GOODNESS IS BEAUTY:

One of the problems was that Hellenism was the culture of the human figure which was penetrating Judea. What attracted the Judeans was not so much the grandeur of Greek intellectuality but a cynical, pleasure-loving form of indulgence that appealed to the physical body and felt alienated by the spiritual dimensions emphasised by Judaism. The more you read the cynicism of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), the more you see how great was the allure of Hellenism. No wonder some pagan-minded Jews were in two minds when the traditionalist Maccabees prevailed and the Temple altar in Jerusalem was cleansed and rededicated for the worship of the unseen God.

Loewe saw the problem as ideological. He thought "a dramatic danger signal" had shocked the Jews and challenged the strict Jewish sense of the nature of God. After all, the ancient Greeks liked to be surrounded by statues and pictures, and they admired physical handsomeness, bodily exercise, sport, and sculpture. Judaism saw all this as an example of avodah zarah, forbidden graven images. What Judaism valued was not the physical man but the non-physical God, not avodah zarah -- outward appearance -- but avodah shebalev, inner virtue. What mattered was not looks but books. As the Psalmist says, "God is not impressed with the legs of a man" (Psalm 147:10). What mattered with God was the mind, heart, and soul.

Solomon Schonfeld wrote in his book The Universal Bible that the Greeks esteemed beauty as an end in itself, whereas Jews believed in a higher ideal -- beauty for goodness' sake. The Jewish sages say that when Scripture speaks of Yefet (Japheth) dwelling in the tents of Shem (Genesis 10:27), it is making a statement that the beauty of Greece must not be allowed to overwhelm the ethics of Israel. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth-century Jewish exegete, said that while Yefet beautified the world, Shem enlightened it. Judaism would not have appreciated what modern-day urban civilisation calls "temples of beauty".

Loewe was right to regard Antiochus as the chief enemy. He was right to see Antiochus as something of a largely irrelevant red herring. He was right to pinpoint the paganism that Antiochus symbolised, but he could have said more about the Greek adulation of art, since the Jewish objection was not to art itself but to how it reduced Divine truth from Revelation to Reason, making man, not God, the arbiter of accuracy. It has been said, "The altar was rededicated and so were the people."

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