ABSTRACT
The Exagoge is an example of the early Jewish fascination with the biblical past, but it also illustrates the changes that Jewish culture went through in the wake of Alexander the Great. Alexander was born in Macedonia in 356 BCE, and before he was thirty he had managed to conquer the Persian Empire, defeating Darius III in 331 BCE. Alexander was not the first Greek to travel in the Near East, and he did not rule this empire for long (he died in 323), but the impact of his conquests transformed the cultures of the ancient Near East for centuries, initiating a period known as the Hellenistic age (from Hellas, the Greek word for “Greece”) that lasted until the Roman conquest of the Near East and Mediterranean in the first century BCE. Under the rule of Alexander’s successors, Greek, or rather a dialect of Greek known as koine, became widely used, and Greek-style cities, distinguished by a distinctively Greek notion of citizenship, were established throughout the Near East. The most famous was the city of Alexandria in Egypt, founded by Alexander himself and renowned in antiquity for its architectural wonders and library, and many other cities were founded or reorganized in similar ways, including Jerusalem. Greek forms of education and the literature that formed the curriculum for this education-the writings of Homer, Plato, and so forth-spread with the Greek city-state, along with Greek artistic tastes, architectural conventions, and styles of dress. This is how our author learned the skills he needed to compose a “Tragedy of Moses”—Ezekiel probably lived in Alexandria or another Hellenized city, receiving an education that included the Bible but also Greek literature.
