Leithart
1 Maccabees famously includes a letter from King Areus of Sparta to Onias, high priest of Israel, in which it is stated that “the Spartans and the Jews . . . are brothers and are of the family of Abraham.” Scholars dismiss the genealogical connection, and many even deny that the letter is authentic: Would a Spartan king claim ancestry with a barbarian people? But James C. VanderKam ( From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile 
To start, he cites Moses Hadas’ claim that Greeks took up whatever genealogy that could be advantageous to them: “It was the Greeks themselves who set up the precedent; their ancient genealogies . . . made a place for the founders of various eastern nations, including Egypt and Persia, and in the historical period they were not above inventing genealogies when it suited their political ambitions.”
Besides, there are other ancient documents that make a connection between Greeks and Hebrews.
Josephus ( Antiquities 14) includes the text of a decree from Pergamum dated in the late second century BC, written to the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I. It says, “to preserve and increase his friendship with us and always be responsible for some act of good in the knowledge that he will receive a fitting recompense, and also remembering that in the time of Abraham, who was the father of all Hebrews, our ancestors were friends, as we find in the public records.” VanderKam notes, “some one hundred fifty years later than the Areus-Onias correspondence, a Greek city claimed a common past with the Jews.”
Where might this idea have come from? VanderKam suggests that it may have come from Hecateus of Abdera. According to Plutarch, he visited Sparta and he is credited with writing a book On Abraham and the Egyptians . That book is lost, and perhaps was never written, but Hecateus did write On the Egyptians , in which he gives a brief account of the exodus. When a pestilence began to ravage Egypt, the Egyptians decided to expel all foreigners, thought to be the source of the plague: “At once, therefore, the aliens were driven from the country, and the most outstanding and active among them banded together and, as some say, were cast ashore in Greece and certain other regions; their leaders were notable men, chief among them being Danaus and Cadmus. But the greater number were driven into what is now called Judea, which is not far distant from Egypt and was at that time utterly uninhabited.” VanderKam comments that “Danaus” is “the ancestor of the Canoi who lived in the Peloponnesus and who produced both dynasties of Spartan kings. Hecateus thus paired the ancestors of the Spartans and Jews as two groups who were expelled from Egypt at the same time (the time of Moses) and under the same circumstances.”
Ultimately, VanderKam suggests that the source of this genealogical connection is Genesis 25:2-3, the list of Abraham’s children by Keturah. The second son of Jokshan, who was father to Sheba and Dedan: “The name Dedan resembles that of Danaus to some extent; moreover the name of his son – Leummim – was translated in Tg. Onq. Gen 10:5 as nagon , a term for the islands inhabited by Gentiles descended from Japheth, that is, the Greeks. It is possible that Hecateus had heard of an equation of the names Danaus and Dedan and that he was the source behind Areus’s claim that the two peoples shared Abraham as an ancestor.”
VanderKam concludes that “A plausible case can be created, then, for the conclusion that Areus I sent a letter to Onias I.” And if that’s true, we might ask whether Areus might have known something we don’t about the origins of the Spartans.
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