The Roman conquest of Israel was a great blow to Judaism, in theological terms.  Damage to the countryside was light, after all the Romans intended to tax the people, not destroy them.  The Temple was still standing, there was no great murder of all the priests.  With great efficiency, the Romans came and came to say.  That they had just conquered a Jewish state with a Davidic Monarchy is what caused the great blows to Judaism.

    For the period of time when Israel was ruled by a Monarch from the line of David, all was right with the world.  The Messiah had come, Israel was independent once more and ruled by the line of David.  What more could the Jewish people want?  A period of what could be called Jewish nationalism was in place, with the priests working to destroy the Hellenization that had happened during the rule of the Greeks.  Judaism was made pure.

    And then came the Romans.  The Kingdom fell, there was no ruling Monarch from the line of David.  Many Jews fled Israel to other major cities with large Jewish populations, such as Alexandria.  Others chose to stay in their homeland.  How the Jewish people responded to this tragedy gave rise to two major sects in the Jewish religion.

    The Jews who stayed in Israel were close to the Temple, still under the guidance of the Priests.  Here politics the question of the Messiah was answered by the Priests in charge.  The Messiah had not yet arrived, although the period of the Davidic Monarchy was seen as God's reminder to the Jewish people to keep the faith.  A splinter group claimed that God would send not one, but three Messiahs and only the first had been sent.  Anti-Roman, this group called the Zealots saw the Messiah as a military leader who would crush the Romans.

    Roman policy in Israel wisely stayed away from religion, only paying attention to the Jews when they gave rise to anti-Roman rebels, such as the community of Zealots around the Dead Sea at Qumran.  The rather tolerant treatment of Judaism allowed the priests to continue their focus on animal sacrifices, fulfillment of the Law and the requirements of Temple worship.  The Torah, or the Pentateuch, was the main focus on the Jewish faith in Israel, with the prophetic writings of the Nebiim falling out of favor.  The Priests wanted to survive, and did not like the thought of Messiah expecting Jews revolting against the Romans and resulting in total destruction of Israel.

    In the major cities outside of Israel, fleeing Jews found that the Jewish populations there were already Hellenized to a great degree.  Many had thought that the Messiah had already come, and then the conquest of Israel.  They also saw the great level of civilization and arts going on around them, and how their Jewish faith was seen as a backwater religion.  And so they changed.  In the major cities, Jewish faith mixed with the faith of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, and more.  With an amazingly short amount of time, Greek replaced Hebrew and Aramaic as the major language of the Jews outside of Israel.

    Here, the Hellenization of Judaism gave rise to some very interesting things.  A Jewish version of the Pagan Sibylline Oracles was created, complete with a Jewish Sibyl who's writings were in perfect Greek hexameters.  Jews began to claim that Moses was the founder of all Mystery religions, that Plato and Aristotle had borrowed from Moses and that Moses somehow was both Hermes Trismegistus, founder of the Egyptian Mysteries, and Mausaeus, the founder of the Greek Mysteries.

    The Letter of Aristeas, for example, states "They [the Greeks] worship the same God -the Lord and Creator of the Universe, as all other men, as we ourselves, O king, though we call him by different names, such as Zeus . . ."  and continues to argue for harmony between Jews and Greeks.  Hellenized Jews in Alexandria and other Roman cities no longer saw Jehovah as a tribal deity who was in complete opposition to Paganism.  They saw Jehovah as a universal God, identical with the vision of the Oneness preached by Plato.

    During this time of the Hellenization of the Jews, a Jewish playwright by the name of Ezekiel re-wrote Exodus as a Greek tragedy.  Written in Greek, it was in the style of Euripides and presents the story of Exodus slightly differently.  Here Moses not only was educated in the Jewish traditions, but had a wide range of knowledge of Egyptian spiritualist wisdom.  A central part of the Pagan Mysteries was a Pagan godman, mortal yet immortal, god yet man.  One who died yet was resurrected, a figure who often came to save mankind and offered spiritual teachings.  If the Jews could Hellenize Exodus into a Greek tragedy, might a Hebrew version of Euripides' The Bacchae be far off?

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