The Greeks in Bactria and India c12.88

c12.88

¹ Bickermann op. cit. His valuable examination of the formulae in the royal letters puts the work within the limits 145 to 100 B.C., though strictly speaking the facts he gives p. 289 n. 1 prove a date c. 100. His dating before 127 depends entirely (for the sea-port matter Pseudo-Aristeas is self-contradictory) on the implication in a phrase of Pseudo-Aristeas that Idumea was not part of Palestine, 127 being the date of its annexation to the Maccabee realm. But Bickermann has himself shown that much of Pseudo-Aristeas’ description of Palestine is simply a compound of the Old Testament and of ideas about the Ideal State, and one cannot, I think, pick odd items out of this farrago and say ‘These are dated history’; the independent Idumea is only O.T. Edom. He has not noticed that Pseudo-Aristeas was so ignorant about Palestine that he makes the Jordan encircle Judaea and then join another river near Egypt and run out to sea with it (116–17).