The Septuagint translation of the Bible was one answer to the lying accounts of Israel's early history concocted by anti-Semitic writers. As we have seen,[24] the Alexandrian Jews began early to write histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose. And for some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever their form, to serve a defensive purpose. But later they took the offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about them, and the missionary spirit became predominant. Alexander Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his "History of the Jews" fragments of these early Jewish historians and apologists, which the Christian bishop Eusebius has handed down to us. From them we can gather some notion of the strange medley of fact and imagination which was composed to influence the Gentile world. Abraham is said to have instructed the Egyptians in astrology; Joseph devised a great system of agriculture; Moses was identified variously with the legendary Greek seer Musaeus and the god Hermes. A favorite device for rebutting the calumnies of detractors and attracting the outer world to Jewish ideas, was the attachment to some ancient source of panegyrics upon Judaism and monotheism. To the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the Greek historian Hecatæeus, who wrote a history of the world, passages which glorify the Hebrew people and the Hebrew God were ascribed. Still more daring was the conversion into archaic hexameter verse of the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles. The Sibyl, whom the superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of prehistoric ages, was made to recite the building of the tower of Babel, or the virtues of Abraham, and again to prophesy the day when the heathen nations should be wiped out, and the God of Israel be the God of all the world. Although the fabrication of oracles is not entirely defensible, it is unnecessary to see, with Schürer, in these writings a low moral standard among the Egyptian Jews. They were not meant to suggest, to the cultured at any rate, that the Sibyl in one case or Heraclitus in another had really written the words ascribed to them. The so-called forgery was a literary device of a like nature with the dialogues of Plato or the political fantasies of More and Swift. By the striking nature of their utterances the writers hoped to catch the ear of the Gentile world for the saving doctrine which they taught. The form is Greek, but the spirit is Hebraic; in the third Sibylline oracle, particularly, the call to monotheism and the denunciation of idolatry, with the pictures of the Divine reward for the righteous, and of the Divine judgment for the ungodly, remind us of the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah; as when the poet says,[25] "Witless mortals, who cling to an image that ye have fashioned to be your god, why do ye vainly go astray, and march along a path which is