ABSTRACT
Scattered widely across the Hellenistic world, and particularly in capital cities such as Alexandria and Antioch, Ephesus and Corinth, was a sizeable Jewish population whose steady geographical expansion was fostered by the scope of the Hellenistic economic and trading system. In the aftermath of the Alex-andrian campaign, as Greek intellectuals came into fairly close contact with Jewish communities for the first time, they perceived their own philosophical conception of God in the strict monotheism of the Old Covenant. Similarly, the Jewish community of Palestine shaped by Mosaic law reminded them of their own ideal of government by philosophers.
