt to embrace Greek
culture while maintaining a distinctive Jewish identity. On the one hand, it
demonstrates the huge interest that Greek culture aroused among Jewish
elites, and how much they could feel at home in the Greek-speaking world.
On the other hand, it also shows that Jews remained very much aware of
their distinctive cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, some Jews
abandoned the ancestral customs of their people. We know, for instance, of
Dositheos son of Drimylos and of Philo’s nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexan-
der. “Apostasy,” if we may call it that, was probably more common among
the elites than among the ordinary people. But in the case of Greco-
Roman Egypt, which we know better than other places in the Diaspora,
both the literary and the papyrological evidence show that, in general, Jews
who expressed themselves in Greek did not indulge in religious paganism
or give up the commandments of the Torah. Their culture and identity
were bipolar and their relationship to Hellenism selective. They showed a
great deal of creativity and boldness in appropriating Greek literary gen-
res, Greek mythology, and Greek philosophical concepts, but used them
for their own purposes. In other words, their relationship with Greek cul-
ture was not passive but active — and critical. Even when dealing with the
biblical or Jewish traditions they inherited, however, they showed great
exegetical freedom (a freedom not unparalleled in Hebrew and Aramaic
compositions).
That Jews in the Hellenistic and early Roman eras borrowed concepts,
literary motifs, and vocabulary from the surrounding culture was nothing
new or exceptional. The biblical texts already attest many borrowings from
Canaanite, Babylonian, and Persian cultures. Whatever its stage of devel-
opment, Judaism was never impermeable or completely inward-looking.
What was new was the attempt to translate the tradition into a language
and cultural idiom that were not Semitic. Obviously, for texts to be trans-
lated one first needed to have them reach a certain state of completion.
This was achieved in the course of the Hellenistic period, as the collection
of manuscripts from Qumran shows. This was a major historical and cul-
tural phenomenon that would leave important marks on the cultural his-
tory of the world.
This process of translation was not merely a linguistic one. Even the
Septuagint — a collection of Hebrew and Aramaic texts translated into
Greek — represented aculturaltranslation, an endeavor to transpose Jew-
ish beliefs and traditions into a different key. Since Jewish beliefs and tradi-
tions were not set once and for all, this transposition also gave birth to new249Early Jewish Literature Written in GreekEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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