That any rule of Sabbath observance which demanded this had actually developed during the post-Exilic period is likewise untenable. The Jews served frequently in the army under both Persian and Greek rule. This is amply demonstrated by the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine and the existence of Jewish mercenaries under the Ptolemies.[[193]] The professional soldier whose service could not be relied upon one day in seven would soon find his occupation gone.
Several passages in the Books of Maccabees have often been taken to imply that the strict observance of the Sabbath was maintained before the Hasmonean revolt, and deliberately abrogated by Mattathiah (I Macc. ii. 30-44; II Macc. viii. 23-25). But upon closer analysis it will be seen that the incidents there recorded do not quite show that. The massacre of the loyal Jews in the desert was a special and exceptional thing. They were not rebels in arms, but hunted fugitives. Their passive submission to the sword was an act of voluntary martyrdom (I Macc. ii. 37). ἁποθάνωμεν οἱ πάντες ἐν τη ἁπλότητι ἡμων: μαρτυρει ἐφ’ ἡμας hὃοὐρανος καὶ ἡ γἡ ὁτι ακριτως ἀπόλλυτε ἡμας, “Let us all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth bear witness for us that ye put us to death wrongfully.”
Again, it is not Mattathiah, but the sober reflection of his men, that brings them to the resolution that such acts of martyrdom, admirable as they are in intention, are futile. The decision is rather a criticism of their useless sacrifice than anything else.
Similar acts of self-devotion on the part of inhabitants of doomed cities were not uncommon. As final proofs of patriotism on the part of those who would not survive their city, they received the commendation of ancient writers.[[194]] But to kill oneself or allow oneself to be killed for a fantastic superstition, could have seemed only the blindest fanaticism.
Now there is no reason for doubting the essential accuracy of the report in I Maccabees, to the effect that one group of Jewish zealots chose passive resistance to the attempt of Antiochus, and by that nerved the Hasmoneans to a very active resistance. And it is very likely that in this event we have the basis for the stories that related the capture of Jerusalem—almost in every case—on the Sabbath. The story is told of the capture by Nebuchadnezzar, by Artaxerxes Ochus, by Ptolemy, and by Pompey. It is a logical inference from the non-resistance of the refugees mentioned in I Maccabees. The conditions of ancient warfare make it highly improbable that it was more.
The rationalist Greek or Roman felt it a point of honor to hold in equal contempt the “old-wives’ tales” of his own countrymen as to the supramundane facts with which the myths were filled,[[195]] and the vain and foolish attempts by which barbarians, and Greeks and Romans too, sought to dominate the cosmic forces or tear the secret from fate. These attempts generally took the form of magic, not, however, like the primitive ceremonies, of which the real nature had long been forgotten, but in the elaborate thaumaturgic systems which had been fashioned in Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. In their lowest forms these were petty and mean swindling devices. In their more developed forms they contained a sincerely felt mysticism, but under all guises they aroused the contempt of the skeptic, to whom the most ancient and revered rites of his own cult were merely ancestral habits which it did no harm to follow. The tone such men adopted toward the complicated Oriental theologies and rituals was very much like that of modern cultivated men toward the various “Vedantic philosophies,” which at one time enjoyed a certain vogue. Those who seriously maintained that by the rattling of a sistrum, or the clash of cymbals, or by mortifications of the flesh, influences could be exerted upon the laws that governed the universe, so as to modify their course or divert them, were alike insensate fools, whose chatter no educated man could take seriously. The Jews, who observed, even when they were less rigorous, a number of restrictive rules that gravely hampered their freedom of action, who seriously maintained that they possessed a direct revelation of God, were fanatics and magicians, and exhibited a credulity that was the first sign of mental inferiority.
“Senseless,” “nonsense,” ἀνοητός, ἄνοια, are terms that are principally in the mouths of the Philopator of III Maccabees and the Antiochus of IV Maccabees, in whose words we may fairly see epitomized all the current abuse as well as criticism which opponents to the Jews, from philosophers to malevolent chauvinists, heaped upon them.
Hecataeus says of Moses that he instituted an “inhospitable and strange form of living.”[[196]] The two words μισόξενον and ἀπάνθρωπον form a doublette, or rhetorical doubling of a single idea. That idea is “inhospitality,” lack of the feeling of common humanity, a term which for Greeks and Romans embodied a number of conceptions not suggested by the word to modern ears.
The word ξένος, which is the root of the words for “hospitality” and its opposite, has no equivalent in English. A ξένος was a man of another nation, who approached without hostile intent. The test of civilization was the manner in which such a ξένος was dealt with. The Greek traditions, even their extant literature, have a very lively recollection of the time when hospitality was by no means universal, when the ξένος was treated as an enemy taken in arms or worse. The one damning epithet of the Cyclops is ἄξενος, “inhospitable.”[[197]] The high commendation bestowed upon the princely hospitality of the Homeric barons itself indicates that this virtue was not yet a matter of course, and that boorish nations and individuals did not possess it.
Legally, of course, the ξένος had no rights. Such claim as he could make for protection rested upon the favor of the gods, especially of Zeus, who was frequently addressed by the cult title of Ξένιος, the Protector of Strangers. The uncertain aid of the gods was soon displaced by personal relations between individuals and groups of individuals in different states, who were mutually πρόξενοι to each other, a title that always created a very definite moral obligation and soon a legal one as well. So, when Alexander destroyed Thebes, he spared the πρόξενοι of his own family and of the Macedonians in general.[[198]]