ABSTRACT
What we call ancient Jewish literature includes such works as the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and the Qumran Writings, which do not belong to the Jewish canon, and also the writings of Philo and Paul, of which the latter is hardly considered part of the Jewish legacy.1 However, as Nicholas de Lange rightly asserts, all those writings (excluding Paul’s), written in the period from the end of the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE, ‘form part of the Jewish heritage’, on the grounds that ‘they were written by Jews to be read by Jews, and they bear witness to the life and thought of Jews in bygone times.’2 As for the writings of Paul, despite the fact that they were written by a Christianized Jewish figure and addressed primarily to Christians of both Jewish and nonJewish origin, they are of great importance in showing the sort of background against which rabbinic literature evolved. Accordingly, all these non-rabbinic Jewish writings of antiquity present indirect, yet significant, evidence on the nature of the rabbinic understanding of chosenness. It fact, one main purpose of the formation of the post-biblical Jewish literature, both rabbinic and nonrabbinic, was to maintain and further the biblical notion of the ‘holiness’ of the people of Israel. So what follows will be a discussion of Israel’s chosenness as it appears in the ancient Jewish literature – in terms of non-canonical Jewish books as well as the writings of Philo and Paul. Although dealing exhaustively with the whole topic is beyond the reach of a single chapter, some main points will be highlighted in this way.
