who was conspicuous in his time at once as the great student of the sacred Hebrew literature, as the collector of the grave and short sentences of the wise men who went before him, and as himself uttering "some things of his own, full of understanding and "judgment." But the characteristics of his work must be reserved for its appearance in the Greek form in which alone it is now known. onies in We turn from these brief and disjointed notices of the internal history of Palestine under the Jewish colPtolemies to the important Jewish settlement Egypt." more directly connected with them in Egypt. It was close along the sea-shore, directly to the east of Alexandria probably with a view to the convenience of their ablutions in the Mediterranean - that the Jewish colonists chiefly resided; and to this day the burial-ground of their race is on the sandy hillocks in the same situation. They were in such numbers as to be known by the name of "The Tribe." They retained the privileges alleged to have been granted by Alexander, as on a level with the Macedonian settlers. The commercial enterprise of the race, never since extinct, now for the first time found an outlet They gradually became a separate community under their own chief, entitled Ethnarch or Alabarch, and represented more than a third of Alexandria, with a council corresponding to that which ultimately ruled at Jerusalem.3 2 This was the only settlement of permanent interest. Other colonies may be traced here and there, under the Ptolomæan rule, in insulated fragments. One was the band of Samaritans, who, still keeping up their deadly 1 Josephus, c. Ap., ii. 4. 2 Ibid. 8 See Herzfeld, Geschichte, iii. 437 438, 445, 446. Josephus, Ant., xi. 8. Leontopolis. feud, retired to the Thebaid. Another was the group of anchorites by the lake Mareotis, the forerunners of the parents of Christian monasticism. Another powerful community was settled at Cyrene-just become a dependency on Egypt - destined to react on the nation in Palestine by their special synagogue at Jerusalem. Another, still in the future, but drawn by the same friendly influence of the Græco-Egyptian dynasty was the settlement at Leontopolis. When, in the subsequent troubles of Palestine, it seemed that the Temple itself would perish, one of the High Priestly family, Nechoniah or Coniah, in Greek Onias- fled to Egypt, and begged the loan of a deserted temple of Pasht, the Cat-Goddess, in the neighborhood of Heliopolis. There, with the military experience which he may have acquired in heading a band of troops in one of the Egyptian civil wars, he built a fortress and a temple, which, although on a smaller scale, was to rival that of Jerusalem, where he and his sons, keeping up the martial traditions of the Levitical tribe, formed a powerful body of soldiery, and assumed the name and habits of a camp. The general style of the sanctuary 4 1 Acts ii. 1; vi. 1; Herzfeld, iii. locality in any other part of Egypt. 321. 2 The name of Leontopolis, in conAction with the Temple of Onias, probably arose from this. Every Temple of Pasht (called by the Greeks Bubastis) was (as is familiar to every visitor to Thebes) a menagerie of cats, living, embalmed, or in stone. This to the Greeks, as to the Arabs, who give one name to the two animals, may well have caused this sanctuary of Pasht to have been called the City of Lions, and therefore we have no need to seek the This solution had occurred to me be- Josephus, c. Ap., ii. 5. was (apparently) not Jewish but Egyptian. A huge tower—perhaps equivalent to the great gateway of Egyptian temples 1. 1-rose to the height of sixty cubits. There were no obelisks, but it was approached by the usual long colonnades of pillars. The altar alone resembled that of the Jewish temple. But instead of the candlestick a golden chandelier was suspended from the roof by a golden chain. A circuit of brick walls, as in the adjacent sanctuary of Heliopolis, inclosed it, and the ruins of these it is that still form the three rugged sandhills known by the name of "the Mounds of the "Jews." It was a bold attempt to form a new centre of Judaism; and the attempt was supported by one of the earliest efforts to find in the poetic language of the ancient prophets a local, prosaic, and temporary application. In the glowing prediction of the homage which Egypt should hereafter pay to Israel, Isaiah had expressed the hope that there should be five cities in Egypt speaking the language of Canaan and revering the Sacred Name, and that one of these should be the sacred City of the Sun. What had been indicated then as the most surprising triumph-the conversion of The chief sanctuary of the old Egyptian worship to the true religion—was seized by Onias as a proof that in the neighborhood, if not within the walls, of the Sun City which the Greeks called Heliopolis, and which the Egyptians called On - there should rise a temple of Jehovah. The very name of On was a likeness to 1 Josephus, B. J., vii. 10, 3. 2 This must be the origin of the statement of Apion (Josephus, c. Ap., . 2) and of Strabo xvii. Isa. xix. 18, 19. "The city of 'the sun - wrongly translated in the A. V. "the city of destruction." Herzfeld (iii. 561) gives the expla- his own name of Onias. The passage in Isaiah was yet further changed to give the city a name more exactly resembling the title of Jerusalem. As the City of the Palestinian sanctuary was called the Holy City, the City of Holiness, so this was supposed to have been foreseen as the Righteous city—the City of Righteousness.1 It was, moreover, close within the view of that sacred college where, according to Egyptian tradition, Moses himself had studied. But a worship and a system so elaborately built up on doubtful etymologies and plays on ambiguous words was not destined to long endurance; and, although an ample patrimony was granted by the Egyptian kings for the endowment of this new Pontificate, and although the territory round was long called the "Land of Onias," and the sanctuary lasted for three centuries, it passed away under the pressure of the Roman 3 government, and left no permanent trace even on the Alexandrian Jews. The failure of such a distorted prediction is a likeness of what may be in store for equally fanciful applications of sacred words and doubtful traditions in more modern times. It may be that round this centre of ancient Jewish traditions, secluded on the border of the desert from the great world of Alexandria, was gathered the opposition to the Grecian learning, which we faintly discern in the next century. But it had only a local and sectarian existence. The flow of the religious life of the new story of "Israel in Egypt" rolled on regardless of this artificial and insulated sanctuary. The presiding ge 1 This appears in the LXX. translation of Isa. xix. 18, 19, πόλις Ασεδέκ. 2 The whole question is ably dis cussed in Herzfeld, iii. 556–564. Josephus, B. J., vü. 10, 4. 4 Nicolas, 842. nius of Egyptian Judaism was not the priestly house of Onias, but the royal house of Ptolemy. The Ptolemies. Over these Jewish colonists, as over their native Egyptian subjects, the Ptolemies, at least for the first four reigns, ruled with beneficent toleration. The Egyptian priesthood, after the hard dominion of the Persian iconoclasts, welcomed them as deliverers. The temples were restored or rebuilt after the antique model. The names of the Grecian Kings and Queens were carved in hieroglyphics, and their figures painted on the Temple walls in the disguise of the Pharaohs. And as to the Egyptians they became as Egyptians, to the Jews they became almost as Jews1 -sending their accustomed sacrifice to the Temple of Jerusalem, and patronizing with lands and privileges the Temple of Leontopolis. The Museum with its unique Library, the scholars who frequented the court -Euclid the geometrician, Apelles the painter, Eratosthenes the grammarian- brought the Grecian learning to the very doors of the Israelite community.2 In this fostering atmosphere there sprang up those influences which Alexandria exercised over the Jewish, nd thus over the Christian, Church for ever. The first was the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek the rise of what may properly be termed the Greek Bible. As the meeting of the Greek Empire with the Jewish 1 The one exception is Ptolemy Philopator, whose endeavor to enter the Temple, and whose employment of the Indian punishment of trampling under the feet of enraged eleohants, is the subject of the 3d Book of Maccabees. But even these incidents terminate happily for the Jews. He is restrained from enter ing the Temple by Simon the Just; he is compelled to acknowledge the rights of the Alexandrian Jews by the reluctance of the elephants; and this was commemorated by a festival like that of Purim. See Ewald, v. 468. 2 Herzfeld, iii. Sharpe's Egypt, vii. 446-458. See |