and was searching for a more real object to revere and lean on. The
people were thirsting for the living God. And in place of the gods of
nature, whom they had found unsatisfying, or the impersonal
world-force, with which they sought in vain to come into harmony, the
Jews offered them the God of history, who had preserved their race
through the ages, and revealed to them the law of Moses.

The missionary purpose was largely responsible for the rise of a
philosophical school of Bible commentators. The Hellenistic world was
thoroughly sophisticated, and Alexandria was distinguished above all
towns as the home of philosophical lectures and book-making. One of
Philo's contemporaries is said to have written over one thousand
treatises, and in one of his rare touches of satire Philo relates[28]
how bands of sophists talked to eager crowds of men and women day and
night about virtue being the only good, and the blessedness of life
according to nature, all without producing the slightest effect, save
noise. The Jews also studied philosophy, and began to talk in the
catchwords of philosophy, and then to re-interpret their Scriptures
according to the ideas of philosophy. The Septuagint translation of
the Pentateuch was to the cultured Gentile an account in rather bald
and impure Greek of the history of a family which grew into a petty
nation, and of their tribal and national laws. The prophets, it is
true, set forth teachings which were more obviously of general moral
import; but the books of the prophets were not God's special
revelation to the Jews, but rather individual utterances and
exhortations: and their teaching was treated as subordinate to the
Divine revelation in the Five Books of Moses. Those, then, who aimed
at the spread of Jewish monotheism were impelled to draw out a
philosophical meaning, a universal value from the Books of Moses.
Nowadays the Bible is the holy book of so much of the civilized world