around 600 BCE, when previously unconnected material began to be drawn together. By around 400 BCE these books, the forerunners of the Torah, had reached their modern form and began to be recognised as complete, unchangeable, and sacred. By around 200 BCE, the five books were accepted as the first section of the Jewish canon. It seems that the tradition of Mosaic authorship was first applied to Deuteronomy, which scholars generally agree was composed in Jerusalem during the reform program of King Josiah in the late 7th century BCE; it is this law-code that books such as Joshua and Kings (completed in the mid-6th century BCE) mean when they speak of the "torah of Moses". In later books such as Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah the meaning had expanded to include the other laws such as Leviticus, and by the Hellenistic period, Jewish writers referred to the entirety of the five books, narrative and laws, as the Book (or books) of Moses. Authorship was not considered important by the society that produced the Hebrew Bible (the Protestant Old Testament), and the Torah never names an author. It was only after , when Jews came into intense contact with author-centric Greek culture, that the rabbis began to feel compelled to find authors for their books, and the process which led to Moses becoming identified as the author of the Torah may have been influenced by three factors: first, by a number of passages in which he is said to write something, frequently at the command of God, although these passages never appear to apply to the entire five books; second, by his key role in four of the five books (Genesis is the exception); and finally, by the way in which his authority as lawgiver and liberator of Israel united the story and laws of the Pentateuch. Rabbinic tradition to the modern period The Babylonian Talmud, an encyclopedia of Jewish scholarship composed between 200 and 500 CE, states that "Moses wrote his own book and the section concerning Balaam." The medieval sage Maimonides (c.1135–1204) enshrined this in his Thirteen Principles of Faith (a summary of the required beliefs of Judaism), the 8th of which states: "I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah presently in our possession is the one given to Moses." The rabbis explained that God wrote the Torah in heaven before the world was created, in letters of black