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For the period before the Destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, a wealth of valuable information is now available concerning individual writings, ancient authors, prominent persons, political and religious groups, and socio-economic matters, which are treated in relevant, separate encyclopaedia articles (Stuckenbruck and Gurtner 2019). These articles offer essential bibliography. Individual, pre-70 texts have been critically discussed with careful attention to their origins and settings in life (Nickelsburg 2005); and their complex relationship to the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint has been described and illustrated in detail in a scholarly manner accessible to non-Hebraists (Kugel 1998). The apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings, since the discovery and analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, have assumed new significance: Stone 2011 offers fresh and original insights into this literature, with an extensive bibliography. An important study of the literary genres employed in Jewish writings from the Second Temple period up to the end of the Talmudic period (Samely e.a. 2013) has cast light on the distinctive character and quality of Jewish interaction with surrounding cultures, which supplements our growing knowledge of Jewish self-understanding in the ancient world (Collins 2000). The early history of Rabbinic Judaism and the literature which it produced has come to be viewed more sensitively in relation to the general economic, social, and administrative life of the Roman world which hosted it (Lapin 2012). The Babylonian Talmud, which became the authoritative text (along with the Hebrew Bible) for Rabbinic Judaism, reveals how deeply embedded Babylonian Jewry was in its non-Jewish world, and, judiciously employed, can reveal important historical information about the ways Jews and non-Jews lived in late antiquity outside the borders of the Roman Empire (Kalmin 1994; Fonrobert and Jaffee 2007). For further reading on the Midrashim, a good and reliable guide is provided by the collection of essays edited by Teugels and Ulmer 2005.