[156] According to the Arabian accounts the Benu Sâlih migrated from the region of Mecca (about 190 A.D., according to the conjectures of Caussin de Perceval, Hist. des Arabes, i. 212) to Syria, and settled there alongside of the Benu-Samaida, in whom Waddington finds anew the φυλὴ Σομαιθηνῶν of an inscription of Suwêda (n. 2308). The Ghassanids, who (according to Caussin, about 205) migrated from Batn-Marr likewise to Syria and to the same region, were compelled by the Salihites, at the suggestion of the Romans, to pay tribute, and paid it for a time, until they (according to the same, about the year 292) overcame the Salihites, and their leader Thalaba, son of Amos, was recognised by the Romans as phylarch. This narrative may contain correct elements; but our standard authority remains always the account of Procopius, de bello Pers. i. 17, reproduced in the text. The phylarchs of individual provinces of Arabia (i.e. the province Bostra; Nov. 102 c.) and of Palestine (i.e. province of Petra; Procop. de bello Pers. i. 19), are older, but doubtless not much. Had a sheikh-in-chief of this sort been recognised by the Romans in the times before Justinian, the Roman authors and the inscriptions would doubtless show traces of it; but there are no such traces from the period before Justinian.
[157] [This statement and several others of a kindred tenor in this chapter appear to rest on an unhesitating acceptance of views entertained by a recent school of Old Testament criticism, as to which it may at least be said: Adhuc sub iudice lis est.—TR.]
[158] Whether the legal position of the Jews in Alexandria is warrantably traced back by Josephus (contra Ap. ii. 4) to Alexander is so far doubtful, as, to the best of our knowledge, not he, but the first Ptolemy, settled Jews in masses there (Josephus, Arch. xii. 1.; Appian, Syr. 50). The remarkable similarity of form assumed by the bodies of Jews in the different states of the Diadochi must, if it is not based on Alexander’s ordinances, be traced to rivalry and imitation in the founding of towns. The fact that Palestine was now Egyptian, now Syrian, doubtless exercised an essential influence in the case of these settlements.
[159] The community of Jews in Smyrna is mentioned in an inscription recently found there (Reinach, Revue des études juives, 1883, p. 161): Ῥουφεῖνα Ἰουδαί(α) ἀρχισυναγωγὸς κατεσκεύασεν τὸ ἐνσόριον τοῖς ἀπελευθέροις καὶ θρέμ(μ)ασιν μηδένος ἄλ(λ)ου ἐξουσίαν ἔχοντος θάψαι τινά εἰ δέ τις τολμήσει, δώσει τῷ ἱερωτάτῳ ταμείῳ (δηναρίους) ͵αφ, καὶ τῷ ἔθνει τῶν Ἰουδαίων (δηναρίους) ͵α. Ταύτης τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς τὸ ἀντίγραφον ἀποκεῖται εἰς τὸ ἀρχεῖον. Simple collegia are, in penal threats of this sort, not readily put on a level with the state or the community.
[160] If the Alexandrian Jews subsequently maintained that they were legally on an equal footing with the Alexandrian Macedonians (Josephus, contra Ap. ii. 4; Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 7) this was a misrepresentation of the true state of the case. They were clients in the first instance of the Phyle of the Macedonians, probably the most eminent of all, and therefore named after Dionysos (Theophilus, ad Autolycum, ii. 7), and, because the Jewish quarter was a part of this Phyle, Josephus in his way makes themselves Macedonians. The legal position of the population of the Greek towns of this category is most clearly apparent from the account of Strabo (in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 7, 2) as to the four categories of that of Cyrene: city-burgesses, husbandmen (γεωργοί), strangers, and Jews. If we lay aside the metoeci, who have their legal home elsewhere, there remain as Cyrenaeans having rights in their home the burgesses of full rights, that is, the Hellenes and what were allowed to pass as such, and the two categories of those excluded from active burgess-rights—the Jews, who form a community of their own, and the subjects, the Libyans, without autonomy. This might easily be so shifted, that the two privileged categories should appear as having equal rights.
[161] Pseudo-Longinus, περὶ ὕψους, 9: “Far better than the war of the gods in Homer is the description of the gods in their perfection and genuine greatness and purity, like that of Poseidon (Ilias, xiii. 18 ff.). Just so writes the legislator of the Jews, no mean man (οὐχ ὁ τυχὼν ἀνήρ), after he has worthily apprehended and brought to expression the Divine power, at the very beginning of the Laws (Genesis, i. 3): ‘God said’—what? ‘Let there be light, and there was light; let the earth be, and the earth was.’”
[162] The Jew Philo sets down the treatment of the Jews in Italy to the account of Sejanus (Leg. 24; in Flacc. 1), that of the Jews in the East to the account of the emperor himself. But Josephus rather traces back what happened in Italy to a scandal in the capital, which had been occasioned by three Jewish pious swindlers and a lady of rank converted to Judaism; and Philo himself states that Tiberius, after the fall of Sejanus, allowed to the governors only certain modifications in the procedure against the Jews. The policy of the emperor and that of his ministers towards the Jews was essentially the same.
[163] Agrippa II., who enumerates the Jewish settlements abroad (in Philo, Leg. ad Gaium, 36), names no country westward of Greece, and among the strangers sojourning in Jerusalem, whom the Book of Acts, ii. 5 f., records, only Romans are named from the West.
[164] Antipater began his career as governor (στρατηγός) of Idumaea (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 1, 3), and is there called administrator of the Jewish kingdom ὁ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐπιμελητής (Joseph. Arch. xiv. 8, 1), that is, nearly first minister. More is not implied in the narrative of Josephus coloured with flattery towards Rome as towards Herod (Arch. xiv. 8, 5; Bell. Jud. i. 10, 3), that Caesar had left to Antipater the option of himself determining his position of power (δυναστεία), and, when the latter left the decision with him, had appointed him administrator (ἐπίτροπος) of Judaea. This is not, as Marquardt, Staatsalth. v. 1, 408, would have it, the (at that time not yet existing) Roman procuratorship of the imperial period, but an office formally conferred by the Jewish ethnarch, an ἐπιτροπή, like that mentioned by Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 6. In the official documents of Caesar’s time the high priest and ethnarch Hyrcanus alone represents the Jews; Caesar gave to Antipater what could be granted to the subjects of a dependent state, Roman burgess-rights and personal immunity (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 8, 3; Bell. Jud. i. 9, 5), but he did not make him an official of Rome. That Herod, driven out of Judaea, obtained from the Romans a Roman officer’s post possibly in Samaria, is credible; but the designations στρατηγὸς τῆς Κοίλης Συρίας (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 9, 5, c. 11, 4), or στρατηγὸς Κοίλης Συρίας καὶ Σαμαρείας (Bell. Jud. i. 10, 8) are at least misleading, and with as much incorrectness the same author names Herod subsequently, for the reason that he is to serve as counsellor τοῖς ἐπιτροπεύουσι τῆς Συρίας (Arch. xv. 10, 3), even Συρίας ὅλης ἐπίτροπον (Bell. Jud. i. 20, 4), where Marquardt’s change, Staatsalth. v. i. 408, Κοίλης destroys the sense.
[165] In the decree of Caesar in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 10, 5, 6, the reading which results from Epiphanius is the only possible one; according to this the land is freed from the tribute (imposed by Pompeius; Josephus, Arch. xiv. 4, 4) from the second year of the current lease onward, and it is further ordained that the town of Joppa, which at that time passed over from Roman into Jewish possession, should continue indeed to deliver the fourth part of field-fruits at Sidon to the Romans, but for that there should be granted to Hyrcanus, likewise at Sidon, as an equivalent annually 20,675 bushels of grain, besides which the people of Joppa paid also the tenth to Hyrcanus. The whole narrative otherwise shows that the Jewish state was thenceforth free from payment of tribute; the circumstance that Herod pays φόροι from the districts assigned to Cleopatra which he leases from her (Arch. xv. 4, 2, 4, c. 5, 3) only confirms the rule. If Appian, B. C. v. 75, adduces among the kings on whom Antonius laid tribute Herod for Idumaea and Samaria, Judaea is not absent here without good reason; and even for these accessory lands the tribute may have been remitted to him by Augustus. The detailed and trustworthy account as to the census enjoined by Quirinius shows with entire clearness that the land was hitherto free from Roman tribute.