HISTORY BEFORE THE JEWS: ISRAELITES AND GREEKS IN THE IRON AGE MEDITERRANEAN

The tendency to regard the Jews as a uniquely odd presence in the Mediterranean basin in antiquity provides an excellent reason to begin our account with a brief discussion of the ways in which the prehistory and early history of the Jews were absolutely typical for the physical and political geography of the central and eastern Mediterranean coast. There is, in fact, an unexpectedly large number of points of similarity between pre-Hellenistic Greek and Israelite/Jewish history: stories of invasion, migration and colonization set at the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages (c. thirteenth century bce), a long and obscure archaic period in which subsequently central ideas and institutions took shape, periods of crisis in the sixth century and the powerful ideologies of highly particularistic but internally egalitarian citizen communities that emerged in the aftermath, and finally subjection to a single, though fissiparous, Greco-Macedonian empire (exploration of some parallels in J. P. Brown 1995–2001).

These parallels may or may not be the result of the diffusion of ideas and stories through contact; they are certainly the result of shared geographical proximity to regional and transregional political processes; to some extent they are also the result of a similar ecology. To be sure, it was highly consequential that Greeks gravitated to the coasts and Israelites to the hills. The modern idea that until sometime in the Hellenistic period the ancient Jews were somewhat isolated is not just due to reading later theological concerns back into antiquity. Ancient Jewish texts themselves mention it occasionally and ascribe it to the fact that Israelites/Jews did not live on the seacoast, which was the land of the Canaanites (= Phoenicians) and the Philistines, and later on the latter’s cousins, the Greeks (Numbers 23.9; Josephus, Ag.Ap. 1.60). The hill country felt isolated, but the point should not be exaggerated. The line of ridges which constituted the heart of the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah was nowhere more than about 45 miles from the coast, an easy enough three-day walk even uphill, and the hills themselves, though challenging for large armies to penetrate and control, were in most places not very forbidding.