Before the Church · c. 160–100 BC
Sibylline Oracles, Book Three
Anonymous
What it is
The oldest Jewish Sibylline book, written in Egypt in Homeric hexameters: the empires rise and fall, the seventh king of Greek descent will come, and at the end the nations will send gifts to the temple and the earth will bear its fruit without cutting.
Why it lasted
The first Jewish text to take up a pagan prophetic voice wholesale, and the beginning of a tradition later Christian writers would read as a pagan witness to Christ — the Sibyl of the Dies irae and the Sistine ceiling.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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