ABSTRACT
The establishment of the learned centre of Alexandria, especially the Museion, may have been a decisive factor in the development of Hellenism. The Book of Jubilees preserves the most extensive retelling of the Primeval Story found in Hellenistic literature. Jubilees follow the Greek myth and have the Titans chained to the depths of the earth. Historiography in the Old Testament does not have the work of the great Greek history writers as its closest parallel, but rather the Hellenistic type of historiography that people find in Livy's Ab urbe condita, his enormous history of ancient Rome. This chapter does not argue that it was unlikely that biblical literature had its home in Palestine in the Persian Period, nor is it likely that it originated in Iron Age Jerusalem. By and large, Palestine, and especially the southern highlands, provides one of the poorest cultural environments in the whole of the ancient Near East.
