"
At this epoch, and at Alexandria especially, Judaism was no
self-centred, exclusive faith afraid of expansion. The mission of
Israel was a very real thing, and conversion was widespread in Rome,
in Egypt, and all along the Mediterranean countries. The Jews, says
the letter of Aristeas, "eagerly seek intercourse with other nations,
and they pay special care to this, and emulate each other therein."
And one of the most reliable pagan writers says of them, "They have
penetrated into every state, and it is hard to find a place where they
have not become powerful."[27] Nor was it merely material power which
they acquired. The days had come which the prophet Amos (viii. 11) had
predicted, when "God will send a famine in the land, not a famine of
bread, nor a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of
the Lord." The Greek world had lost faith in the poetical gods of its
mythology and in the metaphysical powers of its philosophical schools,
and was searching for a more real object to revere and lean on. The
people were thirsting for the living God. And in place of the gods of
nature, whom they had found unsatisfying, or the impersonal
world-force, with which they sought in vain to come into harmony, the
Jews offered them the God of history, who had preserved their race
through the ages, and revealed to them the law of Moses.
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