The Bible is one of the most influential collections of texts in human history. Its influence goes far beyond the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, which regard different versions of it as sacred; it has fundamentally shaped how most people living in the west in the twenty-first century, even those who of us who are not religiously Christian or Jewish, think about religion in general. Because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are so central to modern Judaism and Christianity respectively, many people have wondered whether any non-Israelite cultures of the ancient world had similar collections of sacred texts.
As it happens, a large number of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts have survived that were relevant in various ways to those peoples’ religious practices, including some texts that people considered to be “divinely inspired” in some sense and some that bear significant parallels to Biblical literature. Nonetheless, the Hebrew Bible bears some remarkable features that set it apart from other sacred writings that existed in the ancient world.
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