The Pseudepigraphal writings
Works indicating a Greek influence
The Letter of Aristeas
An important document of Jewish Hellenistic literature is The Letter of Aristeas, a pseudepigraphon ascribed to Aristeas, an official of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, a Greek monarch of Egypt in the 3rd century bce. The letter is addressed to his brother and gives an account of the translation of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament) into Greek, by order of Ptolemy. According to the legend, reflected in the letter, the translation was made by 72 elders, brought from Jerusalem, in 72 days. The letter, in reality written by an Alexandrian Jew about 100 bce, attempts to show the superiority of Judaism both as religion and as philosophy. It also contains interesting descriptions of Palestine, of Jerusalem with its Temple, and of the royal gifts to the Temple.
IV Maccabees
Another Jewish Hellenistic work combining history and philosophy is The Fourth Book of Maccabees. The theme of the book, reflecting the views of the Greek Stoics, is “whether the Inspired Reason is supreme ruler over the passions.” This thesis is demonstrated by the martyrdom of the elderly scribe Eleazar and the unnamed seven brothers and their mother, taken from II Macc. 6:18–7:41. The idea of the expiatory force of martyrdom is stressed more in IV Maccabees than in its source. The author probably lived in the 1st century bce and may have been from Antioch (in Syria), where the tombs of the Maccabean martyrs were venerated by the Jews.
III Maccabees
The Greek book called The Third Book of Maccabees itself has nothing to do with the Maccabean period. Its content is a legend, a miraculous story of deliverance, which is also independently told—in another historical context—by Josephus (Against Apion II, 5). In III Maccabees the story takes place during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator (reigned 221–203 bce). The central episode of the book is the oppression of Egyptian Jews, culminating with an anti-Jewish decree by the King. The Jews who were registered for execution were brought into the hippodrome outside of Alexandria; the King had ordered 500 elephants to be drugged with incense and wine for the purpose of crushing the Jews, but by God’s intercession “the beasts turned round against the armed hosts [of the king] and began to tread them under foot and destroy them.” The Jews fixed annual celebrations of this deliverance. The book was probably written at the end of the 1st century bce by an Alexandrian Jew in a period of high anti-Jewish tension.
The Lives of the Prophets
The little book called the Lives of the Prophets is a collection of Jewish legends about Old Testament prophets. It is preserved in Greek and in versions and recensions in various languages, all based on the Greek. The purpose of the work was to furnish to the readers of the Bible further information about the prophets. The collection evidently passed through Christian hands since it includes an assumed prophecy of Jeremiah about the birth of Christ. Thus, the date of composition of the supposed original Jewish work and the question as to whether it was originally written in Hebrew or Greek are difficult to resolve. Scholars are inclined toward a 1st-century-ce date in Palestine—with the exception of the life of “Jeremiah,” which is Egyptian in origin.
The Ascension of Isaiah
According to the Lives of the Prophets, Jeremiah was stoned to death and Isaiah was sawn asunder. These two legends are reflected in two originally Jewish works. The Ascension of Isaiah, in which the martyrdom of Isaiah is narrated, is as a whole extant only in Ethiopic, translated from a Greek original, which itself is also known from fragments. The book contains important Christian passages from the 1st century ce, but the story about Isaiah’s martyrdom is most likely based upon a Jewish written source. According to this legend, Isaiah was killed by the wicked king Manasseh, who served Beliar-Sammael, the chief of the evil spirits, instead of God. Isaiah, with his followers, had fled to the wilderness, but upon being captured he was sawn asunder with a wooden saw, and his followers fled to the region of Tyre and Sidon. The activity of Beliar is known also from the writings of the sect that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls and similar writings, and the story itself resembles in some way the history of the Dead Sea sect; but no fragment of the Jewish part of the book was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The original Martyrdom of Isaiah was written probably in Hebrew or Aramaic before the 1st century ce.
Paralipomena of Jeremiah
In the last chapter of the Greek text of the Paralipomena (additional stories) of Jeremiah, there is a hint of the Christian part of the Ascension of Isaiah: the people stoned Jeremiah to death because he, like Isaiah before him, prophesied the coming of Christ. In a parallel legend (preserved in Arabic), both the violent death of Jeremiah and the Christian motif are lacking. The book begins shortly before and ends shortly after the Babylonian Exile and contains mostly otherwise unknown legends. The legend about the long sleep of Abimelech (the biblical Ebed-melech—an Ethiopian eunuch who rescued Jeremiah from a cistern), who slept and so did not see the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians—is based upon a legendary understanding of Psalm 126:1; a similar legend about another person is preserved in the Talmud (the authoritative rabbinical compendium of Jewish law, lore, and commentary). The book is basically Jewish, and the last chapter was Christianized. The Jewish work was probably written at the end of the 1st century ce or at the beginning of the 2nd, originally in either Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.
The Testament of Job
Though there are scholars who think that the Testament of Job was once written in Hebrew or Aramaic, it is more probable that the existing Greek text of the book is the original or even a rewritten later version of a Greek work; a fragment of an older form is probably preserved in the Greek translation of Job (2:9). Job is identified, according to some Jewish traditions, with the biblical Jobab (king of Edom), and his (second) wife is Dinah, Jacob’s daughter. Job knew by revelation that, for destroying an idol, he would undergo suffering but that a happy end would be the final outcome. Thus, in contrast to the biblical Book of Job, this work does not deal with the question of God’s righteousness but places great emphasis on resurrection and eternal life. These special motifs in the book indicate that the book probably was written by a member of an unknown Jewish group that upheld a high mystical spirituality. The extreme “pietistic” tendency of the book is noted in the exaggeration of Job’s love for suffering and of his charity to the poor. At the end of the book Job’s soul was taken to heaven in a heavenly chariot. The book was probably written before 70 ce.
Life of Adam and Eve
The many Christian legends in many languages about the lives of Adam and Eve probably have their origin in a Jewish writing (or writings) about the biblical first man and woman. The most important of these works are the Latin Vita Adae et Evae (Life of Adam and Eve) and a Greek work closely parallel to it, named erroneously by its first editor the Apocalypse of Moses. The narrative runs from the Fall to the deaths of Adam and Eve. The religious message in the story involves the repentance of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from paradise—and the description of their deaths does not show any traces of the idea of original sin, which was important in later Christian theology. Nonetheless, there are definitely Christian passages in the various versions, and the treatment of Adam in the literature of the Ebionites (an early Jewish Christian sect) shows an affinity for the story. Thus, the Jewish source probably was composed in the 1st century ce in Jewish circles that influenced the Ebionites. The original language of this supposed source is unknown.