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 Schuerer, in these writings a low moral standard among the Egyptian Jews.  They were not meant to suggest, to the cultured at any rate, that the Sibyl in one case or Heraclitus in another had really written the words ascribed to them.  The so-called forgery was a literary device of a like nature with the dialogues of Plato or the political fantasies of More and Swift.  By the striking nature of their utterances the writers hoped to catch the ear of the Gentile world for the saving doctrine which they taught.  The form is Greek, but the spirit is Hebraic; in the third Sibylline oracle, particularly, the call to monotheism and the denunciation of idolatry, with the pictures of the Divine reward for the righteous, and of the Divine judgment for the ungodly, remind us of the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah; as when the poet says,[25] “Witless mortals, who cling to an image that ye have fashioned to be your god, why do ye vainly go astray, and march along a path which is not straight?  Why remember ye not the eternal founder of All?  One only God there is who ruleth alone.”  And again:  “The children of Israel shall mark out the path of life to all mortals, for they are the interpreters of God, exalted by Him, and bearing a great joy to all mankind."[26] The consciousness of the Jewish mission is the dominant note.  Masters now of Greek culture, the Jews believed that they had a philosophy of their own, which it was their privilege to teach to the Greeks; their conception of God and the government of the world was truer than any other; their conception of man’s duty more righteous; even their conception of the state more ideal.

The apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon, which was probably written at Alexandria during the first century B.C.E., is marked by the same spirit.  There again we meet with the glorification of the one true God of Israel, and the denunciation of pagan idolatry; and while the author writes in Greek and shows the influence of Greek ideas, he makes the Psalms and the Proverbs his models of literary form.  “Love righteousness,” he begins, “ye that be judges of the earth; think ye of the Lord with a good mind and in singleness of heart seek ye Him.”  His appeal for godliness is addressed to the Gentile world in a language which they understood, but in a spirit to which most of them were strangers.  The early history of the Israelites in Egypt comes home to him with especial force, for he sees it “in the light of eternity,” a striking moral lesson for the godless Egyptian world around him in which the house of Jacob dwelt again.  With poetical imagination he tells anew the story of the ten plagues as though he had lived through them, and seen with his own eyes the punishment of the idolatrous land.  He ends with a paean to the God who had saved His people.  “For in all things Thou didst magnify them, and Thou didst glorify them, and not lightly regard them, standing by their side in every time and place.”