“Managing the Ancestral Way of Life in the Roman Diaspora: The Mélange of Philosophical and Scriptural Practice in 4 Maccabees,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 48 (2017): 1–29. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
In the Second Century B.C.E. the Jews rebelled against their Seleucid overlords achieving, for a while at least, some sort of limited independence. The events that occurred are, in the main, recorded by two works: First and Second Maccabees. The latter of these is a much neglected text. It is maligned as tragic or pathetic history and generally only used by scholars on an ad hoc basis to support particular arguments. Second Maccabees is, however, still a product of a particular time and place, and therefore can give insights into the society from which it evolved. This thesis makes use of this premise to analyse Second Maccabees. Our intention is to uncover some of the author's perceptions and beliefs in order to explain aspects of Jewishness and Jewish society. To do this we approach the text in a fresh way, paying close attention to repeated uses of particular words and any patterns in context that can be associated with these words - this includes associations that are made t...
The Books of the Maccabees: History, Theology, Ideology
BRILL eBooks, 2007
The present volume contains papers read at the Second International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books, organised by the Shime'on Centre for the Study of Hellenistic and Roman Age Judaism and Christianity of the Reformed Theological Academy, Papa, Hungary. The topic of the conference was the Books of the Maccabees-important witnesses to the thinking of a particular strand of early Judaism-which nicely mirror the theological and ideological interpretation of history by their authors. Within a certain frame, consisting of three papers treating either general, introductory questions of the Deuterocanonical corpus as a whole, or some relevant topics of cognate literature, the contributions in this volume intend to work with the interrelated questions of history, theology and ideology. In doing this, they seek to find the place of the Maccabaean literature within the thinking of the circles that authored them, and to contextualise these works in the contemporary literature. The editors express their deep gratitude to John Kampen, professor of the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, who kindly offered his invaluable help in correcting the English of the volume, and to the series editor, John J. Collins, who kindly accepted this book-as its predecessor on Tobit-for publication in the series of JSJ Supplements.
The Third Book of Maccabees: Literature, History and Ideology
Hebrew; Ph. D. diss., The Hebrew University of …, 2002
The Third Book of Maccabees is not considered to have great historical or literary value and, therefore, has not frequently been discussed in the literature. Moreover, even despite the growing academic preoccupation with Jewish Hellenistic literature, this book has remained marginal. The purpose of this study is to examine the historical significance of III Maccabees, that is to determine its place from the point of view of the Weltanschauungen prevalent in Hellenistic Jewry and the historical context in which it was composed. The basic assumption of the study is that the preliminary stage in a historical discussion of any written source, be it historiographic or fictional, is the examination of its nature and its goals. Hence, literary analysis of III Maccabees must proceed before any historical conclusions may be reached.
The present study explores the themes of persuasion and force in Greco-Roman political thought and their appropriation in 4 Maccabees. I argue that among Greco-Roman political writers, stretching from Plato to Plutarch, the problem of balancing persuasion and force and their relationship to civic virtues cut to the heart of the varied constitutional theories and proposals. While persuasion was preferred in ideal situations, force was recognized to be an important corollary for the masses (§1). Turning to 4 Maccabees, a good example of the Jewish appropriation of the dominant political philosophy, I demonstrate that the political persuasion/force dynamic is foundational both to the philosophical prologue and the martyr narrative (§2).
The concept of evil in 4 Maccabees differs from what we find in most ancient Jewish literature, and little attention has been paid to its philosophical background. In this article I submit that the author of 4 Maccabees has absorbed and adapted a Stoic conception of evil into his Jewish philosophy. I trace the concept of evil in Stoicism and in 4 Maccabees using the categories of value theory, natural law, and the emotions. The outcome is an integrative philosophy that embraces vice as the sole evil, yet maintains a belief in the "goodness" of an afterlife; redefines natural law in terms of the Torah, reckoning any deviance from that Law as vicious; and conceives of the emotions as false belief and the cause of evil behavior, while still maintaining their God-given nature.
Journal for the Study of Judaism, 2024
The study of exempla and exemplarity in Mediterranean antiquity touches the methodological borderlines and interest areas of several distinct academic disciplines. Earlier studies focused on semantics and the development from the Greek παράδειγμα to the Roman exemplum. More recently, the field of Classics has tended to examine exemplarity as a phenomenon with a distinctively Roman edge. At the same time, scholars in adjacent disciplines like ancient Judaism and early Christianity have engaged Classics scholarship on this topic in their own work. This paper extends this arena by clarifying aspects of exemplarity within two paradigmatic texts of Hellenistic-and Roman-era Judaism. We examine 1 Maccabees 2:49-68 and Josephus' Jewish War 6.99-110, both speeches set within "contemporary" histories written by Jewish authors. By examining these ancient Jewish passages, written within the Greco-Roman world, we help add clarity and meaning to what could be "Jewish" about exemplarity in ancient Mediterranean contexts.