ABSTRACT
The Hebrew Bible has traditionally been considered a collection of texts with deep Ancient Near Eastern cultural roots, composed mostly during the monarchic period that preceded Jerusalem's fall and the Babylonian and Persian periods that followed that event. In the last two decades, biblical scholarship has increasingly come to accept the possibility that the major texts of the Hebrew Bible, including both the Pentateuch and the Primary History, might in fact be the product of the Hellenistic Era. An important test for the Hellenistic Era composition of the Hebrew Bible is an analysis of the literary genres that appear in the biblical corpus to see if they reflect Ancient Near Eastern or Greek literary categories. Many biblical texts do in fact appear to follow distinctively Greek literary conventions. This article surveys Greek and Hellenistic literary genres that are easily detected in biblical writings and are without Ancient Near Eastern parallels.
