At the moment when he met St Philip the eunuch was studying Chapter 53, verses 7-8, of the Book of Isaiah in the Greek Septuagint version:(2) 'He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and as a lamb before his shearer is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.' It is clear that while he had left his home an adherent of Judaism he returned as a Christian convert. It is unlikely that he lived in religious isolation or that he was not part of a larger Jewish community. Like the settlements around the Mediterranean, which receive much attention in the New Testament, one may suppose that this one also would have been composed largely of proselytes who would have been more familiar with the Bible in its Greek translation than with the Hebrew original. As for the eunuch's mission, is it not possible that he was engaged on a diplomatic errand to discuss with the Jews of Palestine the possibility of concerted action against the common Roman foe and had seized the opportunity to strengthen his religious affiliation? News of the Zealot party in Palestine, which represented a resistance movement against Roman rule, could have reached as far as Meroe which itself was under pressure from the aggressive Roman armies which, in 23 BC, had sacked the former capital of Napata. (3)

Some writers have conjectured that references to the Trogodytes and a people called the Coloboi (meaning mutilated), living in the Red Sea coastal region and mentioned in the writings of the historians Diodorus Siculus (4) and Strabo, (5) in the first century BC, refer to Jews because they were circumcised 'like the Egyptians'. Apart from this their customs appear to have nothing in common with Jewish rites, though Strabo has a curious reference to another coastal people whom he calls 'Creophagi [meat-eaters] of whom the males have their sexual glands mutilated and the women are excised in the Jewish fashion', (6) though the latter is decidedly not a traditional Jewish practice.

On the eastern side of the Red Sea a series of states had

(1)Ethiopia and the Bible, pp. 142f
(2) Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, i, 790.
(3) Adams, p. 340.
(4) Book III, 32. The spelling of Trogodytes is that deliberately adopted by the translator, C.H. Oldfather.
(5) Book XVI, 4, 5.
(6) ibid., 4, 9.