If, as we have seen, syncretism affected Palestinian Judaism we shall expect the same to have been the case with Hellenistic Judaism; this was, indeed, so, and to a much greater extent. Thus, their conception of God was enriched with new ideas from both Platonic and, to a greater degree, from Stoic philosophy, e.g., the doctrine of Divine Immanence, to which we shall refer in dealing with the signs of Greek influence in Jewish religious literature (Chapter V), where we shall see also that the Jewish conceptions of the nature of man was greatly influenced by Greek philosophical teaching. Again, the Dispersion Jews commended their Scriptures to the heathen world by means of interpreting them allegorically; the real sense of Scripture would often be entirely explained away by this method. This, too, shows the influence of the Hellenistic spirit, for this method of interpretation was borrowed from the Stoics who had been in the habit of allegorizing the Greek myths. Finally, it is worth pointing out that even in Palestine, as indications in some later Old Testament and other books show, there had for generations been a tendency towards mitigating the importance of the sacrificial system; the effect of this is likely to have been proportionately great among the Jews of the Dispersion, who would, moreover, have found difficulties in observing many other precepts of the Law. The result would have been to make them all the more susceptible to the foreign cults and philosophical systems which met them on every side; how great that susceptibility was has been illustrated in an extraordinary manner by the recently found _papyri_ referred to above. No one, as Bertholet has truly remarked, can understand the religion of the Jews—and this applies to the Jews of the Dispersion even more than to those of Palestine—“without a full intelligence of their astonishing faculty of assimilation; this assimilation even going the length of actively supporting heathen cults or, as the recently discovered _papyri_ of Assouan have informed us, of swearing by an Egyptian goddess.”[75] III. THE SEPTUAGINT One of the results of the Hellenistic Movement, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated, was the Græco-Jewish literature to which it gave birth. It is impossible to deal here with the whole mass of that literature,[76] even in the most cursory manner, nor is this necessary for our present purpose.[77] We must restrict ourselves in this section to a brief mention of what Schürer calls “the foundation of all Judæo-Hellenistic culture,” namely, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which was the special possession of the Jews of the Dispersion.