אלוהי משה אצל סטראבון

Bezalel Bar-Kochva's paper, appearing in this issue, offers a philological and comparative analysis of Strabo's Jewish ethnography, particularly with regard to its social, political and cultic aspects, which demonstrates that Strabo's source is Posidonius of Apamea, the most prolific Stoic author and historian of the first century BCE. Another feature of Strabo's Jewish ethnography, the peculiar conception of the God of Israel, is the subject of the present paper. Philological and philosophical considerations indicate that here, too, Strabo's source is Posidonius. The most problematic sentence in Strabo's account of the God of Israel is the statement, Tor this one thing alone is God, the [thing] encompassing all of us and land and sea - the thing which we call heaven, and universe, and the nature of the things which are'. Scholars have used this sentence both to prove and to disprove a Posidonian source. In fact the sentence cannot be Stoic, let alone Posidonian; at the same time, it may be shown to be alien to its immediate context, a speech delivered by Moses, which is a reworking of an account by Hecataeus. The sentence has been imposed upon the speech, and seems to have replaced some terms by which the deity could be conceived of simultaneously as all-encompassing and all-pervading. The identification of the deity simultaneously with the all-encompassing heaven and the omnipresent kosmos points to a Stoic who not only located the ruling part of the kosmos in the heaven - the outermost sphere of the aither - but also conceived of the substance of this ruling part as informing the rest of the kosmos. That informing substance itself could be said not only to control the universe (as the 'ruling principle', the hegemonikon) but to be the universe. Possible Posidonian evidence that Chrysippus and Zeno held this view must be suspect. Only Posidonius himself conceived the system that could allow such a position. His system, particularly his view of pneuma, is discussed at length in this paper. Hecataeus had portrayed the Jewish God as all-encompassing heaven. Posidonius would have regarded this as only one aspect of his own Stoic god. Therefore, I suggest, he had Moses extend the list of God's attributes to enable the inclusion of two aspects, e.g., heaven, pneuma, hegemonikon (and hence) kosmos. The intermediate hegemonikon or 'ruling principle' is a necessary link, without which the leap from all-encompassing heaven to the kosmos in its entirety is incomprehensible. In Strabo's account, however, the peculiarly Stoic terms have been removed and replaced by 'the nature of the things which are', which is coextensive with kosmos but cannot be squared with the all-encompassing heaven. Who could have made such a modification to Posidonius' portrayal of Moses' speech? Posidonius presented his concept of the ruling principle in a peculiarly Posidonian part of Stoic physics which dealt with causes. Strabo, therefore, would have reacted strongly against an appearance of the ruling principle in Moses' speech, where it must have appeared, by replacing it with non-technical terms. Conversely, it may be noted that it is against Posidonius that Strabo rails on the issue of the causes, and not against other geographers. All this indi-cates that Strabo is the author of the offending sentence, but that his source was Posidonius.