Epilogue
appear to at first sight to do so, in fact brings the story, in the form of pseudo-
prophecies, down to the second century.., in the Hellenistic period.^30 So
too do two books which were to form part of the Greek Christian Bible,
and hence of contemporary Catholic Bibles, but were not included in the
eventual canon of the Hebrew Bible; I mean, of course, Ben Sira / Ecclesiasti-
cus, written in Hebrew (of which some was found on Masada), apparently in
the early second century.., and then translated two generations later into
Greek;^31 and Maccabees, preserved in Greek, but for which a Hebrew origi-
nal is often supposed. In other words, the earliest actual texts from Qumran,
from the third century.., overlap in time with the writing of the latest bib-
lical, or semi-biblical, works, and are not enormously remote in time even
from the latest events explicitly narrated in the canonical Bible, that is, those
recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which took place in the fifth
century. In a sense, therefore, if we wish to write ‘‘Old Testament history,’’
our starting point and material are now quite promising, and all the more so
if we choose to deploy the mass of non-biblical Near Eastern primary ma-
terial, as in John Bright’s classicHistoryof Israel, to retell the whole story from
Abraham onwards against the background of what we know from primary
documents of local and regional history, from the neighbouring Phoenician
cities or to Aramaean kingdoms to the Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian em-
pires.^32 Or, on the other hand, we might argue that all the earlier stages of
the narrative represent a fabrication, concocted in the Babylonian Captivity,
under the Persian Empire, or even in the Hellenistic period.^33
Alternatively, we could leave open the question of whether the narrative
offered by the Hebrew Bible is history or historical fiction and concentrate
on the place of that story in the awareness of writers either from the Hel-
lenistic period, such as Ben Sira / Ecclesiasticus, Daniel, or the authors of
and Maccabees, or from the Roman period, such as (above all) Josephus
in hisJewish Antiquities. Whatever choice we make, its basis, to repeat, has
been fundamentally transformed by the availability of biblical manuscripts,
. See the author’s ‘‘Hellenistic History in a Near Eastern Perspective: The Book of
Daniel,’’ in P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, and E. Gruen, eds.,Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Cul-
ture, History and Historiography(), ( chapter in the present volume).
. For the (partial) Hebrew text of Ben Sira from Masada, see S. Talmon,MasadaVI:
Hebrew Fragments from Masada(), andThe Qumran Bible(n. above), –.
. J. Bright,A History of Israel^3 ().
. For an example of the extreme sceptical view, see, e.g., Philip R. Davies,In Search of
‘‘Ancient Israel’’^2 (), and for a vigorous recent response W. M. Schniedewind,How the
BibleBecameaBook().