Re-reading Biblical Exodus of the Jews from Egypt with Hecataeus of Abdera

Hecataeus of Abdera, considered the “father of scientific ethnography”, provides the earliest known account of the Jews in Greek literature. Between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, Hecataeus spent time at the Egyptian court, where he may have encountered Jews directly and gained access to stories about them preserved in the royal archives. In his comprehensive historical work on Egypt, he dedicates an excursus to the origins of the Jews and Judaism, which he explains through Greek concepts and notions. This account, transmitted by Diodorus Siculus, laid the groundwork for later Greek and Latin authors who expanded upon its details and developed the first anti-Jewish literature. This presentation will offer an opportunity to examine the various elements that constitute this characteristic example of early ethnographic writing.

Stéphanie É. Binder, PhD, is a scholar of the interactions between Jews, Greeks, and Romans during the Second Temple period and the interrelationship between Judaism and early Christianity in Late Antiquity. She teaches in the Department of Classical Studies at Bar-Ilan University and leads a research group in the E-Lijah laboratory for digital humanities at the University of Haifa. She serves as the managing editor of the Mediterranean Historical Review. Her publications include: (Brill, 2012), Tertullien et moi (Éditions du Cerf, 2022), and Tertullian and the Jews in Early Christian Literary Imagination (CUP, forthcoming).

Lunch will be provided for those who register by Sunday, February 15th

Sponsored by: the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Classics, and the Department of Religious Studies

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