THIS book is more than a translation of my Hebrew book, published in 1992. In preparing the English version, I not only expanded and improved on it in several aspects; I also corrected those points that required correction, and tried to be more precise in the concepts and terms I used. In consequence this is in many respects a vastly different book from that published in Hebrew.

When I began writing this book, almost six years ago, its general structure, scope, and central ideas were quite clear to me; I was familiar with some of the literature dealing with its main topic and related topics, but it had not occurred to me that the relevant literature was so vast. I am not referring only to academic works but to all those numerous texts in which the world of Judaism is linked, in one way or another, with classical antiquity and Hellenism. I very soon found myself as the reverse of Hemingway's old man: I had a skeleton, but in order to put skin and bones on it, I had to throw my net into the large ocean of texts. In the course of the years during which I wrote and rewrote this book, I cast my net again and again-and each time I discovered how full the sea is. I also had to resolve to throw back into the sea many fish that already were or subsequently became familiar to me; for example, I had to forgo citing many works of philosophy, theology, semantics, and psychosemantics. On the other hand, I tried to haul in those fish that were not so well known, or were dispersed in different waters. But I have no doubt that the number of references to the subject is immense and many fish still remain in the large sea of texts. While I believe that a few more of these texts could enrich the evidence presented in this book, they would not change its skeletal structure or its key ideas.

The main subject of this study is Jewish history, but I truly believe that even a zealous classicist may find it interesting and enriching to see the diverse, and often strange, fields to which the classical heritage was borne and in which it was transplanted.