Ierusalem (olim) regina: (Self-)Perceptions of Jerusalem’s ‘Kingship’ in Some Hellenistic Jewish Writers

The article surveys the works of three Hellenistic Jewish authors (Ps.-Aristeas, Ps.-Solomon and Flavius Josephus) in search for more references to Jerusalem’s queenship during the Second Temple Period. In so doing, on the one hand, it aims to show that king-/queenship language and discourse in John’s Revelation do not necessary imply allusions to Rome and Roman rule, nor correspondences with ‘real’ world rulers or world ruling cities, not even with an actual urban agglomerate according to our or ancient standards. On the other hand, the article argues that in Revelation John’s attempt to defy and define queenship emerges as a deliberate act of prophetic inner-Jewish counterpropaganda. The article is therefore divided in two parts, a pars destruens and a pars construens. In the pars destruens, I examine passages from Dio of Prusa, Vergil’s Aeneid, the Synoptic tradition and the anonymous Christian apocalypse appended to 4 Ezra and known as 5 Ezra. By showing in the light of these texts that any human aggregation form or ‘political’ entity could be depicted as aspiring or en-joying the ‘queen’ and ‘world ruler’ status, I intend to underline – and possibly undermine – the naive fallacy of automatically equating Babylon, the great city reigning over the kings of the earth in Rev, with imperial Rome. In the pars construens, I move on to actually survey the writings of the aforementioned Jewish writers. Ps.-Aristeas does not name Jerusalem a queen but portrays the city and its ruling elite as comfort-ably fitting in the political and economic peer-to-peer network of Hellenistic kingdoms. Just like John more than a century later, Ps.-Solomon describes ‘another’ Jerusalem under ‘other’, illegitimate and deviant rulers and an idolatrous Israel alike as the kingdom of Babylon among the nations. Last in chronological order but not least, Flavius Josephus has indeed the unquestionable tendency to extol the greatness of Jerusalem and her rulers in Greco-Roman times as well as to praise the prosperity and urban integration of the Jews in the whole Mediterranean area. On the other side, he ambiguously counterbalances this tendency with criticisms leveled against priestly elites and influential families, the Herodian dynasty, military leaders, and commoners for disobeying the Law and abandoning Jewish traditions and customs. As a result of the textual surveys in both the pars destruens and the pars construens, I offer some general, provisionary conclusions. They can be resumed as follows: kingship language and discourse were employed as rhetorical, that is, encomiastic or polemical, tools, therefore, they do not necessarily need to mirror historical realia; Lupieri’s dossier of texts on Jerusalem’s rule over the nations must and can be expanded; in Revelation John seems to target and counter supremacy hopes centering on Jerusalem and Israel shared by ‘others’, in order to clear the deck and assert his own vision of God’s Israel. These concluding remarks are also meant to function as desiderata proposals. As such they are intended to open new perspectives on reading John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ as a piece of Jewish Hellenistic literature in the Greek speaking Diaspora of Roman Asia.