lethargic_man | (no subject)

Seven years ago, when researching my story about the showdown between King Ahab and Elijah the prophet, I read in the Encyclopaedia Judaica how, though the Bible records the three-year drought at the time (ninth century BCE) as being caused by, and ultimately lifted by, Elijah, the Phoenicians record it as having been ended by the prayers of Ahab's father-in-law, the king of Tyre. I wrote to

rysmiel at the time, saying, "I have a reference to 'Menander (Ant., 8:323-4)', though I've got no idea how to go about looking it up."

That was then; now, there's just so incredibly much of everything on the Web that the problem became trivially googlable. "Menander" was the Syriac Menander, aka Pseudo-Menander; "Ant." Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and the passage in question reads:

Now Menander mentions this drought in his account of the acts of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians^*; where he says thus: "Under him there was a want of rain from the month Hyperberetmus till the month Hyperberetmus of the year following; but when he made supplications, there came great thunders. This Ethbaal built the city Botrys in Phoenicia, and the city Auza in Libya." By these words he designed the want of rain that was in the days of Ahab, for at that time it was that Ethbaal also reigned over the Tyrians, as Menander informs us.

So now, finally, I know.

* Josephus didn't provide the hyperlinks... :o)