Christians have often called the Second Temple Period is sometimes called the “400 silent years” since there are no authoritative writers from the end of the Old Testament until Paul begins to write in the early 50s A.D. But this period is anything but silent! Jewish writers produced a considerable amount of literature during the Second Temple period, especially if we include Josephus and Philo. Aside from the New Testament, these are the main collections of texts a student needs to read in order to understand the Second Temple periodOne small correction: the earliest complete text of 2 Enoch is the Church Slavonic version, but there are also fragments (discovered in 2009) of a Coptic version in a manuscript that dates from the 8th to the 10th centuries CE. Both the Slavonic and the Coptic were presumably translated from a Greek Vorlage.
I would also add the relevant ancient inscriptions in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin to the list.
Past posts in Phil Long's new series on the Second Temple Period are collected here. For Phil's earlier series on 2 Enoch, see here and follow the links. And for some past PaleoJudaica posts on 2 Enoch see here and links (cf. here and here).
