WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Some years before, when the Greeks who had conquered the entire known world first met the Jews, they were astonished. They'd never encountered people like this before. On the positive side the intellectual, spiritual and legal aspects of Judaism were totally unique and no doubt fascinating to the philosophical Greeks.
The Jews were just so different from anyone else they had ever encountered. They were the only monotheists in the world and they subscribed to a worldview that is totally different from anyone else's - namely, that everything that exists had been created and is sustained by one infinite, invisible and caring God. This idea -- particularly that this caring, perfect Being busies Himself with the lives of imperfect mortals -- the Greeks found just about incomprehensible. The Greek historian Hecateus (ca 360-290 BCE) describes the unique monotheism of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
There is no image, nor statue, nor votive offering therein; nothing at all is planted there, neither grove nor anything of the sort. The priests abide therein both nights and days, performing certain purification rites, and drinking not the least drop of wine while they are in the temple
On top of that, the Greeks could not understand the Jewish view of the Torah. This was an ancient book, which the Jews claimed they got from God, and which contained odd teachings on how to lead a life of peace, brotherhood, social responsibility, and respect for life -- all values that were far removed from Greek ideals.
In short, the Greeks didn't know what to make of the Jews.
The Jews were likewise confounded. The Greeks were people who valued education and intellectual pursuits -- something the Jews also valued and very much admired. The Greeks spoke a beautiful language, which the Jews appreciated very much. (The Talmud says that ancient Greek is the most beautiful language in the world, it's the only language you can write a kosher Torah scroll besides Hebrew.) (2)
Indeed, the Torah was promptly translated into Greek (in the 3rd century BCE) by Ptolemy III -- the first such translation in Jewish history. This translation was called the "Septuagint" after the 70 rabbis who did it.
It happened that King Ptolemy gathered seventy-two sages and placed them in seventy-two houses without telling them why he had brought them together. He went to each one of them and told him, "translate for me [into Greek] the Torah of your master Moses(3).
(This translation is considered a national disaster for the Jewish people. In the hands of the non-Jewish world, the now accessible Hebrew Bible has often been used against the Jews, and has been deliberately mistranslated. Most Christian Bibles in English today depend on the Greek translation which was then translated into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and from there into English. You can just imagine how many interpretations and mistakes and deliberate mistranslations were made along the way.(4))
However, it was inevitable that the Hebrew Bible would be translated into Greek because Greek became the international intellectual language of the ancient Mediterranean world. It was as common everywhere as English is today! And the Jews who were mostly speaking Aramaic thanks to their foray in the Babylonian exile become conversant in Greek as well. (Hebrew was then a language primarily of prayer and of study but not the spoken language of the street, even in Israel.)
Despite this mutual appreciation -- which incidentally lured a lot of Jews -- the vast differences could not be tolerated by the dominant culture for long.
JEW VS. JEW
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