The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Nevertheless the country for many years remained tranquil. Unlike the Persians, the Greeks respected the religion of the people. Ptolemy did his utmost to conciliate the priesthood; their temples were restored and decorated, their festivals were treated with honour; above all, their endowments were untouched. And with the priesthood disposed to be friendly towards him, Ptolemy had no reason to be afraid. The priests were the national leaders; they it was who had stirred up the revolts against the Persian, and the temples in which they served had been the fortresses and rallying-points of the rebel armies. The Egyptians have always been an intensely religious people; whatever may have been their form of creed, whether pagan, Christian, or Moslem, they have clung to it with tenacity and battled for it, sometimes with fanatical zeal. Religion will arouse them when nothing else can do so; by the side of it even the love of gain has but little influence.

Besides conciliating the priesthood, Ptolemy planted garrisons of Greeks in several parts of the country. Bodies of veterans colonised the Fayyûm, and Ptolemais, now Menshîyeh, in Upper Egypt, was a Greek city modelled in all respects upon Alexandria. The public accounts were kept in Greek, and though the clerks and tax-gatherers were usually [pg 144] natives who had received a Greek education, many of them were Greeks by birth and even Jews. “Ostraka,” or inscribed potsherds, have been found at Thebes, which show that in the days of Ptolemy Physkôn, a Jew, Simon, the son of Eleazar, farmed the taxes there for the temple of Amon. As he did not himself know Greek, his receipts were written for him by one of his sons. After his death he was succeeded in his office by his son Philoklês. The name is noticeable, as it shows how rapidly the Jews of Egypt could become wholly Greek. The religion of his forefathers was not likely to sit heavily on the shoulders of the tax-gatherer of a heathen temple, and we need not wonder at the Hellenisation of his family. Simon was a sample of many of his brethren: in adopting Greek culture the Jews of Egypt began to forget that they were Jews. It required the shock of persecution at Jerusalem, and the Maccabean war of independence to recall them to a recollection of their past history and a sense of the mission of their race.

With the rise of the Greek kingdom in Egypt, the canonical books of the Old Testament come to an end. Jaddua, the last high-priest recorded in the Book of Nehemiah (xii. 7, 22), met Alexander the Great at Mizpeh, and if Josephus is to be trusted, obtained from him a recognition of the ancient [pg 145] privileges of the Jews and their exemption from taxation every Sabbatical year. The First Book of Chronicles (iii. 23) seems to bring the genealogy of the descendants of Zorobabel down to an even later date. But where the canonical books break off, the books of the Apocrypha begin. Jesus the son of Sirach, in his prologue to the Book of Ecclesiasticus, tells us that he had translated it in Egypt from Hebrew into Greek, when Euergetês, the third Ptolemy, was king, and thirty-eight years after its compilation by his grandfather Jesus. Like most of the apocryphal books, it thus had a Palestinian origin, but its translation into Greek indicates the intercourse that was going on between the Jews of Palestine and those of Egypt, as well as the general adoption of the Greek language by the Egyptian Jews.

The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek about the same period is a yet more striking illustration of the same fact. The name of “Septuagint,” which the translation still retains, perpetuates the legend, derived from the false Aristæas, of its having been made all at one time by seventy (or seventy-two) translators. But internal evidence shows that such could not have been the case. The various books of the Canon were translated at different times, and the translators exhibit very different degrees of [pg 146] ability and acquaintance with the Hebrew language. The Pentateuch was the first to be rendered into Greek; the other books followed afterwards, and it would appear that the Book of Ecclesiastes never found a place in the translation at all. The Greek translation of the book which is now found in the Septuagint was probably made by Aquila.

It was under Ptolemy ii., who justified his title of Philadelphus, or “Brother-loving,” by the murder of his two brothers, that the work of translation was begun. Ptolemy Sôtêr, his father, had resigned his crown two years before his death, and the event proved that his confidence in his son's filial piety was not misplaced. The coronation of Philadelphus at Alexandria was celebrated with one of the most gorgeous pageants the world has ever seen, the details of which are preserved by Athenæus. Under the new king the internal development of the monarchy went on apace. The canal was opened which connected the Nile with the Red Sea, and at its outlet near Suez a town was built called Arsinoê, after the king's sister. The ports of Berenikê and Philotera (now Qoseir) were constructed and fortified on the coast of the Red Sea, and roads made to them from Koptos and Syênê on the Nile. In this way the ivory and gems of the Sudân could be brought to Egypt without passing through the hostile territories [pg 147] of the Ethiopians in Upper Nubia. In the eastern desert itself the mines of emerald and gold were worked until the royal revenue was increased to more than three millions sterling a year.

Though Ptolemy Philadelphus was fond of show, he was not extravagant, and his income was sufficient not only to maintain a large army and navy and protect efficiently the frontier of his kingdom, but also to leave a large reserve fund in the treasury. It was said to amount to as much as a hundred millions sterling. It was no wonder, therefore, that Alexandria became filled with sumptuous buildings. The Pharos or lighthouse was finished by Sôstratos, as well as the tomb of Alexander, whose body was moved from Memphis to the golden sarcophagus which had been prepared for it. The library of the Museum was stocked with books until 400,000 rolls of papyrus were collected together, and men of science and learning from all parts of the world were attracted to it by the munificence of the king. The principal librarianship, however, changed hands on the accession of the new king. Demetrius Phalereus, the ex-tyrant of Athens, who had been the first librarian, had offended Philadelphus by advising that the crown should descend to his elder brother instead of to himself, and he had accordingly to make way for Zênodotos of Ephesus, famous as a critic of Homer.

Among the books which found a place in the great library of Alexandria was doubtless the Greek translation of the Pentateuch. Philadelphus showed remarkable favour to the Jews. The Jewish captives of his soldiers were ransomed by him and given homes in various parts of Egypt. One hundred and twenty thousand slaves were thus freed, the king paying for each 120 drachmas, or 30 shekels, the price of a slave according to the Mosaic Law. It is quite possible that there may be some truth in the legend that the Greek translation of the Old Testament was made at his desire. Whether or not we believe that he sent two Greek Jews, Aristæus and Andræus, with costly gifts to Eleazar the high-priest at Jerusalem, asking him to select fit men for the purpose, he was probably not unwilling that a copy of the sacred books of his Jewish subjects, in a form intelligible to the Greeks, should be added to the library. We must not forget that it was he who employed Manetho, the priest of Sebennytos, to write in Greek the history of his country, which he compiled from the hieroglyphic monuments and hieratic papyri of the native temples.

Ptolemy iii., Euergetês, the eldest son of Philadelphus, succeeded his father in b.c. 246. A war with Syria broke out at the beginning of his reign, and the march of the Egyptian army as far as [pg 149] Seleucia, the capital of the Syrian kingdom on the Euphrates, was one uninterrupted triumph. On his return, Ptolemy laid his offerings on the altar at Jerusalem, and thanked the God of the Jews for his success. The Jewish community might well be pardoned for believing that in the conqueror of Syria they had a new proselyte to their faith.

The Egyptians had equal reason to be satisfied with their king. Among the spoils of his Syrian campaign were 2500 vases and statues of the Egyptian deities which Kambyses had carried to Persia nearly three centuries before. They were restored to the temples of Upper Egypt, from which they had been taken, with stately ceremonies and amid the rejoicing of the people, and Ptolemy was henceforth known among his subjects as Euergetês, their “Benefactor.”

Euergetês, in fact, seems to have been the most Egyptian and least Greek of all the Ptolemies. Alone among them he visited Thebes and paid homage to the gods of Egypt. Their temples were rebuilt and crowded with offerings, and the priesthood naturally regarded him as a king after their own heart. He, too, like the Pharaohs of old, turned his attention to the conquest of Ethiopia, which his predecessors had been content to neglect.[9] It was [pg 150] under Euergetês, moreover, that the so-called Decree of Canôpus was drawn up in hieroglyphics and demotic Egyptian as well as in Greek. Its occasion was the death of Berenikê, the king's daughter, to whom the Egyptian priests determined to grant divine honours. It is the first time that we find the old script and language of Egypt taking its place by the side of that of the Macedonian conqueror, and it is significant that the Greek transcript occupies the third place.