At this epoch, and at Alexandria especially, Judaism was no self-centred, exclusive faith afraid of expansion.  The mission of Israel was a very real thing, and conversion was widespread in Rome, in Egypt, and all along the Mediterranean countries.  The Jews, says the letter of Aristeas, “eagerly seek intercourse with other nations, and they pay special care to this, and emulate each other therein.”  And one of the most reliable pagan writers says of them, “They have penetrated into every state, and it is hard to find a place where they have not become powerful."[27] Nor was it merely material power which they acquired.  The days had come which the prophet Amos (viii. 11) had predicted, when “God will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.”  The Greek world had lost faith in the poetical gods of its mythology and in the metaphysical powers of its philosophical schools, 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 that it is somewhat difficult for us to form a proper conception of what it was to the civilized world before the Christian