The Jews among the Greeks and Romans

One of the great determining events in ancient and modern history took place on January 1, 27 B.C.E., when Gaius Caesar Octavianus, returned from his successful campaigns in the...

We have been concerned so far almost wholly with Greeks and the Greek attitude toward the Jews. It will be necessary at this point to turn our attention to a very different peop...

The Jews in Rome at the time of Cicero formed, we have seen, an important and numerous class amidst the largely orientalized plebs of the city. With the other foreigners residen...

The empire established by Augustus was, as has been set forth (above, p. 259), a more or less abstract thing. It was the _imperium_, or supreme authority, which a single communi...

The Mishnah gives in considerable detail the laws that governed the life of the Jew at this period, and also those that regulated the intercourse of Jew and non-Jew. But the Mis...

We are all familiar with the assertion that both Greeks and Romans of the last pre-Christian century were in a state of complete moral and religious collapse, that polytheism ha...

The Jew is presented to the modern world in the double aspect of a race and a religion. In a measure this has always been the case, but we shall not in the least understand what...

A favorite adjective in describing the Jews was “superstitious.” Strangely enough, another, perhaps even more general, was “irreligious.” The Jews were frequently stigmatized as...

The Jews were not the only nation that fought with desperate fury against complete submergence in the floods of Roman dominance. The spread of the Roman arms had encountered, fr...

If the rivals and opponents of the Jews had nothing more to say of them than that they worshiped the head of an ass, it is not likely that their opposition would have been recor...

The preaching of a gospel seems to us as natural as the existence of a religion. That is because the religions we know best are universal ones, of which the God is a transcenden...

Jews came into the occidental horizon as part of a larger whole. That whole was known as Syria. Unfortunately Syria itself is a very vague term, and is without real ethnographic...

In the matter of government no change had been made that was at all noticeable. The internal autonomy of Persian times had been maintained; the claims of the tax-collector and r...

Greek civilization was essentially urban. The city-state, or polis, was its highest governmental achievement. When, therefore, under Alexander and Ptolemy, Egypt was to be trans...

The influence of Egypt upon Palestine is no new thing in its history. For century after century the mighty empire across Sinai had been the huge and determining fact in the poli...

The ancient state was based on community of _sacra_, of cult-observances. Anything that tended to destroy them or impair general belief in their necessity, went to the very root...

“And there arose from them [the companions of Alexander] a root of sin, to wit, Antiochus Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, he who had been hostage in Rome.” That to the writer...

The Jews took to Babylon a highly complicated body of civil law and religious doctrine. The essence of the latter was an exclusive monotheism, and that belief was not the posses...

We have briefly sketched in the foregoing chapters the concepts of race and religion that Greek and Roman applied to the world about them. These concepts were not starkly rigid....

The theory advanced by Wilcken-Mitteis (Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Pap. vol. I.) that all who paid a poll-tax were _dediticii_, and therefore excluded from the Const. Ant....

Roman religious ideas were in many respects like those of the Greeks, partly because they were borrowed from the Greeks and partly because they were common to all the nations of...

During the nineteenth century a peculiar rigidity was given to the conception of race through the application of somewhat hastily formed biological theories. One or another of t...

It is nowhere directly stated that the power of a god did not extend beyond a definite locality. But the numerous local epithets applied to the various gods indicate it. We need...

Myths are understood by modern anthropologists exclusively as a “folk-way,” with the effects of single creative imaginations almost wholly eliminated. However, the better-known...

While notoriously corrupt governors like Cotta (130 B.C. E.), Cic. Pro Mur. 58, and Aquilius (126 B.C.E.), Cic. Div. in Caec. 69, were acquitted, a rigidly honest man like Rufus...

descriptive term than a proper name. Josephus (Ant. IV. x.) has no name for it, although he has for the others. In the Talmud, it is ימא “the Day,” יומא רבא “the Great Day,” צומ...

Perhaps the “egg laid on the Sabbath” would have excited less comment, if the fact were kept in mind that a decision in a specific case can hardly fail to be particular.

The reading of the last phrase in the mss. is _quod servata_, which is scarcely consistent with the rest of the passage. Bernays, Rh. Mus. 1857, p. 464 seq., conjectured that it...

Caphthor is rendered Cappadocia in the LXX (Amos ix. 7), for no better reason, it may be, than the similarity between the first syllables. The Keftiu ships of the Egyptian monum...

Long before the attempts made in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate all the generally acknowledged historical monsters, historians had looked askance at the portrait of Tibe...

Cumont, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, gives the best and clearest account of the spread of these foreign cults. The Cabiri came from Samothrace. They were g...

of Psalm xxvi. 5 implies a formal association of evil-doers, a Camorra. We shall be compelled to rely wholly on the passages in Maccabees for any information about the ʽAssidaei...

However completely oligarchical in practice the government became, the sovereignty of the dēmos was recognized in theory. In the ancient doom ascribed to Lycurgus (Plutarch, Lyc...

After the defeat of the Persians, the victors set up a tripod at Delphi, about the stem of which a bronze serpent was coiled. About this serpent ran an inscription, τοίδε τὸν πό...

actually been enforced in the sense indicated, Jews would have been wholly useless for the army. But we have seen that they not merely fought their own battles, but engaged free...

Tac. Ann. iii. 40 seq.; _ibid._ ii. 52; iv. 23. In 52 C.E., Cilicia rose in revolt; _ibid._ xii. 55. The Jewish disturbances of the same year are alluded to in Tac. Ann. xii. 54...

Juvenal, Sat. xv. 1-3. _Quis nescit Volusi Bithynice qualia demens Aegyptos portenta colat? crocodilon adorat pars haec, illa pavet saturam serpentibus ibïn_; cf. also _latrator...

It is usual to speak of the Seleucid kingdom as Syria. That, however, conveys a wholly wrong impression of either the pretensions of the house or the actual extent of its domini...

This fragment, of the authenticity of which little doubt can be entertained, must be distinguished from the books attributed to Hecataeus about the Jews and Abraham. Josephus us...

Adolph Bastian presents his theory of _Grundideen_ in his numerous writings. It has, however, been found difficult, if not impossible, even for anthropologists to present the de...

The Carduchi, Taochi, Chalybes, Phasiani (Xenophon, An. IV. iii. 6), make friends with the Greek adventurers, or oppose them on their own account without any apparent reference...

The Messenians also expelled the Epicureans (Athen. xii. 547), and Antiochus (VI) Dionysius, or rather Tryphon in his name, expelled all philosophers from Antioch and all Syria...

For the Boeotians cf. the common ὗς Βοιωτία; Pind. Ol. vi. 153; _id._ Fr. iv. 9, and Hor. Epp. II. i. 244; for Egyptian _perfidia_, Val. Max. v. 1, 10; for Abdera, Juv. Sat. x....

By Mishnic tradition Antigonus was a pupil of Simon the Just (Abot i. 3). A later legend makes him the founder of the Sadducees (Abot R. N. v.). The saying of Antigonus is: “Be...

That the name is Sira and not Sirach, as it appears in the LXX, is generally accepted. It was the practice of Greeks to put a final Χ to foreign names to indicate that they were...