Petichta; Symbolist; Confession; Unclear Foresight; Revisiting the Politeia

1.  The first essay I read today was Lewis Barth’s “The Midrashic Enterprise”.  What I’ll share from that article is that there’s a debate among scholars about the petichta in midrashic literature.  What is a petichta?  Let’s take Leviticus Rabbah.  It’s interpreting a passage from Leviticus.  But it introduces its exegesis of the Leviticus passage with a verse from (say) Psalms.  Then, it tries to tie that verse from Psalms into the Leviticus passage.

In any case, the debate is over whether the petichta was originally an introduction to a sermon, or was a sermon by itself.  I’m not sure what the arguments are for each side.  But the debate appears to be this: Was the petichta leading up to the action of interpreting Leviticus and drawing lessons from it, or was the whole process of tying the petichta verse back to Leviticus in itself a sermon, intended to teach the Jewish people lessons?  Personally, I like the idea of meandering around and learning stuff along the way.

2.  My second reading for today was from pages 68-82 of Saul Lieberman’s Hellenism in Jewish Palestine.  What stood out to me from that was Lieberman’s discussion of the exegesis of dreams, and how the rabbis applied some of those techniques to their interpretation of Scripture.  But did the rabbis believe that dreams mattered?  Lieberman quotes a rabbinic passage stating, “If the contents of dreams which have no effect may yield a multitude of interpretations, how much more then should the important contents of the Torah imply many interpretations of every verse.” 

This viewpoint holds that dreams have “no effect” (if I’m interpreting it correctly).  And Lieberman notes that the rabbis condemned the superstitious belief that encountering a weasel is a bad portent.  They weren’t too big on superstitions!  Yet, Lieberman refers to rabbinic statements that dreams were significant.  There were rabbis who thought that seeing certain letters in a dream was a good omen.  Some maintained that the presence of barley in a dream meant that the dreamer’s sins were forgiven, for the Hebrew word for “barley” sounds like a Hebrew phrase for “sin is removed”.

And so there were rabbis who tried to decode Scripture, and other signs in the universe that may be significant (such as dreams).  There were people whom Lady in the Water would call “symbolists”.  But there were other rabbis who opposed superstition, and the fear in which it held people captive.  They probably looked down on superstition because they believed that God was the ultimate power in the universe, so who cares about your bad dream, or if a weasel crosses your path?

3.  I read more of G.A. Kennedy’s New History of Classical Rhetoric.  Kennedy refers to Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias, in which Socrates says that a guilty person can help himself more if he uses rhetoric—not to get himself let off—but rather to get himself convicted, since then he’s helping himself out more.  But Kennedy goes on to say that Socrates wasn’t being overly serious when he made that point, but he was just trying to get Ponus to think. 

But Socrates’ point reminds me of some Desperate Housewives plots.  Orson ran over Mike Delfino, and his wife, Bree, wanted him to confess his crime and to go to jail.  In Season 1, her son, Andrew, accidentally ran over Carlos Solis’ ”MaMA” (as Carlos calls her), and left the scene.  In the last season, someone was using that to blackmail Bree so she’d sell him her company.  Andrew told Bree that it was time for him to pay for running over Carlos’ mother—by going to jail.  That demonstrated a lot of growth on Andrew’s part—from the cocky kid of the early seasons to the responsible adult of this past year.

Then there are Dostoevsky novels, such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, in which a character decides to go to jail to pay for what he did, and to let God prune him and make him spiritually fruitful.

Jail can be a place of growth, as one encounters people who have experienced problems, and learns empathy as a result.  But it can also be a place that hinders growth.  My sister knows someone who went to jail for many years for burning down his fraternity house when he was drunk.  When he got out, he dated younger women, for jail had placed him in a sort of time-warp, if you will, in which he was away from society.  When he got out, it was like he was the same age as when he went in, in his mind.

The Big Book tells alcoholics that they may need to go to jail as a result of making amends, but not everyone chooses to follow that rule.  For some, the best way to make amends is to try to be a better person.

But Socrates was probably criticizing the sort of person who successfully defended himself in court, and learned nothing.  He had no intention of using his freedom to become a better person. 

I’ll tie into this item my church for this morning.  I went to two masses: one at 12:00, and another at 12:30.  The Scriptures and the homilies were about forgiveness: the importance of us knowing that we’re forgiven (which, to me, sounds rather Protestant, since some Protestants harp on assurance of salvation), and of seeing every sinner as a potential saint.

4.  I read a few essays be Renee Bloch on midrash.  Bloch talks about various versions of a midrash about Exodus 1.  In one version, the Pharaoh decrees that every newborn baby boy—Egyptian and Hebrew—is to be drowned, for he wasn’t sure if an Egyptian or a Hebrew would deliver the Israelites out of Egypt.  According to the midrash, the reason that the Pharaoh chose to kill the babies by drowning them was that the astrologers foresaw “that the Savior of Israel would be punished by water, and they thought that he would drown in the water.”  Moses was punished on account of water—he struck the rock and claimed credit for the water coming out of it, rather than speaking to the rock and giving God the glory.  But the astrologers misinterpreted what they saw, I guess.  And apparently they tried to hasten Moses’ downfall through water—back when he was an infant!

5.  While the maintenance man was vacuuming gallons of water from my wet apartment carpet (I’m serious—it was gallons!), I was reading more of Lee Levine’s Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity.   In a footnote on page 39, Levine distinguishes between maximalists—who believe that Hellenistic influence was great right before the Maccabean revolt—and minimalists—who believe it was not so great.  In the maximalist camp, he has Elias Bickerman and Martin Hengel.  In the minimalist camp, he has Victor Tcherikover.  He has other names too, but these were the scholars I used in writing my Politeia Paper.  And, in retrospect, I find Levine’s characterizations to be accurate.  My problem with Tcherikover was that he acted as if the Hellenizers merely changed Judea’s political structure, while leaving the Jewish religion intact.  I wondered how that would incite a revolt!  Hengel overlapped with Tcherikover on this issue, but at least he argued that the change in Judea’s political structure had profound ramifications, which offended religious conservatives.

Found Diodorus

In a post a while back, Paper on IV Maccabees: Looking for Diodorus, I discussed how a first century B.C.E. historian, Diodorus of Sicily, might help me on my IV Maccabees paper. My paper is about statements in II and IV Maccabees that renegade Jews undermined the Jewish politeia, or ancestral constitution, leading God to punish the nation of Israel with brutal attacks by Antiochus Epiphanes.

Right now, I have the book in which Diodorus discusses challenges to Israel’s ancestral laws. I’ll post a few quotes. I said in my post that Diodorus refers to a certain Hecataeus, who describes the Jews as xenophobic and committed to their political system, but I could not find anything about him in what I read.

Anyway, here are some quotes:

40.2: “During Pompey’s stay in Damascus of Syria, Aristobulus, the king of the Jews, and Hyrcanus his brother came to him with their dispute over kingship. Likewise the leading men, two hundred in number, gathered to address the general and explain that their forefathers, having revolted from Demetrius, had sent an embassy to the senate and received from them the leadership of the Jews, their ruler being called High Priest, not King. Now, however, these men were lording it over them, having overthrown the ancient laws and enslaved the citizens in defiance of all justice; for it was by means of a horde of mercenaries, and by outrages and countless impious murders that they had established themselves as kings” (279).

Diodorus is describing an incident in the first century B.C.E., when Aristobulus and Hyrcanus competed to be king over Israel. Each did so by seeking Roman backing. I’m not sure who overthrew the ancient laws–King Aristobulus? The high priests?–or how exactly they did so. Diodorus goes on to describe the history and laws of the Jews, so perhaps I should reread that to gain more insight.

Diodorus of Sicily, vol. 12, trans. Francis R. Walton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

40.3: “But later, when they became subject to foreign rule, as a result of their mingling with men of other nations (both under Persian rule and under that of the Macedonians who overthrew the Persians), many of their traditional practices were disturbed. Such is the account of Hecataeus of Abdera in regard to the Jews” (286-287).

Okay, there’s where he mentions Hecataeus. I don’t see him saying here that the Jews were xenophobic. But Diodorus is claiming that the Jews’ disturbed their traditional practices when they mingled with other nations. That’s pretty much what we see in I, II, and IV Maccabees.

Jubilees and the Hellenistic Reform

Source: George W.E. Nickelsburg, “The Bible Rewritten and Expanded,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 103.

“…many of Jubilees’ additions to the biblical text of Genesis and Exodus have the Jew-gentile situation in focus. In addition to the strictures against nakedness and uncircumcision mentioned above (3:31; 15:34), are the following items. Observance of the lunar calendar is construed as following ‘the feasts of the gentiles’ (sic!) (6:35). Marriage to a gentile is strictly and repeatedly forbidden (20:4; 22:20; 25:1; 27:10; 30:1-15). Warnings are issued against idolatry and consuming blood (6:12-41; 7:30; 21:6). The author stresses Israel’s unique covenantal relationship to God and qualitative difference from the gentiles (cf. also 2:31 on the Sabbath). His stringent prohibitions against contact with the gentiles suggest that such contact was not infrequent in the Israel of his time.”

This quote is relevant to my paper on IV Maccabees, which asks what II and IV Maccabees mean when they say that the Hellenistic reform challenged Israel’s poiliteia (constitution). Here, I see what one Jewish party had against Hellenistic incursions into the nation. At the same time, II and IV Maccabees may not agree with Jubilees on everything, since the Hasmoneans (whom the Maccabees books endorse) supported the lunar calendar, which Jubilees opposed.

Paper on IV Maccabees: Seth Schwartz Article

Yesterday, I read Seth Schwartz’s “The Hellenization of Jerusalem and Shechem,” Jews in a Greco-Roman World, ed. Martin Goodman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 37-46. Here are some quotes:

1. “See Tcherikover (1958), 152-174; Bickerman (1979), 38-42, arguing that Jason established not a Greek city but a Greek corporation within the still Jewish city of Jerusalem. See also Le Rider (1965), 410-11, supporting Tcherikover’s argument on the basis of such common Seleucid coin legends as Antiochon ton en Ptolemaidi, where the reference is clearly to a Greek city, and not a Greek corporation in a native city; Millar (1978), 10; Habicht (1976), 216-217. Verse 19: ‘Jason…sent as theoroi men who were Antiochenes from Jerusalem [or, as theoroi from Jerusalem men who were Antiochenes], carrying three hundred silver drachmas…’ This is, on the face of it, difficult to reconcile with Tcherikover’s view. Perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees himself misunderstood what his source, Jason of Cyrene, had written” (39).

This sounds bumpy because it’s a footnote. But it’s a somewhat decent summary of the debate about whether Antioch was Jerusalem-turned-into-a-polis, or rather a Hellenistic sub-section within Jerusalem. I may check out some of those references.

2. “The second account is more closely related to the first: when, according to Josephus (Ant. 12.257-64), the traditional Jewish cult was abolished in Jerusalem, the rulers of the Samaritan city of Shechem petitioned Antiochus for the right to reform the municipal cult so as to make Zeus Xenios the patron-god of the city. (I am assuming, by the way, that the letter is basically genuine, notwithstanding the powerful arguments of Rappenport.) And they asked to retain their traditional laws, provided with an interpetatio graeca and altered in such a way as to obscure the laws’ connection with those of the Jews. The king responded by welcoming the Shechemites‘ adoption of ‘Hellenic customs’ (hellenika ethne; Joseph. Ant. 12.264; the expression is also used in Jerusalem in Antiochus V’s rescission of the Hellenization, 2 Macc. 11:24). What resulted in both cases were cities whose Hellenism was in part notional; Jerusalem was still governed by a high priest and a board of gerontes (elders) (2 Macc. 4:18, 44), just as Phoenician cities in the same period were still ruled by their dikastai (judges); the municipal religion in both Jerusalem and Shechem was at first basically the traditional one, and even later in Jerusalem was not precisely Greek. In sum, then, the hellenika ethe of these Greek cities consisted of normally Hellenized religion, and political structure, combined with (at Jerusalem certainly, at Shechem possibly) a gymnasium and ephebate.

“We cannot be sure that the same process occurred also in such Hellenizing cities as Sardis, Tyre, Sidon, and Gaza, but the supposition that something similar did explains the significant continuities in religious and political life listed by Fergus Millar in his discussion of Phoenician cities, and by Sherwin-White and Kuhrt (1993:180-4) in their discussion of Sardis. Indeed, such continuities may have been even more conspicuous in the other cities than in Jerusalem, where the zeal of the petitioners, or of the king, eventually led them to introduce changes more radical than what was normally required to make a community ‘Greek’–a fact which may help explain the failure of Hellenization in Jerusalem (about the fate of Shechem, where the reforms were more moderate, we can only speculate)” (39-40).

“Yet the new Greekness functioned in two different ways to preserve elements, displaced and altered, of traditional cultures. Now I assume that when one, or several, of the Phoenician cities resumed the title dikastai for one of their magistrates, few people after the first generation, were necessarily aware that anything distinctive, or at any rate distinctively Phoenician, was being preserved; but the preservation of the traditional cults in the Hellenized cities may have actually functioned to keep alive a significant consciousness of a special past. Certainly the priests preserved pre-Hellenic language and myths (even if the latter often incorporated layers of Greek interpretation)–how else are we to understand the survival of the Phoenician language and, in the work of Philo of Byblos, of fragments of Canaanite mythology, albeit stoicized and euhemerized? Once Hellenized, of course, this mythology took its place in the common elite culture of the Hellenistic world, and thereby changed it, yet it retained simultaneously an irreducable distinctiveness” (42).

These quotes tell me that, in cities other than Jerusalem that became Hellenized, there wasn’t really a radical change in political structure and culture. I’d like to follow up on that Josephus reference to Shechem, since that city tried to Hellenize while preserving its traditional customs, which resembled Judaism. If there wasn’t a radical change in political structure, then why did II and IV Maccabees claim that the politeia had been changed? I think a lot of it had to do with Hellenization’s compromise of Judaism, in that it undermined circumcision and instituted a gymnasium that challenged Jewish customs. It wasn’t enough of a change to incite a revolt, but it did cause the authors of II and IV Maccabees to retroactively claim that God sent Antiochus‘ persecution as punishment for Israel’s sins.

Paper on IV Maccabees: Looking for Diodorus

Diodorus of Sicily was a Greek historian who lived in the first century B.C.E. In his Bibliotheca Historica, Book 40, he discusses the Jews. Martin Hengel cites him to say that some Jews believed the Hasmoneans were violating their ancestral laws. Later in Book 40, Diodorus refers to Hecataeus, who describes the Jews as xenophobic and committed to their political system.

Reading this may give me insight into what violation of ancestral laws actually meant, as well as why Jews may have been eager to unite with the Gentiles. I Maccabees 1:11 states, after all: “In those days certain renegades came out from Israel and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since we separated from them many disasters have come upon us’” (NRSV). What laws separated Jews from Gentiles?

I could not find all of this Diodorus passage online, but I found some of it in Greek and French. Next week, I may try to translate it (see here, pages 76-77).

I’m trying to order it on the library, but my computer is slow today.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably shift gears and write some about my Fishbane paper.

Paper on IV Maccabees: Philo on Sports

I read the following in Philo’s Life of Moses II 211. The translation is from C.D. Yonge, The Works of Philo (United States: Hendrickson, 1993).

“For this reason the all-great Moses thought fit that all who were enrolled in his sacred polity should follow the laws of nature and meet in a solemn assembly, passing the time in cheerful joy and relaxation, abstaining from all work, and from all arts which have a tendency to the production of anything; and from all business which is connected with the seeking of the means of living, and that they should keep a complete truce, abstaining from all laborious and fatiguing thought and care, and devoting their leisure, not as some persons scoffingly assert, to sports, or exhibitions of actors and dancers, for the sake of which those who run madly after theatrical amusements suffer disasters and even encounter miserable deaths, and for the sake of these the most dominant and influential of the outward senses, sight and hearing, make the soul, which should be the heavenly nature, the slave of the senses” (509-510).

Philo criticizes sports, as if they go against the aim of the Mosaic politeia. Of course, he does so for Stoic reasons–sports make people a slave to the senses–but it’s interesting that we have another person here who views them as contrary to the law. II and IV Maccabees seem to as well, as does Josephus. So maybe that’s why Jason’s gymnasium violated the Jews’ politeia, according to II and IV Maccabees.

I’m close to actually writing this paper, I think. This coming Sunday, I’ll want to check out that reference in which the Pharisees accuse the Hasmoneans of violating the politeia. Maybe I’ll find it online. If not, I’ll get it from my school’s library.

Paper on IV Maccabees: Philo on Antinomian Jews

Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM, 1974) 301.

“Philo, too, reports much criticism of the Torah in Greek-educated and predominantly Jewish circles in Alexandria, ‘who disregard kinsmen and friends, who transgress laws in which they were born and brought up, who undermine ancestral customs which cannot rightly be censured, and fall away from it’ (Vit. Mos. 1, 31, M2, 85). In another passage, he attacks those ‘who proclaim their displeasure with the constitution made by the fathers and express incessant censure and complain against the law’, talking about the ludicrous fables…in the Pentateuch.”

Hengel’s reference here is Conf. ling. 2f. (M I, 404).

Challenging the politeia seems to be the same as opposing the law. For the authors of II Maccabees and IV Maccabees, Jason opposed the law when he set up a gymnasium.

Yet, Philo had no problem with the gymnasium (see Spec. II. 229f., 246; Opif. 78). Maybe Palestinian Jews and Alexandrian Jews had different ideas on what challenged the politeia.

Paper on IV Maccabees: Other Changes in Government

Today, I read Robert Doran’s “Jason’s Gymnasion,” Of Scribes and Scrolls, ed. Harold W. Attridge, John J. Collins, Thomas H. Tobin (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990) 99-109.

Here is a quote about a change in education impacting the politeia:

“The strong connection between education and politeia is particularly well attested for Sparta. When Solon praises Spartan practices, Anacharsis asks why the Athenians have not imitated them. Solon’s reply is interesting: ‘Because we are content, Anacharsis, with these exercises which are our own; we do not much care to copy foreign customs…” (Lucian, Anach. 39) In every discussion of Greek education, Sparta’s system…is given a separate chapter. Sparta had its own way of forming its citizens. Awareness of this deep division between Sparta and other Greek cities is important in understanding what Philopoemen did to Sparta in 188 BCE. Besides demolishing the walls of Sparta, dispersing foreign mercenaries and scattering newly-freed slaves, the Achaeans are said by Livy to have abrogated the laws and customs…of Lycurgus and to have forced the Spartans to adopt the laws and institutions of the Achaeans: ‘so that they would all become one body, and concord would be established among them…The state of Lacedaemon having, by these means, lost the sinews of its strength, remained long in subjection to the Achaeans; but nothing did so much damage as the abolition of the discipline of Lycurgus…in the practice of which they had continued during seven hundred years’ (Livy 38.34)” (104).

Doran then quotes Plutarch, Phil. 16.5-6, which discusses the destruction and later reinstitution of Sparta’s politeia. Doran’s argument is that, by altering Sparta’s notorious educational system, the Achaeans were challenging its ancestral constitution. The same thing is said about Jason’s introduction of the gymnasium in Jerusalem in I Maccabees 1:13-14, II Maccabees 4:9-15, and IV Maccabees 4:19-10: that it challenged Israel’s law.

Now, I wonder about Sparta the same thing that I’m wondering about Jason’s reform of Jerusalem: what exactly changed?

Paper on IV Maccabees: A Few Hengel Quotes

I’m working my way through Martin Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM, 1974). I stumbled on some quotes that may relate to my paper topic:

1. “A way was to be opened for the extension of Hellenistic civilization and customs, which had previously been hindered by the religious prejudices of conservative groups. The limitations which the latter placed on unrestricted economic and cultural exchanges with the non-Jewish environment were to be abolished…To this end, the ‘reactionary’ conservative groups had to be deprived of their political power, so that they could no longer exercise their influence to carry through limiting, legalistic, and ritual regulations, as had happened under Simon the just…

“The prerequisite for this was the repeal of the ‘letter of freedom’ promulgated by Antiochus III, as this grounded the internal ordering of the Jewish ‘ethnos’ solely on the traditional ‘ancestral laws’ and gave a legal basis to the defenders of the traditional theocracy. These aims could be most easily achieved by the transformation of Jerusalem–and thus of the whole Jewish ethnos in Judea–into a Greek ‘polis’. As the bestowal of citizenship of the proposed polis, and admission to the gymnasium and ephebate, were under the control of Jason and his friends…True, the temple liturgy with its sacrifices continued in the usual way, and the law of Moses was by no means officially repealed, remaining valid largely as a popular custom, but the legal foundations were removed from the Jewish ‘theocracy’. Political order and policy were no longer determined by the Torah and the authoritative interpretation of it by priests and soperim; in the future they were to be based on the constitutional organs of the new polis, the ‘demos‘, i.e. the full citizens, the gerousia and the magistrates appointed by them. This inevitably resulted in a lowering of the status of the priestly nobility, and a sign of the strength of the desire within the priestly aristocracy to adopt Greek customs is the fact that this consequence was taken into account. The most powerful lay family, the Tobiads, will on the other hand have welcomed the tendency, as the fact that they were not of priestly descent had been a hindrance to them in earlier struggles for power. The considerable relaxation of the law, which was no longer a binding norm, was evidenced in the fact that individual Jewish ephebes, presumably because of the participation of foreigners in contests in the gymnasium, underwent epispasm…The unsuccessful sacrifice for the Tyrian Heracles can also be regarded as a sign of tendency towards assimilation in the development as a whole” (278).

But even Hengel says elsewhere that Jason was a Zadokite (224). Wasn’t Jason a Tobiad? That’s something to check out.

Hengel pretty much goes with Tcherikover here, only Hengel says that Jason’s Hellenistic reform chipped away at the law. Tcherikover does not really believe this, for he says, “Any change in the manner of worship or offence to monotheistic purity would without doubt have provoked a reaction among the common people in Judea and Jerusalem, but no such reaction is heard of at the time of the Hellenistic reform.” Victor Tcherikover, “The Hellenistic Movement in Jerusalem and Antiochus’ Persecutions,” The Hellenistic Age (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1972) 128.

The Hellenistic reform had to be bad enough to be a cause for God to punish Jerusalem (according to II Maccabees and IV Maccabees), but not bad enough to spark a revolt among pious Jews.

One thing to look into is how Jewish law inhibited interaction with foreigners, since Hellenization was the reverse of this. That could give some indication as to how Hellenization challenged the Jewish politeia.

2. “The complaints which the delegation of two hundred Pharisees brought in the spring of 63 BC to Pompey in Damascus in effect confirm the step which the Teacher of Righteousness had taken about ninety years earlier. They sound like the accusations of II Macc. against Jason and Menelaus: the Hasmonean leaders had ‘done away with the ancestral laws’…and unjustly enslaved the citizens (Diod., 40 fr. 2…)” (227).

Hengel quotes the Jewish historian Eupolemus. His writings may be worth looking at to see how he believed the Hasmoneans undermined the Jewish ancestral laws. But it looks like such an accusation was a standard charge. We saw that Josephus used it when he discussed Herod’s openness to the Gentiles (see Paper on IV Maccabees: Some Josephus Passages).

Paper on IV Maccabees: Was Jerusalem a Polis?

II Maccabees 4:22 says that Antiochus IV “was welcomed magnificently by Jason and the city, and ushered in with a blaze of torches and with shouts” (NRSV). The Greek word for city is polis.

In Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004), Victor Tcherikover states about this passage: “It may well be that this mention of the ‘city’ (the Greek polis of Antioch) is not by chance, but possesses a deeper significance; possibly the visit of Antiochus and the festivities associated with it marked the actual juridicial foundation of the polis…” (165).

I have some thoughts/questions about this:

1. Just because I-II Maccabees call Jerusalem a polis, that doesn’t mean it was a formal Greek city. Fergus Millar points out in “The Problem of Hellenistic Syria,” Hellenism in the East, ed. Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987): “In 1 Macc. 5.26-27 a whole string of places across the Jordan, all of which have retained analogous Arabic names until modern times–’Bosora’, ‘Bosor’, ‘Alema’, ‘Chaspho’, ‘Maked’, ‘Karnaim’–are described as large fortified poleis. These too will have been fortified villages; it is worth noting that the author of 1 Macc. has no notion that polis ought to be restricted to self-governing cities formally recognized as such; he uses it for instance of Modein (2.15), the village from which the Maccabees came” (123).

R.J. van der Spek makes the same argument about Greek sources in his essay (58-59 of the same book): that they don’t limit the term polis to Greek city-states.

2. A city could have a gymnasium without being a polis. Babylon had a gymnasium, yet it was allowed to keep its own traditions and system of government (20-65). Similarly, van der Spek asserts that “the action by the high priest Jason to hellenise Jerusalem did not affect the government structure, even though a dynastic name was introduced (2 Macc. 4.9, 12, 14)” (59).

What’s my point? Maybe Jerusalem was a Greek polis, or maybe it wasn’t. II Maccabees 4:9, 19 says that Jason wanted to enroll the Jerusalemites as citizens of Antioch. That may mean that Jerusalem became a polis.

But the change in the government was minor. I have a hard time thinking that this offended Jews, especially when Jerusalem got to keep its high priest and gerousia. Since challenges to the politeia can encompass sins in general (see Paper on IV Maccabees: Other Challenges to Politeia), I think that the authors of II and IV Maccabees believe that the introduction of foreign customs into their country encouraged a violation of the politeia, the law.

What I may get into Sunday is the idea that a polis could exist alongside traditional Jerusalem. That could work, but what would happen when the authorities of traditional Jerusalem were the participants in the polis? Could that result in the polis undermining traditional Jerusalem?