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The “Judaism” of Samaria and Galilee in Josephus's Version of the Letter of Demetrius I to Jonathan (Antiquities 13.48–57)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Seth Schwartz
Seth Schwartz
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The slapdash, seamy character of the second half of Josephus's Antiquities frequently obscures the author's purpose; the recovery of this information is therefore often neglected, though scholars are becoming increasingly aware of the task's importance. A good example of this scholarly neglect concerns the little narrative complex of Ant. 13.1-79, covering the period from Judas's death in battle against Bacchides in 160 BCE to the appointment of Jonathan as high priest (152 BCE) and the death of Demetrius I in 150 BCE; the complex concludes with two stories about Jewish affairs in Egypt (13.62-79). These stories have been clumsily introduced into a narrative which is otherwise a close paraphrase of 1 Maccabees, and are not commonly understood to have any relation to their context other than a vague chronological aptness: both stories are said to have occurred, like most of the high priesthood of Jonathan, in the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (13.79). I shall argue that the stories have not only a chronological but also a close thematic connection to their context, and that the narrative, properly understood, expresses a propagandists motif not hitherto noticed in Antiquities. Furthermore, this motif may have important implications for our understanding of Antiquities as a whole, and perhaps important historical implications, as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 377 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1989

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References

1 To mention only some recent book-length studies: Attridge, Harold W., The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquities Judaicae of Flavius Josephus (HDR 7; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Cohen, Shaye J. D., Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1979) especially 24–65;Google ScholarSchwartz, Seth, Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1990), especially 170–200Google Scholar. Of course, the groundwork was laid in the standard older studies of Gustav Hölscher, “Josephus,” PW 9.2. 1934-2000; Niese, Benedictus, “Josephus,” ERE 7.569–79;Google ScholarLaqueur, Richard A., Der Jüdische Historiker Flavius Josephus (Giessen, 1920Google Scholar; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970) especially 128-220; Thack-eray, Henry St. J., Josephus the Man and the Historian (New York: Jewish Institute of Religion, 1929) especially 51–73Google Scholar. But it has been, and to some extent remains, far more common to view Antiquities as an arbitrarily assembled collection of ill-digested sources.

2 Ptolemy ruled from 180 to 145 BCE. Josephus gives no more precise date here, but in 12.386 indicates that Onias IV, whose foundation of a temple of Yahweh at Leontopolis is the subject of 13.62-72, fled to Egypt soon after the appointment of Alcimus to the high priesthood of the Jerusalem temple, in 162 BCE (see Bickermann, Elias J., Der Gott der Makkabäer [Berlin: Schocken, 1937] 14Google Scholar; Goldstein, Jonathan, I Maccabees [AB; Garden City: Doubleday, 1976] 329)Google Scholar. In Bell.1.32-33, though, Josephus connected the flight of Onias (wrongly identified as the deposed high priest Onias III) and construction of his temple with the pollution of the Jerusalem temple by Antio-chus IV in 167 BCE. A papyrus (Tcherikover, Victor, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicorum, (CPJ) [Cambridge/Jerusalem: Harvard University Press, 1957] l.#132)Google Scholar may indeed demonstrate his presence in Egypt by 164, though Aryeh Kasher has recently questioned this (see his The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt [Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1978] 64–65Google Scholar [in Hebrew]). The date(s) of Onias's settlement and foundation of his temple remain(s) uncertain: see Tcherikover, Victor, HaYehudim VehaYevanim BiTekufah HaHelenistit (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1974) 222–24;Google ScholarCPJ, #132; Kasher, , Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, 124- 27Google Scholar. Was Josephus' s placement of the story after the death of Demetrius I (in 150) intended to have precise chronological implications? Probably not—see below, pp. 385-86.

Our only information about the date of the second story is Ant. 13.79.

3 That I Maccabees is probably distorting the story by pretending that Demetrius's letter (if authentic) was intended for Jonathan is likely, but not my concern here. The point is that Josephus understood the story as I Maccabees intended it to be understood, and even introduced Jonathan's name into his paraphrase of vs 26 (Ant. 13.48), the letter's address. I need not discuss the problem of the letter's authenticity or the circumstances of its composition, if a forgery; there is a large literature on these issues. See most recently Schiirer, Emil, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (3 vols., rev. and ed. Verities, Geza and Millar, Fergus [=Schürer-Vermes]; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973) 1.170Google Scholar; Bunge, Jochen, “Zur Geschichte und Chronologie des Untergangs der Oniaden und des Aufstiegs der Hasmonäer,” JSJ 6 (1975) 27–43;Google ScholarMurphy-O'Connor, Jerome, “Demetrius I and the Teacher of Righteousness,” RB 83 (1976) 400–420;Google ScholarGoldstein, , I Maccabees, 405–17;Google ScholarGauger, Jörg Dieter, Beiträge zur jüdischen Apologetik (Cologne/Bonn: Hanstein, 1977) 123, 137-38Google Scholar.

4 A11 translations in the following are my own. I have tried to stay as close as possible to the Greek, sacrificing fluency in the process.

5 Marcus, , in his notes to the LCL AntiquitiesGoogle Scholar (Josephus, vol. 7 [Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1976]), lists Josephus's divergences from his source. Most are trivial. Isaiah Gafhi's discussion of Josephus's adaptation of IGoogle ScholarMaccabees, (“On the Use of I Maccabees by Josephus Flavius,” Zion 45 [1980] 81–95Google Scholar [in Hebrew]) does not extend to the account of the reigns of Jonathan and Simon.

6 Ant. 13.50 reads so much more smoothly than 1 Mace 10:30 that Goldstein (I Maccabees, ad loc.) suggests it reflects the original text of I Maccabees; perhaps. But the documents quoted in 1 Maccabees are rilled with obscurities. This is not surprising, given that, as they stand before us (and stood before Josephus), the authentic ones are the results of translation from bureaucratic Greek, into Hebrew (which must have lacked an adequate bureaucratic vocabulary), and back into Greek. (This presupposes—as is now generally acknowledged—that Josephus used only the Greek version, not the Hebrew original, of 1 Maccabees; see, e.g., Cohen, , Josephus in Galilee and Rome, 44–47.)Google Scholar

7 But Josephus is inconsistent: in 13.54 (see below) he retains the original terminology of the documents. Note also in 13.49-50 the use of three different words to mean “remit,” presumably to avoid the source's monotonous repetition of ⋯φíημι.

8 See Momigliano, Amaldo, “Errori intomo alle toparchie della Palestina,” RF 58 (1930) 71Google Scholar; Abel, Félix Marie, Les Livres des Maccabées (Paris: Gabalda, 1949) 187Google Scholar; Goldstein, , I Maccabees, 407Google Scholar; Freyne, Sean, Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian (Wilmington/Notre Dame: Michael Glazier, 1980) 54 n. 30Google Scholar; but this view is opposed by Alt, Albrecht, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel (Munich: Beck, 1953) 2.404, n. 3Google Scholar; Dancy, John Christopher, A Commentary on I Maccabees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954) 144–46Google Scholar, implicitly; Stern, Menahem, Te'udot Lemered Hahashmonaim (Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Meuhad, 1965) 101–2Google Scholar. These scholars suppose the words καì ǽΤαλιλαíας, in 1 Maccabees to be a scribal error. If so, Josephus's error(?) demonstrates that the scri-bal error was an early one.

9 This was essentially the view of Momigliano, , “Errori,” 71–74Google Scholar —the only discrete study of Josephus's version of Demetrius's letter. As far as I can tell, only Abel, (Livres des Maccabees, ad 1 Mace 10:30)Google Scholar suggested that Josephus's version was more than a mere error: it was indeed an “erreur,” but one which “plaisit a sa fantaisie de rendre les propositions du roi encore plus alléchantes et plus flatteuses.”

Morton Smith has suggested in private correspondence that καì ǽΤαλιλαíας in Antiquities is a gloss and the clause should be translated as follows: “…of the three toparchies being attached to Judaea from (=genitive of separation) Samaria-and-Galilee.” That is, Josephus reported the content of 1 Maccabees precisely. But one would in this case have expected a preposition after προσκεμένων, and perhaps some manuscript evidence that καì ǽΤαλιλαíας is a gloss. No published translation as far as I know has understood the text in this way.

10 This paraphrases 1 Mace 10:37, which guarantees Judaean troops in the Seleucid army the right to have their own commanders and follow their own laws, “just as the king commanded also for the land of Juda.”

11 The manuscripts here (καì τοỉς τρισνìν προκειμένοιςέν τ⋯ Ἰονδαíᾳ νóμοις ύποτáσθαι βοúλομαι: “I wish them to be subject to the three laws in charge in Judaea”) yield no sense; the reading adopted in the LCL involves only minor corrections and it, or something like it, is, I believe, inevitable. (Some such reading apparently underlies Hebrew, Abraham Schalit's translation [Flavii Josephi Antiquities Judaicae, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1963)]Google Scholar, as well.) Naber's, Samuel punctuation (Flavii losephi Opera Omnia, vol. 3 [Leipzig: Teubner, 1892])Google Scholar after ύποτáσεσθαι also renders the sense obscure: Niese's, punctuation (Flavii losephi Opera, vol. 3 [Berlin: Weidmann, 1892]),Google Scholar adopted in the LCL, is preferable. (I am not convinced by Fischer, Thomas, Seleukiden und Makkabäer [Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1980] 110Google Scholar n. 266, that the nonsense of the codices results from Josephus's misunderstanding of the word νομóς—a word he had understood perfectly well when paraphrasing 1 Mace 10:30.)

12 In eliminating δέ after άρζιερεῖδέ after άρζιερεῖδέ after άρζιερεῖδέ after άρζιερεῖ (and consequently the comma after βοúλομαι) I follow the reading of most of the manuscripts. (Though even if the δ⋯ were retained, it would in conjunction with καì indicate only a very weak stop; see Denniston, John D., The Greek Particles [2d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1978] 200–1.)Google Scholar Most translators take καì τῷ ⋯ρχιερεî… Ἰεροσολúμοις as if it were one clause, the i'va indicating the goal of the high priest's έπιμεíα, as in the translation provided in the parentheses. Even if this is so, the ἴνα clause must still be understood as referring to the annexed districts if it is not to be thought merely superfluous; hence, my argument would not be seriously affected. It is, however, somewhat unlikely that the common translation is correct. Nowhere else does Josephus follow έπιμελ⋯ομαι or έπιμελ⋯ς ἔστιν with a ἴνα clause; he normally uses an infinitive (Ant. 14.154, 261) or ὥσ(τε) clause (Ant. 4.283). In this, Josephus follows the grammatical conventions of Greek prose (see Smyth, Herbert W., Greek Grammar [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976] 497Google Scholar; Kühner, Raphael and Gerth, Bernhard, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, [Hannover: Hahn, 1983] 2.2.337–39)Google Scholar according to which ἴνα is rarely used i n such contexts.

13 Or possibly, “be subject to, and be the responsibility of, the high priest.” (I thank Shaye Cohen for this suggestion.) Such a reading would of course exclude the reading rejected in the previous note. However, it is somewhat odd to have έπιμελ⋯ς modifying το⋯ςέν τρισíν κτλ.

14 Ταûτα μ⋯ν οủν ὑπιπισχνο⋯μενος καì χαριζóμενος τοîς Ἰονδαíοις ἕγραψε Δημ⋯τριος; “So, Demetrius wrote to the Jews promising and bestowing these things.”

15 See Ant. 13.125. Either the change from Peraea to Joppa illustrates the saw that liars need good memories, or the text is corrupt, as Naber supposed, and ΠΕΡΑΙΑΣ is to be read for ΙΟΠΠΗΣ. At any rate, the inconsistency suggests that Samaria and Galilee were the more important for Josephus's purposes; the third district was perhaps, as Momigliano thought (note 8 above), simply filled in on the basis of preexisting lists.

A further illustration of Josephus's sloppiness in late Antiquities is that in his transcription of Demetrius II's letter to Jonathan (13.127), he for the first time gets the names of the three nomes right, though just a few lines earlier he still got them wrong.

16 There is a hint that Josephus seriously thought of Galilee as Jewish even before the reign of Aristobulus. According to Ant. 13.154, the generals of Demetrius II, then Jonathan's enemy, attacked the town of Kedasa, in far Upper Galilee, assuming that Jonathan, then campaigning on behalf of his protector Antiochus VI in Syria, would come to defend the Galileans as their ally; “for they thought that he would not allow the Galileans, who were his, to be attacked.” (1 Macc 11:63 does not mention the generals' reasoning.) In what sense were the Galileans of Kedasa Jonathan's? Most likely Marcus and Schalit are right in supposing that the reference is to kinship between Judaeans and Galileans. But one can easily imagine other explanations—not kinship but, e.g., alliance or clientela, or some comparable form of dependency (as Chamonard, Joseph, Oeuvres complètes de Flavius Josèphe, vol. 3 [Paris: Leroux, 1904]Google Scholar ad loc. implies). Furthermore the text of 13.154 is uncertain. Some manuscripts (whose reading is adopted by Niese) read: τ⋯ς γàρ Ταλιλíας ὅντας αύτοὺς ούπεριóψται πολεουμ⋯νους—i.e., “because he would not overlook it that those from Galilee were being attacked.” Of course, this is no explanation at all, only tautology; furthermore, the syntax is peculiar. Hence, most modem editors and commentators (Chamonard, Marcus, Schalit) have followed Naber in reading αύτοû. But tautology and poor syntax are not necessarily sufficient reasons to reject Niese's reading: Josephus was capable of worse.

17 How and why was the new territory acquired? In what sense were the inhabitants judaized, and what did this imply? These are among the most difficult and significant questions in Jewish history, and among the least studied; hence the ambiguities and qualifications of the above sentence. The character of the Hasmonean expansion has been controversial since the emergence of two main schools of thought only a few decades after the events themselves. The standard handbook account—enshrined in Schürer-Vermes, it may be destined to remain standard— follows the main narrative in Antiquities, presumably based on the General History of Nicolaus of Damascus: the Hasmoneans, now a rich, powerful dynasty with a large mercenary force at their disposal, conquered Idumaea, Samaria, Galilee, Peraea, and the Greek cities along the coast and in the Transjordan by force of arms and compelled the inhabitants to submit to Judaism. Somehow, this policy succeeded in many places, meeting resistence mainly in the cities. Critics of this view (primarily Rappa-port, Uriel, Jewish Religious Propaganda and Proselytism in the Period of the Second Commonwealth [Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1965 (in Hebrew)]Google Scholar and “The Hellenistic Cities and the Judaizing of the Land of Israel in the Hasmonean Period,” in Perlman, S. and Shimron, B., eds., Doron: Jubilee Volume in Honour of Professor B. Z. Katz [Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1967] 219–30Google Scholar(in Hebrew); and Morton Smith, in a monograph entitled “The Gentiles in Judaism: c.125 BCE-66 CE,” to appear in a forthcoming volume of the Cambridge History of Judaism; I thank Professor Smith for letting me see a draft of this work.) observe that Josephus's own account indicates that the reigns of the Hasmoneans were wracked by civil dissension, and their governments tended to collapse whenever a marginally vigorous pretender assumed the Seleucid throne; such conditions hardly encouraged forcible acquisition of land and souls. Hence, the expansion should be seen rather as a Judaean-led alliance—probably against the Greek cities of Palestine and their Seleucid patrons—one of whose terms was the adoption of “Judaism” (Smith and Rappaport disagree as to what this might have meant) by the non-Judaean allies. This view was foreshadowed by the first-century BCE historian Timagenes, in a passage quoted by Josephus himself (Ant. 13.319). These matters obviously require more careful consideration than a footnote permits, consideration I hope to give in the near future. But, since my main concern here is Josephus's description of the expansion and its implications for our understanding of the late first century CE, I proceed without further discussion at this point.

18 The crudity of my translation reflects the difficulty of the original; this passage is now fully discussed by Smith, “Gentiles in Judaism.”

19 Resistance is reported for Pella—τα⋯την δ⋯ κατ⋯σκαψαν (so Marcus following Naber; Niese followed by Schalit reads κατ⋯σκαψεν) ούχ (Niese omits ούχ) ύποχομ⋯νων τ⋯νων τ⋯ν ένοικο⋯ντων έςτά τά πáτρια τ⋯ν Τουδαíων μεταβαλεîσθαι—this may imply that Alexander did succeed in judaizing other cities. However, as Schurer-Vermes, 1. 228 n. 32 observe, Josephus alludes elsewhere to the destruction of other Greek cities (Ant. 14.75-76, 88), probably in the time of Alexander; even cities which were judaized probably lost much of their populations to flight or the enslavement of resisters. Flight is implied by Ant. 14.75: “(Pompey) returned Hippos and Skythopolis, etc., to their inhabitants.”

20 Hyrcanus conquered the city of Samaria only much later. It was a Macedonian military colony and had withstood a long siege; Hyrcanus razed it to the ground (Ant. 13.280-81).

21 The Medabans had allegedly stood a six-month siege during which Hyrcanus's army endured hardships, so they could not expect generous treatment from the monarch and his troops. Josephus knew this well and may have taken it for granted that his readers did too; if so, Josephus is not presenting all the “loudaioi” of Peraea as having been incorporated without requiring conversion—some were destroyed.

22 See Bell. 1.76: in the account of Aristobulus's domestic tragedy, almost surely taken from Nicolaus, Josephus mentions in passing that Aristobulus's brother Antigonus had been campaigning in Galilee—a fact interestingly absent in the Antiquities parallel. Freyne (Galilee from Alexander to Hadrian) tends to reject the possibility that this passage refers to campaigning in Galilee (though it is fairly clear on the point), apparently to harmonize the passage with Josephus's silence elsewhere. Indeed, Freyne denied that Galilee needed to be judaized in any sense: for him, Galilee had always been Jewish. On Alexander Jannaeus's allegedly having been brought up in Galilee (Ant. 13.322), see Schurer-Vermes, 1. 218 n. 10.

23 For Josephus, the Gerizim temple, too, was modeled on that of Jerusalem (Ant. 11.310; 13.255), and had a staff of cast-off Judaean priests (11.306-12, 346-47); see also Bell. 1.33, on the temple of Onias, and 1.63, on Gerizim. This is a way of indicating the Judaism, but also the inferiority, of these temples.

24 According to the “royal letter,” quoted here by Josephus (70-71), it was Onias's proposal to use a ruined temple of Boubastis, with its sacred animals and άσ⋯λγεια (wantonness), that upset the royal couple's piety; but, pace Marcus, it was presumably not this alone which upset Josephus's piety.

25 Josephus recognized this himself in his anticipation of this story at Ant. 12.10. Yet this important fact is almost never taken into account by modern writers about Jews in Hellenistic Egypt: Tcherikover, Victor, The Jews in Egypt in the Hellenistic-Roman Age in the Light of the Papyri (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1963Google Scholar [in Hebrew]) and Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, both ignore the issue completely; Schurer-Vermes (3.59-60) presents a brief, inadequate, discussion of the Samaritan presence in Egypt, again without acknowledging that they and the Jews constituted a single community (Josephus's stories are presented as historically dubious, as indeed they are; but as propaganda presumably invented by and/or for the use of the Judaeans of Alexandria, it must be supposed that in order to be effective they would have had to reflect conditions there accurately. Hence, the obvious implications of the stories are most likely true); cf. also Coggins, R. J., Samaritans and Jews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) 97–98;Google ScholarKippenberg, Hans G., Garizim und Synagoge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971) 52, 66-67Google Scholar; Egger, Rita, Josephus Flavius und die Samaritaner (Freiburg/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986) 95–101Google Scholar, 230-36. The chief exception is the account of Smith, Morton, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971) 188–92Google Scholar.

26 This is explicitly stated in Ant. 1.14-25. That this is in fact the main theme of Antiquities, I argue at length in Josephus and Judaean Politics, 170-200.

27 The only book-length treatment of Josephus's attitude to the Samaritans is Egger, Josephus Flavius und die Samaritaner. The value of the work is greatly diminished by the author's attempt to jam Josephus's clumsy and inaccurate propaganda into the procrustean twin-beds of terminological and historical precision by means of a reading so atomistic as to be implausible even for Antiquities, a work which encourages—and sometimes rewards—atomistic reading. Egger's main conclusion is that Josephus implicitly distinguishes between two groups, the Samaritans proper, who were essentially “Jews” and reasonably well liked by Josephus, and the “Khouthaeans,” a mixed multitude, partly descended from foreign settlers, and partly assimilated to Jewish or Israelite religious practice, whom Josephus opposed (see pp. 310-16). That such a distinction existed in reality is rather unlikely (though it does resemble Alt's view, Kleine Schriften, 2.316-37. See, however, Smith, , Palestinian Parties, 193–201); that it exists in Josephus's works can be proved false by a disinterested perusal of the relatively few relevant passagesGoogle Scholar.

28 Josephus represents Manasses' marriage to Nikaso, daughter of Sanaballetes, governor of Samaria, as a “mixed marriage.” But Josephus may have thought of Sanaballetes as Persian, not Samaritan. Or, the story's separatist Judaean source considered Samaritans foreigners, and Josephus failed to revise it. Lawrence Schiffman's interpretation of this passage—Manasses' marriage was not itself prohibited; the elders feared only that it would encourage others to engage in prohibited relations—seems forced (“The Samaritans in Tannaitic Halakhah,” JQR 75 [1984/1985] 334)Google Scholar. Herod's marriage to a Samaritan woman is reported without comment (Bell. 1.562; in Ant. 17.250, Malthake's nationality is not mentioned—here, at least, we might have expected a denunciation, were there anything to denounce); nor is there any suggestion that her sons, Archelaus and Antipas, were somehow less “Jewish” for having had a Samaritan mother.

29 That Josephus despised them in the 80s and 90s did not prevent him from having had friends in Samaria in the 60s; see Vit. Jos. 269. Cohen, (Josephus in Galilee and Rome, 237- 38)Google Scholar observes that the Jewish War treats the Samaritans more mildly than Antiquities.

30 See, e.g., Ezra 4:1-7; Neh 2:10-20; 3:33-38; 4:1 -9; 13:4-9, 28; Sir 50.25-26; 1 Maccabees often takes it for granted that only Judaeans who observe the law are “Israelites;” all others are classified as “lawless ones” or “the nations roundabout.” This is most strikingly so in the account of Judas's campaigns in northern Palestine and the Transjordan, in chapter 5.

31 Tobit admits that most northerners did not (1.4-8); Freyne (Galilee), in contending that the Galileans were indeed always Jewish, ignored this passage.

32 Generally understood, if at all, as a mere biblicizing idealization: see Tramontano, Raffaele, La Lettera di Aristea a Filocrate (Naples: Giannini, 1931) 54Google Scholar; Pelletier, André, La Lettre d'Aristée a Philocrate (SC 89; Paris: Cerf, 1962) 130–31Google Scholar(following Moses Hadas); implicitly also Schurer-Vermes, 3.1.681.

33 See Bickerman, Elias, “The Septuagint as a Translation,” Studies in Jewish and Christian History (Leiden: Brill, 1976) 1.173–74, and cf.Google Scholaridem, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1988) 104.

34 C. Ap. 2.43. See comments of Stern, Menahem, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974) 1.44. Additional evidence about the “Judaism” of the Samaritans may be found inGoogle ScholarSmith, , Palestinian Parties, 188–92Google Scholar. My comments on this issue are indebted to Smith's.

35 A similar suggestion is rejected by Büchler, Adolf, 'Am Haaretz Hagelili (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1964) 193; but seeGoogle ScholarGoodman, Martin, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132-212 (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983) 93–118Google Scholar.

36 With the exception of Rabbi Yose “the Galilean” and his sons, whose epithet indicates the rarity of the phenomenon of the Galilean Rabbi. Of course it is difficult to know anything about the backgrounds of most early rabbis, but for the most part they seem to have been priests and lay Judae-ans. Büchler, ('Am Haaretz, 193–240)Google Scholar lists about a dozen early rabbis whom he designates as Galile-ans. But the most he can be said to have proved for any of them other than Yose and his family is that they may have lived in Galilee at some time of their lives. Even if a few of those listed really were of Galilean origin (and the majority are reported to have lived in Tiberias and Sepphoris, cities with strong royal and Judaean connections), they may be dismissed as exceptional both as Galileans and as rabbis.

37 See Cohen, , Josephus in Galilee and Rome, 206–10Google Scholar. The fact, observed by Cohen, that in the Jewish War Josephus frequently refers to his Galilean subordinates as “Ioudaioi,” whereas in the parallel passages in the Life he does so only once, may indicate not only a change in Josephus's attitude, but also a change in the Galileans—one which may explain why in Antiquities 13, written about six years before the Life, their Judaism could no longer be taken for granted.

38 For a different explanation of the prominence of the synagogue, see Goodman, , State and Society, 87Google Scholar.

39 The earliest source is t. Ter. 4.12, 14, a statement attributed to Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel. Other sources about the attitudes of early rabbis are amoraic in date. But given the likely spread of hostility toward the Samaritans among the rabbis from the later second century (see Alon, Gedaliah, Toldot Hayehudim Be'eretz Yisrael Bitekufat Hamishnah Vehatalmud [Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Meuhad, 1955] 2.251–53)Google Scholar, late reports of sympathy among early rabbis are plausible. See also Kasher, Aryeh, Edom, Arabia and Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1980) 53–54Google Scholar n. 17. A more detailed, and highly suggestive, study is Schiffman, , “The Samaritans in Tannaitic Halakhah,” 323–50Google Scholar. He concludes that before c. 200 CE, the rabbinic consensus regarded the Samaritans as Jews, albeit apparently of an inferior class; after this date there was a sudden anti-Samaritan shift in rabbinic attitude. Though quite useful, particularly in collecting and evaluating rabbinic sources, the work is historically a bit naive (see especially 349-50—the rabbinic shift is attributed to the growing “hellenization” of the Samaritans as they moved to the coastal cities, and their support of Rome in the Bar-Kokhba Revolt. But Judaeans were also streaming to the coastal cities after the two revolts, and no doubt many of them, including rabbis, had also supported Rome in the second revolt. At any rate, the new rabbinic hostility to the Samaritans affected villagers also, not only the urbanized; furthermore, it is hard to see how support of Rome could have been thought to change the Samaritans' personal status) and, as the author suggests (326), only a beginning.