A clear indication of the origin, even to the month, is given in the book of Daniel. Here, in apocalyptic form, the world's history, as far as it affected the Jews, is reviewed, from the days of Alexander the Great to the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (164). It is evident that the author wrote under the impression produced by this important event, which he expected would inaugurate the kingdom of heaven. Less certain, although very likely, is the as sumption that the book of Esther was written at the same period, because its author starts from the same point of view, presenting Israel's deliverance from a cruel persecution, although his idea is just the opposite of that of his supposed contemporary. Daniel pleads for a religious solidification, and the author of Esther for an amalgamation with the non Jewish world. It is very difficult to say when the Bible, as such, was formed into a canon. It is probable that this never took place, but that the various books and fragments of such were collected as a library of ancient Hebrew literature. and only later on considered as divinely inspired. The collection may have taken place in the 1st century ac., and the be lief that these books were written under special divine guidance was more and more crystallized a century later.
The conquest of the Orient by Alexander the Great had a far-reaching influence on the spiritual life of the Jews. Through the medium of Greek, which now was generally adopted in the Orient, the Jews became acquainted with an entirely different realm of thought. This widened their horizon and stimulated their pride, because, while the Greelet looked down upon them as barbarians, they were zealous to show that whatever was good in Greek thought was borrowed from the Jews. They conceived for the first time an idea of secular literature. There is only one book in the Hebrew Bible which could be definitely classed as secular, and this is the book of Canticles, almost certainly modeled after the Idyls of the Greek Theoo ritus.
The influence of Greek thought on the Jews is manifested in the so-called Septuagint (q.v.), a translation of the Bible, which, according to the legend, was undertaken by 72 Jewish scholars, designated • by the High Priest, upon the request of the Egyptian king, Ptolemy HI (283--87). This translation became very popu lar among the Jews outside of Palestine, and in some instances superseded the Greek original, as was also the case with the book of Strad), written in Hebrew about 180 and translated 50 ymrs later by the author's grandson into Greek. The Hebrew text was entirely lost until 1896, when remnants were discovered in the garret of an old synagogue. The book of Sirach is
an imitation of the Biblical book of Proverbs. So is the Wisdom of Solomon, and a great many authors tried their hands at writing books after Biblical patterns, and at interpolating the existing Hebrew books of the Bible. These books form the collection of Apocrypha, which means hidden books or books excluded from the canon of holy writ. Sonic were devoted to contemporary history, as is the case with the first and second books of the Maccabees, writ ten most probably in the 1st century B.0 Others were amplifications of existing Biblical books, as is the case with the fourth book of Ezra, or the book of Jubilees and the book of Enoch. Finally, a great number were apologetic, prompted by a desire to show to the Greek speaking world the superiority of Jewish thought and life. To this class belong the third and fourth books of the Maccabees; the latter the work of the historian Josephus.
The desire to prove that Judaism was the only true philosophy and tended to elevate man to the highest attainable levelprompted the writing of quite a number of Jewish books. The most prominent authors of this type are Philo of Alexandria and his younger contem porary, Flavius Josephus of Palestine. Both wrote historical and philosophical works. Josephus is known to us as a classic historian and is especially valuable for the history of his own time and the century preceding his days, for which he is the only complete source extant. In his book against Apion he defends Judaism against charges preferred by a Greek author. Similar is the work of Philo, the most classic representative of the Jewish Alexandrian school, on whose work Christian ideas are, to some extent, based. Besides theological writer* we find among the Jews a number of authors who, prompted by the Greek classics, tried to present Jewish ideas in -the poetical form, bor rowed from the Greeks. The most prominent are Ezekiel, who wrote a dream based on the Exodus, and another Philo, who *rote an. epic on Jerusalem. Another peculiar feature of this welding of the Jewish and Greek spirits is presented in the Sibylline oracles. Here Jew i511 authors adopted the mythical idea of a Sibyl, who in remotest antiquity had predicted events of later times by putting into the mouth of the Sibyl the glorification of Israel and the pre diction of its final triumph. Christian authors have partly interpolated some of these Jewish *orks and partly imitated •them, making the Sibyl predict the coming of Christianity as the 'final solution of the world's problems.