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 recorded. But they would have put their training to meager use, if they could not devise better and stronger terms of abuse.
The very first Greek historian who has more than a vague surmise of the character and history of the Jews is Hecataeus of Abdera (comp. above, p. 92). As has been seen, his tone is distinctly well-disposed. But he knows also of circumstances which to the Greek mind were real national vices. He mentions with strong disapproval their credulity, their inhospitality, and their aloofness.
Credulity is not a vice with which the Jews were charged in later times. That may be due to Christian tradition, in which of course the sin of the Jews is that they did not believe enough, as stated in Christian controversial writings. But Greeks and Romans were quite in accord, that the Jews were duped with extraordinary facility; especially that they were the victims of the deception of their priests, so that they attached importance to thousands of matters heartily without importance. We may remember Horace’s jibe, Credat 177Iudaeus Apella, “Tell it to the Jew Apella”;[185] and nearly two hundred years later Apuleius mentions the Iudaei superstitiosi, “the superstitious Jews.”[186]
Among the Greeks particularly the quality of ε??θεια, “simplicity,” had rapidly made the same progress as the words “silly” and “simpleton” have in English.
Sharpness and duplicity were the qualities with which non-Greek nations credited the Greeks, and whether the accusation was true or not, “na?veté,” ε??θεια, excited Greek risibilities more quickly than anything else. The ε??θεια of the Jews lay of course not in their beliefs about the Deity. On that point all educated men were in accord. But it lay in believing in the sanctity of the priests, and in the observance of the innumerable regulations, particularly of abstention, which had already assumed such proportions among the Jews. The line of Meleager of Gadara, about his Jewish rival,
?στι κα? ?ν ψυχρο?? σ?ββασι θερμ?? ?ρω?,[187]
Even on the cold Sabbaths Love makes his warmth felt,
contains in its ψυχρ? σ?ββατα “cold Sabbaths,” an epitome of the Greek point of view, ψυχρ??, “cold,” was almost a synonym for “dull.” That a holiday should be celebrated by abstention from ordinary activities and amusements seemed to a Greek the essence of unreason. Their own religious customs were, like those of all other nations, full of tabus, but they were the less conscious of them because they were wholly apart from their daily life. Jews avoided certain foods, not merely as an occasional fast, but always. Their myths were not 178irrelevant and beautiful stories, but were firmly believed to be the records of what actually happened. The precepts of their code were sanctioned, not merely by expediency, but by the fear of an offended God.
An excellent example of how the rhetorical τ?πο? of “na?veté” was handled is presented by Agatharchidas of Cnidus, who wrote somewhere near 150 B.C.E.[188]
He tells us of Stratonice, daughter of Antiochus Soter and wife of Demetrius of Macedon, who was induced by a dream to remain in a dangerous position, where she was taken and killed. The occasion is an excellent one to enlarge upon the topic of superstition, and Agatharchidas relates in this connection an incident that is said to have happened one hundred years before Stratonice, the capture of Jerusalem by Ptolemy Soter through the fact that the Jews would not fight upon the Sabbath. “So,” says Agatharchidas, “because, instead of guarding their city, these men observed their senseless rule, the city received a harsh master, and their law was shown to be a foolish custom.” One cannot reproduce in English the fine antitheses of the related words φυλ?ττειν τ?ν π?λιν balanced by διατηρο?ντων τ?ν ?νοιαν, ν?μο? answering to ?θισμ?ν; but, besides the artificiality of the phrases, the total absence of any attempt to make the words fit the facts is shown by the conclusion to which Agatharchidas, by rule of rhetoric, had to come. Now a “harsh master” is just what Ptolemy was not to the Jews, and Agatharchidas of all men must have been aware of that fact, for he wrote not only at Alexandria, but at the court of Philometor, an especial patron of the Jews individually and as a corporation.
179The practice of the Sabbath was one of the first things that struck foreigners. It is likely that the congregations of Sabbatistae in Asia Minor were composed of Jewish proselytes.[189] The name of the Jewish Sibyl Sambethe,[190] the association of Jewish worship with that of the Phrygian Sabazios,[191] were based upon this highly peculiar custom of the Jews. But its utter irrationality seemed to be exhibited in such instances as Agatharchidas here describes, the abstention from both offensive and defensive fighting on the Sabbath.
Whether the incident or others of the same kind ever occurred may reasonably be doubted. The discussion of the question in Talmudic sources is held at a time when Jews had long ceased to engage in warfare.[192] Their nation no longer existed, and their legal privileges included exemption from conscription, if they chose to avail themselves of it. In the Bible there is no hint in the lurid chronicles of wars and battles that the Sabbath observance involved cessation from hostilities during time of war, and the supposition that no resistance to attack was offered on that day is almost wholly excluded. It is not easy to imagine one of the grim swordsmen of David or Joab allowing his throat to be cut by an enemy because he was attacked on the Sabbath.
That any rule of Sabbath observance which demanded this had actually developed during the post-Exilic period is likewise untenable. The Jews served frequently in the army under both Persian and Greek 180rule. This is amply demonstrated by the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine and the existence of Jewish mercenaries under the Ptolemies.[193] The professional soldier whose service could not be relied upon one day in seven would soon find his occupation gone.
Several passages in the Books of Maccabees have often been taken to imply that the strict observance of the Sabbath was maintained before the Hasmonean revolt, and deliberately abrogated by Mattathiah (I Macc. ii. 30-44; II Macc. viii. 23-25). But upon closer analysis it will be seen that the incidents there recorded do not quite show that. The massacre of the loyal Jews in the desert was a special and exceptional thing. They were not rebels in arms, but hunted fugitives. Their passive submission to the sword was an act of voluntary martyrdom (I Macc. ii. 37). ?ποθ?νωμεν ο? π?ντε? ?ν τη ?πλ?τητι ?μων: μαρτυρει ?φ’ ?μα? h?ο?ρανο? κα? ? γ? ?τι ακριτω? ?π?λλυτε ?μα?, “Let us all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth bear witness for us that ye put us to death wrongfully.”
Again, it is not Mattathiah, but the sober reflection of his men, that brings them to the resolution that such acts of martyrdom, admirable as they are in intention, are futile. The decision is rather a criticism of their useless sacrifice than anything else.
Similar acts of self-devotion on the part of inhabitants of doomed cities were not uncommon. As final proofs of patriotism on the part of those who would not survive their city, they received the commendation of ancient writers.[194] But to kill oneself or allow oneself 181to be killed for a fantastic superstition, could have seemed only the blindest fanaticism.
Now there is no reason for doubting the essential accuracy of the report in I Maccabees, to the effect that one group of Jewish zealots chose passive resistance to the attempt of Antiochus, and by that nerved the Hasmoneans to a very active resistance. And it is very likely that in this event we have the basis for the stories that related the capture of Jerusalem—almost in every case—on the Sabbath. The story is told of the capture by Nebuchadnezzar, by Artaxerxes Ochus, by Ptolemy, and by Pompey. It is a logical inference from the non-resistance of the refugees mentioned in I Maccabees. The conditions of ancient warfare make it highly improbable that it was more.
The rationalist Greek or Roman felt it a point of honor to hold in equal contempt the “old-wives’ tales” of his own countrymen as to the supramundane facts with which the myths were filled,[195] and the vain and foolish attempts by which barbarians, and Greeks and Romans too, sought to dominate the cosmic forces or tear the secret from fate. These attempts generally took the form of magic, not, however, like the primitive ceremonies, of which the real nature had long been forgotten, but in the elaborate thaumaturgic systems which had been fashioned in Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. In their lowest forms these were petty and mean swindling devices. In their more developed forms they contained a sincerely felt mysticism, but under all guises they aroused the contempt of the skeptic, to whom the most 182ancient and revered rites of his own cult were merely ancestral habits which it did no harm to follow. The tone such men adopted toward the complicated Oriental theologies and rituals was very much like that of modern cultivated men toward the various “Vedantic philosophies,” which at one time enjoyed a certain vogue. Those who seriously maintained that by the rattling of a sistrum, or the clash of cymbals, or by mortifications of the flesh, influences could be exerted upon the laws that governed the universe, so as to modify their course or divert them, were alike insensate fools, whose chatter no educated man could take seriously. The Jews, who observed, even when they were less rigorous, a number of restrictive rules that gravely hampered their freedom of action, who seriously maintained that they possessed a direct revelation of God, were fanatics and magicians, and exhibited a credulity that was the first sign of mental inferiority.
“Senseless,” “nonsense,” ?νοητ??, ?νοια, are terms that are principally in the mouths of the Philopator of III Maccabees and the Antiochus of IV Maccabees, in whose words we may fairly see epitomized all the current abuse as well as criticism which opponents to the Jews, from philosophers to malevolent chauvinists, heaped upon them.
Hecataeus says of Moses that he instituted an “inhospitable and strange form of living.”[196] The two words μισ?ξενον and ?π?νθρωπον form a doublette, or rhetorical doubling of a single idea. That idea is “inhospitality,” lack of the feeling of common humanity, a term which 183for Greeks and Romans embodied a number of conceptions not suggested by the word to modern ears.
The word ξ?νο?, which is the root of the words for “hospitality” and its opposite, has no equivalent in English. A ξ?νο? was a man of another nation, who approached without hostile intent. The test of civilization was the manner in which such a ξ?νο? was dealt with. The Greek traditions, even their extant literature, have a very lively recollection of the time when hospitality was by no means universal, when the ξ?νο? was treated as an enemy taken in arms or worse. The one damning epithet of the Cyclops is ?ξενο?, “inhospitable.”[197] The high commendation bestowed upon the princely hospitality of the Homeric barons itself indicates that this ............