If you went to a good College or University you learned that Thucydides was the world’s “first historian” and that his masterwork, The Peloponnesian War was the first work of genuine history in the world, at least the Western world. Both claims are false. Moreover, both claims are advanced to bury Jewish history and, implicitly to denigrate Judaism. They are a form of the Hellenized (secular) polemics that still pervade Academia even in these postmodern times when it is fashionable to criticize American and the West, — but only in certain ways.

In the very first page of his book, Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 BCE), in the last lines of the very first paragraph, with Hellenism’s typical ego-centrism, especially prevalent in Athens, Thucydides demolishes his own claims for historical knowledge and consciousness.

“For though I have found it impossible, because of its remoteness in time, to acquire a really precise knowledge of the distant past or even of the history preceding our own period, yet, after looking back into it as far as I can, all the evidence leads me to conclude that these periods were not great periods either in warfare or in anything else.” [1]

The translator’s claim that the worldview of Classical Athens “stimulated an inquiry into the past”[2] is disproved at the outset by Thucydides’ own clam admission of one might term self-centered a-historicism. Note some of the world-shaping events that occurred only a few hundred miles from the spots where Thucydides, an Athenian General, wrote in the decades and centuries before his birth. The Persian Empire was extensively engaged in the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE when the Spartans pulled down the great walls of Athens); yet the author says almost nothing of the great Persian invasions only decades before his birth and that ended in the battles of Marathon (490) and Salamis (479 BCE), the latter of which led to Athenian hegemony over Hellas. Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians who died when Thucydides was a boy, wrote a great work (The Persians) about the effect of the Athenian victory on the court in Mesopotamia. Moreover, on his tomb Aeschylus had inscribed that he was a soldier at Marathon, a fact of which he was prouder than his numerous triumphs in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.

One might think it essential for Thucydides to treat, at least in summary form of the rise of Persia and the massive political, ideological and military struggles of the Middle East that preceded it. But he has nothing on the Persians defeat of Babylon, the ancient people and military juggernaut that after a century of struggle threw off the hegemony of the Second Assyrian Empire and demolished it at the battle of Carchemish in 613 BCE, one of the decisive battles of history. It was while hastening to aid the Assyrians at this battle that Pharaoh Neco (“Shishak”) met King Josiah of Judah (at a ‘peace meeting’ perhaps) and killed him. Shishak’s intervention and the subsequent Babylonian descent south through Israel, Judah and into Egypt resulted in the vassal kings, sons of Josiah whose eventual resistance, under Tzidkiyahu (“Zedekiah”) led to Babylon’s invasion of Judah and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Ancient Israel and Judah, whose history and Tanakh are verified by numerous Assyrian and Persian records is invisible in Thucydides and in the works of the Greek tragedians despite the obvious Hebrew source of the names and place names of some of the most prominent Greek characters (like Kadmos, “the one from the east, from Sidon” founder of the most ancient Greek city, Thebes, and whose name, without its Greek suffix derives from K-D-M, the root that means “the one from the east, from the origins).*

Similarly glaring in its absence are the presence of the Persians in Israel and Egypt during Thucydides own lifetime. While the Peloponnesian War was raging, Jews were guarding the northeastern and southern approaches to Egypt, — indeed, they had been doing this for Pharaoh since the reign of King Menasha of Judah (c. 685-630 BCE). On the isle of Elephantine, now submerged, a Jewish Temple housed the garrison and was used to offer sacrifices and for prayer because of the distance from Jerusalem. This was a source of constant friction between Jews and Egyptians that was adjudicated by the Persians and the Jewish governor of Egypt in Jerusalem. [3]. An historian in our sense could hardly ignore such geopolitically powerful events occurring at the same time and only a few hundred miles from the theatre of action he purports to cover accurately.
One could go on but the point is that Thucydides’ own words from the outset of his account declare his limited, a-historic Hellenist-centric frame of reference. Despite this, for centuries his account of what indeed was a conflict of great importance to Western pre-history was presented to students as the first history in the world. Spengler glances at the reasons of tone and style that may account for this gross distortion noting that “Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the Persian Wars…what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective”[4]. But the main reason probably yet another example of Hellenized ‘scholarship’ in its Christian and post-Christian displacement of abundantly verifiable Jewish history and Judaism’s uniquely historic consciousness. As has been recognized in many texts over the centuries, the Hebrew’s sense that the world has been designed by a Designer for a specific purpose, providence, is the ground from which the uniquely historical consciousness derived from Judaism in time tried to permeate the West. Scholars like Johannes Reuchlin, John Selden, William Bradford and Isaac Newton once understood this but the glare of the ‘Enlightenment’ obscured the truth in a new ‘scholarly’ kind of Judaeophobia. The failure of Ezra Stiles to get Hebrew taught as a required course at Yale in the 1780s may be taken as a watershed in American life of the burial of the Hebraic content of the West and, thus, of the West’s accelerating suicide now recognizable in many fields from finance and economy, to pop culture to geopolitics.

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[1] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (NY 1972; Rex Warner trans 1954; I. M. Finley Introduction 1972), 35
[2] Rex Warner, translator’s introduction, ibid. 14
[3] Peter Shaffer, Judaeophobia: Attitudes toward Jews in the Ancient World (Harvard University Press 1995); c.f. the Amarna Tablets, obelisk of Shalmaneser II, the relief sculpture regarding Sennarcherib, etc
[4] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (NY 1996, Alan Helps one-volume abridgement from the English translation of Charles Atkinson), 8-9. Spengler comments that the writers of the Classical period “lose their sureness of eye from the moment when he, looking backward encounters motive forces [outside] his practical experience,” outside the present of the writer.
*This may be found in the very last Greek Tragedy, The Bacchae of Euripides (c. 402 bce)

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