general issue of God’s justice and Israel’s faithfulness to the covenant is a
recurring topic in Jewish literature written in Hebrew or Aramaic too.
This list of themes is not exhaustive; Jewish texts written in Greek en-
gage other issues as well. But some themes are strikingly absent or mar-
ginal: messianism and cultic prescriptions, to name just a few. If one were
to add to the corpus texts such as3 Baruch, 4 Baruch (Paraleipomena
Jeremiou), Testament of Abraham,and2 Enoch,heavenly visions and an-
gelic revelations would feature more prominently in the general picture.
The Jewish or Christian provenance of these works, though, continues to
be disputed. Also conspicuous is the lack of liturgical and halakic texts.
Here again, though, the shape of the corpus likely reflects the selective in-
terests of the church fathers.Ideological Features
Jewish works composed in Greek do not display uniform ideological fea-
tures. For instance, Theodotus’s epic poem reflects a nationalistic and ex-
clusive conception of Judaism. As mentioned above, he completely omits
Jacob’s condemnation of the aggression perpetrated by Simeon and Levi
against the Shechemites (Gen. 34:30). By contrast, the author of 4 Macca-
bees refers to this condemnation and even quotes Gen. 49:7: “Cursed be
their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel.” According to
him, the very fact that Jacob says about Simeon and Levi “May their anger
be cursed” means that reason is able to restrain anger (4 Macc. 2:19-20).
The violence with which the two brothers avenged their sister, which
seemed so praiseworthy to Theodotus that he presented it as the fulfill-
ment of an oracle from God, is depicted as a reprehensible passion by the
author of 4 Maccabees. The same degree of disagreement can be noticed
concerning other issues. For example, as we noted above, not all Jewish au-
thors writing in Greek condemned marriages to foreign women. More-
over, had the writings of extreme allegorizers of Scripture (criticized by
Philo inDe Migratione Abrahami89–90) been preserved, we would proba-
bly have an even more diverse picture.
The use of the Greek language and the mastery of Greek literary
forms, then, does not in itself predetermine the ideological or philosophi-
cal orientation of the writer. In particular, writing in Greek is not synony-
mous with openness to Gentiles or universalism. Still, in Second Temple
literature the most universalistic texts are indeed to be found among those247Early Jewish Literature Written in GreekEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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