Books that almost were Bible
Date
200BCE
200 BCE to 200 CEapproximate date
With no way to authenticate a book as biblical, Jewish authors imitated scripture's style and ascribed texts to ancient figures; some may have counted as scripture for some Jews, though they stayed outside today's Jewish canon.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
9 statements
01False writing
Since there was no way to authenticate a work as genuinely biblical, authors tried to pass certain texts off as biblical by imitating the style of Genesis and ascribing authorship to figures like Moses and Solomon, producing the writings now called the Pseudepigrapha, from the Greek for 'false writing'. There are many, written in the centuries after the Persian period, attributed to Enoch, Moses and others, but they did not enter today's Jewish canon.
Most of the pseudepigraphical works were known long before the Dead Sea Scrolls, from translations into Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic and Armenian preserved by Christian communities. Jews wrote them between 200 BCE and 200 CE (Christians later reworked several). Written centuries after the age they describe, they do not illuminate the time of Abraham and Moses, but they help us understand how the Bible was interpreted in early Judaism.
Examples: 1 Enoch and other works attributed to Enoch, of whom Genesis says he 'walked with God', recount what he supposedly witnessed and was taught in heaven, among it the mysteries of nature and the future, and seem to have first appeared in the third and second centuries BCE. Jubilees, written in the mid-second century BCE, tells of an alternative revelation to Moses at Sinai by an angel and follows a 364-day solar calendar, unlike the lunar basis of the Jewish calendar.
The Wisdom of Solomon, probably dating to the first century BCE or CE, speaks of divine judgment after death, with the wicked punished and the righteous granted immortality, and belongs to the Greek Bible and to certain Christian churches. The Testament of Solomon, perhaps of the fifth or sixth century CE, tells how the king enlisted demons to help build the Temple.
There are also books written to emulate the Bible, with stories set in biblical times. From the Apocrypha come Tobit, about an upright man living among Israelites carried off to Assyria, and Judith, about a pious widow who single-handedly saved her people from Nebuchadnezzar; from the Pseudepigrapha, Joseph and Aseneth, about Joseph's Egyptian wife, here depicted as a convert.
02Apocrypha and other canons
A few of these Bible-like works belong today to certain Christian canons, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, among what Catholics call the deuterocanonical books and Protestants, who exclude them, call the Apocrypha. For the most part, though, they were composed too late to win mainstream acceptance among Jews.
Protestants chose a canon lacking the deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books and sought to go back to the Hebrew in their translations and commentaries, yet their Bible, like every Christian Bible, also contains the New Testament, which Jews do not count as scripture. Muslims likewise include Abraham, Moses and David in their sacred history, but their canon is the Quran, which records the later revelations to Muhammad.
One could say that every religious community that venerates the Bible has its own conception of it. The authors concentrate on the Bible as Jews define and understand it, a text now organized in three parts: Torah, Prophets and Writings.
Context
Scholars are fairly confident that canonization began in the Persian period, but when it ended is unclear. Centuries later there was still debate over whether books like Ecclesiastes belonged in the canon, and other books may have been viewed as canonical by some Jews and rejected by others. Even so, once the Second Temple era closed, most Jews seem to have agreed on the contents, which were close to today's Jewish Bible.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
James Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), esp. 7–34 (Letter of Aristeas); 35–142 (Jubilees); 775–919 (Ezekiel's tragedy and other Jewish texts in Greek).
Translations of Jewish texts in Greek (source of the translation of Ezekiel's tragedy used in the chapter) · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 88
Lawrence Wills and Jonathan Klawans, The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha (Oxford University Press; listed as forthcoming in the book).
Translation of the Apocrypha with commentary from the perspective of Jewish studies · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 61
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 51inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 52inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 51inspect
- 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 53inspect
- 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 53inspect
- 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 51inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.