[German Version] The Oniad famly, a Jewish priestly family in the early Hellenistic period, traced their origins to the list of high priests in Neh 12:10ff. The main historical source is the sometimes rather unclear account by Flavius Josephus. OniasI was high priest in the early 3rd century bce, and according to 1 Macc 12 he corresponded with the Spartans regarding their common descent from Abraham. The Oniads came to prominence in the 3rd century bce, when OniasII was defeated by PtolemyIII in the 3rd Syrian War (246–241 bce). It is to this time that Josephus’s account of a dispu…

[German Version] is the name given to the author of Greek fragments, preserved in Josephus and later writers, attributed to the Greek writer Hecataeus of Abdera. Because Hecataeus, in his ethnographic work “On the Egyptians,” had included a discussion of the Jews, other works on the Jews came to be ascribed to him. Two such works have survived, whose sympathies suggest the author(s) may have been Jewish, living sometime between 300 bce and the 1st century ce. On the Jews, whose authenticity already had been doubted in antiquity, records the migration of Jews to Egypt under…