ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with an example from a later period of history, a Jewish tradition that is both traditional and Hellenized at the same time: the ritualized retelling of the Exodus during Passover. The Jewish culture that emerges over the course of the Hellenistic period is the product of interaction with Greek culture, certainly not always embracing Greek influence in the obvious way that Ezekiel does but in one way or another transformed by the process of Hellenization. Sometime between the third and first centuries BCE, a Jew named Ezekiel composed a work that shows how important the Bible was for early Jews and also captures how different Jewish culture in this period was from that of ancient Israel. Jason’s embrace of Greek athletic culture was part of a still larger change that he was trying to introduce—the transformation of Jerusalem into a Greek-style city, a polis, with all the trappings of a city as the Greeks understood that institution.
