Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (review)

One seldom encounters a scholarly work such as Heritage and Hellenism that is such a pleasure to read. Heritage and Hellenism is a logical extension of Gruen’s detailed study of Hellenistic culture. In this book, he focuses on how Jews, from 300 b.c.e. to 100 c.e., interpreted themselves through their writings to themselves and to the pagan world in which they lived. His research design is to study the works of Jewish Hellenistic authors and modern scholars who have commented on those Hellenistic works, as well as the results of modern archeological research. Both ancient and modern works are extensively documented in his footnotes.

After a helpful introduction, Gruen shows how the Hasmonean kings depended on the backing of the Seleucids to maintain their monarchy, thus accommodating Jews to Greek ways without compromising Judaism—indeed, elevating Jewish pride in their own history and traditions. Gruen then goes on to show how Jewish writers in the Hellenistic Age, writing commentaries on the Bible, put spins on Biblical stories. Josephus, for example, accepted a tradition that after the Exodus, the Jews returned to Egypt, defeated the Egyptians in battle, and ruled Egypt for a long time. Other Hellenistic authors claimed that Joseph not only revised the whole economy of Egypt while he was Pharoah’s minister but also introduced the system of Egyptian weights and measures. In the anonymous romance Joseph and Aseneth, written between the later third and the early first century b.c.e., Joseph even became a heroic pharoah of Egypt. In the playwright Ezekiel’s drama Exagoge, written at about the same time as Joseph and Aseneth, Moses has a dream in which he is taken above the earth where he has a view of the whole cosmos. Then the stars fall on their knees before him, and he is given a scepter and a diadem and mounts a great empty throne. This is a remarkable spin on the Biblical story of Moses, calculated to improve Jewish pride in their ancient hero and to lift Jewish self-esteem.

The chapter, “Embellishments and Inventions,” provides especially delightful reading, showing how Hellenistic Jewish authors could be both amazingly fanciful and often amusing. Abraham becomes the ultimate source of Greek learning and the heroic companion of Heracles. Moses gives the alphabet to Jews, Phoenicians, and Greeks; trains the Egyptians in building techniques; and teaches the Greeks poetry and music. These tales helped to increase Jewish self-esteem by emphasizing Jewish intellectual and cultural superiority over the Hellenes.

Some scholars may quarrel with Gruen’s emphasis on the extent to which Hellenistic Jews sought to accommodate their beliefs and customs to those of the Greeks and others around them, but his arguments are persuasive, and the documentation of his conclusions is exemplary. We are greatly in Gruen’s debt for providing insight on these fascinating and important writings, heretofore read by only a few scholars and seldom by the general public.