Sibylline Oracles

Introduction

Imagine standing at the threshold of a vast, echoing temple, torchlight flickering against stone walls inscribed with words that seem to pulse with a life of their own. The air smells of incense and burning laurel. Somewhere deep within the sanctuary, a woman sits upon a tripod, her eyes rolled back, her lips moving with utterances that no ordinary mind could manufacture. What she speaks is not hers. It belongs, so the ancients believed, to the divine itself — to Apollo, to the God of Israel, to cosmic forces that bend history like a river bending around stone. What she speaks is prophecy. And for nearly a thousand years, the civilizations of the Mediterranean world hung upon such words with a desperate, reverent hunger.

The texts gathered and examined in this book represent one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of the ancient world. They are a collection of prophetic poems written in Greek hexameter verse — the same stately, rolling meter that Homer used to sing of Achilles and Odysseus — yet their content is something altogether stranger and more urgent than any epic adventure. They speak of empires rising and crashing into ruin. They describe floods and fire raining from heaven. They name kingdoms, denounce tyrants, mourn the fallen, and promise a new age of righteousness. They blend the mythology of Greece and Rome with the theology of Judaism and early Christianity in ways that still startle scholars today. They are, in short, one of the most remarkable crossroads documents in all of human history — texts where multiple civilizations met, argued, borrowed, and transformed one another.

The figure at the center of all this is the Sibyl. She was not one woman but many, or perhaps one woman who appeared in many places and many ages, depending on which ancient writer you consulted. She was said to have lived at Cumae on the Bay of Naples, at Erythrae on the coast of Asia Minor, at Delphi, at Tibur, at Babylon, at the banks of the Hellespont. She was described as ancient beyond reckoning, her body withered by centuries of life, her voice still carrying the terrible clarity of divine inspiration. The Roman poet Virgil placed her at the entrance to the underworld, guiding Aeneas through the realm of the dead. The philosopher Heraclitus mentioned her in the fifth century BCE, suggesting that the tradition of the raving, inspired prophetess was already ancient in his time. By the height of the Roman Empire, the Sibyl had become one of the most potent spiritual symbols in the Western world — a figure who transcended any single religion or culture and spoke to something universal in the human longing for foreknowledge.

Yet the texts we actually possess under the name of the Sibylline Oracles are not the famous original books that the Romans kept locked in a stone chest beneath the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Those books, the Sibyllini Libri, were destroyed — first partially in a fire in 83 BCE, and eventually lost altogether. What survived, what was copied and transmitted across the centuries, is a different and in many ways more fascinating collection: a sprawling anthology of prophetic poetry composed over roughly six centuries, from approximately the second century BCE to the seventh century CE, by authors who were predominantly Jewish and Christian, writing in Greek, using the persona of the ancient Sibyl as a vehicle for their own theological visions, historical anxieties, and apocalyptic hopes.

This is the aspect of these texts that makes them so intellectually thrilling and, at times, so disorienting to the modern reader. They are not what they pretend to be. Or rather, they are something far more interesting than straightforward ancient prophecy. They are acts of creative religious imagination, of cultural negotiation, of polemic and consolation and eschatological dreaming. When a Jewish author in Alexandria around 150 BCE sat down to compose verses in the voice of the Sibyl, he was doing something audacious: he was claiming the most prestigious prophetic authority in the Greco-Roman world and redirecting it toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was saying, in effect, that the very oracle the pagans revered had always been pointing toward the truths of Jewish monotheism. This was not deception in the cynical modern sense. It was a sophisticated form of cultural argument, a way of entering a conversation on terms the other party would recognize.

Later, Christian authors would do the same thing, building on Jewish foundations and adding their own layers of interpretation, their own historical references thinly veiled in prophetic language, their own visions of Christ's coming and the end of the age. The result is a palimpsest of voices, a text that has been written over and over by different hands across different centuries, each layer adding new meaning while preserving older strata beneath. Reading these oracles carefully is like doing archaeology with words — you can sometimes peel back the layers and identify the different communities that contributed to the whole, each one speaking out of its own moment of crisis or hope.

The historical contexts that produced these texts are as dramatic as anything in the ancient world. The Jewish books were composed against backdrops of Seleucid persecution, the desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem, the trauma of Roman conquest, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the catastrophic revolts of the second century. The Christian additions and revisions were shaped by imperial persecution, theological controversy, the fall of Rome, and the slow transformation of the ancient world into something new. To read these oracles is to hear the voices of communities under pressure, communities that turned to prophetic poetry because straightforward speech was dangerous, because the language of divine vision could carry truths that no political authority could easily prosecute, because sometimes the only way to say what needed to be said was to put it in the mouth of a woman who had been dead for a thousand years.

There is also, it must be said, genuine literary beauty in many of these passages. The Greek hexameter is a magnificent instrument, and whoever composed the finest sections of this collection wielded it with real skill. There are passages of apocalyptic description that rival anything in the Book of Revelation for sheer visionary intensity. There are laments over fallen cities that carry authentic emotional weight. There are cosmological passages that attempt to describe the structure of the universe and the nature of God with a philosophical ambition that connects these texts to the great intellectual currents of their age — to Stoicism, to Platonism, to the Jewish wisdom tradition, to early Christian theology. These are not merely historical curiosities. They are works of the religious imagination that deserve to be read with the same seriousness and attention we bring to any major document of ancient spiritual life.

Voices Across the Centuries

To understand how these texts came to exist, we need to think carefully about what prophecy meant in the ancient world — not as a supernatural phenomenon to be either believed or dismissed, but as a social and literary institution with its own conventions, purposes, and audiences. In Greece, the most prestigious form of prophecy was oracular: the god spoke through a human intermediary, usually in a state of divine possession, and the resulting utterances were interpreted by priests and consulted by cities, kings, and private individuals seeking guidance on matters ranging from military campaigns to personal decisions. The oracle at Delphi was the most famous of these institutions, but there were dozens of others scattered across the Greek-speaking world.

The Sibyl occupied a slightly different position in this prophetic landscape. Unlike the Pythia at Delphi, who spoke in response to specific questions, the Sibyl was said to prophesy spontaneously, driven by an inner compulsion she could not control. Her words were not tailored to individual inquiries but were cosmic in scope, addressing the fates of nations and the arc of history itself. This made her utterances harder to interpret but also grander in their implications. She was not a consultant but a herald, announcing what was coming whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. This quality of unsolicited, all-encompassing prophetic vision made the Sibyl an ideal literary persona for authors who wanted to comment on the sweep of history from a position of divine authority.

The oldest layers of the surviving collection appear to draw on genuinely ancient prophetic traditions, even if the texts themselves were composed much later. The first two books, which deal with cosmological themes and the ages of the world, show strong influence from Hesiod's myth of the five ages — gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron — but transform it through a Jewish theological lens, adding the flood of Noah, the tower of Babel, and a vision of eschatological judgment that owes more to the Hebrew prophets than to anything in Greek religion. This blending is not clumsy or accidental. It reflects a deliberate intellectual project: the demonstration that Greek mythological history and Jewish sacred history are not merely compatible but identical, that the same divine plan underlies both traditions.

The third book is generally considered the oldest substantial Jewish composition in the collection, with its core probably dating to the second century BCE, though it has been extensively revised and expanded over subsequent centuries. It is also one of the most politically engaged, containing lengthy denunciations of specific kingdoms and empires — Babylon, Egypt, Macedonia, Rome — that read as thinly veiled commentary on contemporary events. The famous passage about the seventh king of Egypt, for instance, has been interpreted as a reference to the reign of Ptolemy VII Physcon, suggesting that the author was writing from within the Jewish community of Alexandria and addressing the specific anxieties of that community's relationship with their Ptolemaic rulers.

What is remarkable about this political engagement is how it is framed. The denunciations are not presented as political analysis or historical commentary but as eternal divine judgment. The empires being condemned are not merely bad governments; they are manifestations of cosmic evil, representatives of the forces of arrogance and idolatry that have always opposed the divine order. This apocalyptic framing gave the political critique a weight and urgency that straightforward analysis could never achieve. It also gave it a kind of safety, since the words were attributed to an ancient prophetess rather than to any living author who might face consequences for speaking too boldly.

As we move through the collection chronologically, we can trace the shifting historical circumstances of the communities that produced it. The fourth and fifth books show clear evidence of having been composed in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and they carry the raw grief of that catastrophe. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE is referenced in terms that make it an act of divine vengeance against Rome for the destruction of the Temple — a remarkable interpretive move that transforms a natural disaster into a theological statement. The fifth book in particular is suffused with an almost unbearable sense of loss, alternating between mourning for what has been destroyed and fierce hope for divine retribution and ultimate restoration.

The Christian books — primarily six, seven, and eight, though Christian interpolations appear throughout the collection — introduce new theological themes while maintaining the basic framework of Jewish apocalypticism. The eighth book contains one of the most famous passages in the entire collection: a lengthy acrostic poem in which the first letters of each line spell out, in Greek, the phrase 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross' — the famous ICHTHYS acrostic that became one of the earliest Christian symbols. This is a stunning piece of literary craftsmanship, and it illustrates perfectly the way in which the Sibylline tradition was adapted for new theological purposes. The ancient pagan prophetess is made to spell out, letter by letter, the central confession of Christian faith.

The later books — nine through fourteen, sometimes called the 'minor' books though they are anything but minor in historical interest — extend the collection into the Byzantine period, incorporating references to events as late as the Arab conquests of the seventh century. By this point, the Sibylline tradition had been thoroughly Christianized, and the prophetic persona of the Sibyl had been absorbed into a Christian eschatological framework in which her visions pointed toward the Second Coming of Christ and the final judgment of all nations. Yet even in these later texts, the older layers are still visible beneath the surface, and the fundamental impulse that drove the entire tradition — the desire to understand history as the unfolding of a divine plan, to find meaning in catastrophe, to insist that justice will ultimately prevail — remains constant from the earliest Jewish compositions to the latest Christian additions.

The transmission of these texts across the centuries is itself a remarkable story. They were copied and preserved primarily by Christian scholars who found in them useful evidence for the antiquity of Christian truth — the Sibyl prophesying Christ was a powerful apologetic tool, demonstrating that even pagan wisdom had pointed toward the gospel. The early Church Fathers quoted the Sibylline Oracles extensively. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, Augustine — all of them treated the Sibyl as a genuine prophetic figure whose words confirmed the truth of Christianity. This enthusiastic endorsement by major Christian thinkers ensured that the texts would be copied and preserved through the medieval period, even as their complex Jewish origins were largely forgotten or ignored.

Why These Texts Still Matter

There is a temptation, when approaching texts as ancient and as strange as these, to treat them primarily as historical artifacts — interesting for what they tell us about the past, but essentially inert, their living significance exhausted by the circumstances that produced them. This would be a serious mistake. The Sibylline Oracles speak to concerns that are as alive today as they were two thousand years ago, and they do so with an urgency and a literary power that can still reach across the centuries and grab the modern reader by the collar.

Consider what these texts are fundamentally about. They are about communities trying to maintain their identity and their faith under the pressure of overwhelming imperial power. They are about the attempt to find meaning in historical catastrophe — to insist that the destruction of everything you love is not the final word, that a larger pattern of justice is at work even when all the evidence seems to point the other way. They are about the encounter between different cultures and religious traditions, and the creative possibilities that emerge when those traditions are forced into dialogue. They are about the use of language as a form of resistance, the way that words — especially sacred, prophetic words — can sustain a community's sense of purpose and identity when all its material supports have been stripped away.

These are not antiquarian concerns. They describe experiences that are recognizable to any community that has faced persecution, displacement, or cultural pressure. The Jewish authors who composed the earliest layers of this collection were doing something that Jewish communities have had to do repeatedly throughout history, and that many other minority communities have done in their own ways: finding a language powerful enough to sustain hope in conditions that seemed to make hope impossible. The tools they chose — apocalyptic imagery, prophetic authority, the grand sweep of cosmic history — may seem exotic to modern secular readers, but the underlying human need they served is entirely familiar.

There is also something deeply interesting about the way these texts handle the relationship between different religious and cultural traditions. The Sibylline Oracles are, at their core, an exercise in what we might today call intercultural dialogue, though it was a dialogue conducted under conditions of significant inequality and often with polemical intent. Jewish authors appropriated Greek literary forms and prophetic figures in order to make arguments for Jewish theology. Christian authors built on Jewish foundations while redirecting the tradition toward their own theological conclusions. Pagan elements were preserved, transformed, and reinterpreted rather than simply discarded. The result is a text that belongs fully to no single tradition but draws on and speaks to multiple traditions simultaneously.

This hybridity is not a weakness. It is one of the most intellectually interesting things about the collection. These texts demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, that religious and cultural traditions do not develop in isolation but are always in conversation with and in competition with their neighbors. The Judaism that produced the earliest Sibylline books was not the Judaism of the desert or the village; it was the Judaism of Alexandria and the Diaspora, a Judaism that had been living inside Greek culture for generations and had developed sophisticated strategies for engaging with that culture on its own terms. The Christianity that produced the later books was similarly a Christianity that had grown up inside the Roman imperial world and had learned to speak its languages, including the language of prophetic poetry.

For readers coming to these texts from a background in biblical studies, the Sibylline Oracles offer a fascinating window into the world of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity — the world that produced the New Testament and shaped the development of rabbinic Judaism. They show us traditions and concerns that the canonical texts only hint at, communities and voices that were marginalized or forgotten by the process of canon formation. The apocalyptic intensity of some of these passages illuminates the apocalyptic elements of the New Testament in ways that straightforward theological commentary often cannot. When you read the Book of Revelation after reading the fifth Sibylline book, you begin to understand the shared vocabulary and shared emotional register of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism in a new and deeper way.

For readers coming from a background in classical studies, the collection offers an equally rich set of rewards. The use of Greek hexameter for Jewish and Christian religious content is itself a remarkable phenomenon that raises profound questions about the relationship between literary form and religious meaning. Can a meter associated with Homer and Hesiod carry the God of the Hebrew Bible without fundamental distortion? The authors of these texts seem to have believed that it could — or rather, that the distortion was acceptable, even productive, because it made their message accessible to audiences who might not otherwise have listened. This pragmatic approach to cultural form is characteristic of the broader phenomenon of Hellenistic Judaism, and the Sibylline Oracles are one of its most sustained and ambitious expressions.

For readers who come to this book with no particular scholarly background but simply with a curiosity about the ancient world and its spiritual life, perhaps the most important thing to know is this: these texts were written by real people in real historical circumstances, people who were afraid and hopeful and angry and grieving in ways that are entirely recognizable across the centuries. The apocalyptic imagery can seem overwhelming at first — all those empires falling, all those cosmic fires and floods — but beneath the imagery is a very human story about the struggle to believe that the world makes moral sense, that the suffering of the innocent will not go unanswered, that history has a direction and a destination. This is a struggle that did not end in the ancient world, and these ancient voices have something to say to everyone who has ever looked at the chaos of human history and demanded to know what it means.

The pages that follow will take you through the full sweep of this extraordinary collection, from its earliest Jewish layers to its latest Christian additions, from its cosmological visions to its intensely specific historical references, from its borrowings from Homer and Hesiod to its echoes of Isaiah and Revelation. Along the way, you will encounter some of the most vivid and powerful prophetic writing to survive from the ancient world. You will meet communities of faith under pressure, making art out of their anguish and hope out of their despair. You will see the ancient world's great religious traditions in conversation and collision, producing something that none of them could have produced alone. And if you read carefully, you may find that the voices speaking through these ancient verses are not quite as distant as they first appeared — that the questions they are asking are still, in some essential way, our questions too.

The journey begins, as all journeys into the ancient world must, with an act of imagination: the willingness to step into a world where the boundaries between human and divine, between history and myth, between political commentary and cosmic vision, were drawn very differently than we draw them today. It requires a certain suspension of the categories we normally use to organize our experience — not a suspension of critical judgment, but a willingness to take seriously a mode of understanding the world that is genuinely different from our own. The reward for that willingness is access to one of the richest and strangest archives of human spiritual experience that has come down to us from antiquity. These are not easy texts, but they are magnificent ones, and they have been waiting, patient as only ancient things can be, for readers willing to hear what they have to say.

Sibylline Oracles

Book I

Beginning with the first generation of mortal men and going down to the very last, I will prophesy each thing in turn: what once was, what is now, and what shall yet befall the world through the impiety of men.

First, God urges me to relate truly how the world came into being. And you, shrewd mortal, make this known with care, lest you neglect my commands: the most high King brought the whole world into existence by saying, "Let there be," and there was. He established the earth, placing it round about Tartarus, and himself gave the sweet light. He raised the heaven on high, spread out the gleaming sea, and crowned the sky with an abundance of bright-shining stars. He decked the earth with plants, mingled the sea with rivers, and filled the air with zephyrs and watery clouds. Then, appointing another order of creation, he gave fishes to the seas, birds to the winds, shaggy-necked beasts to the woods, and crawling snakes, and all the creatures that now appear upon the earth. All these he made by his word, and everything was done swiftly and with precision, for he was self-caused and looked down from heaven, and the world was finished exceedingly well.

Thereafter he fashioned again a living being, shaping a new man in his own image, beautiful and divine, and bade him dwell in an ambrosial garden, that beautiful labors might be his care. But in that fertile field of Paradise the man longed for companionship, being alone, and prayed that he might see another form like his own. And forthwith God took a bone from the man's side and made fair Eve, a wedded spouse, and gave her to dwell with him in that Paradise. When the man gazed upon her he was suddenly filled with joy, and great admiration held his soul at so exact a likeness, and he answered in turn with wise words that flowed spontaneously, for God had care for all things. Their minds were not darkened by passion, nor did they conceal their nakedness, but with hearts far from evil they walked with limbs exposed, even as wild beasts do.

Afterwards God delivered them his commands and showed them not to touch a certain tree. But the dread serpent drew them away by guile, leading them toward the fate of death and the knowledge of both good and evil. The wife proved the first traitor to God: she gave of the fruit and urged the unknowing man to sin. He, persuaded by the woman's words, forgot the immortal Maker utterly and treated his plain commandments with neglect. Therefore, instead of good, they received evil according to their deed. They pierced the leaves of the sweet fig tree and made clothes, put them on each other, and concealed their sexual parts, for they were ashamed.

The Immortal set his wrath upon them and cast them out of the immortal land. Their dwelling henceforth in mortal land was brought to pass, since they had heard and yet not kept the word of the immortal mighty God. And straightway they went forth upon the fruitful soil, wet with their tears and groans. Then the immortal God himself spoke to them a further word: "Multiply, increase, work constantly upon the earth, that with the sweat of labor you may have sufficient food." So he spoke. And he made the author of deceit press the ground on belly and on side, a crawling snake, driving him out severely. He sent dire enmity between them: the serpent watches to strike at man's head, and man watches to strike at his heel, for death is a near neighbor both to evil-plotting vipers and to men.

And then the race multiplied as the Almighty himself had commanded, and one people grew up after another, innumerable. They adorned their houses in every fashion, built cities and raised their walls with skill and expertise. They were given a long span of days for a life much loved, for they did not die worn out by troubles but as though subdued by sleep — most happy men of great heart, whom the immortal Savior, the King, God, loved. But they too transgressed, struck with folly. With impudence they mocked their fathers and scorned their mothers; they did not acknowledge their kinsmen and formed intrigues against their brothers. They were impure, having defiled themselves with human blood, and they made wars. Then the last calamity came down from heaven and snatched those dreadful men away from life, and Hades received them. It was called Hades because Adam, having first tasted death, went there first and the earth encompassed him around. And therefore all men born upon the earth are called to go to the dwellings of Hades. But even in Hades these men had honor when they arrived, for they were the earliest race.

When Hades had received these, God formed a second race, one of very subtle nature, that cared for lovely works and noble toils, and was distinguished by reverence and solid wisdom. They were trained in arts of every kind, finding inventions through necessity. One devised how to till the land with plows, another worked in wood, another gave his care to sailing, and another watched the stars and practiced augury with winged birds. One took interest in the use of drugs, while another was drawn to magic, and others were instructed and wide awake in every other art that men pursue — industrious, worthy of their name, for they had a sleepless mind within and a huge body. Stout and mighty in form they were, but nonetheless they went down into the terrible chamber of Tartarus, held in firm chains to pay full penalty in the Gehenna of strong, furious, quenchless fire.

After these appeared a third race, strong-minded and overbearing, terrible men who wrought many evils among themselves. Fights, homicides, and battles continually destroyed those men of overweening heart. From them in turn proceeded yet another race, late-completed and youngest born, bloodstained and perverse in counsel — these were the men of the fourth race. Much blood they spilled; they feared God not at all and had no regard for men, for maddening wrath and sore impiety were sent upon them. Wars, homicides, and battles sent some of them into Erebus, so overbearing and impious were they. But the rest the heavenly God himself afterwards changed from his world in anger, casting them down into mighty Tartarus beneath the foundation of the earth.

And later yet the Immortal formed another race, worse still, for they wrought many evils.

For they were much more violent than those, giants perverse, pouring out foul language.

Single among all men, most just and true, was the most faithful Noah, full of care for the noblest works. And to him God himself spoke from heaven: "Noah, be of good cheer, and go preach repentance to all the people, so that they may all be saved. But if, with shameless souls, they will not heed me, I will utterly destroy the whole race with mighty floods of water. Build now, quickly, an undecaying house of strong planks impervious to the wet. I will put understanding in your heart, and subtle skill, and rule of measurement and order; and I will care for all things, so that you may be saved, and all who dwell with you. And I am He who is — discern this in your heart. I clothe myself with the heaven, and cast the sea around me; the earth is my footstool, and the air is poured around my body, and on every side the chorus of the stars runs around me. Nine letters have I; I am of four syllables — discern me. The first three have each two letters, the remaining one the rest, and five are vowels; and of the entire sum the hundreds are twice eight and thrice three tens along with seven. Now, knowing who I am, do not remain uninitiated in my lore."

Thus he spoke, and great trembling seized Noah at what he heard. Then, having turned each matter over in his mind, he went to the people and began with words like these:

"O men insatiable, struck with great madness, whatever things you have practiced will not escape God's notice, for he knows all things — the immortal Savior who oversees all, who has commanded me to warn you, so that you may not perish. Be sober, cut off wickedness, do not fight one another with blood-guilty hearts, and do not irrigate the land with human gore. Revere, O mortals, the supremely great and fearless heavenly Creator, the imperishable God whose dwelling is the sky; and all of you entreat him — he is kind — for the life of cities and of all the world, and of four-footed beasts and flying birds; entreat him to be gracious to all. For when the whole unbounded world of men is destroyed by waters, you will raise a fearful cry. And suddenly the air will be thrown into disorder, and from heaven the fury of the mighty God will come upon you. And it will certainly come to pass that the immortal Savior will send his wrath against men if you do not placate God and repent from this time forward; and no longer shall you do fretful and evil things lawlessly to one another, but let each man guard himself by a holy life."

But when they heard him, each turned up his nose, calling him mad, a frenzy-stricken man.

And then Noah sounded this strain once more:

"O men exceeding wretched, base in heart, unstable, having left modesty behind and loving shamelessness — rapacious lords, fierce sinners, false, insatiable, mischievous, in nothing true, stealthy adulterers, flippant in speech, pouring forth foul words, not fearing the wrath of the most high God — kept to the fifth generation to atone! You do not weep at all, harsh men, but laugh; a sardonic laugh you will laugh when there comes what I speak of — God's dire incoming flood, when Eve's polluted race, blooming perennial in the great earth like a tree with impervious stem, shall disappear root and branch in a single night, and cities, men and all shall the Earth-shaker scatter from the depths and destroy their walls. And then the whole world of unnumbered men shall die. But how shall I weep, how shall I lament inside a wooden house, how mingle my tears with the waves? For when this water that God has commanded comes, the earth shall float, the hills shall float, and even the sky shall float; everything shall be water, and all things shall be destroyed by waters. And the winds shall stand still, and a second age shall begin. O Phrygia, you shall be the first to rise from the crest of the waters, and you shall be the first to nourish another race of men, beginning all over again anew, and you shall be nurse to all."

But when he had spoken thus in vain to that lawless generation, the Most High appeared and cried aloud once more:

"The time has now come, Noah, to fulfill each thing — all that I promised and confirmed to you that day — and to bring to completion, because of a disobedient people, throughout the boundless world, all the things that the generations of former times have practiced, evil things without number. But go quickly and enter with your sons and their wives. Bring in as many as I command of the tribes of beasts and creeping things and birds, and in as many as I ordain for life I will put a willingness to enter."

Thus he spoke. Noah went out and called aloud. Then his wife, his sons, and their brides entered the wooden house; and then the other creatures went in as well, as many as God willed to shut inside. But when the fitting bolt was set about the lid and fitted sideways into its polished place, the purpose of the God of heaven was straightway brought to pass.

He massed the clouds and hid the bright disk of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the circle of heaven, obscuring everything around; he thundered loudly, a terror to mortals, sending forth lightning; and all the winds were roused together, and all the veins of water were unloosed by the opening of great cataracts from heaven, and from the caverns of the earth and the tireless deep the myriad waters appeared, and the whole illimitable earth was covered over.

But that wondrous house swam on the water, and torn by many furious waves and struck by the force of winds it rushed on fearfully; yet with its keel it cut through the mass of foam while the loud-babbling waters dashed around it.

But when God had deluged all the world with rains, Noah took thought to observe by the counsels of the Immortal, for he had by now had enough of the sea. And straightway he opened the house from the polished wall that was bound fast crosswise with skillful stays. And looking out upon the mighty mass of boundless waters on all sides — and it was his fortune to see it with his own eyes — fear possessed him and shook his heart mightily.

Then the air grew a little calm, weary as it was from wetting all the world for so many days; and parting, it brought to light how pale and blood-red was the mighty sky.

The sun's bright disk grew weary, and Noah barely kept his courage. He sent a dove out alone into the distance, to learn whether firm land had appeared. But she flew around over everything with tired wings and came back to him, for the water had not yet ebbed away — it was still filling every place to the depths.

After resting quietly for some days, he sent the dove out again, to learn whether the great waters had receded. She flew on and on, passing over the earth, and rested her body lightly on the damp ground, then came back to Noah bearing an olive branch — a great sign of good news.

Courage and great joy filled them all, for they hoped at last to look upon the land. Then Noah sent out another bird, one with black wings, just as quickly. Trusting to its wings, it flew out willingly, came to the land, and stayed there. And Noah knew the land was near.

When the divine vessel had been tossed here and there over the ocean's billows on the crashing waves, it came to rest at last on a narrow shore. There is in Phrygia, on the dark mainland, a steep and towering mountain called Ararat, so named because upon it all were to be saved from death, and there was great longing in their hearts. From that mountain spring the headwaters of the great river Marsyas.

There on a lofty peak the ark came to rest when the waters ceased, and then again from heaven the divine voice of the great God proclaimed these words: "O Noah, guarded, faithful, just — come boldly forth, with your sons and your wife and the three brides, and fill all the earth, increasing and multiplying, rendering justice to one another through all generations, until every race of men shall come to judgment; for judgment shall come to all."

So spoke the divine voice. Then Noah, encouraged, hastened from his resting place onto the land, and with him went his sons and wife and brides, and creeping things, and birds and four-footed beasts, and all else went out from the wooden house into the open world. And Noah went forth as the eighth, most just of men, having spent on the waters a full forty-one days by the counsel of the mighty God.

Then a new stock of life arose again — golden first, which was indeed the sixth age and the best, reckoned from the time when the first-formed man appeared. Heavenly is its name, because all things shall be a care to God. O first race of the sixth age! O mighty joy that I afterward shared, when I escaped sheer ruin, tossed greatly by the waves, together with my husband and brothers-in-law, stepfather and stepmother, and the wives of my husband's brothers, all of us suffering terribly.

Now I will sing of fitting things. There shall be a many-colored flower on the fig tree, and afterward Cronos shall hold royal power and dominion. For three kings of great soul, most just of men, shall divide the portions of the earth and rule for many years, rendering justice to men who care for toil and deeds of love.

And the earth shall glory in her many fruits, growing of themselves and yielding much grain for the race. And the foster-fathers, ageless all their days, shall be kept far from chilling and dreadful diseases; they shall die as though falling asleep, and shall pass away to Acheron in the dwellings of Hades, where they shall have honor, for they were a race of blessed ones — fortunate heroes to whom the Lord of Sabaoth gave a noble mind and with whom he always shared his counsels. And blessed shall they be even when they go into Hades.

Then afterward there shall come another race, oppressive and strong — the earth-born Titans. All shall excel in form, stature, and growth, and there shall be one language, as in the beginning, which God implanted in their breasts from the first race. But even these, with haughty hearts and rushing headlong toward ruin, shall at last resolve to make war against the starry heaven. Then the stream of the great ocean shall pour its raging waters upon them. But the mighty Lord of Sabaoth, though enraged, shall restrain his wrath, because he promised that no flood would again be brought upon men of evil soul.

But when the great high-thundering God shall cause the boundless swelling of the many waters — with their waves rising high on every side — to cease from wrath, and shall reduce their measure into the other depths of the sea, setting bounds by harbors and rough headlands around the land, then also shall a child of the great God come to men clothed in flesh, fashioned in the likeness of mortals upon the earth, and he shall hear. Four vowels and two consonants are twice announced in him; the whole sum I will name: eight ones, and as many tens upon these, and yet eight hundred — these will reveal the name to men who seek it. Know in your own understanding that the Christ is the child of the immortal God most high.

He shall fulfill God's law, not destroy it, bearing his very image, and shall teach all things. Priests shall bring and offer to him gold and myrrh and frankincense, for all these things he shall also bring to pass.

But when a voice shall come through the desert land bearing tidings to men, calling all to make straight paths and to cast wickedness out of the heart, and to illuminate with water all the bodies of mankind so that, being born again, they may no more go astray from what is righteous — and one of barbarous mind, bound by the spell of dances, shall cut that voice off and bestow it as a reward — then on a sudden there shall be a sign to mortals. Watched over, there shall come out of the land of Egypt a fair stone, and on it the Hebrew people shall stumble; but through his guidance the nations shall be brought together, for through him they shall also come to know the God who rules on high, and the way in the common light. For to chosen men he will show eternal life, but fire shall be brought upon the lawless for ages.

Then shall he heal the sick, and all who are blameworthy and trust in him. The blind shall see, the lame shall walk, the deaf shall hear, and the dumb shall speak. He shall drive out demons, and there shall be a resurrection of the dead; he shall walk upon the waves, and in a desert place

He shall satisfy five thousand with food from five loaves and a fish out of the sea, and with what remains he shall fill twelve baskets full, a sign of hope for all peoples.

But Israel, drunk with blindness, will not perceive this, nor will they hear, weighed down by dull and feeble ears.

Then the furious wrath of the Most High shall come upon the Hebrews and take faith away from them, because they slew the Son of the heavenly God. With foul lips Israel will strike him, spit upon him, and give him gall for food and undiluted vinegar for drink, acting with wicked madness in their hearts and souls, impious and unseeing, blinder than moles, more terrible than crawling venomous beasts, bound fast in a heavy sleep.

But when he spreads his hands wide and measures out all things, and bears the crown of thorns, and they pierce his side with reeds — for which a dark and dreadful night shall cover the middle of the day for three hours — then the temple of Solomon shall bring a mighty sign to its end before the eyes of men, as he descends to the house of Hades to proclaim resurrection to the dead.

And when in three days he comes again into the light and shows himself to men and teaches all things, he shall ascend through the clouds to the house of heaven, leaving the world a gospel and a covenant.

In his name a new shoot shall blossom from the nations guided by the law of the Mighty One. After this there shall be wise guides, and then afterward the prophets shall cease.

Then, when the Hebrew people reap the harvest of their evil, a Roman king shall utterly destroy much gold and silver. Afterward other royal powers shall arise in succession as kingdoms perish, and they will oppress all mortals. Great ruin shall come upon those men when they begin to practice unrighteous arrogance.

And when the temple of Solomon in the holy land falls, cast down by barbarous men clad in bronze armor, and the Hebrews are driven from their land to wander in desolation, and much darnel is mingled among the wheat, then evil strife shall arise among all mankind. Cities suffering outrage shall mourn one another, receiving in their hearts the wrath of the great God, because they have done wicked works.