Kentron (Dec 2012)
Flavius Josèphe et l’évergétisme : un regard juif sur un échange perverti
Abstract
As a genuine son of the Hellenistic World, nurtured within its social conventions, Flavius Josephus commonly describes social and power relationships of his time or of former centuries within the frame of the values and the language of evergetism; but he interpretes to the same extent much older biblical stories. However, it is striking that, while he describes harmonious relations between partners in evergetism when it is anachronistic, on the contrary, when applied to the correct context, either Greek societies or Hellenistic and Roman judaism, these relationships become inefficient and even perverse, since they may backfire. This leads to the conclusion that, against Polybius, who fully trusts in this way of social regulation, regardless of those involved in these relations, and far from Philo, who loads the evergetic frame with moral values which do not concern its own logic, Josephus was not optimistic that evergetism could be acclimated, neither in real judaism, nor in late hellenistic societies now plagued with moral degradation and bad faith: evergetism only reveals what participants are worth.
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