36. Of course, it suits Jewish, writers, like Dr. Jost, to deprecate the value of the Pseudepigrapha. Their
ardour of expectancy ill agrees with the modern theories, which would eliminate, if possible, the
Messianic hope from ancient Judaism.
37. Comp. Dillmann in Herzog's Real-Encykl. vol. xii. p. 301.
The most interesting as well as the oldest of these books are those known as the Book of
Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, the Psalter of Solomon, and the Book of Jubilees, or Little
Genesis. Only the briefest notice of them can here find a place.38
38. For a brief review of the `Pseudepigraphic Writings,' see Appendix I.
The Book of Enoch, the oldest parts of which date a century and a half before Christ, comes to
us from Palestine. It professes to be a vision vouchsafed to that Patriarch, and tells of the fall of
the Angels and its consequences, and of what he saw and heard in his rapt journeys through
heaven and earth. Of deepest, though often sad, interest, is what it says of the Kingdom of
Heaven, of the advent of Messiah and His Kingdom, and of the last things.
On the other hand, the Sibylline Oracles, of which the oldest portions date from about 160
b.c., come to us from Egypt. It is to the latter only that we here refer. Their most interesting
parts are also the most characteristic. In them the ancient heathen myths of the first ages of man
are welded together with Old Testament notices, while the heathen Theogony is recast in a
Jewish mould. Thus Noah becomes Uranos, Shem Saturn, Ham Titan, and Japheth Japetus.
Similarly, we have fragments of ancient heathen oracles, so to speak, recast in a Jewish edition.
The strangest circumstance is, that the utterances of this Judaising and Jewish Sibyl seem to
have passed as the oracles of the ancient Erythraean, which had predicted the fall of Troy, and
as those of the Sibyl of Cumae, which, in the infancy of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus had
deposited in the Capitol.
The collection of eighteen hymns known as the Psalter of Solomon dates from more than half a
century before our era. No doubt the original was Hebrew, though they breathe a somewhat
Hellenistic spirit. They express ardent Messianic aspirations, and a firm faith in the Resurrection,
and in eternal rewards and punishments.
Different in character from the preceding works is The Book of Jubilees - so called from its
chronological arrangement into `Jubilee-periods' - or `Little Genesis.' It is chiefly a kind of
legendary supplement to the Book of Genesis, intended to explain some of its historic
difficulties, and to fill up its historic lacunĉ. It was probably written about the time of Christ - and
this gives it a special interest - by a Palestinian, and in Hebrew, or rather Aramĉan. But, like the
rest of the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic literature which comes from Palestine, or was
originally written in Hebrew, we posses it no longer in that language, but only in translation.
If from this brief review of Hellenist and Pseudepigraphic literature we turn to take a retrospect,
we can scarcely fail to perceive, on the one hand, the development of the old, and on the other
the preparation for the new - in other words, the grand expectancy awakened, and the grand
preparation made. One step only remained to complete what Hellenism had already begun. That