Greek Witnesses to the Jews

But now I ought to satisfy the demand of those who distrust the records of the barbarians and think only the Greeks worth believing. I must produce many of these very Greeks who knew our nation, and set before them the places where, as occasion arose, they mentioned us in their own writings. [a]

Pythagoras of Samos, then, lived in very ancient times and is held to have surpassed all philosophers in wisdom and in piety toward God. It is plain that he not only knew our ways but was to a very great degree an admirer and follower of them. No writing is acknowledged to be his own, but many have written his history, and the most distinguished of them is Hermippus, a man careful in every kind of history. In the first book of his work on Pythagoras, Hermippus says that when one of Pythagoras’s companions died, a man named Calliphon, a native of Croton, Pythagoras said that this man’s soul kept company with him night and day; and that Pythagoras used to urge people not to cross a spot where an ass had sunk down, to keep away from water that makes one thirsty, and to avoid all abusive speech. After this Hermippus adds: “He did and said these things in imitation of the beliefs of the Jews and the Thracians, which he took over into his own teaching.” For it is quite truly said of this man that he carried many of the Jewish laws over into his own philosophy.

Our nation was not unknown of old in the cities either. Many of our customs had already spread to some of them, and some people thought them worth imitating. Theophrastus shows this in his work On Laws, where he says that the laws of the Tyrians forbid swearing foreign oaths; and among these, along with certain others, he lists the oath called korban. This oath would be found among no people except the Jews alone, and translated from the Hebrew language it means, as one might put it, “a gift to God.”

Nor was Herodotus of Halicarnassus ignorant of our nation; he plainly mentions it in a way of his own. In his second book, writing about the Colchians, he says this: “The only peoples who have circumcised their genitals from the beginning are the Colchians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learned it from the Egyptians. The Syrians around the rivers Thermodon and Parthenius, and their neighbors the Macrones, say they learned it only recently from the Colchians. These are the only peoples on earth who are circumcised, and they plainly do it in the same way as the Egyptians. As for the Egyptians and the Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which of them learned it from the other.” So he has said that the Syrians of Palestine are circumcised. But of all who live in Palestine, only the Jews do this; so it was knowing of them that he said it.

Choerilus too, an older writer and a poet, mentions our nation, saying that it marched with Xerxes, king of the Persians, against Greece. After listing all the nations, he places ours last of all, saying:

I think it is plain to everyone that he means us, since the Solymian mountains are in our country, where we live, and so is the lake called Asphaltitis, which is broader and larger than any other lake in Syria. That is how Choerilus mentions us.

It is easy to see, too, that the Greeks not only knew the Jews but admired any of them they met — and not the lowest of the Greeks, but those most admired for wisdom. Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle and second to none of the Peripatetic philosophers, says in the first book of his work On Sleep that his teacher Aristotle told the following story about a certain Jew, and he gives the conversation to Aristotle himself. It is written like this: “Most of what he said would take too long to tell, but it will do no harm to go through those of his sayings that had something wonderful and philosophical about them. I tell you plainly, Hyperochides,” he said, “I shall seem to you to be telling a marvel like something out of a dream.” Hyperochides answered cautiously, “That is the very reason all of us want to hear it.” Aristotle said, “Then let us follow the rule of the rhetoricians and first go through his race, so that we do not disobey the teachers of narration.” Hyperochides said, “Tell it, if you like.” “This man, then, was a Jew by race, from Coele-Syria. These people are descended from the philosophers of India. Among the Indians, they say, the philosophers are called Calani, and among the Syrians they are called Jews, taking the name from the place, for the place they live in is called Judea. The name of their city is a very awkward one: they call it Jerusalem. Now this man was the guest of many people and came down from the upper country to the coast, and he was a Greek not only in his speech but in his soul. While we were staying in Asia, he came to the same places and met with us and with some other scholars, testing our learning. And since he had lived on close terms with many educated men, he passed on to us more than he received.”

This is what Aristotle says in Clearchus, and he goes on to describe at length the great and wonderful endurance of this Jew in his way of living, and his self-control. Those who wish can learn more from the book itself, for I am careful not to set down more than is enough. Clearchus said this in a digression, since his main subject was something else; that is how he mentions us.

Hecataeus of Abdera, however, a philosopher and at the same time a most capable man of affairs, who flourished in the time of King Alexander and was associated with Ptolemy son of Lagus, did not mention us in passing; he wrote a whole book about the Jews themselves. I want to run briefly over some of the things said in it. First I will show his date. He mentions the battle that Ptolemy fought against Demetrius near Gaza, and this took place in the eleventh year after Alexander’s death, in the hundred and seventeenth Olympiad, as Castor records. Setting down this Olympiad, Castor says: “In this Olympiad Ptolemy son of Lagus defeated in battle at Gaza Demetrius son of Antigonus, who was called Poliorcetes, the Besieger.” And all agree that Alexander died in the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad. It is clear, then, that our nation flourished both in Hecataeus’s time and in Alexander’s.

Hecataeus goes on to say that after the battle of Gaza Ptolemy became master of the places around Syria, and that many people, hearing of Ptolemy’s mildness and humanity, wanted to go with him to Egypt and share in his affairs. “One of these,” he says, “was Hezekiah, high priest of the Jews, a man about sixty-six years old, highly regarded by his countrymen, of no small intelligence, a capable speaker besides, and as experienced in public affairs as any man. And yet all the priests of the Jews who receive the tithe of the produce and manage the public affairs number about fifteen hundred at most.” Recalling the same man again, he says: “This man, having gained this honor and become familiar with us, gathered some of those with him and read out to them everything that set their people apart; for he had their settlement and their constitution in writing.”

Then Hecataeus shows again how we stand toward our laws: that we choose to suffer anything rather than break them, and think it noble to do so. “So,” he says, “though they are spoken ill of by their neighbors and by all who visit them, and have often been insulted by the Persian kings and satraps, they cannot be moved from their convictions. For these things they face tortures and the most terrible deaths, defenseless, more than any other people, rather than deny the ways of their fathers.” He also offers no small number of proofs of their firmness about the laws. He says that once, when Alexander was in Babylon and had decided to clear away the fallen temple of Bel, and had ordered all his soldiers alike to carry off the rubble, the Jews alone paid no heed. They endured many beatings and paid heavy fines, until the king pardoned them and let them be. “Moreover,” he says, “when people came into the country to them and built temples and altars, they tore them all down. For some of these they paid fines to the satraps, and for some they were pardoned.” And he adds that they deserve to be admired for this.

He also speaks of how very populous our nation has been. “The Persians,” he says, “carried many tens of thousands of them off to Babylon in earlier times, and not a few tens of thousands moved to Egypt and Phoenicia after Alexander’s death because of the strife in Syria.” The same man has also recorded the size and beauty of the country we live in. “They occupy about two million acres of the best and most fruitful land,” he says, “for that is how large Judea is.”

He also tells how we have lived from the most ancient times in Jerusalem itself, a most beautiful and very large city, and he speaks of the number of its people and of the construction of the temple in this way: “The Jews have many fortresses and villages throughout the country, but only one fortified city, about six miles around, which about a hundred and twenty thousand people inhabit; they call it Jerusalem. Near the middle of the city is a stone enclosure about five hundred feet long and a hundred and fifty feet wide, with double gates. In it is a square altar, built of unhewn stones gathered together and left unworked, each side thirty feet long, and fifteen feet high. Beside it is a great building, in which are an altar and a lampstand, both of gold, weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds. On these is a light that is never put out, night or day. There is no image there at all, and no votive offering, and nothing whatever planted, no grove or anything of the kind. Priests spend their nights and days in it, performing certain purifications and drinking no wine at all while they are in the temple.”

He also testifies that the Jews served in the army of King Alexander, and afterward of his successors. And I will set down what he says he himself saw done by a Jewish man during the campaign. These are his words: “As I was marching toward the Red Sea, one of the Jewish horsemen escorting us came along with the rest. His name was Mosollam, a man of great strength of spirit, and by common consent the best archer of all, Greek or barbarian. Many people were walking along the road, and a seer was taking omens from a bird and asking everyone to halt. This man asked why they were waiting. The seer pointed out the bird to him and said that if it stayed where it was, it was best for all of them to wait; if it rose and flew forward, they should go on; and if it flew backward, they should withdraw again. Mosollam said nothing, but drew his bow, shot, struck the bird and killed it. The seer and some others were indignant and began to curse him.” “Why are you raving, you poor wretches?” he said. Then he took the bird in his hands. “How could this bird, which did not foresee its own safety, tell us anything sound about our journey? If it could know the future, it would never have come to this place, for fear that Mosollam the Jew would shoot it and kill it.” But enough of Hecataeus’s testimonies; those who want to learn more can easily read his book.

I will not hesitate, though, to name Agatharchides as well, who mentioned us in mockery of what he takes to be our simplicity. He is telling the story of Stratonice: how she came from Macedonia into Syria, leaving her husband Demetrius; how, when Seleucus would not marry her as she had expected, she stirred up a revolt around Antioch while he was on his expedition from Babylon; and how afterward, when the king returned and Antioch was being taken, she fled to Seleucia, and though she could have sailed away quickly, she obeyed a dream that forbade it, and was captured and put to death. Having told this and made fun of Stratonice for her superstition, Agatharchides uses the story about us as an example, and writes this: “The people called Jews live in the strongest city of all, which the inhabitants happen to call Jerusalem. They are accustomed to rest every seventh day, and at those times they neither carry arms nor touch farming nor perform any other service, but stretch out their hands in their holy places and pray until evening. So when Ptolemy son of Lagus entered the city with his force, and the people, instead of guarding the city, kept up their folly, their country received a harsh master, and their law was shown to contain a foolish custom. What happened has taught everyone except that people to take refuge in dreams and in the notions handed down about the law only when human reasoning has failed them in their difficulties.” To Agatharchides this seems worth laughing at. But to those who examine it without ill will it appears a great thing and worthy of much praise, when certain people always put the keeping of their laws and their piety toward God ahead of their own safety and their country.