The Encounter Of Simon The Just With Antiochus The Great: From Zenon Of Rhodes To Josephus Flavius And The Talmud
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The story of the encounter of Alexander Macedon with the Jewish nation, reported by Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud, was a favorite topic of many generations of Judaica scholars but fell in complete disrepute in the last century due to several inconsistencies. To account for some of them, Solomon Zeitlin (1924) suggested that the Greek king of the encounter was King Antiochus III, not Alexander, however his idea did not receive the recognition it deserves. Here I enrich Zeitlin’s idea with several new insights. As Antiochus was accompanied by a historian of note, Zenon of Rhodes, the encounter story is likely a fragment from non-extant history writings by Zenon, known to us through Polybius. I conjecture that it was dessiminated by Timagenes of Alexandria who changed the king’s name to Alexander Macedon. In this form, through Strabo, the story became known to Josephus who made further amendments changing the high priest’s name to Yaddua. Developing my earlier (2005) insight, I give a rational explanation to a seemingly fabulous detail of the story, the king’s alleged ‘recognition’ of the high priest, and also resolve several other discrepancies between Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud related to ‘Parmenio’ and ‘Antipatris’. Summing up, I claim the encounter story describes a genuine historical episode, which can be dated according to the historical context to January 9, 198 BC. This reading may provide new bounds on the timing of Septuagint, explain a cryptic episode in the Talmud Yerushalmi and shed light on the circumstances of creating the ‘Alexander Romance.’
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".