Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (4 page)

Languages bring values with them, and one cannot learn a language without making one’s own the things the civilization that developed the language considers important. The warrior as the greatest of all human figures—this was not something confined to the Greeks but enshrined in every ancient language (which is why it still lies hidden in the languages of our day). But the Greeks had their own powerful words and phrases which, once learned, gave the speaker a specifically Greek outlook. One could not learn Greek without reading Homer, and one could not read Homer without encountering the Greek heroes and the Greek gods. Alexander, who slept
with his dagger and a copy of the
Iliad
under his pillow, believed himself descended from Achilles, the greatest of all Greek warriors, as well as from Hercules, the god of invincible strength, and from Asiatic Dionysos, the dark, impetuous, havoc-provoking god of wine. In learning to read Homer and the Greek playwrights, one ingested a whole mythology, indeed a whole psychology. In reading Plato and the Stoics, one absorbed a whole philosophy of life. By making use of the rhetorical models of
Demosthenes,
¹
the student of Greek learned how to write a letter and to shape a speech—how to argue a point and present his arguments to best advantage.

We needn’t imagine that every Iranian garrison commander had studied Demosthenes or that every Levantine merchant could quote Homer to understand that whatever Greek they knew affected their outlook. Similarly, common English words and phrases adopted nowadays throughout the world give even simple people, living in cultures bound by non-Western myths, access to such values as progress,
democracy, technology, and capitalism (even if one should see these values through the eyes of inflexible traditionalists: as contempt for traditions of authority and discipline and love of chaos and of self at the expense of the common good).

And just as anyone in our world may turn on a television and see well-stocked refrigerators and family cars as desirable components of the American Way of Life, anyone in the ancient world that Alexander had united could raise his eyes to the horizon and see there the reasonable Greek temple, decorated with the
stories of gods and heroes, place of prayers and offerings to the forces of fate. Nearby was the
gymnasion
(from which we derive our word
gymnasium
and the Germans their word for high school), where young male athletes trained in the nude and, after their vigorous workouts, sat at the feet of a philosopher, as Alexander had once sat at the feet of
Aristotle,
Plato’s most famous pupil, whom his father had employed as royal tutor.
²
(This was not a simple act of paternal affection on Philip’s part. The Greeks thought of the Macedonians as shabby cousins at best, and it was essential for the Macedonian royal family to assert convincingly its Greek
bona fides.
) Within the compass of Alexander’s far-flung empire, then, Greek was the lingua franca, disseminated first by soldiers and administrators, then by the businessmen, traders, priests, oracles, trainers, and tutors who followed in their wake; and everywhere one was confronted with Greek assumptions, Greek images, the Greek Way of Life.

I
T
WAS
NOT
a way of life that everyone welcomed. Like orthodox Muslims of our own time, many of the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean viewed the innovating intromission of foreign values into their society as an infection that might prove fatal. They resented mightily what they took to be these dangerous, exotic fashions that their less thoughtful countrymen were adopting with such gusto. They remembered their own unique history—their forebear
Abraham whom their God had called by name to become the father of a great nation, a nation with a salvific role for all humanity; their incomparable leader
Moses, who had led them out of cruel
slavery in pagan Egypt and given them the
Torah, their Law and Way of Life;
David, their rocklike poet-king, who had given them the thrilling words of his psalms and, by conquering all their neighbors, had made them safe in the Holy Land that God had said was theirs.

It had been a long time, though, since the Jews had been safe. The happy Davidic kingdom had been torn in two in the generations after David, so long ago that it now seemed a myth. The larger portion to the north—Israel—had then been chewed up by Sargon II of Assyria, who had deported its inhabitants, the
Ten Lost Tribes, into slavery and replaced them with his own settlers; the southern portion—
Judah—had been wrecked by Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon, who had burned to the ground the wonderful Temple that David’s son
Solomon had built and where their God had resided invisible above the Tablets of his Law. Like Sargon before him, Nebuchadnezzar had deported much of the population, who languished in Babylon for two generations, till the great
Persian king Cyrus, illustrious predecessor of the unfortunate Darius, overcame the Babylonians in the late sixth century and allowed the Jews to return to their devastated homeland. Not that their own prophets hadn’t warned them that they faced just such disasters if they didn’t amend their evil ways—that is, if they didn’t live in the light of God’s demanding justice, if they didn’t stop worshiping other gods and return to the worship of the God
of the Unspeakable Name, the only god who was real.

So now, now that they finally had come to understand the message of the prophets, were they to abandon the living God and run after the dead gods of bronze and wood that these foreigners were setting up? Their God would surely take revenge, a revenge more horrible even than the earlier deportations and
destructions. If the Jews forsook the Way of God and once again adorned themselves in the cultural trinkets of the gentiles, the catastrophes of the past would pale before the coming one, the complete catastrophe. And surely such a catastrophe was at hand. As these foreign novelties pressed down upon them and all but a remnant abandoned the ancient ways, how could any sane observer doubt that he was witnessing the steps leading to
Apocalypse, the dreadful
Day of the Lord?

What the Jews were thinking was of small consequence beyond the borders of their fragment of a kingdom. It is a mark of how unimportant they had become that Plutarch, Alexander’s biographer, doesn’t even bother to relate that the
Macedonian conquered the Jews. He must have, because we know that he marched his army from
Tyre to
Gaza, and he could not have done so without encountering the Jews, who were certainly in no position to stop him. Perhaps they were relieved to be rid of the Persians, their previous overlords. More likely by this point, one conqueror seemed neither better nor worse than another. In a world that worshiped military might and ever larger spheres of influence, the Jews could not expect to live in freedom, save by a miracle. And a miracle, whether of exaltation or destruction, is just what a people whose day is past, who have been unceremoniously pushed into a confined space at the margins of history, are wont to hope for.

Even if, his sights on bigger game, Alexander immediately forgot the Jews, he did not rule them long. Soon after his untimely death, his son by
Roxane was put to the sword, as were Roxane herself, Alexander’s half-witted brother, Philip, and at last that skillful survivor, the dowager empress Olympias. No blood relative of Alexander’s was left alive. The army, which would have none of them on the throne of Macedon, was taking
no chances. Many of Alexander’s closest companions-in-arms, those who had survived so many campaigns, were already dead or dying; the others were assassinated. The greatest empire the world had ever seen was broken up among conspiring officers of the second rank:
Antigonus II, son of Philip’s legendary general Antigonus the One-Eyed, mounted the throne to control both Macedon and Greece;
Ptolemy took
Egypt, and the Ptolemaic line would last there in its glorious capital of
Alexandria, the bones of Alexander interred in the great mausoleum beside the library, till the last of the line,
Cleopatra, would end her own life with an asp at her breast;
Seleucus took up rule at
Antioch in
Syria and from there the Seleucids ruled the arc of Asia from the Aegean to the Indus. The Levant, which lay between Syria and Egypt, was at first in vassalage to Egypt. But in 200
B.C.
, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III won the Levant from the Ptolemies in battle, after which the Seleucids from their capital of Antioch ruled the entire eastern Mediterranean, including the negligible patch called
Judah.

However highly the world may have regarded Alexander and mourned his passing, those perennial outsiders the Jews had a more jaundiced view, which is summed up nicely in the opening paragraph of the
First Book of Maccabees:

What is especially impressive about this terse, dry-eyed epitome is its sympathy for the world of fellow sufferers, far beyond the borders of
Judah and known to the writer of this chronicle only by report. The growing silence of the earth as nation after nation is plundered and laid low by Alexander, the increasing evils brought on the world by generation after generation of such predatory activity: these are extraordinary images to come upon in ancient records, which seldom waste space on the sufferings of losers. But, then, it is seldom people at the invigorating center of events—the ones who normally write the first drafts of history—who see clearly what has happened, especially the “increasing evils” wrought by those who blindly pursue their own wealth and power. Rather, it is the dispossessed, the ones who have been relegated to the margins, whose eyes are open and who know what wounds they bear.

A decade or so before the end of the sixth century
B.C.
, the Jews had completed the rebuilding of their Temple, ever after called the
Second Temple. But the Holy of Holies was empty. According to the
Talmud, several important things were missing, most notably the
Ark of the Covenant—which had contained the Ten Commandments, the very heart of the
Law of Moses—and the
Spirit
of God, who had fled with the destruction of the Ark. Without God’s living presence, prophecy,
which depended on the Spirit, must necessarily dwindle; and by the time the
First Book of Maccabees was written (at the end of the second century
B.C.
), its author had reason to lament that there were no longer any prophets about that one could count on to settle difficult matters definitively and give the sort of advice one might act on with confidence.

The First Book of Maccabees lives in a kind of canonical limbo: considered an inspired book of the Bible by most Christians but, since we no longer have the
Hebrew original, only a Greek translation, never accepted by the rabbis into the canon of the Hebrew Bible and relegated to an appendix of “
apocrypha” by
Martin Luther and subsequent Protestants. It certainly reads nothing like the
Torah, the normative
Five Books of Moses, to which Judaism gives its deepest reverence. Nor is there anything of prophetic ecstasy and terror in it. It isn’t even much like the Bible’s primitive “historical” books, which chronicle in saga-like form the exploits of such outsized figures as David and Solomon. It is, even if the original was written in Hebrew, a species of Greek history. For, though it takes a sober view of Alexander and all his ilk, it reads very like Plutarch’s and all the other histories that were churned out regularly by authors throughout the Greek world. Just as Plutarch depended largely on the correspondence contained in Alexander’s archive and on diaries of eyewitnesses, the author of First Maccabees has reviewed the correspondence in the royal archive of the
Seleucids and eyewitness accounts kept in the
Temple at Jerusalem. Like Plutarch, he is interested in phenomena, like dreams and visions, to which a modern historian would be unlikely to devote so much attention; and, like historians in every age, he is looking for a meaning beneath the chaotic surface of events. But he understands that he is bound by rules of evidence,
research, and fact checking: he is a scholar, using the Greek methods of scholarship that were current in his day.

But if he borrows Greek form, the content of his story is decidedly Jewish. Its hero is
Judas Maccabeus, known to the world not only for his appearance here but because Dante in the
Divine Comedy
discovers him in Paradise, because he is the title character of Handel’s stirring oratorio, and because the story of
Hanukkah, the Jewish
Festival of Lights celebrated each December, is largely a celebration of Judas himself.

The Seleucids were engaged, like all successful successors to Alexander, in actively Hellenizing their conquests. After all, uniformity of culture and standardization of its procedures made governing so much simpler. When toward the end of the third century
B.C.
the Seleucid king
Antiochus Epiphanes proposed a
gymnasion
for
Jerusalem, all too many Jews were eager to imitate their betters by taking out gym memberships and running around naked (a practice alien to the modest Judeans, among whom public nudity, so prevalent in the ancient world—at least among males—was quite unknown). Because the perfect male body was for the Greeks a kind of
physical expression of spirit—the harder the pecs and the tighter the buns the more spiritual you were—any deformity or deviation from the norms of perfection (ideally expressed in the work of sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles) was viewed with repugnance. If a missing ear or toe rendered one an object of derision, imagine what
circumcision did. So the Jews who were especially eager to be Greek began to “disguise their circumcision,” as First Maccabees puts it discreetly—that is, they underwent epispasm, a painful (and often unsuccessful) exercise in ancient plastic surgery.