Alexander and the High Priest: Josephus’ Account

The encounter between Alexander and the high priest first appears in Book 11 of Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities. This is obviously not the first reference to Alexander in Jewish literature. 1Maccabees opens with a description of Alexander’s conquests and of his death (1Macc 1:1–7). It is also highly likely that knowledge of Alexander and his persona forms the underpinning of Daniel 8:5 (see John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 331). Alexander materializes in Josephus at the intersection of the biblical and the post-biblical worlds. The 11th book opens with Cyrus and the return to Zion and surveys the events of the Persian period according to the books of Ezra-Nehemiah, Daniel and Esther. The book’s final section recounts the Esther story (Ant. 11, 186–296), followed by a brief extra-biblical episode regarding a confrontation between the high priest and his brother that led to the slaying of Jesus by his brother Johanan, the high priest. This murder prompted the entry to the Temple of Bagoses, the Persian appointee, amidst the Jews’ tremendous consternation (Ant. 11, 297– 301). On this episode and reverberations of its biblical sources (see James C. VanderKam, From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 58–63).

Rest of the story of Alexander being monotheist and sacrificing to the Jewish God:

Scholars have distinguished four discrete narrative strands in this Josephus’ story:

1. Notwithstanding minor disagreement over the precise delineation of the strands, this division is, overall, an accepted one. The first division proposalwas suggested by Adolf Büchler,“La relation deJosèphe concernant Alexandre le grand”, Revue des Études Juives 36 (1898): 1–26. Since then there have been many proposals, see Tropper’s concise review, Simeon the Righteous, 121–125. For a detailed discussion of the various proposals see Meir Ben Shahar, “Alexander the Great and the High Priest”, in Josephus and the Rabbis, ed. Tal Ilan and Vered Noam in collaboration with Meir Ben Shahar, Daphne Baratz and Yael Fisch, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2017): 100– 104 (Hebrew).
2. Compounded by the disjointedness of the various sections and the contradictions between them, this division has prompted scholars to view Josephus’ story as a tapestry of disparate sources. Consensus reigns on the references to Alexander’s campaign: they are attributed to other historians who documented the campaign. The other sections’ provenance is more difficult to determine. Scholars attributed the story of Alexander’s encounter with the high priest—from which the Samaritans are absent—to Jewish sources. Early scholars assumed a Samaritan source for the story of Sanballat, on the premise that the story of his meeting with Alexander was intended to legitimate the Samaritan temple (Büchler, “Alexandre le grand”, 4–6). However, as many have noted, it is very difficult to perceive in Josephus’ exposition of the story of Sanballat, a reflection of a Samaritan or pro-Samaritan source: the construction of the temple is depicted as a dubious gift to a power hungry priest and Sanballat himself is portrayed as an opportunist who violates his oath to Darius. The second segment of the account of Alexander and the Samaritans is certainly not pro-Samaritan as it elaborates their failure to procure recognition of their status and of their temple (Daniel R. Schwartz, “On Some Papyri and Josephus’ Sources and Chronology for the Persian Period”, Journal for the Study of Judaism, 21 (1990): 190, n. 39). The discrepancy between the two sections with regard to Alexander’s role is glaring. The story of Manasseh’s marriage to Sanballat’s daughter, as well as the promise to erect a temple is entirely unrelated to Alexander’s exploits. It is Josephus, by inserting two sentences depicting Alexander’s exploits at the height of the drama in Jerusalem, who determines that the story occurred during Alexander’s time. These sentences (Josephus, Ant. 304–305) begin with the phrase “About this time”.

This is Josephus’ stock phrase that he uses when inserting material from other sources (See Daniel R. Schwartz, “kata toyton ton kaipon: Josephus’ source on Agrippa ii”, Jewish Quarterly Review 72 (1982): 241–268, esp. 248)

On the contrary, had Josephus possessed any actual historical memory he would have recorded the Samaritan revolt, forcibly suppressed by Alexander. Description of the revolt can be found in Curtius Rufus, Hist. iv 8.9–11. For modern discussions of the revolt see Menachem Mor, “Samaritan History: The Persian, Hellenistic and Hasmonean Period”, in The Samaritans, ed. Alan D. Crown (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989), 9–11; Aryeh Kasher, “Further Revised Thoughts on Josephus’ Report of Alexander’s Campaign to Palestine (aj xi 304–347)”, in Judah Between East and West: The Transition from Persian to Greek Rule (ca. 400–200bce), ed. Lester L. Grabbe and Oded Lipschits (London: t&t Clark, 2011): 153–157. Josephus, who detested the Samaritans would not have sufficed with such a pallid ending; rather, he would have preferred to depict their crushing defeat—a consequence of the disloyalty of which, he alleges, they were guilty. The absence of any memory or tradition relating to the encounter between Alexander and the Samaritans is what led him to cast the third episode as a mirror image of the meeting between Alexander and the Jews.

The depiction of the confrontation between Manasseh and Sanballat and the people of Jerusalem contains no details that mandate its postponement to the time of Alexander. Evidently, Josephus indeed relied on Nehemiah 13 or a related source. This is also the conclusion of Schwartz, “Some Papyri”, 198–199. The fact that the Bible concludes with this event enabled him to connect it with the end of the Persian and the beginning of the Hellenistic periods. To sum up: apparently, Josephus’s story was woven from three disparate sources. Nehemiah 13:28 or a related text underpins the first Samaritan episode. Seemingly, Josephus appropriated the encounter between Alexander and the high priest from a Jewish source that also handed him the building blocks for the incident of Alexander’s meeting with the Samaritans. Additionally, Greek and Roman historians furnished Josephus with various details about Alexander’s campaign.

The Rabbis on Alexander and the Samaritans

As mentioned, scholars identified a Jewish source concerning the encounter between Alexander and the high priest among the likely sources that contributed to Josephus’ story. Although rabbinic literature has conserved a depiction of the meeting of the two personalities, as we shall see, it is implausible that this was Josephus’ source. Megillat Taanit (the Scroll of Fasting) contains the most detailed depiction of the encounter. The scroll is a litany of 35 auspicious dates marking salvations that befell the Jews, on which fasting and mourning were prohibited. Nearly all the events listed date to the Second Temple period—from the early Persian to the Roman period. The scroll’s style is concise and laconic. Each date is accompanied by several words that describe its concomitant event. The scroll’s terse language was presumably formulated for an audience that was well acquainted with the dates and their stories. Apparently, the scroll was authored at the end of the Second Temple period: over the course of time, the terse depiction proved inadequate and thus, in the 3rd–4th centuries it was amplified by a commentary referred to by scholars as the Scholion commentary.

1. The Textual Dimension of the Stories of Sanballat, Alexander and the High Priest
2. Despite discrepancies with regard to numerous details, the encounter story in Josephus and the rabbinic source is discernibly structurally analogous. The story begins and concludes with the status of the Samaritans. Occupying the middle is a relatively lengthy unit depicting the encounter between Alexander and the high priest. Interestingly, several surprising points of convergence exist among the numerous and significant discrepancies with regard to the ‘Samaritan’ segments.

It seems there are two distinct types of similarities and affinities between Josephus and the rabbinic source: textual and structural-thematic. The only substantive linguistic affinities inhere with regard to the encounter between Alexander and the high priest and these indicate that Josephus and the rabbis made use of a unified textual source. Alongside these similarities, there are also structural-thematic affinities. The rabbis and Josephus frame the story of the encounter between Alexander and the high priest in the context of the struggle between Jews and Samaritans. Both drew from the book of Ezra-Nehemiah from which they extracted the first Samaritan episode. Josephus used the concluding verses while the Talmudic source relates to the conflict between the returneesfrom Babylon and the“people of the land”. Due to divergent plot lines, the last episode that describes the Samaritan defeat manifests very differently in Josephus and in the rabbinic source. Josephus focuses on the privileges accorded by Alexander, while the Scholion, preoccupied with elucidating the “day of Mt. Gerizim”, exploits the remnants of an ancient tradition regarding John Hyrcanus’ campaign against the Samaritans.