Powerful currents of opinion within Judaism also continued to suggest modifications of aspects of Jewish belief if there seemed to be valuable material in the religions of others. Following Greek thought, Jews embraced the concept of nothingness, and that gave them a new perspective on creation. II Maccabees, a work of the Apocrypha probably written in the second century BCE, is the first in Jewish literature to insist that God did not make creation ‘out of things that existed’, unformed, chaotic material, but summoned creation out of nothing.
