Eupolemus
Eupolemus · Historical & Religious Figures
Envoy of Judas Maccabeus who negotiated the first treaty between Judea and Rome in 161 BCE, and the earliest Jewish historian to write in Greek from Judea itself
IIe siècle av. n. è., Judée — IIe siècle av. n. è., Judée
Jérusalem, Rome
Eupolemus is recognized among Jewish contributors to Historical & Religious Figures — Envoy of Judas Maccabeus who negotiated the first treaty between Judea and Rome in 161 BCE, and the earliest Jewish historian to write in Greek from Judea itself
Origins and early life
Eupolemus, son of John, son of Accos, belonged to a priestly family of Judea whose father had already served the nation as a diplomat, winning privileges for the Jews from the Seleucid king Antiochus III; he was a Jew of the Hasmonean generation, and the First Book of Maccabees names him as such. In 161 BCE, after the victories of Judas Maccabeus over the armies of Antiochus IV and the rededication of the Temple, Judas sent Eupolemus and Jason son of Eleazar to Rome to 'make a league of amity and confederacy' with the Republic, and the Senate granted it: the treaty that the First Book of Maccabees preserves, the first alliance between the Jewish people and Rome, which recognized the Jews as an independent nation and warned the Seleucids that Rome stood behind them.
Work and career
A historian of the same name, writing in Greek in Judea in the same years — very probably the same man, in the judgment of most scholars, though this fiche notes that the identification is not certain — composed a work On the Kings of Judah of which fragments survive in Eusebius and Clement of Alexandria. In them Moses is the first wise man, who taught the alphabet to the Jews, who passed it to the Phoenicians and thence to the Greeks; Solomon builds the Temple in correspondence with Hiram of Tyre and the pharaoh of Egypt; and the history of Israel is set in the chronology of the nations, dated to the fifth year of Demetrius — 158 or 157 BCE.
Nothing more is known of his life. He stands at the beginning of two things: Jewish diplomacy with the West, and Jewish historiography in the language of the world.
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Source: https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5908-eupolemus
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Envoy of Judas Maccabeus who negotiated the first treaty between Judea and Rome in 161 BCE, and the earliest Jewish historian to write in Greek from Judea itself
Source: https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5908-eupolemus
