Self-Rule under Empire

Origen

Epistle to Africanus 14

Mid-3rd Century

But you say, “How could they who were in captivity pass a sentence of death?” asserting, I know not on what grounds, that Susanna was the wife of a king, because of the name Joakim.¹ The answer is, that it is no uncommon thing, when great nations become subject, that the king should allow the captives to use their own laws and courts of justice. Now, for instance, that the Romans rule, and the Jews pay the half-shekel to them, how great power by the concession of Caesar the ethnarch has; so that we, who have had experience of it, know that he differs little from a true king! Private [secret] trials are held according to the law, and some are condemned to death. And though there is not full license for this, still it is not done without the knowledge of the ruler, as we learned and were convinced of when we spent much time in the country of that people.

Notes

[Joakim was also the name of a Judean king. See 2 Kings 24:15. This king was not Susanna’s husband.—Ed.]

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2: Emerging Judaism.

In his epistle to Africanus, the third-century church father Origen responds to Julius Africanus, a Christian writer, who had challenged Origen’s inclusion of a Greek text, Susanna, in the biblical book of Daniel. In the course of his defense, Origen briefly refers to the Jewish “ethnarch,” presumably the patriarch, although he may have exaggerated the patriarch’s power for rhetorical purposes. He likens the Jews’ use of their own law courts in the Susanna narrative during a period of exile and captivity to the same system under an ethnarch, which, though not fully sanctioned, was nonetheless tolerated by the emperor. See also “Susanna.”

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Self-Rule under Empire

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