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Thereafter, some Jews, writing in Greek, sought to demonstrate the high antiquity (and thus the nobility) of their Law and constitution, sometimes going so far as to suggest that the great Greek lawgivers, like Solon and Lycurgus, and the major philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno had derived their ideas and political philosophies from Moses. Such men as Aristobulos, Artapanus, and Eupolemus, whose writings survive only in fragmentary form, ensured awareness of Jewish intellectual activity among the Greek-speaking population, and provided the basis for further cultural interaction between Jew and Gentile. All of them, in their different ways, were engaged in attempts to “embed” Jews and their culture in the Hellenistic environment; and, in so doing, they “wrote Jews into” the wider ancient historical context made familiar to educated Greeks through the writings of Herodotus, and, in later times, the works of historiographers like Manetho and Berossos (for the latter, see ssss1). In the view of Aristobulos, Artapanus, Eupolemus, Demetrius the Chronographer, and many others, Jews and Greeks shared in the same world, and, whatever the distinctiveness of the Jews, au fond espoused common values (Holladay 1983–1995). The degree to which such convictions could influence Greek-speaking Jewish writers is well illustrated by the case of Ezekiel the Tragedian, who composed in iambic trimeter verse a play called Exagogē, dramatizing the story of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt (Jacobson 1982; Lanfranchi 2006).

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