the whole collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Septuagint, or the writings of individual authors such as Philo or Josephus. One valuable aspect of these works is that nearly all of them reveal something about how the Torah and other sacred texts were commonly interpreted at the time in which the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha were written. (The same, of course, is true of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic Jewish writings.) The interest in the meaning of Scripture,