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Re: 4Q318
On Sun, 13 Oct 1996, Seth L Sanders wrote:
> As David Pingree's appendix to the latter article shows, there is nothing
> exceptional in this: the Hellenistic world inherited Mesopotamian
> astronomy and astrology, and as we find inmany cases, the Qumran
> covenanters were a part of the Hellenistic world.
>
The term Hellenistic can of course be used as a general term for the
period after Alexander the Great and then the "Hellenistic world" is
everything that happened after that. More generally, though the term
implies some sort of fusion, mixture, cohabitation of cultures, and I am
not quite sure why we need to assume that Mesopotamian culture had to come
to Qumran by means of the Hellenistic world. Is it not possible that
Babylonian culture directly influenced Palestine? The fact the
astrological texts of later period that survived are in Greek does not
mean that there could not have been many other such texts in Phoenician,
Hebrew, etc?
Chaim Milikowsky
Talmud, Bar Ilan