the formation of the bible 29
single solar deity in the fourteenth century bce, but easier to trace is the
reverse impact of Egyptian culture, in that the most conspicuous reli-
gious practices of pagan Egypt came to be seen as the greatest sin.
Of the religious influence of the Persian state, under whose benev-
olent auspices Jewish exiles returned from Babylonia in the sixth century
and in due course rebuilt the Jerusalem temple, perhaps most striking
was the proliferation of speculation about angels as denizens of the
divine realm. The impact of Greek ideas on Judaism, after the Persian
state had been swept away by Alexander of Macedonia between 332
and 323 bce and Jerusalem had been incorporated into a series of states
ruled by Macedonian kings who favoured Greek culture (see Chapter
5), came too late to have more than a minimal effect on the Bible itself,
although the cynicism of Ecclesiastes may be ascribed to the influence of
Greek philosophy. These echoes of the wider world in which the Bible
was formulated are scattered unevenly through the text and have been
used, along with linguistic evidence from the Hebrew, as dating criteria
for the composition of particular books. Thus, for instance, in conjunc-
tion with linguistic evidence from the Hebrew, the Greek ideas found
in Ecclesiastes suggest a date in the third century bce despite the
traditional attribution of the work to King Solomon some 800 years
earlier.^5
The Bible was the product of a variety of landscapes, from the
marshes, lagoons, mudflats and reed banks of Mesopotamia and the
villages and pyramids huddled alongside the Nile in Egypt, to the world
of nomads in the rocky, sandy wastes of the Sinai desert punctuated by
occasional wells, and the peasant agriculture of the land of Israel in the
Iron Age, with its regular harvests of grain, wine and oil. These land-
scapes were as much imagined as real – the Jordan has never been a
particularly impressive river, and Judaea appears to be a ‘land flowing
with milk and honey’ only in contrast to the aridity of the semi- desert
to the east and south – but they all left profound imprints on the devel-
opment of a religion which was to be practised in very different
environments in the next two millennia.
By the time the Bible had been compiled in roughly its present form in
the third century bce, much the most important in the eyes of all Jews
were the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. To Josephus, the authori-
tative books of the Jews constituted ‘the law and the prophets’, a
formulation he shared with his contemporaries who wrote the New
Testament. Of the biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea