Minor Jewish Hellenistic Authors

Abstract

The Jewish writings presented here are only known from Christian excerpts: Aristobulus, Demetrius, Eupolemus, the dramatist Ezekiel, and others. Of particular interest is Jason of Cyrene, the author behind what has become the 2nd Book of Maccabees in the Christian Septuagint, in which the Maccabean warriors had to lend their name and their fame to a group of previously anonymous martyrs. His original writing can be reconstructed to some degree. Special attention is drawn to authors, male and female, of technical treatises on matters other than religious, that is law, beginnings of natural sciences, and rhetorics.