Canon Formation II

I'm continuing my discussion of Satlow's book, from yesterday's blog entry.


"The father of Hellenistic ethnography was Hecataeus of Abdera. A Greek working for Alexander's general and successor, Ptolemy I Soter (367-283 BCE), Hecataeus wrote a comprehensive account of the Egyptians....Hecataeus's Aegyptiaca influenced generations of later Greek ethnographers. Aegyptiaca contains an excursus on the Judeans, whom he identified as a distinct polity centered in Jerusalem ("Hieroslyma") and ruled primarily by priests."


Hecataeus was interested in the "politeia" of the Judeans. This Greek word, sometimes transliterated "politics" or translated "constitution" is wider than either of those terms. It means, "the social system" or "the laws" if that term is quite broadly understood.


A little later, Satlow tells us that Hecataeus was "aware of, and maybe consulted, a written source that he believed to contain the Judean politeia. He writes, 'At the end of their laws there is even appended the statement, 'These are the words that Moses heard from God and declares unto the Jews.'"


So ... what document was he referencing that ends that way?


Look at the final verse of Leviticus, chapter 27, verse34. "These are the commandments that the Lord gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai."


The Septuagint, which became the 'official' version of Hebrew scripture in Greek, didn't exist yet. Hecataeus was presumably aware of something older that ends much the same way.


Leviticus is the third book of the Bible, after Genesis and Exodus. whether Hecataeus had in mind a collection of all three books, or Leviticus as a stand-alone. Satlow says that "nearly all the details" in Hecataeus' account of the Judeans could have been taken from Leviticus standing alone. But at any rate, he thought of this as "their laws" ending with that statement.


So: why is this account a big deal?


First, it indicates that when group A conquers group B, and plans to hold the territory of group B as a province, they often need to learn something about B. Even if all they want is to keep the peace and wring a lot of taxation out of the province at issue., they need to know how the people who've been living there live and talk and think.


So: the Greeks who had just conquered a lot of western Mediterranean and eastern Asian [see map above]. created new fields of study, and Hecataeus was among those who stepped into this scholarly/political opening.
What is more: Hecataeus isn't merely a source for us today, in the story of the canonization process. He may be a player in the story.
Because Hecateaus wrote it up this way, it eventually came to the attention of another Greek elite group, the librarians at Alexandrian, that there were Jewish law books that any truly comprehensive library should include. That in turn meant that they'd have to be translated into Greek.