The 'Apocryphal' Old Testament

‘Many great teachings have been given to us through the Law and the Prophets and the others that followed them.’ So wrote the grandson of Ben Sira in the late second century bce, in the preface to the translation of his grandfather’s book. The passage is often cited as evidence for the emerging notion of a tripartite canon. The third part (‘the others’) was ill-defined and open-ended. Ben Sira himself aspired to contribute something analogous. We do not know how the corpus of ‘the Prophets’ was delimited, and even the exact understanding of the Law might be open to some debate. But there is no doubt that by the second century bce there existed a corpus of authoritative writings, although its extent and the authority of the various books might vary from place to place. The existence of such an authoritative corpus is clearly presupposed in the Dead Sea scrolls.
The existence of a body of authoritative writings by no means signalled the end of literary production in ancient Judaism. Ben Sira was not alone in wishing to contribute to the tradition. But the traditional corpus influenced the new writing in various ways. At one end of the spectrum, we see the beginnings of explicit interpretation of the old books, in the pesharim of the Dead Sea scrolls and the allegorical commentaries of Hellenistic Judaism. At the other end, even writings that were quite original in theme and genre usually allude to the older writings in various ways. In between there is a range of compositions that are modelled in various ways on the antecedent literature, or invoke the great figures of the tradition as pseudonymous authors or narrators for new works.