The development of the scriptures had an effect on the Jews which set them apart from, say, the Greeks and, later, the Romans. In Greece, the fifth, fourth and third centuries BC saw the development, as we have seen, of philosophy, critical thinking, tragic drama, history writing, and a trend to less and less religious belief. In Israel it was the opposite: as people learned to read, and to take pleasure in the book, they made more and more of it. Since so much of it was prophecy, rather than mythology, or observation (as in Greece), there was huge scope for interpreting what, exactly, the
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