Die Griechen und das antike Israel.

• Position: Book review

Die Griechen und das antike Israel. Edited by STEFAN ALKIER and MARKUS WITTE. Orbis Biblicut et Orientalis. vol. 201. Freiburg: ACADEMIC PRESS, 2004. Pp. x + 199, illus. FS60.

The momentous events that transpired in the Near East in the centuries following the campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander in the fourth century B.C.E. and their far-reaching impact on the essence of Western civilization have attracted the attention of scholars from the very beginning of academic historical inquiry. The inception of Christianity, a religious tradition that combined Semitic wisdom in Greek guise, and its ascent to the world's helm highlighted the magnitude of the cultural transformations--normally termed "Hellenism"--that took shape in the eastern regions of the Mediterranean.

The roots of these changes clearly go back to the arrival of the Greeks in the days of Alexander. Not denying the impact of military conquests on cultural engineering (a topic that seems never to lose steam), scholars have pondered whether elements of Greek life took residence in the Middle East prior to the days of Alexander. The pendulum on this question has swung from the nineteenth-century romantic view that credited any change to political and military developments, thus associating the origins of the Greek presence in the East with Alexander's victories, to the more recent views informed by cultural and then colonial criticism, arguing that significant Greek interaction with the East predates the Greek war machine. For a recent example of the latter view, see Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton, 2001), 23-25.

The authors in this short but extremely useful collection of articles (based on a 2003 conference in Frankfurt am Main) offer a corrective to this common scholarly trend. With great insight, the authors apply a variety of research tools to reexamine the cultural arena of pre-Hellenistic, that is. Persian. Palestine. (The designation "Palestine" is quite misleading for this early stage and may be seen by some as informed by modern-day concerns.) Chief among the authors' tools are archaeology, focusing on both architecture and pottery (most notable among the latter are the potsherds of imported vessels from Attica and the information one can glean from them)...