The Hellenistic World · Part 5 · Judea and Alexandria · B2
Philo’s Alexandria and the Greek Scriptures
Part 5 of The Hellenistic World: our journey ends where Philo lives, in Alexandria, the city where the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek. From here they were to travel all over the world. The future in the past (they would become…, they were to travel…), the present perfect for looking back (we have travelled three thousand years), and concluding phrases (in short, to sum up, all in all), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
We have travelled from the reed marshes of Sumer to the harbour outside this window. Tonight, the last stop: here.
Do you? Let us ask the same questions about it that we have asked about Babylon and Jerusalem.
Including about my scriptures in Greek, I suppose. Very well. It would be strange to stop being honest at the last lesson.
Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and became the capital of the Ptolemies. It had the lighthouse of Pharos, the Museum, where scholars lived and worked at the king’s expense, and the great Library, which tried to collect every book in the world. It was a city of Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Syrians and many others.
Its Jewish community was one of the largest in the world. Philo says that two of the city’s five quarters were called “Jewish”, because most of their people were Jews. They spoke Greek, read Greek, and had their own council and prayer houses. How many Jews lived in the city is not known; estimates vary greatly.
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