The Septuagint translation of the Bible was one answer to the lying
accounts of Israel's early history concocted by anti-Semitic writers.
As we have seen,[24] the Alexandrian Jews began early to write
histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose. And for
some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever
their form, to serve a defensive purpose. But later they took the
offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about
them, and the missionary spirit became predominant. Alexander
Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his "History
of the Jews" fragments of these early Jewish historians and
apologists, which the Christian bishop Eusebius has handed down to us.
From them we can gather some notion of the strange medley of fact and
imagination which was composed to influence the Gentile world. Abraham
is said to have instructed the Egyptians in astrology; Joseph devised
a great system of agriculture; Moses was identified variously with the
legendary Greek seer Musaeus and the god Hermes. A favorite device for
rebutting the calumnies of detractors and attracting the outer world
to Jewish ideas, was the attachment to some ancient source of
panegyrics upon Judaism and monotheism. To the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus and the Greek historian Hecatæeus, who wrote a history of
the world, passages which glorify the Hebrew people and the Hebrew God
were ascribed. Still more daring was the conversion into archaic
hexameter verse of the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic
prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles. The Sibyl, whom the
superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of
prehistoric ages, was made to recite the building of the tower of
Babel, or the virtues of Abraham, and again to prophesy the day when
the heathen nations should be wiped out, and the God of Israel be the
God of all the world. Although the fabrication of oracles is not
entirely defensible, it is unnecessary to see, with Schürer, in these