II.  The Jews in Egypt.  The chief intellectual and religious center of the Jews of the dispersion, however, was in Alexandria.  It is probable that fully a million Jews were to be found in Egypt during the latter part of the Maccabean period.  Industry and commerce had made many of them extremely wealthy and had given them the leisure to study not only their own scriptures but also the literature of the Greeks.  The prevailingly friendly way in which the Ptolemaic rulers treated the Jews naturally led them to take a more favorable attitude toward Greek culture.  Alexandria itself was the scene of an intense intellectual activity.  Attracted by the munificence of the Ptolemies and by the opportunities offered by its great library, many of the most famous Greek philosophers and rhetoricians of the age found their home in the Egyptian capital.  Public lectures, open discussions, and voluminous literature were only a few of the many forms in which this intellectual life was expressed.  Hence it was at Alexandria that Hebrew and Greek thought met on the highest plane and mingled most closely.

III.  The Jewish Temple at Leontopolis.  After the murder of his father Onias iii near Antioch, whither he had fled from the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, Onias IV sought refuge in Egypt.  Here, as the legitimate head of the Jewish high-priesthood, he was favorably received by Ptolemy and granted territory in the Nile Delta to the north of Memphis in which to rear a temple to Jehovah.  In the light of recent discoveries at Elephantine it is evident that this step was not without precedent (Section xci:vii).  Ptolemy’s object was to please his Jewish subjects and to attract others to the land of the Nile.  Josephus’s statement in The Jewish War, vii, 10:4 favors the conclusion that the temple was built two hundred and forty-three years (not 343) before its final destruction in 73 A.D., that is, in 170 B.C.  In any case it was probably built between 170 and 160 B.C., at the time when the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes made pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple impossible, and threatened its continued existence.  The plan of the Leontopolis temple indicates that it was not intended to be a rival to the Jerusalem sanctuary, but rather a common place of meeting for the Egyptian Jews and of defence in case of attack.  It never seriously rivalled the Jerusalem sanctuary, although in later days it was viewed with jealousy by the Jews of Palestine.

IV.  Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.  Far more significant than the building of the Leontopolis temple was the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.  The tradition preserved by Josephus that the translation was made in seventy-two days by seventy-two scholars, sent from Jerusalem by Eleazar the high priest at the request of Ptolemy, is clearly unhistorical.  The impossibility of completing so vast a task in this limited time is obvious.