A Sacred Race of Pious Men

The sibyls were a group of seers mentioned by Greek writers as early as the fourth century BCE and held in high regard in Rome. They were old women who, in a state of frenzy, predicted a typically doom-laden future. Jews and, later, Christians exploited this tradition to assert that the sibyls confirmed their own beliefs about the future.

The original sibylline books are lost, but a collection of Jewish and Christian oracles in the same style was put together around the seventh century CE by a Byzantine Christian editor. The individual texts of this collection, referred to collectively as the Sibylline Oracles, date from the second century BCE to the seventh century CE and were written in the Jewish diaspora in Greek hexameter. The texts were constantly reworked, and Jewish and Christian elements are often jumbled together. These texts were ultimately preserved in Christian libraries, though their earliest stratum is unquestionably Jewish, especially books 3, 4, and 5.

In this excerpt, the sibyl, identified with Noah’s daughter-in-law, foretells the restoration of the Jewish people, after acknowledging that the Babylonian exile was a consequence of Israel’s sins. The “young seventh king of Egypt” is likely either Ptolemy VII Neos Philopator or Ptolemy Memphites, both of whom lived during the later second century BCE. The author was an Egyptian Jew, probably living in Alexandria.