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Date Posted: 13:57:53 10/13/04 Wed
Author: schwabra
Author Host/IP: nr1-216-196-133-26.fuse.net / 216.196.133.26
Subject: The Great Legacy of Alexander

It seems impossible that Alexander’s conquest of the Jews would result in an alternate reading of the Book of Isaiah, but it did. As a background, Israel is seen as a collective entity. The whole of which is punished for the collective failures of the whole to be true to the will of God. The constant retelling of the story of exile and return, failing to heed God’s will and being cast out, and the return of the obedient to God’s protection screams out that this is an important thing to the Israelite’s self view.
When Alexander would conquer an area, he would set up Greek institutions. A town could not be Greek without an arena, a gymnasium, and Greek bathhouses. The influx of Greek speaking people and Greek culture from the Greeks that lived in these areas undoubtedly influenced the thinking of those that, as defeated natives of the area, came into contact with them. Without a doubt the ideas of the native people would be of interest to the Greeks themselves. It is from this exchange of ideas that Jewish tradition met the Greek way of reading a text. From the Greek perspective, it was important to know the authors of each text. The individuals that authored the texts should be known. This was new to the Jews that had composed their works as a community without specific regard to the individual authors.
This focus on the individual would find its way into the way Greeks would see the text itself. The “suffering servant” was an individual, not a collective people. So the tradition of seeing this servant as a metaphor for the Jewish people as a whole, would now be seen as the description of the person, the individual that would save the people as individuals. This change was natural for the Greeks, not reading the text through the traditions of the Jews, but reading the text through their own tradtions. It would be interesting to find out how much of the Greek Tragedy also could have influenced the reading of the texts by the Greeks.
This re-reading of the texts would also become popular with the hellenizing Jews. These Jews would lose the traditions of their ancestors as they engross themselves in the culture of the Greeks. While this is understandable for those that needed to engage in commerce, the fact is that the amount of Jews embracing this new culture exceeded this.
This influence of those that embraced Greek culture would have created groups of Jews that found this distasteful. So distasteful in fact that they would turn away from the Temple to go and form their own communities, such as Qumran. In this society, the tainting of the pure Jewish faith, as seen by its members, would need to be removed from their midst. So to cleanse themselves of this influence they would take the path of their past prophets and go into the desert for purification. They would not eat with these people, or do business with them.
It is from the environment created by this fragmentation that Christianity would arise. Can it be a coincidence that so many of the Greek influences were to take hold in a group that would invite non-Jews to its ranks? The interpretations of the Christians would have a Greek basis, while the interpretations of the Jews would retain the Jewish traditions, but also a strong influence from the Greek philosophies.

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