What distinguishes the Hellenistic period from earlier Greek history is the active exporting of Greek culture and language around the known world. Not only did the Greeks control most of the world that they were aware of, they also felt that their ways of thinking were better than the cultures and world views of the people they dominated. While they were generally tolerant of other cultures, particularly in terms of religion, nonetheless the Hellenistic period saw a globalization of Greek values and social systems in a way that was only equaled by the spread of Chinese culture over the face of eastern Asia about the same time (but lasting far longer).
Cultural Change
The story of Hellenism then, is not merely a Greek story. It's an Egyptian story, a Hebrew story, a Mesopotamian story, and even, to some extent, an Indian story. The spread of Greek thought and culture greatly changed these cultures at a fundamental level. The story, then, concerns one of these hybrid cultures.
The Greek Hebrews
When Alexander marched into Judaea, he found a culture completely foreign to Greek thought and practices. In Judaea as elsewhere, however, the culture quickly began to incorporate ideas from the Greeks. In particular, Diaspora Jews living throughout the Hellenistic world became "Hellenistic Jews," that is, Jews that spoke Greek as a primary language. (It was these Hellenistic Jews that were principally responsible for the spread of Christianity in the first century AD.)
For this assignment, you will speculate on how Hellenistic culture and Hebrew culture might have hybridized. To make your argument, you should point out aspects of world views that both the Greeks and the Jews had in common. Then, you should point out aspects of Jewish and Greek world views that are absolutely incompatible. Finally, you should explain what, given the material discussed in your first two paragraphs, Hellenist Jewish culture would look like. Would it be closer to Jewish or the Greek world view? What parts of the Greek world view would be adopted by Hellenist Jews? What parts rejected?
The Materials of Your Argument
In order to make this argument, you need to define the world views of both cultures. To do this, you need to use: a) terminology that defines the world view of both cultures; b) primary texts from each culture; and c) a certain amount of historical knowledge from the text. This historical knowledge should be used to help you speculate on what Greeks and Jews would think about the world based on their history.
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