What exactly does Jewish aristocrat mean in ancient time?
For example: Flavius Josephus was said to be a Jewish aristocrat. (He wrote the Jewish Antiquities) His father was of priestly descent; his mother claimed to have royal blood.
Does aristocrat here mean someone who is of royal blood? Would a descendent of priest be considered aristocrat too? Or, does it just mean a powerful member of the society?
What does priest mean here? High priests in the temple of Jerusalem? Or rabbis in local synagogue? (Actually, did they have rabbis at the time? Are they the “Scribes” mentioned in the Bible?)
What kind of the ranks and titles did they have? Beside king and prince?
What kind of honorific would you use to call them? (“Sir” obviously has not been invented yet?)
The nation of Israel was divided into 12 tribes, each of which claimed descent from one of the sons of the patriarch Jacob/Israel. One of these tribes was the tribe of Levi. Levi’s grandson, mentioned in Exodus, was a guy named Amram, who had two sons: Moses (he of Ten Commandments fame) and Aaron. Aaron himself had two sons, Eleazar and Ithamar. “Priests” (kohanim) in Judaism are all the descendents in the male line of Aaron (who was the first High Priest of Israel). Back when there still was a temple, the kohanim performed sacrifices. Now that the temple is gone, kohanim nowadays don’t have many special responsibilities because of their ancestry (although they still are restricted in who they can marry, and can’t attend funerals or go near the dead).
"And as Moses stood at the foot of the mountain, the commandments in sherds at his feet, eyes ablaze with the fury of The Lord gazing through the very soul of his brother. Aaron stepped forth, wiped the sweat from his brow and the blood from his mouth and said…
Well, being descended from Aaron was what made him a priest. What made him an “aristocrat”, was, as he put it in his autobiography:
So basically, his father comes from an important priestly family, and his mother is related to the Hasmonean kings (who were the kings of Judea before they were overthrown by King Herod).
Specifically, we learn from his autobiograpy that his grandmother was the daughter of Jonathan Apphus(this is probably not true…he’s probably missed a generation or two here, and really is the great-great-great grandson of Johnathan Maccabeaus, but anyway), which makes him descended from one Hasmonean king, and all the other Hasmonean kings his cousins, as well as all the Herodian kings after Herod the Great (Archelaus, Antipas, Herod Agrippa, etc.)
Brilliant.