Alexander the Great in Jerusalem - Myth and History

Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History



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English | 2025 | ISBN: 0198929528 | True PDF | 220 pages | 5.19 MB

Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.

The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.