"But even while the teachings of Hellas
were pushing their way into subjugated Palestine, seducing Jewish
philosophy to apostasy, and seeking, by main force, to introduce
paganism, the Greek philosophers themselves stood awed by the majesty
and power of the Jewish prophets. Swords and words entered the lists as
champions of Judaism. The vernacular Aramaean, having suffered the Greek
to put its impress upon many of its substantives, refused to yield to
the influence of the Greek verb, and, in the end, Hebrew truth, in the
guise of the teachings of Jesus, undermined the proud structure of the
heathen." This is a most excellent characterization of that literary
period, which lasted about three centuries, ending between 100 and 150
C. E. Its influence upon Jewish literature can scarcely be said to have
been enduring. To it belong all the apocryphal writings which,
originally composed in the Greek language, were for that reason not
incorporated into the Holy Canon. The centre of intellectual life was no
longer in Palestine, but at Alexandria in Egypt, where three hundred
thousand Jews were then living, and thus this literature came to be
called Judaeo-Alexandrian. It includes among its writers the last of the
Neoplatonists, particularly Philo, the originator of the allegorical
interpretation of the Bible and of a Jewish philosophy of religion;
Aristeas, and pseudo-Phokylides. There were also Jewish _litterateurs_:
the dramatist Ezekielos; Jason; Philo the Elder; Aristobulus, the
popularizer of the Aristotelian philosophy; Eupolemos, the historian;
and probably the Jewish Sybil, who had to have recourse to the oracular
manner of the pagans to proclaim the truths of Judaism, and to Greek
figures of speech for her apocalyptic visions, which foretold, in
biblical phrase and with prophetic ardor, the future of Israel and of
the nations in contact with it.

Meanwhile the word of the Bible was steadily gaining importance in
Palestine. To search into and expound the sacred text had become the
inheritance of the congregation of Jacob, of those that had not lent ear
to the siren notes of Hellenism. Midrash, as the investigations of the
commentators were called, by and by divided into two streams--Halacha,
which establishes and systematizes the statutes of the Law, and Haggada,
which uses the sacred texts for homiletic, historical, ethical, and
pedagogic discussions. The latter is the poetic, the former, the
legislative, element in th