Next up (well, for this blog anyway): Miriam Ben Zeev Hofman in Daise & Hartman. This deals with Ezekiel the Egyptian's Exagōgē, a Greek play about Moses, who would then be the "exagogue" I suppose. It is NOT the haggada!
By which I mean - Moses is the protagonist. God isn't. When Moses has a vision about Sinai, he doesn't receive the Torah; God sits him on a throne and supplies to him the sceptre of Hellenistic royalty.
Of interest is that many Jews, even some (not all) Egyptian Jews, clearly did believe that Moses was a lawgiver. Ezekiel already had recourse to this second book of Septuagint. Gentiles agreed that Moses had delivered some precepts and ordinances. This much, irrespective of whatever goys thought of the laws in question - Apion thought they were terrible, Trogus (for one) defended them. Usually classical authors like Trogus approved of orderly laws just for being laws. So I guess I'm asking why Ezekiel isn't backing up Trogus.
Are we just missing Ezekiel's take? We have Ezekiel only from what Eusebius relays... and that, from Alexander Polyhistor. Eusebius, a quasi-Arian Christian whose very name implies the fear-of-God, had no problem with Moses-as-lawgiver. Would Polyhistor have thought otherwise? I don't see Polyhistor as an antinomian, nor as one who thought these particular laws were embarrassing; and he certainly wasn't hostile to the Jews as Jews. I'll go further: Ezekiel's throne vision takes the place of that famous Charlton Heston scene.
One thought is that the Torah is absent as simply being an anticlimax to the epic of Moses; especially as an epic as translates to the stage. The sceptre is the Torah, in symbolature. We can compare the Animal Apocalypse now in "1 Enoch".
But here's another thought. Ezekiel does not mention circumcision. Sure: he's Egyptian, and everyone be snippin'-willies by the Nile. He is speaking the Greek language and thereby appealing to Greeks, perhaps to do some "entryism". Another appeal to Greeks, mayhap, is in substituting Libya - that is, Cyrene - for Midian, elsewhere figured in the northwest Arabia. Hē Exagōgē isn't an argument for full Torah; it's an argument for Moses, against detractors like Agatharch and maybe Manetho.
Honestly I wonder if Ezekiel even bothered to snip his own sons. 1 Maccabees is coming, for him and for his.
BACKDATE 6/13
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