Alexander the Great in Jerusalem

Abstract

Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been. The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current foreign rule (Hellenistic and Roman). The earliest version is traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III “the Great,” and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of provincia Judaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered not as latest but as earliest—that of Josephus. The tradition consistently maintains the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. It not only bolsters Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brings the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history.