colonies in internal history of Palestine under the Ptolemies to the Jewish important Jewish settlement more directly connected with Egypt. them in Egypt. It was directly to the east of Alexandriaclose along the sea-shore, probably with a view to the convenience of their ablutions in the Mediterranean-that the Jewish colonists chiefly resided; and to this day the burialground of their race is on the sandy hillocks in the same situation. They were in such numbers as to be known by the name of "The Tribe." They retained the privileges alleged to have been granted by Alexander, as on a level with the Macedonian settlers. The commercial enterprise of the race, never since extinct, now for the first time found an outlet. They gradually became a separate community under their own chief, entitled Ethnarch or Alabarch, and represented more than a third of Alexandria, with a council corresponding to that which ultimately ruled at Jerusalem.3 This was the only settlement of permanent interest. Other colonies may be traced here and there, under the Ptolemæan rule, in insulated fragments. One was the band of Samaritans, who, still keeping up their deadly feud, retired to the Thebaid. Another was the group of anchorites by the Lake Mareotis, the forerunners of the parents of Christian monasticism. Another powerful community was settled at Cyrene-just become a dependency on Egypt-destined to react on the nation in Palestine" by their special synagogue at Jerusalem. polis. Another, still in the future, but drawn by the same Leontofriendly influence of the Græco-Egyptian dynasty, was the settlement at Leontopolis. When, in the subsequent troubles of Palestine, it seemed that the Temple itself would perish, one of the High Priestly family, Nechoniah or Coniah, in 1 Josephus, c. Ap. ii. 4. Jos. c. ap. ii. 4. See Herzfeld, Geschichte, iii. 437, 438, 145, 446. Jos. Ant. xi. 8. Acts ii. 1; vi. 1; Herzfeld, iii. 321. Greek Onias-fled to Egypt, and begged the loan of a deserted temple of Pasht,' the Cat-Goddess, in the neighbourhood of Heliopolis. There, with the military experience which he may have acquired in heading a band of troops in one of the Egyptian civil wars, he built a fortress 2 and a temple, which, although on a smaller 3 scale, was to rival that of Jerusalem, where he and his sons, keeping up the martial traditions of the Levitical tribe, formed a powerful body of soldiery, and assumed the name and habits of a camp. The general style of the sanctuary was (apparently) not Jewish but Egyptian. A huge tower-perhaps equivalent to the great gateway of Egyptian temples 5-rose to the height of sixty cubits. There were no obelisks, but it was approached by the usual long colonnades of pillars. The altar alone resembled that of the Jewish temple. But instead of the candlestick a golden chandelier was suspended from the roof by a golden chain. A circuit of brick walls, as in the adjacent sanctuary of Heliopolis, enclosed it, and the ruins of these it is that still form the three rugged sandhills known by the name of 'the Mounds of the Jews.' It was a bold attempt to form a new centre of Judaism; and the attempt was supported by one of the earliest efforts to find in the poetic language of the ancient prophets a local, prosaic, and temporary applica The name of Leontopolis, in connection with the Temple of Onias, probably arose from this. Every Temple of Pasht (called by the Greeks Bubastis) was (as is familiar to every visitor to Thebes), a menagerie of cats, living, embalmed, or in stone. This to the Greeks, as to the Arabs, who give one name to the two animals, may well have caused this sanctuary of Pasht to have been called the City of Lions, and therefore we have no need to seek the locality in any other part of Egypt. This solution had occurred to me before I saw it worked out in Herzfeld, iii. 562. Jos. Ant. xiii. This must be the origin of the statement of Apion (Jos. c. Ap. ii. 2) and of Strabo xvii. tion. In the glowing prediction of the homage which Egypt should hereafter pay to Israel Isaiah had expressed the hope that there should be five cities in Egypt speaking the language of Canaan and revering the Sacred Name, and that one of these should be the sacred City of the Sun. What had been indicated then as the most surprising triumph-the conversion of the chief sanctuary of the old Egyptian worship to the true religion—was seized by Onias as a proof that in the neighbourhood, if not within the walls, of the Sun City-which the Greeks called Heliopolis, and which the Egyptians called On-there should rise a temple of Jehovah. The very name of On was a likeness to his own name of Onias. The passage in Isaiah was yet further changed to give the city a name more exactly resembling the title of Jerusalem. As the City of the Palestinian sanctuary was called the Holy City, the City of Holiness, so this was supposed to have been foreseen as the Righteous City-the City of Righteousness. It was, moreover, close within the view of that sacred college where, according to Egyptian tradition, Moses himself had studied. But a worship and a system so elaborately built up on doubtful etymologies and plays on ambiguous words was not destined to long endurance; and, although an ample patrimony was granted by the Egyptian kings for the endowment of this new Pontificate, and although the territory round was long called the 'Land of Onias,'3 and the sanctuary lasted for three centuries, it passed away under the pressure of the Roman government, and left no permanent trace even on the Alexandrian Jews. The failure of such a 1 Isa. xix. 18, 19. The city of the sun-wrongly translated in the A.V. 'the city of destruction.' Herzfeld (iii. 561) gives the explanation as above. Gesenius (on Isaiah, iii. 639) has doubts of the genuineness of the passage. Whiston (on Jos. Ant. xiii. 3, 1), with his usual honesty and eccentricity, supposes Onias's interpretation to be correct. 2 This appears in the LXX. translation of Isa. xix. 18, 19, πόλις Ασεδέκ. The whole question is ably discussed in Herzfeld, iii. 556-564. Jos. B. J. vii. 10, 4. The distorted prediction is a likeness of what may be in store for equally fanciful applications of sacred words and doubtful interpretations in more modern times. It may be that round' this centre of ancient Jewish traditions, secluded on the border of the desert from the great world of Alexandria, was gathered the opposition to the Grecian learning, which we faintly discern in the next century. But it had only a local and sectarian existence. The flow of the religious life of the new story of Israel in 'Egypt' rolled on regardless of this artificial and insulated sanctuary. The presiding genius of Egyptian Judaism was not the priestly house of Onias, but the royal house of Ptolemy. Over these Jewish colonists, as over their native Egyptian Ptolemies. subjects, the Ptolemies, at least for the first four reigns, ruled with beneficent toleration. The Egyptian priesthood, after the hard dominion of the Persian iconoclasts, welcomed them as deliverers. The temples were restored or rebuilt after the antique model. The names of the Grecian Kings and Queens were carved in hieroglyphics, and their figures painted on the Temple walls in the disguise of the Pharaohs. They became as Egyptians to the Egyptians, and so to the Jews they became almost as Jews2-sending their accustomed sacrifice to the Temple of Jerusalem, and patronising with lands and privileges the Temple of Leontopolis. The Museum with its unique Library, the scholars who frequented the court-Euclid the geometrician, Apelles the painter, Eratosthenes the grammarian-brought the Grecian learning to the very doors of the Israelite community. In Nicolas, p. 842. The one exception is Ptolemy Philopator, whose endeavour to enter the Temple, and whose employment of the Indian punishment of trampling under the feet of enraged elephants, is the subject of the 3rd Book of Maccabees. But even these incidents terminate happily for the Jews. He is restrained from entering the Temple by Simon the Just; he is compelled to acknowledge the rights of the Alexandrian Jews by the reluctance of the elephants; and this was com memorated by a festival like that of Purim. See Ewald, v. 468. Herzfeld, iii. 446-458. See Sharpe's Egypt, chap. vii. this fostering atmosphere there sprang up those influences which Alexandria exercised over the Jewish, and thus over the Christian, Church for ever. The first was the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek-the rise of what may properly be termed the Greek Bible. As the meeting of the Greek Empire with the Jewish The nation is presented to us in the legend of Alexander's inter- Septuagint (LXX.) view with Jaddua, so the meeting of the two sacred languages of Greek and Hebrew is presented to us in the legend of the Seventy Translators. It was believed two centuries laterand, however much the details have been shaken by recent criticism, the main fact is not doubted-that in the reign of the second Ptolemy the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek was undertaken at Alexandria. It is, perhaps, most probable that it sprang up spontaneously to supply the wants of the Alexandrian Jews. But the Jewish community would not be satisfied with this homely origin. The story took two forms. One was that King Ptolemy Philadelphus, wishing to discover the difference between the Jews and the Samaritans, summoned1 five translators-three representing the Samaritans, one Jew, and one assessor. The Samaritans undertook the Pentateuch, the Jew the later Books, and the King approved the Samaritan version. This was, doubtless, the Samaritan tradition. It points to the gradual growth of the work. It also may connect itself with the venerable High Priest Hezekiah, whom Hecatæus met in Egypt, and who appears to have been the chief of the sacerdotal order not in Jerusalem but in Samaria. 1 The number 5 also appears in the Talmudic traditions (Sopherim, i. 7) quoted in Herzfeld, iii. 536. Two names were connected with the work by tradition, Aristobulus with Exodus, Lysimachus with Esther (Grätz, iii. 35). Jos. c. Ap. Herzfeld (iii. 538) founds this conjecture on the facts (1) |