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The Jewish tradition knows the eastern origins and the Greek adoption of the Sibyl: *I tell you these things, after leaving the long Babylonian walls of Assyria, stung to frenzy, a fire sent to Greece, prophesying God's anger [or, revelations] to all mortal men... so that I prophesy to humans the divine riddles. Throughout Greece men shall speak of me as from another country, the shameless one of Erythrae. But others shall say that I am the demented, lying Sibyl whose mother was Circe and whose father was Gnostos.

11: 6—9; 35: 1—10; 65: 17—25). Particularly interesting is the statement that ' From the sun, God shall send a king, who shall make the whole earth cease from evil war' (6521). Behind this expectation lies the Egyptian mythology, which saw the Pharaohs, and later the Ptolemies, as the incarnation of the sun god. The Alexandrian Jewish author is drawing on Egyptian royal language to describe a messianic figure whom he seems to identify with a Ptolemaic ruler. Men will hide their idols for shame, he says, 'when a young king, the seventh in succession from the rule of the Greeks, reigns in Egypt' (608f).

It has been noted that in the story of the banquet preceding the actual translation (182—294) seven rounds of questions are put to the translators. , seventy-two men in all), and it has been suggested that the author has adapted the account in this way to meet the needs of his own original scheme of six translators from each tribe. The emphasis is on the obtaining of an accurate translation, based on the majority verdict of the elders. The committee technique of translation is historically much more credible than the later accounts, which describe the miraculous total verbal agreement of translators working separately.