34 A History of Judaism
translation much later in antiquity, in the sixth century ce, even among
Jews whose religious ideas were expressed in Aramaic, although for
such Jews the Greek translation never reached the authoritative status
ascribed to it by Philo, any more than did the Aramaic translations from
late antiquity, the targumim, which were treated as adjuncts to the Heb-
rew text to aid in its interpretation, rather than as substitutes. Already
in the first century ce some Jews, who presumably took a different view
of the Septuagint to Philo, began a process of revising the Greek text to
bring it closer to the Hebrew, and these revisions, in the names of Theo-
dotion, Symmachus and Aquila, circulated widely among both Jews and
Christians in late antiquity.^12
The biblical books were composed by many different authors over a
long period and it would be naive to expect a consistent theology or
worldview throughout the corpus, but they were clearly seen to share
important characteristics. We know that the demarcation of these texts
as particularly sacred involved selection from a wider corpus of Jewish
literature, excluding for example such Jewish writings as the revelations
ascribed to the antediluvian sage Enoch, mentioned in passing in Gen-
esis, of which multiple copies have been found in fragmentary form
among the Dead Sea scrolls alongside copies of books which were to be
included in the biblical canon. The Enochic books were evidently very
popular at the time the main contours of the biblical corpus were being
defined, in the fourth and third centuries bce, but they were never
themselves treated as scripture. Among the characteristics shared by the
books incorporated into the Bible the most important was the centrality
of the covenant with God revealed to Moses, and it may be that the
Enochic books were excluded because they claimed as the source of
their divine revelation a figure believed to have lived long before Moses,
rather than Moses himself.^13
What makes scripture different from other writings, beyond the notion
of divine inspiration? The original authors came from very different
backgrounds and had different purposes for writing. It is likely that
many legal and historical texts in the Bible, including parts of the Pen-
tateuch, were composed by priests from the Jerusalem Temple seeking
to reinforce the claims of the Temple as the focus of worship. The prophetic
books combine collections of sayings uttered by the prophet under
divine inspiration with autobiographical accounts of the prophet’s
ministry and narratives about the prophet put together by others. The
wisdom literature, such as the book of Proverbs, commends a general