nature with the dialogues of Plato or the political fantasies of More and Swift. By the striking nature of their utterances the writers hoped to catch the ear of the Gentile world for the saving doctrine which they taught. The form is Greek, but the spirit is Hebraic; in the third Sibylline oracle, particularly, the call to monotheism and the denunciation of idolatry, with the pictures of the Divine reward for the righteous, and of the Divine judgment for the ungodly, remind us of the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah; as when the poet says,[25] "Witless mortals, who cling to an image that ye have fashioned to be your god, why do ye vainly go astray, and march along a path which is [pg.31] not straight? Why remember ye not the eternal founder of All? One only God there is who ruleth alone." And again: "The children of Israel shall mark out the path of life to all mortals, for they are the interpreters of God, exalted by Him, and bearing a great joy to all mankind."[26] The consciousness of the Jewish mission is the dominant note. Masters now of Greek culture, the Jews believed that they had a philosophy of their own, which it was their privilege to teach to the Greeks; their conception of God and the government of the world was truer than any other; their conception of man's duty more righteous; even their conception of the state more ideal.

The apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon, which was probably written at Alexandria during the first century B.C.E., is marked by the same spirit. There again we meet with the glorification of the one true God of Israel, and the denunciation of pagan idolatry; and while the author writes in Greek and shows the influence of Greek ideas, he makes the Psalms and the Proverbs his models of literary form. "Love righteousness," he begins, "ye that be judges of the earth; think ye of the Lord with a good mind and in singleness of heart seek ye Him." His appeal for godliness is addressed to the Gentile world in a language which they understood, but in a spirit to which most of them were strangers. The early history of the Israelites in Egypt comes home to him [pg.32] with especial force, for he sees it "in the light of eternity," a striking moral lesson for the godless Egyptian world around him in which the house of Jacob dwelt again. With poetical imagination he tells anew the story of the ten plagues as though he had lived through them, and seen with his own eyes the punishment of the idolatrous land. He ends with a pæan to the God who had saved His people. "For in all things Thou didst magnify them, and Thou didst glorify them, and not lightly regard them, standing by their side in every time and place."

At this epoch, and at Alexandria especially, Judaism was no self-centred, exclusive faith afraid of expansion. The mission of Israel was a very real thing, and conversion was widespread in Rome, in Egypt, and all along the Mediterranean countries. The Jews, says the letter of Aristeas, "eagerly seek intercourse with other nations, and they pay special care to this, and emulate each other therein." And one of the most reliable pagan writers says of them, "They have penetrated into every state, and it is hard to find a place where they have not become powerful."[27] Nor was it merely material power which they acquired. The days had come which the prophet Amos (viii. 11) had predicted, when "God will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord." The Greek world had lost faith in the poetical gods of its [pg.33] mythology and in the metaphysical powers of its philosophical schools, and was searching for a more real object to revere and lean on. The people were thirsting for the living God. And in place of the gods of nature, whom they had found unsatisfying, or the impersonal world-force, with which they sought in vain to come into harmony, the Jews offered them the God of history, who had preserved their race through the ages, and revealed to them the law of Moses.

The missionary purpose was largely responsible for the rise of a philosophical school of Bible commentators. The Hellenistic world was thoroughly sophisticated, and Alexandria was distinguished above all towns as the home of philosophical lectures and book-making. One of Philo's contemporaries is said to have written over one thousand treatises, and in one of his rare touches of satire Philo relates[28] how bands of sophists talked to eager crowds of men and women day and night about virtue being the only good, and the blessedness of life according to nature, all without producing the slightest effect, save noise. The Jews also studied philosophy, and began to talk in the catchwords of philosophy, and then to re-interpret their Scriptures according to the ideas of philosophy. The Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch was to the cultured Gentile an account in rather bald and impure Greek of the history of a family which grew into a petty nation, and of their tribal and national [pg.34] laws. The prophets, it is true, set forth teachings which were more obviously of general moral import; but the books of the prophets were not God's special revelation to the Jews, but rather individual utterances and exhortations: and their teaching was treated as subordinate to the Divine revelation in the Five Books of Moses. Those, then, who aimed at the spread of Jewish monotheism were impelled to draw out a philosophical meaning, a universal value from the Books of Moses. Nowadays the Bible is the holy book of so much of the civilized world that it is somewhat difficult for us to form a proper conception of what it was to the civilized world before the Christian era. We have to imagine a state of culture in which it was only the Book of books to one small nation, while to others it was at best a curious record of ancient times, just as the Code of Hammurabi or the Egyptian Book of Life is to us. The Alexandrian Jews were the first to popularize its teachings, to bring Jewish religion into line with the thought of the Greek world. It was to this end that they founded a particular form of Midrash—the allegorical interpretation, which is largely a distinctive product of the Alexandrian age. The Palestinian rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend. Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers—they [pg.35] were never quite the same as the rabbis—were emphasizing for the outer world as well as their own people the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should satisfy the reason, and seeking to establish the harmony of Greek philosophy with Jewish monotheism and the Mosaic legislation. Allegorical interpretation is "based upon the supposition or fiction that the author who is interpreted intended something 'other' than