“Hellenistic Judaism” in the Works of Edwyn Robert Bevan

Abstract

Elias Bickerman did not like teleologies, and sought, by recognizing their influence, to resist “the teleological point of view,” which he thought he detected behind documents such as Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the works of Josephus. All are important source texts for the persecution of the Jews of Palestine under the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV in the second centuryb.c.e. In their different ways, he believed, these accounts all arose “not out of historical, but out of theological or political considerations.” Adopting a more Rankean approach to the sources, Bickerman reached a very different interpretation of events. Focusing instead on clues regarding the infighting among factions at Jerusalem, he concluded that the Jews had, in effect, been the authors and even the agents of their own persecution. This conclusion still elicits controversy, not least because Bickerman was himself a Jew. In trying to account for this, the Israeli historian Victor Tcherikover thought he discerned the undue influence of, among others, the English scholar Edwyn Bevan—a name that to modern readers is likely to be less familiar than those of Bickerman or Tcherikover.