From the 'Master of the Elephants' to the 'Most Ungracious Wretch': The Image of Foreign Commanders in the Second Book of Maccabees

The question of why the cooperation of Jews with the Persian and Ptolemaic empires achieved some success and why it failed with regard to the Seleucids and the Romans, even turning into military hostility against them, has not been sufficiently answered. The present volume intends to show, from the perspectives of Hebrew Bible, Judaic, and Ancient History Studies, that the contrasting Jewish attitudes towards foreign powers were not only dependent on specific political circumstances. They were also interrelated with the emergence of multiple early Jewish identities, which all found a basis in the Torah, the prophets, or the psalms.