Second Temple Judaism is the world these books were written in, and without it they read like eccentricities. Between the return from exile and the destruction of the temple in seventy, Judaism was arguing with Greek philosophy, watching Persian ideas arrive from the east, and producing far more literature than any canon could hold. These articles supply that context.

The library found by the Dead Sea changed the whole picture: the scrolls gave scholars Hebrew and Aramaic originals of books that had survived only in Ethiopic and Greek translation. The Book of Jubilees retells Genesis on a fixed calendar in which nothing falls on the wrong day, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs divide the world between two spirits.

The outside influences are traceable rather than speculative. Zoroastrian dualism left marks on Jewish angelology and eschatology, Hellenistic philosophy shaped how the apocryphal writers argued, and the older wisdom literature of the Near East stands behind their proverbs. The Letter of Aristeas tells the founding legend of the Septuagint, and the Book of Jasher is a lesson in how a title mentioned in passing acquires a text centuries later.

The largest body of writing to come out of this world is collected in The Books of Enoch: Master Collection.