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(ii) A Literary Form and a Linguistic Convention

We meet apocalyptic writing all over the place in the second-temple period, not only in Judaism but in other ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, including Christianity.² When applied to literature, the word usually denotes a particular form, that of the reported vision and (sometimes) its interpretation. Claims are made for these visions: they are divine revelations, disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, from the Greek for ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans.³ Sometimes these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history of Israel; sometimes they focus on otherworldly journeys; sometimes they combine both. I give two examples, chosen more or less at random, beginning with a description of a vision put into the mouth of the patriarch Abraham:

We came to God’s mountain, glorious Horeb. And I said to the angel, ‘Singer of the Eternal One, behold I have no sacrifice with me, nor do I know a place for an altar on the mountain, so how shall I make the sacrifice?’ And he said, ‘Look behind you.’ And I looked behind me. And behold all the prescribed sacrifices were following us … and he said to me, ‘Slaughter all these … the turtledove and the pigeon you will give to me, for I will ascend on the wings of the birds to show you [what] is in the heavens, on the earth and in the sea, in the abyss, and in the lower depths, in the garden of Eden and in its rivers, in the fullness of the universe. And you will see its circles in all.’⁴

‘To show you what is in the heavens, on the earth … [and] in the fullness of the universe.’ There is the essence of apocalyptic: to Abraham are revealed secrets of all sorts. As a result, he learns new ways of worshipping the true god, and finally glimpses (chapter 31) the future deliverance of Israel.

A second example is ascribed to Baruch, the secretary of Jeremiah:

And when I had said this, I fell asleep at that place and saw a vision in the night. And behold there was a forest with trees that was planted on the plain and surrounded by high mountains and rugged rocks. And the forest occupied much space. And behold, over against it a vine arose, and from under it a fountain ran peacefully … And that fountain came to the forest and changed into great waves, and those waves submerged the forest and suddenly uprooted the entire forest and overthrew all the mountains which surrounded it. And the height of the forest became low, and that top of the mountains became low. And that fountain became so strong that it left nothing of the great forest except one cedar. When it had also cast that one down, it destroyed the entire forest and uprooted it so that nothing was left of it, and its place was not even known anymore. Then that vine arrived with the fountain in peace and in great tranquillity and arrived at a place which was not far away from the cedar, and they brought to him that cedar which had been cast down … and after these things I saw that the cedar was burning and the vine growing, while it and all around it became a valley full of unfading flowers. And I awoke and arose.⁵

Baruch then prays for understanding, and is given an interpretation: a wicked kingdom (the forest, of which one cedar is left) will be judged, and replaced by the messianic kingdom (‘the dominion of my Anointed One which is like the fountain and the vine’, 39.7), which ‘will last for ever until the world of corruption has ended and until the times which have been mentioned before have been fulfilled’ (40:3).

These two examples are reasonably typical of the literary form. In the first case, the seer is invited by the angel to view a wide range of things normally hidden, including secrets of the heavens and the earth, the beginning and the end of things. This will lead him to a full understanding and worship of the one god. It also points forward to the deliverance which Abraham’s family, Israel, can expect at the last. In the second case, the vision is more specific, relating to a particular historical setting. It assures the faithful that the kingdom which is presently oppressing them will be overthrown, and Israel restored. These two extracts are reasonably typical of the regular content, as well as the form, of the apocalyptic genre.

How then, at the level of literary sensitivity, should such works be read?⁶ Clearly, with an eye to the symbolic and many-layered texture of the language used. Baruch’s vision of the coming fountain and vine owes a great deal to biblical imagery, and already awakens echoes of previous visions and prayers about the plight of Israel and her coming redemption.⁷ The rich imagery of the prophets is revived in a somewhat more stylized form but with very similar intent. The writer of 2 Baruch was clearly not writing, in the last analysis, about forestry and viticulture: living after the disaster of AD 70, he intended to say something about Israel, her oppression and her future hope. But the forests and plants are not irrelevant. They enable him to do (at least) two things over and above straight socio-religious discourse: to awaken the echoes of earlier biblical prophecy for hearers whose minds were attuned to such things, and to cast his message of patient hope into a form which lent it divine authority. Earlier prophets might say ‘thus saith YHWH’; 2 Baruch describes a god-given vision and interpretation, putting it in the mouth of a hero of several centuries before. The intended effect is much the same. The different layers of meaning in vision-literature of this type thus demand to be heard in their full polyphony, not flattened out into a single level of meaning. If this had been noted a century ago, biblical scholarship could have been spared many false trails. Apocalyptic language uses complex and highly coloured metaphors in order to describe one event in terms of another, thus bringing out the perceived ‘meaning’ of the first.⁸

We do this all the time ourselves. I have often pointed out to students that to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one well might, as an ‘earth-shattering event’ might perhaps lead some future historian, writing in the Martian Journal of Early European Studies, to hypothesize that an earthquake had caused the collapse of the Wall, leading to both sides realizing they could live together after all. A good many readings of apocalyptic literature in our own century operate on about that level of misunderstanding.

Or take another example. Five people are describing the same event. One says ‘I was aware of a blur of colour and a sudden loud noise.’ The next says ‘I saw and heard a vehicle driving noisily down the road.’ The next says ‘I saw an ambulance on its way to hospital.’ The fourth says ‘I have just witnessed a tragedy.’ The fifth says ‘This is the end of the world for me.’ The same event gives rise to five true statements, with each successive one having more ‘meaning’ than the one before. A biblical example of a similar phenomenon occurs in 2 Samuel 18:29–33. David is waiting for news of his troops in the battle against his rebel son Absalom. The first messenger says ‘I saw a great tumult, but I do not know what it was’. The second says ‘May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man.’ Both have described the same event; the second has invested it with its meaning. Not only, however, has he said what it was that David needed to hear, that Absalom is dead: he has also invested that news with the further comment, that he himself is a loyal subject of the king. Perhaps he knew David’s penchant for anger against those who brought good but upsetting news (2 Samuel 1:11–16), and chose to give his message obliquely, couching it as an expression of loyalty. David, in turn, makes his own statement about the same event: ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’ Each of the speakers is referring to the same event. The different modes of speech invest the reality referred to with increasing layers of meaning.

Statements about events are regularly invested in this way with all kinds of nuances and overtones, designed to bring out the significance and meaning of the events, to help people see them from the inside as well as the outside. In a culture where events concerning Israel were believed to concern the creator god as well, language had to be found which could both refer to events within Israel’s history and invest them with the full significance which, within that worldview, they possessed. One such language, in our period, was apocalyptic.

More specifically, different manners of speaking were available to those who wished to write or talk of the coming day when the covenant god would act to rescue his people. Metaphors from the exodus would come readily to mind; and, since the exodus had long been associated with the act of creation itself,⁹ metaphors from creation would likewise be appropriate. The sun would be turned to darkness, the moon to blood.¹⁰ This is to say: when the covenant god acts, it will be an event (however ‘this-worldly’ by post-enlightenment standards, and however describable by secular historians) of cosmic significance. Once more, we can only understand this if we bear in mind what we discussed in the previous chapter: Israel believed that the god who had chosen to dwell on the hill called Zion was none other than the creator of the universe, and that the holy land was intended to be the new Eden. Within the context of creational and covenantal monotheism, apocalyptic language makes excellent sense. Indeed, it is not easy to see what better language-system could have been chosen to articulate Israel’s hope and invest it with its full perceived significance.

We must not imagine that all ‘apocalyptic’ writings necessarily carried the same or even parallel layers of meaning. Quite the opposite is the case. In my earlier example, from the Apocalypse of Abraham, a great many of the things that Abraham is to be shown in his vision are (what we would call) supernatural or transcendent realities, whose only obvious link to the space-time world is that in some cases they concern the fate of those now long dead. Some of the visions are taken up with the glory of the heavenly realm itself. So far as we can tell, much of this is intended to be taken ‘literally’, that is, as straightforward description of heavenly reality.¹¹ So, too, it is possible and even likely that a book such as 4 Ezra, written like 2 Baruch after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, contains actual visions seen during actual mystical experience, and at the same time regularly intends to speak of actual Israel, her present suffering and her future hope.¹² The metaphorical language of apocalyptic invests history with theological meaning; sometimes, this metaphor may be intended by its authors to pierce the veil between heaven and earth and speak directly of the further side itself.

It is vital for our entire perception of the worldview of first-century Jews, including particularly the early Christians, that we see what follows from all this. When they used what we might call cosmic imagery to describe the coming new age, such language cannot be read in a crassly literalistic way without doing it great violence. The restoration which would be brought about was, of course, painted in glowing and highly metaphorical colours. Writers borrowed all the appropriate imagery they could to show the immense significance with which the coming historical events would be charged. How else could they give voice to the full meaning of what was to take place? If even a pragmatic British Prime Minister could admit to thinking of his political mission in terms of Moses leading the children of Israel to freedom,¹³ it is no wonder if the historical children of Israel should use exodus- and creation-imagery to express their hope for a freedom that would be in somewhat more obvious continuity with such historical memories.

The cash-value of such language is, admittedly, often hard to determine precisely, and this indeed has been a matter of great debate this century.¹⁴ Of great influence here has been the view of Albert Schweitzer, that Jews of the first century expected the physical world to be brought to an end.¹⁵ Schweitzer envisaged this event as being a common Jewish expectation, involving the arrival on earth of a divine messianic figure. This has been commonly referred to, in language borrowed from a few early Christian sources, as the ‘parousia’, though the word does not belong in this sense in the early Jewish writings upon which Schweitzer based his theories. This hypothetical event was, so Schweitzer and his followers thought, regularly denoted by language about the coming kingdom of god.

I have come to the view that the critique of Schweitzer launched by Caird, Glasson, Borg and others is on target.¹⁶ Sometimes, no doubt, extraordinary natural phenomena were both expected, witnessed and interpreted within a grid of belief which enabled some to see them as signs and portents. No doubt eclipses, earthquakes, meteorites and other natural phenomena were regarded as part of the way in which strange socio-political events announced themselves. The universe was, after all, regarded as an interconnected whole (which is not the same thing as a closed continuum). But the events, including the ones that were expected to come as the climax of YHWH’s restoration of Israel, remained within (what we think of as) the this-worldly ambit. The ‘kingdom of god’ has nothing to do with the world itself coming to an end. That makes no sense either of the basic Jewish worldview or of the texts in which the Jewish hope is expressed. It was after all the Stoics, not the first-century Jews, who characteristically believed that the world would be dissolved in fire. (This has the amusing corollary that scholars have thought of such an expectation as a Jewish oddity which the church grew out of as it left Judaism behind, whereas in fact it seems to be a pagan oddity that the church grew into as it left Judaism behind—and which, perhaps, some Jews moved towards as they despaired of the old national hope and turned towards inner or mystical hope instead.¹⁷) Far more important to the first-century Jew than questions of space, time and literal cosmology were the key issues of Temple, Land, and Torah, of race, economy and justice. When Israel’s god acted, Jews would be restored to their ancestral rights and would practice their ancestral religion, with the rest of the world looking on in awe, and/or making pilgrimages to Zion, and/or being ground to powder under Jewish feet.

The ‘literalist’ reading of such language has of course had a profound effect on the study of the New Testament in the present century. If we imagine the majority of first-century Jews, and early Christians, as people who were confidently expecting the space-time universe to come to a full stop, and who were disappointed, we at once create a distance between them and ourselves far greater than that of mere chronology. We know that they were crucially wrong about something they put at the centre of their worldview, and must therefore either abandon any attempt to take them seriously or must construct a hermeneutic which will somehow enable us to salvage something from the wreckage. This was the programme to which Schweitzer and Bultmann—and Käsemann as in some ways the successor of both—gave such energetic attention. In addition, the thought of the space-time world coming to an end belongs closely with the radical dualism which brings together, in a quite unJewish way, three of the dualities discussed in the previous chapter: the distinction between the creator and the world, the distinction between the physical and the non-physical, and the distinction between good and evil. The result is a dualistic belief in the unredeemableness of the present physical world. This meant that ‘apocalyptic’ could be seen as far closer to Gnosticism than was really warranted by the evidence (see below); that it could be uprooted from its context as part of Israel’s national expectation; and that it could thus function as a history-of-religions explanation for (say) Pauline theology, in a way which allowed quite a bit of the previous theory, that of derivation from Gnosticism, to remain in place.¹⁸ That is why, no doubt, an insistence on the ‘imminent expectation’ of the end of the space-time world plays a vital and non-negotiable part in some such readings of the New Testament.¹⁹

There is, I suggest, no good evidence to suggest anything so extraordinary as the view which Schweitzer and his followers espoused. As good creational monotheists, mainline Jews were not hoping to escape from the present universe into some Platonic realm of eternal bliss enjoyed by disembodied souls after the end of the space-time universe. If they died in the fight for the restoration of Israel, they hoped not to ‘go to heaven’, or at least not permanently, but to be raised to new bodies when the kingdom came, since they would of course need new bodies to enjoy the very much this-worldly shalom, peace and prosperity that was in store.²⁰

Within the literary form of standard apocalyptic writings, then, we have found a linguistic convention, which traces its roots without difficulty back to classical prophecy: complex, many-layered and often biblical imagery is used and re-used to invest the space-time events of Israel’s past, present and future with their full theological significance. We shall continue to explore this in the rest of the present chapter.

(v) Daniel 7 and the Son of Man

‘Even a human figure’: that, of course, is where one of the largest problems lies, and I hope that, by approaching it from this angle, light may be shed on the vexed question of Daniel 7:13–14.²⁹ Reading the chapter as far as verse 12, there is no problem. The monsters ‘represent’ (in the literary sense) nations that war against Israel. Why then have critics read the ‘son of man’ figure, whom the beasts attack but who is finally vindicated, as a reference either to an individual human, or possibly divine, being, or to an angel? Part of the answer is the confusion between the different senses of representation. What we have in this chapter, I suggest, is literary representation, whereby a figure in the story—a human figure, surrounded by monsters—functions as a symbol for Israel, just as the monsters function as literary representations of pagan nations. This symbol is obviously pregnant with the meaning of Genesis 2, evoking the idea of the people of God as the true humanity and the pagan nations as the animals.³⁰ This strongly implies, with all the force of the imagery, that Israel, though beleaguered and battered, is about to be vindicated. To say, off the surface of the text, that either the writer or others reading his work would have thought the text was speaking of a ‘son of man’ who was a historical individual, and who, as such, ‘represented’ Israel as a nation in the second, sociological, sense, would be simply to confuse categories. Once again this can be seen by analogy with the monsters: nobody imagines that the author of Daniel, or any of his second-temple readers, thought that there would appear on earth actual monsters who would ‘represent’ the pagan nations much as an MP ‘represents’ a constituency. If anyone, within the first-century Jewish worldview, were to take the step of treating ‘the son of man’ as a sociological representative as well as a literary one—to suggest that the symbol might after all become reality—such a bold move could only be felt as radical and innovatory, new wine bursting old wineskins.³¹ And if such a move were made, so that an individual figure within history were held to be in some sense the fulfilment of Daniel 7:13f., any attempt to make the literary imagery associated with this ‘son of man’ into literal historical truth—to imagine, for instance, that he should be attacked by monsters from the sea—would be an extreme clash of categories.

Equally, it would be wrong to jump from the literary ‘representation’, whereby the ‘son of man’ represents Israel within the logic of the vision-genre, to a metaphysical representation whereby the ‘son of man’ becomes a transcendent heavenly being existing in another realm. Any such suggestion (for instance, on the basis that the ‘saints of the most high’ in verses 18, 25, 27 must refer to angels rather than Israel) must be resisted again on the grounds that it is a confusion of categories. If, once more, anyone were to attempt to combine the metaphysical and literary senses at this point, I suggest that such an idea would be perceived in the world of the first century as a dramatic innovation.

With these distinctions in mind, we may now go further, and suggest a contextual reading of Daniel 7 which shows, I think, the extreme probability that those who read this (very popular) chapter in the first century would have seen its meaning first and foremost in terms of the vindication of Israel after her suffering at the hands of the pagans.³² It is clearly important to establish, not so much what Daniel 7 might have meant in some previous existence (e.g. to an original visionary or an earlier redactor), but what it will have meant to a first-century Jew. We have noted the cryptic evidence of Josephus, to which we shall return later. We must now look at chapter 7 in its context, in other words, as the logical conclusion of the first half of the book of Daniel.

Daniel 7 has long suffered from being read in isolation from chapters 1–6. True, the book seems in some senses to divide at the end of chapter 6, with the previous material consisting largely of stories about Daniel and his friends, and the following chapters offering increasingly complex eschatological visions. Even this simple division, however, is misleading. Daniel 2 and 4 have a good deal in common with the later visions, and indeed the early chapters continually stress Daniel’s skill in knowing and making known hidden mysteries. Chapter 9, though it culminates in an eschatological revelation, consists mainly of a prayer which fits comfortably within the picture of a Jew in exile already drawn in chapters 1–6. In addition, the strange fact that 2:4b–7:28 is in Aramaic suggests that chapter 7 is not to be divorced from chapters 1–6, and indeed hints particularly at a possible link between chapters 2 and 7.³³

The first six chapters of the book have, indeed, two common themes. First, Jews are invited or incited to compromise their ancestral religion, and refuse to do so. They are tested in some way, proved to be in the right, and exalted. Second, various visions and revelations are granted to the pagan king, and are then interpreted by Daniel. Thus, in chapter 1, we have a mild opening statement of the first theme: the four youths refuse the king’s rich (and presumably idolatrous) food, but become healthier than ever, and are given a position of pre-eminence in the royal court. The second theme is introduced in chapter 2, where Daniel’s superior wisdom is demonstrated: only he can reveal, and interpret, the king’s dream. The dream itself is of a statue made of four different parts, and of a stone which breaks it in pieces and becomes a great mountain. When interpreted, this refers to four kingdoms, which will be ousted by the everlasting kingdom of Israel’s god. The content of the vision (the second theme) is the same as the first theme itself. And this content is one with which we are by now very familiar. It is the main story of second-temple Judaism, told and retold in multiple forms throughout our period.³⁴ These two opening chapters thus serve not merely as an introduction to chapters 1–6 but as a setting of themes for the whole book.

In the third chapter, Daniel’s three companions refuse to worship the king’s golden image (possibly intended to link with the ‘head of gold’, representing Nebuchadnezzar, in 2:38), and are thrown into the fiery furnace, whence they are miraculously rescued and given promotion and honour. The same theme is found in inverted form in chapter 4: Nebuchadnezzar has a vision, interpreted by Daniel, in which he is humbled after his great pride, and recognizes the eternal sovereignty of the one god of heaven, whom the reader of course identifies as the god of Daniel. This mutation is then combined with the first theme in chapter 5, when Belshazzar celebrates a pagan feast with the vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem. Daniel interprets the writing on the wall: the one true god is sitting in judgment on the pagan king who has vaunted himself against him. Israel’s god is vindicated, and in his vindication Daniel, the Jew called in to explain the writing (5:13f.), is himself vindicated and exalted (5:16, 29).

This sets the scene for chapter 6, in which Daniel, under pressure himself to compromise his monotheism by praying to the king, refuses, and is cast into the den of lions. When the king comes in the morning and discovers Daniel alive, he has him taken up out of the den (6:23), causes his accusers to be killed in his place, and issues a decree, in language obviously reminiscent of 2:44, 4:3, and 4:34, extolling the god of Daniel:

for he is the living God,

enduring for ever.

His kingdom shall never be destroyed,

and his dominion has no end. (6:26)

There should be no doubt about how material such as Daniel 1–6 would be read and understood in second-temple Judaism, particularly in the Syrian and Roman periods. Pagan pressure for Jews to compromise their ancestral religion must be resisted: the kingdoms of the world will finally give way to the everlasting kingdom of the one true god, and when that happens Jews who had held firm will themselves be vindicated. We may cite 2 Maccabees 7 as a close parallel.³⁵

This complex of beliefs and expectations, I suggest, provides the natural and obvious context in which chapter 7 is to be understood.³⁶ Within the second half of the book as a whole, the two themes from the first half are modified but not abandoned. The individual fortunes of Daniel and his companions become the national fortunes of Israel; and it is Daniel, now, who has the visions, which are interpreted by an angel. Putting chapter 7 in this setting, and reading it as a whole, instead of dismantling it in search of earlier meanings for its hypothetical earlier parts, a consistent picture emerges. The four beasts who come out of the sea (verses 2–8) culminate in the little horn of the fourth beast (verse 8), who makes war with ‘the saints’ (verse 21). But when the ‘most high’, the ‘Ancient of Days’, takes his seat, judgment is given in favour of ‘the saints’/‘one like a son of man’ (verses 13, 18, 22, 27): they are vindicated and exalted, with their enemies being destroyed, and in their vindication their god himself is vindicated:

His dominion is an everlasting dominion,

that shall not pass away,

and his kingship is one

that shall never be destroyed. (7:14)

We shall come to the details presently. For the moment we must note the more than striking parallel between this sequence of events and the whole preceding train of thought, particularly as it finds expression in chapter 6. Here, as there, the human figure is surrounded by threatening ‘beasts’; as we saw, the first beast in 7:4 is like a lion, making the connection with the previous chapter about as explicit as it could be. Here, as there, the king comes in his authority: Darius in chapter 6 acts the part that will be taken by the Ancient of Days in chapter 7. In both, the human figure (Daniel in chapter 6; the ‘son of man’ in chapter 7) is vindicated and exalted, lifted up out of the reach of the beasts. In both, the one true god is glorified, and the enemies of his people subjugated. Both end with a celebration of the kingdom/kingship of the one true god. Dramatically, poetically, the sequence is identical. Granted the strong prevalence of exactly this story-line in so much other second-temple literature, it seems to me morally certain that a Jew of the period would have read Daniel 7 in just this way.

There are obvious points of dissimilarity between chapters 6 and 7: Darius is not himself divine; the lions of chapter 6 are not destroyed, but become the destroyers of the actual enemies of Daniel. But these make no difference to the close parallelism. One might almost suggest, in line with our earlier cautious suggestions about the personal and mystical origins of some apocalyptic literature at least, that chapter 7 is exactly the sort of dream—or nightmare—that someone might have if they had been through the harrowing experience of chapter 6, and had reflected on it theologically. No doubt a writer of sufficient subtlety to construct a book like that of Daniel could have made the same connection. Certainly I find it impossible to believe that whoever put Daniel into its final form was innocent of the parallelism.

But is it really legitimate to read chapter 7 in this way? It has become customary to separate out various different elements in it, obscuring the overall effect just sketched. In particular, (a) the ‘one like a son of man’ has been interpreted as a reference to a transcendent being, or to an angelic figure (or figures), and (b) the various stages of the narrative, particularly the moment of vindication, have been separated out and played off against one another (verses 13f., 18, 22, 27, speaking of ‘one like a son of man’, then ‘saints of the most high’, and then ‘people of the saints of the most high’).³⁷ Both moves, it seems to me, are in danger of misreading the apocalyptic genre.

(a) Collins is surely right to say that, if the reference is to an angel, that still does not nullify the meaning that the faithful Israelites will be vindicated, since the angel is their heavenly counterpart.³⁸ But this move, I think, is simply not necessary. Though it is true that in chapter 10 and elsewhere Michael, the ‘prince’ of Israel, fights against the ‘princes’ of the pagan nations, this need not stand as a model for the interpretation of chapter 7; nor is the reference to ‘the saints’ necessarily to be taken to denote angels, despite the possible parallels in Qumran. We have here the confusion outlined above, between apocalyptic metaphor, i.e. literary representation, and speculative ontology, i.e. metaphysical representation. In the former, a ‘vision’ is a way of referring to earthly realities while investing them with their theological significance. In the latter, such a vision becomes a literal window on actual ‘heavenly’ events, important no doubt because they will have their inevitable earthly counterpart, but also attracting attention in and of themselves. There is, to be sure, a short route between these two possible sets of meaning; but the parallels we have seen between chapter 7 and chapters 1–6 encourage me to assert that in chapter 7 at least, whatever may be the case later on, the natural way of reading the vision is to see the ‘one like the son of man’ as ‘representing’ (in the literary, not the sociological or metaphysical, sense) the ‘people of the saints of the most high’. That is to say, the vision is about the suffering of Israel at the hands of the pagans—more especially, of one pagan monarch in particular, presumably Antiochus Epiphanes—and her coming vindication when the one god reveals himself to be her god and destroys her enemies. Otherwise, we would have expected the ‘beasts’ to be themselves ‘princes’ of the nations, whereas they too ‘represent’ the nations in the literary, not the sociological or metaphysical, sense. When Israel’s god acts to vindicate his name, his people will be revealed as his true humanity, as a ‘human figure’ in contrast to the ‘beasts’.³⁹

(b) It belongs to the apocalyptic genre that the meaning of the vision should be unfolded step by step (if necessary), not that the meaning should actually change from one unfolding to the next. It is thus perfectly proper to allow the fullest, final statement (v. 27) to be determinative for the earlier ones; and the addition of ‘people’ to ‘saints of the most high’ at this point can therefore safely be taken as an indication that this was the reference always intended.⁴⁰

It therefore seems to me perfectly justifiable (though of course the above account remains tendentious, since space forbids the full discussion that would in principle be desirable) to read Daniel 7 in the light of the first half of the book, and to suggest that a Jew of the second-temple period would have read it like that too. Faced with pagan persecution, such a Jew would be encouraged to remain faithful while awaiting the great day of victory and vindication, when Israel would be exalted and her enemies defeated, when the covenant god would show himself to be god of all the earth, and would set up the kingdom which would never be destroyed. The later visions in Daniel 8–12, in my opinion, are to be read as developments from this basic position, rather than as themselves determining the meaning of the earlier portions of the book. And if this is so, it is this overall context of meaning, rather than isolated speculation about the figure who appears in 7:13–14, that must form the basis for understanding the multiple reuse of similar language in the first century.

Putting together the argument of the chapter so far, we may observe the irony of one of the standard features of twentieth-century gospel study. Many have read apocalyptic metaphor (the ‘coming of the son of man with a cloud’) as literal prediction (a human being floating on a real cloud), despite the fact that the rest of Daniel 7 has never been read in this way; and they have then read potentially literal statement (stories about Jesus in the gospels) as metaphor (allegorical or mythical expressions of the church’s faith). This, as we will see on another occasion, is simply to misunderstand the genres involved.

3. No King but God

One slogan stands out from the revolutionary dreams of this period. The Fourth Philosophy, Josephus tells us, were ‘zealous’ in their attempts to get rid of Rome because they believed that there should be ‘no King (hegemon, despotes) but God’.⁵⁶ Nor was this view confined to a fringe group. Those who rebelled against the census did so on these grounds;⁵⁷ the teachers who urged the young men to pull down the eagle held the same view;⁵⁸ the revolutionaries of 66–70 were fired by the same thought.⁵⁹ ‘The kingdom of god’, historically and theologically considered, is a slogan whose basic meaning is the hope that Israel’s god is going to rule Israel (and the whole world), and that Caesar, or Herod, or anyone else of their ilk, is not. It means that Torah will be fulfilled at last, that the Temple will be rebuilt and the Land cleansed. It does not necessarily mean a holy anarchy (though there may have been some who wanted that).⁶⁰ Rather, it means that Israel’s god will rule her in the way he intends, through properly appointed persons and means. This will certainly mean (from the point of view of the Pharisees, Essenes, and anyone loosely described as Zealots) a change in the high priesthood.⁶¹ In some writings it also means a Messiah, though one of the striking features of the period is how comparatively infrequent, and completely unsystematized, expectations of a royal figure seem to be.⁶² But however the slogan is interpreted in detail, it clearly implies a new order in which Israel is vindicated, and then ruled over, by her god—and, by implication, in which the rest of the world is ruled in some way or other, whether for blessing or judgment, through Israel.

How was the new age, the new covenant, to come about? I have discussed in chapter 6 the extent to which political or military revolution was in the air during the first half of the first century. My own view is to a large extent that of Goodman: ‘anti-gentile attitudes which originated long before AD 6, perhaps in Maccabaean times, inspired many different groups, permeating the whole Jewish population and varying only in their intensity’.⁶³ The whole context of the times in general, of the biblical backdrop, of the Maccabaean example, of the uprisings under Herod, of the sporadic anti-Roman violence under the procurators, and of the two subsequent wars which were mounted by (among others) strict and ‘zealous’ Jews, all indicate that violent revolution against Rome was a very live option at this time, and that it would be supported not only by those out for their own ‘non-religious’ ends ⁶⁴ but also by a solid and well-established religious tradition.⁶⁵ If Israel’s god was going to become King, there were many who were eager to be the kingmakers, by whatever means might prove necessary.

The phrase ‘kingdom of god’, therefore, which occurs only sporadically in texts of this period, functions, when it occurs, as a crucial shorthand expression for a concept which could be spoken of in a variety of other ways, such as the impossibility of having rulers other than Israel’s god, or the divine necessity of reversing the present political situation and re-establishing Israel, Temple, Land and Torah. This complex concept picks up and joins together the whole social, political, cultural and economic aspiration of the Jews of this period, and invests it with the religious and theological dimension which, of course, it always possessed in mainline Jewish thinking.

The idea of Israel’s god becoming King is to be seen within the context of the whole historical expectation of Israel, dependent (in a people fiercely conscious of the importance of their own traditions) on Old Testament expressions of hope for the universal divine rule. Thus, for example:

All your works shall give thanks to you, O YHWH,

and all your faithful shall bless you.

They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom,

and tell of your power,

to make known to all people your mighty deeds,

and the glorious splendour of your kingdom.

Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,

and your dominion endures throughout all ages.⁶⁶

for YHWH is our judge, YHWH is our ruler,

YHWH is our king; he will save us.⁶⁷

How beautiful upon the mountains

are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,

who brings good news,

who announces salvation,

who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’⁶⁸

These passages, of course, reflect not only the ideas cherished by certain thinkers and writers, but also the liturgy in which the hope was enacted over and over again.

One of the central biblical books which emphasized this theme was of course Daniel—which, significantly, was a favourite of revolutionary-minded Jews in the first century, since they reinterpreted it so that it spoke of a kingdom to be set up against the present Roman oppression.⁶⁹ Josephus is a little coy about this precise interpretation, no doubt because of his own Roman patronage, but there can be little doubt how his contemporaries read the book. In Antiquities 10:203–10 he describes the dream of Daniel 2:1–45, in which the idolatrous statue is destroyed by the ‘stone’, but he alters it to avoid making it explicit that the Roman empire is symbolized by the mixture of iron and clay (2:33, 41–3) or suggesting that Rome was to be destroyed by the ‘stone’. The obvious inference is drawn by Josephus’ modern editor, Ralph Marcus:⁷⁰ in first-century interpretation the stone was taken as a prophecy of the messianic kingdom which would destroy the Roman empire.⁷¹ Of particular significance is the passage in War 6:312–15, which describes ‘an ambiguous oracle’ from the Jewish scriptures which ‘more than all else incited [the Jews] to the war’, proclaiming that ‘one from their country would become ruler of the world’. Josephus, of course, interprets this to mean the Emperor Vespasian, who was first proclaimed as such on Jewish soil; but he notes that many ‘wise men’ believed that it referred to someone of Jewish race, ‘until the ruin of their country and their own destruction convicted them of their folly’. Word of this oracle also reached the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, probably independently.⁷² Despite Josephus’ own reinterpretation, the common first-century view shines through: from the Jews would arise a leader, a great king, who would rule over the whole world, destroying all rival empires.

The point can be made graphically with the help of two texts which we know to have been current in the first century. To begin with, the ‘Testament of Moses’ puts into the mouth of its hero a ‘prophecy’ about the corruption and wickedness of the second-temple period, and foretells the coming kingdom in which the pagans will be defeated and Israel vindicated. These very much this-worldly events are to be interpreted as the victory of Israel’s god:

Then his kingdom will appear throughout his whole creation.

Then the devil will have an end.

Yea, sorrow will be led away with him.

Then will be filled the hands of the messenger,

who is in the highest place appointed.

Yea, he will at once avenge them of their enemies.

For the Heavenly One will arise from his kingly throne.

Yea, he will go forth from his holy habitation

with indignation and wrath on behalf of his sons.

And the earth will tremble, even to its ends shall it be shaken.

And the high mountains will be made low.

Yea, they will be shaken, as enclosed valleys they will fall.

The sun will not give light.

And in darkness the horns of the moon will flee.

Yea, they will be broken in pieces.

It will be turned wholly into blood.

Yea, even the circle of the stars will be thrown into disarray.

And the sea all the way to the abyss will retire,

to the sources of waters which fail.

Yea, the rivers will vanish away.

For God the Most High will surge forth,

the Eternal One alone.

In full view will he come to work vengeance on the nations.

Yea, all their idols will he destroy.

Then will you be happy, O Israel!

And you will mount up above the necks and wings of an eagle.

Yea, all things will be fulfilled.

And God will raise you to the heights.

Yea, he will fix you firmly in the heaven of the stars,

in the place of their habitations.

And you will behold from on high.

Yea, you will see your enemies on the earth.

And, recognizing them, you will rejoice.

And you will give thanks.

Yea, you will confess your creator.⁷³

It should be clear from the context of this poem that its meaning is not to be found by taking the cosmic imagery ‘literally’. Sun, moon and stars function within a poem like this as deliberate symbols for the great powers of the world: to speak of them being shaken or dimmed is the kind of language a first-century writer might use quite naturally to express the awesome significance of great political events, such as the terrifying year (AD 68–9) in which four Roman emperors met violent deaths, and a fifth marched from Palestine to claim the throne. And the vindication of Israel, which is the correlative of Israel’s god becoming king, should not be thought of as her translation into a transcendent sphere, removed from the space-time universe: the hope is in direct continuity with the events which precede it, but because it is still (from the writer’s point of view) in the future it cannot be described in the same way. The language and imagery of the poem is designed to denote future sociopolitical events, and to invest those events with their full ‘theological’ significance. Israel is to defeat her foes, under the leadership of an appointed ‘messenger’, perhaps a priest;⁷⁴ and that means that Israel’s god is to become King.

The same point emerges from the vivid passage in the War Scroll which speaks in the same breath of detailed military preparations and plans and of Israel’s god becoming king:

Then two divisions of foot-soldiers shall advance and shall station themselves between the two formations. The first division shall be armed with a spear and a shield, and the second with a shield and a sword, to bring down the slain by the judgment of God, and to bend the enemy formation by the power of God, to pay the reward of their wickedness to all the nations of vanity. And sovereignty [meluchah, kingship] shall be to the God of Israel, and He shall accomplish mighty deeds by the saints of his people.⁷⁵

It is clear from this that the detailed military plans are intended to put into effect the coming kingdom: that is, the writer of the Scroll believes that Israel’s god will become king by means of the military action he is describing in advance. When Israel wins the victory, that is to be seen as the coming of the kingdom of YHWH. The deeds of his ‘saints’ are not something other than the operation of his mighty deeds; the two are identified. The modern distinction between socio-political events and the ‘transcendent’ dimension can only be related to the first-century Jewish worldview if we realize that the various different sets of language which were available at the time were used to denote the same events.⁷⁶

An example from a very different context shows how widespread this ‘kingdom’-language was. In the Wisdom of Solomon, hardly a book one would associate with strident revolutionary polemic, the vindication of the righteous ones will be the means of the divine kingship:

In the time of their visitation they will shine forth,

and will run like sparks through the stubble.

They will govern nations and rule over peoples,

and the Lord will reign over them forever.⁷⁷

These instances show clearly enough the use of ‘kingdom’-language in our period. It was a regular means of expressing the national hope, invoking in its support the belief that Israel’s god was the only god—in other words, using Jewish monotheism and covenant theology in the service of eschatology. Israel’s god would bring to pass the restoration from exile, the renewal of the covenant. Because he was also the creator god, this event could not adequately be described without the use of cosmic imagery. Israel’s victory over the nations, the rebuilding of the Temple, the cleansing of the Land: all these together amounted to nothing short of a new creation, a new Genesis.

To speak of the kingdom of this god does not, therefore, mean that one is slipping into a dualistic mode of thought, or imagining that the event which is to come would be related only marginally or tangentially to space-time events. This kingdom was not a timeless truth, nor an abstract ethical ideal, nor the coming end of the space-time universe. Nor did the phrase itself denote a community, though it would connote the birth of a new covenant community. It would denote, rather, the action of the covenant god, within Israel’s history, to restore her fortunes, to bring to an end the bitter period of exile, and to defeat, through her, the evil that ruled the whole world. This restoration of Israel, celebrated in the regular liturgy, is part of the meaning of her god’s becoming king. Israel herself is the people through whom the king will rule.

One false trail must be marked off at this point. There is not much evidence for a direct connection between the symbol ‘kingdom of god’ and the coming of a Messiah.⁷⁸ Those texts that speak of a Messiah can of course be integrated into those that speak of the divine kingdom. The Messiah will fight the battles which will bring in this kingdom. But the apparent tension of YHWH as King and the Messiah as King does not really arise, mainly because the two are not usually spoken of in the same texts. In any case, as we saw, YHWH’s being King does not mean that Israel will have no rulers at all, but that she will have the right rulers. Neither the Hasmoneans, nor Herod and his family, nor Caiaphas and his relations, nor Caesar himself, will rule Israel and the world. Rather, there will be a line of true priests who will minister before YHWH properly, and teach the people the true Torah; and (perhaps) a King who will be the true Son of David, who will dash the nations in pieces like a potter’s vessel, and execute true justice within Israel. These hopes, which we may broadly call ‘messianic’, remained fragmentary. Where they occurred, this is how they fitted, without difficulty, into the wider and far more important overall expectation of YHWH’s coming kingdom. To support this contention we must now look in a little more detail at the hope of a coming Messiah.

4. The King that would Come

Modern scholarship has made one thing quite clear: there was no single, monolithic and uniform ‘messianic expectation’ among first-century Jews.⁷⁹ Most of the Jewish literature we possess from the period has no reference to a Messiah; a good deal of prominent and powerful writing ignores the theme altogether. Such evidence as there is is scattered and diverse, spread across very different writings with a hint here, a dark saying there, and only occasionally a clear statement about a coming Son of David who would execute YHWH’s wrath on the Gentiles, or rebuild the Temple, or otherwise fulfil Israel’s hopes. Nor can we easily appeal to the rabbis for help here, any more than elsewhere in second-temple Judaism. Their conceptions of a coming Messiah were so coloured by their awareness of the failure of the two great wars that we cannot expect much early historical material to have survived unscathed.⁸⁰ So, despite the confident pronouncements of many generations, both Christian and Jewish, we must conclude initially that we cannot say what, if anything, the average Jew-in-the-market-place believed about a coming Messiah. In the surviving literature, ‘when an individual Messiah is envisaged, his role and character remain vague and undefined’.⁸¹

This apparently unpromising start invites an explanation, and three obvious possibilities emerge. First, the idea of a Messiah may have been comparatively unimportant in the period. Second, the literature we happen to have may not be very representative. Third, messianic expectations may have been suppressed in literature composed after the failure of one or other of the would-be messianic movements, or after the rise of Christianity. There may be some truth in all of these suggestions. But at the same time the very diversity and unstandardized nature of the evidence suggests that the idea of a Messiah was at least latent in several varieties of Judaism; that it could be called to consciousness if circumstances demanded; and that there were at least some more or less constant factors within the diversity. We must now examine the evidence and see what can be made of it.

We may begin with four fairly solid historical points. First, Josephus informs us of various messianic movements up to and during the war of 66–70, and we know a good deal about the subsequent one under bar-Kochba. We have already told the story of these movements in chapters 6 and 7 above. What matters here is the fact that they existed at all: that, under certain circumstances, reasonably large numbers of Jews would choose a previously unknown man (or, in the case of the Sicarii, a member of a would-be dynasty) and put him forward as a king, giving him a regal diadem and expecting him to lead them in a populist movement towards some kind of revolution. No doubt there are distinctions to be made between these various movements. But all of them bear witness to a reasonably widespread Jewish hope, cherished no doubt among some classes more than others, that there would come a king through whom Israel’s god would liberate his people. In at least one case, the movement seems to have taken an explicitly ‘Davidic’ form.⁸² If we knew nothing more than this, we would already know a lot.⁸³

Second, we may note the significance of the aspirations apparently cherished by Herod the Great. According to Josephus, Herod undertook the massive project of rebuilding the Temple in a deliberate attempt to imitate, and perhaps outdo, David’s son Solomon.⁸⁴ As we saw in looking at Temple-ideology in chapter 8, he who builds the Temple legitimates himself as king, just as the Maccabaean triumph was able to launch a century-long dynasty not least because Judas Maccabaeus had successfully cleansed the Temple from its pagan pollution. Herod, perhaps realizing that the Jews would never come to accept him as the fulfillment of their hopes, married Mariamne, a Hasmonean princess, probably hoping that, if he had a son by her, that the son would not only complete the rebuilding of the Temple, but would also perpetuate the royal claim of the predecessors whom Herod himself had supplanted. Once again, what matters for our purposes is not that this plan failed, since the Temple was not finally completed until Herod’s line had been reduced to insignificance, and since Mariamne and her two elder sons were suspected of treachery and murdered while Herod was still alive; nor that many Jews did not accept the Hasmonean claim, and many more did not accept Herod’s either. What matters is that such claims could even be advanced. We may assume that Herod had some idea of how his contemporaries’ minds worked. If he was hoping to play on a popular idea of a coming messianic king, then we must assume that such an idea at least existed, even if he was quite able, because of its vagueness, to remould it in his own way.

Third, we may note the significance of the bar-Kochba rebellion. It was clearly a messianic movement, as the solid rabbinic tradition attests, citing Akiba, one of the Mishnah’s heroes, as having hailed the unfortunate rebel leader as ‘Son of the Star’ and Son of David.⁸⁵ Again, the details are not important. What matters is that we have here further evidence that throughout the second-temple period messianic ideas could, under certain circumstances, be evoked; that ordinary people would know what was being talked about; and that many Jews would instinctively rally to a sufficiently credible messianic claimant.

Fourth, we may note the importance of the New Testament itself within this historical sketch. It has been customary in many scholarly circles to assert that the early church quite soon abandoned Jewish messianic ideas, and referred to Jesus in quite different terms. In the light of the comparative scarcity of such ideas in Judaism itself, however, it is all the more remarkable that not only the title Christos but also several clearly messianic themes—Davidic descent, key texts from the Jewish Bible, key themes such as the link with the Temple—still remain even in the gospels, which are commonly thought to date from about a generation after Jesus, and quite likely after the war. My own view is that the scholars here are wrong, misled by a generation that sought to strip Christianity of all things Jewish, and that the early Christians retained the messianic idea in a modified but still quite recognizable form.⁸⁶ After all, even Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, regarded it as important that Jesus should have been the true Jewish Messiah. But even if these scholars were right—indeed, especially if they were right, and if Christianity did officially give up Messianism as such—then the persistence of messianic themes throughout most of the New Testament is all the more powerful a witness to the fact that, whether or not we have a large amount of first-century Jewish evidence, and whether or not we can recreate a single unified picture of Jewish expectation, such expectation certainly existed. The early Christians seem to have done, in this sense, what Herod had done: they took a vague general idea of the Messiah, and redrew it around a new fixed point, in this case Jesus, thereby giving it precision and direction. It is especially striking that the Davidic Messiahship of Jesus should be given such prominence.⁸⁷

These solid historical starting-points give us a more viable framework to begin from than we would have if we simply started with odd references in apocalyptic and other writings. They indicate, moreover, a further solid and undisputable fact. If we know anything about the formation of Jewish belief and expectation in this period we know that it had a good deal to do with the reading of scripture. And the Hebrew Bible, and the Septuagint in which many Jews were accustomed to hear it read, has a good deal to say about a coming king. The promises made to David, and often repeated, come across loud and clear.⁸⁸ They are celebrated in the Psalms.⁸⁹ Some of the most wonderfully poetic passages in the whole Bible include passages where the idea of a coming deliverer is prominent: we might cite, obviously, Isaiah 9 and 11, 42, and 61. True, it is important not to assume that if we discover a potentially ‘messianic’ passage in the Hebrew Bible we can deduce that first-century Jews regarded it thus; but it is even more important not to ignore the regular reading and singing of scripture as a major force in forming the total Jewish worldview, messianic expectations included.

This point is highlighted when we look at four types of second-temple sources which speak unambiguously of a Messiah. In each case, the view taken is based foursquare on scripture. We may begin with the Scrolls, and take first the remarkable fragment recovered from Cave IV at Qumran, dated most likely late in the first century BC, which collects key biblical texts and makes them speak with one voice about the coming king. After a detailed exegesis of 2 Samuel 7:10–11, showing that the writer interpreted the sectarian community in terms of the Temple, the text continues (with biblical quotations here in italics):

The Lord declares to you that He will build you a House. I will raise up your seed after you. I will establish the throne of his kingdom [for ever]. I [will be] his father and he shall be my son. He is the Branch of David who shall arise with the Interpreter of the Law [to rule] in Zion [at the end] of time. As it is written, I will raise up the tent of David that is fallen. That is to say, the fallen tent of David is he who shall arise to save Israel …

Why do the nations [rage] and the people meditate [vanity, the kings of the earth] rise up, [and the] princes take counsel together against the Lord and against [His Messiah]? Interpreted, preted, this saying concerns [the kings of the nations] who shall [rage against] the elect of Israel in the last days …⁹⁰

Here we see what some Jews at any rate were thinking around the time of the death of Herod and the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The Scrolls, as is well known, envisage not only a royal Messiah but also another figure, either a teacher (as here, ‘the Interpreter of the Law’) or a priest as in the ‘Messianic Rule’.⁹¹ But the biblical basis of this picture of the royal Messiah is clear, and it is further filled out in a passage like the following, from the ‘Blessings’ Scroll:

May the Lord raise you up to everlasting heights, and as a fortified tower upon a high wall!

[May you smite the peoples] with the might of your hand and ravage the earth with your sceptre; may you bring death to the ungodly with the breath of your lips!

[May he shed upon you the spirit of counsel] and everlasting might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of God; may righteousness be the girdle [of your loins] and may your reins be girdled [with faithfulness]!

May be make your horns of iron and your hooves of bronze; may you loss like a young bull [and trample the peoples] like the mire of the streets!

For God has established you as the sceptre. The rulers … [and all the kings of the] nations shall serve you. He shall strengthen you with His holy Name and you shall be as a [lion; and you shall not lie down until you have devoured the] prey which nought shall deliver …⁹²

Here again the biblical basis is clear: allusions to the Psalms (61:2f.), and particularly quotations from Isaiah (11:1–5) and Micah (4:13), are the foundation. This, we may be confident, was how some Jews at least understood some quite prominent passages in their Bible.

Moving on from Qumran, we find a similar picture in a second source, the well-known passage in the Psalms of Solomon:

See, Lord, and raise up for them their king,

the son of David, to rule over your servant Israel

in the time known to you, O God.

Undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers,

to purge Jerusalem from gentiles

who trample her to destruction;

in wisdom and in righteousness to drive out

the sinners from the inheritance;

to smash the arrogance of sinners

like a potter’s jar;

To shatter all their substance with an iron rod;

to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth;

At his warning the nations will flee from his presence,

and he will condemn sinners by the thoughts of their hearts.

He will gather a holy people

whom he will lead in righteousness …

There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days,

for all shall be holy,

and their king shall be the Lord Messiah.⁹³

Once again the biblical echoes stand out clearly: Psalms 2, 18, 104 and 101 are all audible, as are Isaiah 42 and other passages. We must be quite clear: here we have evidence that some Jews of the Roman period were reading their Bible with a definite view of a messianic figure, prophesied therein, who would come and deliver them from the Gentiles. If the Psalms of Solomon are Pharisaic, as used to be thought and is still not disproved, this becomes all the more interesting for the complete picture.⁹⁴

We must now consider, as a third source, a passage we have already noted in another connection. In his account of the build-up to the war in 66, Josephus describes various portents and prophecies which presaged the coming devastation. Why, then, he asks, did the Jews carry on down the road to ruin, even despite ‘oracles’ in the Bible which warned of their ruin? Because of another passage in the Bible:

But what more than all else incited them to the war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. This they understood to mean someone of their own race, and many of their wise men went astray in their interpretation of it. The oracle, however, in reality signified the sovereignty of Vespasian, who was proclaimed Emperor on Jewish soil. For all that, it is impossible for men to escape their fate, even though they foresee it. Some of these portents, then, the Jews interpreted to please themselves, others they treated with contempt, until the ruin of their country and their own destruction convicted them of their folly.⁹⁵

If there is one thing I wish Josephus had added to his entire corpus, it is the footnote to this text which would have told us for sure which biblical passage he had in mind. There are, however, significant clues. The passage, clearly, was one which ‘the wise men’ interpreted this way; and it had to do with chronology (‘at that time’).⁹⁶ The most obvious candidate is the book of Daniel: if we know anything about first-century chronological calculations, we know that Daniel was combed fairly thoroughly for information about eschatological time-sequences, particularly by ‘wise’ groups of scholars (compare Daniel 12:3). But which bit of Daniel? The most obvious passage in terms of chronological speculation is chapters 8–9, which provide arcane timetables for calculating the restoration of Jerusalem; these reappear in various works of the period. It has been cogently argued that, according to one way of computing the figures involved, the ‘seventy weeks of years’ mentioned in Daniel 9:24–7 as being the time between the exile, on the one hand, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the coming of ‘an anointed prince’, on the other, would be entering upon their last ‘week’ in the mid-60s AD. This would help to explain why those who adopted such a chronology, which is basically Pharisaic, would be inclined to support moves towards revolution in that period.⁹⁷ But if Daniel 9:24–7 gives the chronological scheme, where does the idea of a ‘world ruler’⁹⁸ come from? The obvious passage is Daniel 2:35, 44–5: after the four great kingdoms, represented by the statue made of four metals,⁹⁹ ‘a stone was cut out, not by human hands, and it struck the statue’ and broke it in pieces; ‘but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth’. When interpreted, this vision indicates that ‘in the days of those kings the god of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.’¹⁰⁰ Josephus’ retelling of this story in Antiquities 10 is interesting for a number of reasons. Not only does he omit to explain what precisely the stone is doing: he changes the text of Daniel 2:29 from ‘to you … came thoughts of what would be hereafter’ to ‘when you were anxious about who should rule the whole world after you’.¹⁰¹ Though in one sense this refers to all the kingdoms that are to come, it particularly refers to the last one, that of the stone. It looks as though we have located Josephus’ missing footnote: Daniel, the book which not only foretells things but gives a chronology, was being read in the 60s as a prophecy of imminent messianic deliverance, through a combination of its second and ninth chapters.

But if this is so—and it seems to me easily the best explanation on offer of a tricky passage in Josephus—it is hard to believe that the very similar passage in Daniel 7 was not part of the equation also. Two bits of evidence point this way. First, we have already observed the very close parallel between Daniel 2 and Daniel 7: the sequence of four kingdoms, followed by Israel’s god setting up a new kingdom which will last for ever, is identical in both. Second, as we shall see presently, it was Daniel 7 that provided the source-material for several other, quite different, first-century messianic speculations. It looks as though some first-century exegetes, combining Daniel 9 (which is explicitly messianic) with Daniel 2 (which can be made so via the figure of the ‘stone’, which is a messianic term elsewhere),¹⁰² had achieved what we described earlier as a radical new possibility: a messianic, i.e. individualized, reading of Daniel 7:13f.

So, then, unless we are to conclude that some groups (those referred to by Josephus) only called on Daniel 2 and 9, and others (represented by such writings as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch) only made use of Daniel 7, in their messianic speculations—which seems absurd—it is better to reach the following conclusion: that Josephus’ cryptic mention of a widely believed messianic oracle refers to the book of Daniel in general, and to chapters 2, 7 and 9 in particular. These happen to be the three parts of the book about which, despite his full recounting of many other parts, Josephus remains silent.¹⁰³ Arguments from silence are notoriously unreliable; here the silence is eloquent indeed.

From Josephus to the apocalyptic writings of 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch and 1 Enoch seems a long jump, but these books too, as our fourth section of evidence, demonstrate a biblically based messianic expectation during the first century. In the case of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch at least, this expectation had survived the ravages of AD 70, and was looking for a deliverance still to come.¹⁰⁴

We may begin by noting that for most of 4 Ezra the question of Israel’s future can be discussed without any detailed mention of a Messiah.¹⁰⁵ Then, in the ‘eagle-vision’ of chapters 11–12, we discover not only a Messiah, but a Messiah who clearly belongs within a rereading of Daniel 7. ‘Ezra’ sees a vision of a many-headed and many-winged eagle, whose wings and heads clearly ‘represent’ (in the literary sense) various kings within dynasties. Then a new creature appears:

And I looked, and behold, a creature like a lion was aroused out of the forest, roaring; and I heard how he uttered a man’s voice to the eagle, and spoke, saying, ‘Listen and I will speak to you. The Most High says to you, “Are you not the one that remains of the four beasts which I had made to reign in my world, so that the end of my times might come through them? You, the fourth that has come, have conquered all the beasts that have gone before; and you have held sway over the world with much terror, and over all the earth with grievous oppression … And so your insolence has come up before the Most High, and your pride to the Mighty One. And the Most High has looked upon his times, and behold, they are ended, and his ages are completed! Therefore you will surely disappear, you eagle, and your terrifying wings, and your most evil little wings, and your malicious heads, and your most evil talons, and your whole worthless body, so that the whole earth, freed from your violence, may be refreshed and relieved, and may hope for the judgment and mercy of him who made it.” ’¹⁰⁶

As usual in the genre, ‘Ezra’ finds this perplexing, and prays for an interpretation. When it comes, the link with Daniel is made explicit:

He said to me, ‘This is the interpretation of this vision which you have seen: The eagle which you saw coming up from the sea is the fourth kingdom which appeared in a vision to your brother Daniel. But it was not explained to him as I now explain or have explained it to you. Behold, the days are coming when a kingdom shall arise on earth, and it shall be more terrifying than all the kingdoms that have been before it … [there follows a long interpretation of the eagle with its various wings and heads]. And as for the lion that you saw rousing up out of the forest and roaring and speaking to the eagle and reproving him for his unrighteousness, and as for all his words that you have heard, this is the Messiah [literally, ‘anointed one’] whom the Most High has kept until the end of days, who will arise from the posterity of David, and will come and speak to them; he will denounce them for their ungodliness and for their wickedness, and will cast up before them their contemptuous dealings … But he will deliver in mercy the remnant of my people, those who have been saved throughout my borders, and he will make them joyful until the end comes, the day of judgment, of which I spoke to you at the beginning. This is the dream that you saw, and this is its interpretation.’¹⁰⁷

This passage is remarkable on many counts. First, it exploits the fact that Daniel’s fourth beast is unspecified (the first three are a lion, a bear and a leopard), and makes it an eagle, which obviously represents (in the literary sense) the Roman empire, and is facilitated in doing so because actual images of eagles were used to represent the Roman empire in the socio-cultural symbolic sense. Second, it is explicit about offering a new interpretation of Daniel 7. Third, at the point in the vision where Daniel introduces ‘one like a son of man’, this vision introduces ‘a lion, [who] uttered a man’s voice’. The best explanation of this seems to be that the ‘man’s voice’ ties the lion to the ‘son of man’ in Daniel 7, while the fact of his being a lion, which would be thoroughly confusing within Daniel 7 itself, is an echo of Davidic Messianism.¹⁰⁸ Finally, the dénouement of the scene is, on the one hand, judgment on the eagle (as the dénouement of Daniel 7 is judgment on the fourth beast) and, on the other, rescue and relief for ‘the remnant of my people’.¹⁰⁹ The ‘saints of the most high’ of Daniel 7:18, 27, which in its original context, as we saw, is the interpretation of ‘the one like a son of man’ in 7:13, have come into their own. Treating our passage as a rereading of Daniel 7 as a whole, we must say that for 4 Ezra the ‘one like a son of man’ represents, in the literary sense, the Messiah, who in turn represents, in the sociological sense, the remnant of Israel. And in this rereading it is quite clear what is going on in real-life terms: ‘the chief activity that the Messiah performs in both this and the next vision is the destruction of the Roman Empire’.¹¹⁰ This explicit reuse not only of Daniel 7 but more explicitly of verses 13–14 shows that it ought to be out of the question to discuss the ‘son of man’ problem on the basis of occurrences of the phrase alone, or without consulting the root meaning of the imagery in Daniel 7 itself.¹¹¹

The final passage in 4 Ezra concerns a ‘man who came up from the sea’¹¹² and who ‘flew with the clouds of heaven’ (13:3):

After this I looked, and behold, an innumerable multitude of men were gathered together from the four winds of heaven to make war against the man who came up out of the sea. And I looked, and behold, he carved out for himself a great mountain, and flew up upon it … [the multitude approached the man, whereupon] he neither lifted his hand nor held a spear or any weapon of war, but I saw only how he sent forth from his mouth as it were a stream of fire, and from his lips a flaming breath, and from his tongue he shot forth a storm of sparks … [which destroyed the multitude]. After this I saw the same man come down from the mountain and call to him another multitude which was peaceable. Then many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful …¹¹³

Once again this vision disturbs ‘Ezra’, and he asks for the interpretation. The man from the sea, he is told, has been kept by the most high for the appointed time, when he will go forth to execute judgment. Then,

when these things come to pass and the signs occur which I showed you before, then my son will be revealed, whom you saw as a man coming up from the sea. And when all nations hear his voice … an innumerable multitude shall be gathered together, as you saw, desiring to come and conquer him. But he will stand on the top of Mount Zion. And Zion will come and be made manifest to all people, prepared and built, as you saw the mountain carved out without hands. And he, my Son, will reprove the assembled nations …¹¹⁴

Once again there are links with Daniel, though this time there is less emphasis on chapter 7 and more on chapter 2, with the difference that whereas in Daniel the stone is carved out and turns into a mountain, here the mountain is carved out and then turns into Zion. The link with Daniel 7 is made largely through the initial mention of the man ‘flying with the clouds of heaven’, in other words, through one image alone, and not, as in the previous section, through the whole sequence of thought.

Two things need to be said about this passage for our present argument. First, by the end of the first century AD, when this book was written, it was clearly possible to use and reuse the imagery of Daniel in a variety of ways, focused on the coming deliverance for Israel, and representing the coming Deliverer in a variety of literary images. But that Daniel 2 and 7 were used in this way there can be no doubt. Second, as with Daniel itself, so with the writings that reuse it: it is simply a misreading of the apocalyptic genre to imagine that Jews of the period would take the vivid and often surrealistic imagery of such passage as literal predictions of physical events. Anyone who still doubts this should reread the eagle vision of 4 Ezra 11. The question is, what do these literary images represent in the world of space, time and history?

Both of these points relate equally to the apocalypse which is closely parallel to 4 Ezra, i.e. 2 Baruch. In chapters 39–40, as we saw earlier, the Danielic image of four kingdoms is set out, after which the Anointed One will be revealed, and will convict the last of the wicked rulers on Mount Zion, whereupon ‘his dominion will last forever until the world of corruption has ended and until the times which have been mentioned before have been fulfilled’.¹¹⁵ Whether or not this is dependent on 4 Ezra, and hence does not count as a fully independent witness, it is still evidence for yet another way in which Daniel 7 was being read messianically, and combined with other biblical themes clearly taken as messianic prophecies, around the end of the first century AD.

Moving from 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch to 1 Enoch, not least to the Similitudes (chapters 37–71), means exchanging comparative clarity for comparative puzzlement. This judgment is, of course, highly subjective, but it is important to stress that, despite the long history of scholarly wrestling with the ‘son of man’ figure in 1 Enoch, if we are looking for clear reuse of the material in Daniel 7 we will find it much more easily in the passages we have just examined. For our present purposes it is not important to examine the rambling and convoluted details of 1 Enoch; we need simply note the different use of imagery.¹¹⁶

In particular, the second ‘Similitude’ (chapters 45–57), though clearly based on Daniel 7, does not attempt to retell the story of that chapter as do 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. Instead, it begins more or less where Daniel 7 leaves off: with the son of man already on the throne before the Ancient of Days, and now turning attention to the details of the judgment and the righteous rule which are the concluding point of Daniel’s vision and interpretation.¹¹⁷ The two figures of the Ancient of Days and the son of man (or the ‘Elect One’, as in 45.3 and many other passages; or the Messiah, as in e.g. 52.4) are simply the starting-points for the detailed judgment scene which unfolds; they are taken for granted, and do not themselves have a developing role. We must discuss in a subsequent volume the relationship between these passages and the early Christian writings which make use of similar imagery. For our present purposes it is enough to note that 1 Enoch does not introduce and explain the ‘son of man’ figure, but simply assumes it.¹¹⁸ This implies that at whatever stage the Similitudes were written, the picture we have seen in more detail in Daniel 7, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch was well enough known to be taken for granted. The four kingdoms, the great reversal, and the vindication of the elect, could be assumed. One could then move on to something else, namely the intricacies of judgment.

This remains the case in the third Similitude (chapters 58–69). In chapters 62–3 there takes place the judgment scene that is the climax of the whole section of the book.¹¹⁹ Once again the Elect One (62:1), the son of man (62:5–9), is simply revealed. He does not appear after a sequence of four kingdoms, nor is he exalted after suffering as in Daniel 7:21–2. He is simply demonstrated before the whole world as the chosen one of the ‘Lord of the Spirits’, and the result of the judgment is joy in his presence for some (62:14) and shame for others (63:11).¹²⁰

What we have in 1 Enoch, then, is a substantial development from the picture of Daniel 7. We should not imagine this development as taking place on a unilinear chronological scale: there is no reason at all why different groups and individuals should not have made their own variations on a theme, returned to the original for fresh inspiration, or harked back to earlier interpretations behind current ones.¹²¹ Nor is there any need to postulate dependence, whether literary or otherwise, between 1 Enoch on the one hand and 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch and the gospels on the other. Rather, what we have here is one more strand in the richly variegated tapestry of first-century Jewish messianic belief and rereading of scripture. What is more, it is a strand which indicates that the authors expect the ideas to be well known. A single piece of literature may thus open up a window on a larger world of potential discourse.

What have we learned from this survey of four very different types of evidence—Qumran, the Psalms of Solomon, Josephus and some apocalyptic writings?¹²² We have reinforced the commonly accepted view, that there was no one fixed view of a Messiah in the period. But we have also seen that generalized and loosely formed messianic themes and ideas were current and well known; that they characteristically drew on and reused well-known biblical passages and motifs; and that, though the language in which they are sometimes couched is heavily symbolic, the referent in many cases is the very this-worldly idea of a ruler or judge who would arise within Israel and who would enact the divine judgment and vengeance on Israel’s oppressors.¹²³ In particular, we have seen that one recurring biblical text was Daniel 7. The controversies about this passage are too varied and complex to be settled here. But if the interpretation of apocalyptic in general and Messianism in particular which I have offered here is anything like on target, then I am led to concur with the judgment of Horbury, in one of the fullest recent articles on the subject:

At the beginning of the Christian era, the Davidic hope already constituted a relatively fixed core of messianic expectation, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. Exegetical interconnections attest that ‘the son of man’ is likely to have acquired, within its wide range of meaning, definite associations with this hope.¹²⁴

We may emerge from this discussion with some cautious conclusions about messianic expectations in the first century. These may be stated in a series of theses.

1. Expectation was focused primarily on the nation, not on any particular individual. The hope we explored earlier in this chapter remains fundamental, occurring far more widely than expressions of hope for a Messiah or similar figure. Sometimes, indeed, texts which might be thought to speak of a Messiah are referred to the whole community a process which is already visible within the Hebrew Bible itself.¹²⁵

2. This expectation could, under certain circumstances, become focused upon a particular individual, either expected imminently or actually present. The circumstances under which this was possible seem to have been threefold: the appearance of an opportunity (such as at the death of Herod); the particular pressure of anti-Jewish action by pagans (such as under Hadrian); and the crescendo of speculation connected with the attempt to work out messianic chronology.

3. When this happened, the generalized expectation of a coming figure can be redrawn in a wide variety of ways to fit the situation or person concerned. Davidic descent can clearly be waived. The idea of two Messiahs is not a contradiction in terms. The particular felt needs of the time can influence the presentation: Herod could hope for his son to be the true king; the Sicarii could put forward Menahem, or the peasants Simon bar Giora.

4. The main task of the Messiah, over and over again, is the liberation of Israel, and her reinstatement as the true people of the creator god. This will often involve military action, which can be seen in terms of judgment as in a lawcourt. It will also involve action in relation to the Jerusalem Temple, which must be cleansed and/or restored and/or rebuilt.

5. It is clear that whenever the Messiah appears, and whoever he turns out to be, he will be the agent of Israel’s god. This must be clearly distinguished from any suggestion that he is in himself a transcendent figure, existing in some supernatural mode before making his appearance in space and time. Generations of scholars have discussed Jewish messianic expectation as though this were the main issue. We have now made a survey of many of the key texts without discovering the theme at all. The only place where it appears for certain is 1 Enoch, and there (in my judgment) the question presses as to which parts of the writing are lurid literary representation and which are to be ‘taken literally’—whatever that overworked phrase might mean in this case. Certainly there is no reason to hypothesize any widespread belief that the coming Messiah would be anything other than an ordinary human being called by Israel’s god to an extraordinary task.

6. Nor is it the case that the Messiah was expected to suffer. The one or two passages which speak of the death of the Messiah (e.g. 4 Ezra 7:29) seem to envisage simply that the messianic kingdom, being a human institution, to be inaugurated within present world history, will come to an end, to be followed by a yet further ‘final age to come’. The traditions we studied earlier which speak of redemptive suffering undergone by some Jews in the course of the struggle (e.g. 2 Maccabees 7) are not applied to the Messiah.¹²⁶

The coming of the King, where it was looked for, would thus be the focal point of the great deliverance. But what would this deliverance actually consist of? Would it be political, or spiritual, or in some sense both?

5. The Renewal of the World, of Israel, and of Humans

We have learned in these last few chapters that a good many things often held apart need to be put together again if we are to understand second-temple Judaism. This is nowhere more true than in the study of the Jewish hope. It is no doubt right, if we are to avoid fuzzy thinking, that we should study different aspects and themes as though they were the only ones in the world. But it is then appropriate, if we are to avoid spurious atomism, that we put the newly polished elements back in their proper relation to one another. Jews of the period were hoping for the ‘real’ return from exile. They were also hoping for a full ‘forgiveness of sins’. Those are not two separate things, but two ways of looking at the same thing. They were looking for the covenant god to fulfil his promises, to display his ‘righteousness’. That too is simply a different reading of the same basic phenomena. Some were looking for a coming Messiah who would be the agent appointed by their god to accomplish redemption; but the redemption was the same. They were looking for a restored Temple, and for their god to come and dwell within it; that is the largest dimension of all, but it is still a dimension of the same thing. We cannot split any of these off from one another.

If all these beliefs and hopes are to be integrated closely with one another, they must also be integrated with the basic first-century Jewish worldview which we have studied. And the purpose of such worldview study is to help us to understand history: to enable us to see behind the events to the meaning, in the sense explored in Part II above.

Before we can finally draw these threads together, we must face a question which arises not least from the apocalyptic literature we have studied in the present chapter. How did this expectation, the longing for a national restoration, fit in, if it did, with the hope for a non-spatio-temporal life after death? How did personal hope fit in with national hope? How did ‘spiritual’ aspiration cohere with ‘political’? And, in the middle of all this, what about the idea of resurrection?

It is clear that some first-century Jews at least had already adopted what may be seen as a Hellenized future expectation, that is, a hope for a non-physical (or ‘spiritual’) world to which the righteous and blessed would be summoned after death, and a non-physical place of damnation where the wicked would be tormented. There are some texts which use language of this sort. They can by no means be dismissed as simply the projection on to a non-historical screen of expectations that can be reduced to purely historical terms. Nothing is more probable than that, in the confusion of non-standardized second-temple Judaism, all sorts of groups and individuals held all sorts of views about life after death, including some that, from our perspective, seem closer to a Hellenistic idea of a shadowy afterlife than to any thought of resurrection, or indeed of the renewal of the space-time world of creation and history.

Nevertheless, I believe it would be a great mistake to regard a Hellenized expectation as basic, and to place the socio-political hope in a secondary position. We have seen throughout this Part of the book that much second-temple Judaism made a serious attempt to integrate what post-Enlightenment thought holds apart, the sacred and the secular. We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’ being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal. Further, we have seen in our study of Josephus that, precisely when he is discussing the beliefs of Jewish groups, he has a penchant for ‘translating’ out of the hard political meaning of his Jewish contemporaries into a less threatening meaning, more easily assimilable by his cultured pagan readers.

The problem here seems to be that the language can be read as metaphorical in either direction. On the one hand, we shall see that Josephus and some of the apocalyptic works refer to physical resurrection while using the language of immortality, i.e. a non-physical life after death. On the other hand, it can also be suggested that a writer refers to immortality while using the language of physical resurrection, in order to make the hope more vivid.¹²⁷ How can we gain a foothold in an area of which even the large-scale revision of Schürer declares that ‘there are so many opinions in Jewish religious thought that it is not feasible to enter into them all at the present time’?¹²⁸ The best course seems to be simply to outline the spectrum of ancient opinion (rather than the spectrum of modern opinion about it, which would be tedious indeed), and point up the various options.¹²⁹

We may begin once more on solid ground, and again in the book of Daniel:

There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.¹³⁰

The italicized sentence of this extract unquestionably refers to physical resurrection, which in this case is of just and unjust alike. We should note, however, that this is flanked by two other statements. First, the opening sentence refers to a time of great national anguish, followed by the great national deliverance. The hope for resurrection is part and parcel of the hope for national restoration after the ‘messianic woes’. Second, the last sentence refers to the luminosity of the blessed, the ‘wise’: they will shine like the sky, or like the stars.¹³¹ By itself, this sentence could easily have been taken to refer to a non-physical ‘heavenly’ existence; in its present context, it demands to be read as a metaphor for the glory which will be enjoyed by those who are raised to everlasting life (which in Hebrew and Greek is ‘the life of the age’, i.e. the ‘age to come’, not simply ‘unending life’). It is not clear whether the earlier statements of similar views in such passages as Isaiah 26:19, Ezekiel 37:1–14, and Hosea 5:15–6:3 were understood in this literal sense in the pre-Maccabaean period; there, their natural literary meaning is that they invest the future restoration of Israel with its theological significance. But we can be sure that those who read Daniel 12 in the full sense just described would have reread such earlier passages and found in them confirmation of the view to which they had come. After all, as we have seen throughout this Part, the antithesis which many have imagined between the national and the individual hope, between the political and the ‘spiritual’, is an anachronism.¹³²

A second firm starting-point is found in 2 Maccabees. In one of the most grisly passages in the whole of our literature, seven brothers are being tortured in the vain attempt to make them submit to the edict of Antiochus Epiphanes. In refusing, many of them explicitly refer to the coming resurrection in which they will be vindicated and given back the bodies that are now being torn apart:

And when he was at his last breath, he said, ‘You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.’

When he was near death, [another] said, ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’

[The mother] … said to them, ‘I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws … accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.’

[The young man said] … ‘If our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants … for our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of everflowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgment of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance. I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.’¹³³

This remarkable passage not only demonstrates again the extremely physical nature of the anticipated resurrection. It also shows the close link between this belief and four others. First, those who were assured of resurrection were those who had died for the ancestral laws. Second, the future bodily life will be a gift of the creator of the universe, an act of new creation, not a mere continuation of an immortal soul. Third, the hope could be phrased in more general terms (‘they have drunk of everflowing life’), which by itself might have been interpreted in a Hellenistic direction, without detracting from the emphatically physical view expressed throughout the chapter. Fourth, the hope for resurrection is placed fair and square within the national, covenantal expectation, conjoined with the belief that the significance of the martyr’s sufferings has to do with their efficacy in bearing the wrath of Israel’s god against his sinful people. Here, in a book which we know to have been in circulation in the first century, is a powerful statement of one regular form of the Jewish worldview.

One other comment on 2 Maccabees 7 is in order at this stage. The first-century AD work known as 4 Maccabees was based more or less entirely on 2 Maccabees, and a good deal of 4 Maccabees (chapters 8–17) is taken up with the retelling and expansion of the chapter we have just studied. Yet, in keeping with the aim of the later book, which is the glorification of Reason by historical examples of those who were prepared to suffer rather than abandon this virtuous faculty, the mention of bodily resurrection has been toned down almost completely, in favour of a much more Hellenistic approach. ‘For we,’ say the young men in 4 Maccabees, ‘through this severe suffering and endurance, shall have the prize of virtue and shall be with God, on whose account we suffer’ (9:8). ‘I’, said one, ‘lighten my pains by the joys that come from virtue’ (9:31); ‘See, here is my tongue,’ said another; ‘cut it off, for in spite of this you will not make our reason speechless’ (10:19); and so on.¹³⁴ This is an excellent example of what we will find in Josephus: a firmly physical account of resurrection can easily, under the right rhetorical constraints, be ‘translated’ into a Hellenistic doctrine of the immortal memory of the virtuous dead.¹³⁵

We find exactly this when we put Josephus’ own statements side by side. Take, first, the speech which he puts into his own mouth when defending his right not to commit suicide after the fall of Jotapata. Those who lay violent hands on themselves, he declares, go into the darker regions of the nether world, while he himself believes

that they who depart this life in accordance with the law of nature and repay the loan which they received from God, when He who lent is pleased to reclaim it, win eternal renown; that their houses and families are secure; that their souls, remaining spotless and obedient, are allotted the most holy place in heaven, whence, in the revolution of the ages, they return to find in chaste bodies a new habitation.¹³⁶

This is as clear a statement of one mainline Jewish view as we could wish for. The righteous dead are presently in ‘heaven’, the domain of the creator god; but there is coming a new age, ha-‘olam ha-ba’, in which the creation will be (not abolished, but) renewed; and the righteous dead will be given new bodies, precisely in order that they may inhabit the renewed earth. ‘The revolution of the ages’ is not the Stoic doctrine of the fiery consumption and remaking of a phoenix-like world, but the Jewish distinction between the present age and the age to come. We are left in no doubt that the age to come would be a renewed physical, space-time world, and that the righteous dead, at present resting in ‘heaven’, would return to share its physical life.

Armed with this passage, which Josephus has claimed as his own view, we may note the slight toning-down which has already taken place in the exposition of Jewish belief in the book Against Apion. No mere financial or other prize, Josephus claims with pride, awaits those who follow our ancestral laws: rather,

each individual … is firmly persuaded that to those who observe the laws and, if they must needs die for them, willingly meet death, God has granted a renewed existence and in the revolution of the ages the gift of a better life.¹³⁷

By itself, this passage might have been thought potentially Stoic, or at least capable of a general Hellenized interpretation. In the light of the earlier passage, there can be no doubt that here, too, we have the same belief as in 2 Maccabees.

It is when we turn to Josephus’ statements about the beliefs of the different parties that we would have difficulty, were it not for these clearer statements. The Pharisees, he says, hold a doctrine of conditional resurrection, while the Sadducees reject it:

Every soul, they [the Pharisees] maintain, is imperishable, but the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment … As for the persistence of the soul after death, penalties in the underworld, and rewards, they [the Sadducees] will have none of them.¹³⁸

Once again, if these passages were all we had, we would still think of the imperishability of the soul as the main Pharisaic doctrine, rather than the resurrection of the body. Even though the idea of the soul’s ‘passing into another body’ makes it clear that this is not pure Platonism (the soul escaping its bodily prison and inheriting disembodied bliss), the phrase by itself could be interpreted as meaning transmigration (the soul passing at death into another physical being), as indeed some modern interpreters have suggested.¹³⁹ In the considerably later parallel passage in the Antiquities, this highlighting of the immortal soul has been taken a large step further:

They [the Pharisees] believe that souls have power to survive death and that there are rewards and punishments under the earth for those who have led lives of virtue or vice: eternal imprisonment is the lot of evil souls, while the good souls receive an easy passage to a new life. Because of these views they are, as a matter of fact, extremely influential among the townsfolk … The Sadducees hold that the soul perishes along with the body.¹⁴⁰

Again, if this passage were all we had to go on, we might conclude that Josephus had gone the whole way into a Hellenistic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The souls go ‘under the ground’ where they receive rewards or punishments; the mention of an ‘easy passage to a new life’ could by itself be interpreted simply as the blessed disembodied life of the successful post mortem Platonist. But in the context of the earlier extracts we must conclude that the ‘passage to a new life’ is a hint, here all but obscured by the language about the immortal soul, of the position which is clear elsewhere: upon death, the souls of the righteous go to heaven, or to be with their god, or under the earth—but this is only temporary. A new, embodied life awaits them in the fullness of time.

Josephus clearly knows all about the Hellenistic views of immortal souls shut up in the prison-house of the body, because that is the view he ascribes to the Essenes, labelling it specifically ‘the belief of the sons of Greece’.¹⁴¹ According to the Essenes, he says, righteous souls go to a place of blessedness beyond the ocean, corresponding to the Greek ‘isles of the blessed’. How far this was actually true of the Essenes it is hard to say, and it may be that Josephus’ account has been considerably distorted here by his desire to present the different groups as Hellenistic philosophical schools.¹⁴² It is interesting, though, that despite the way his descriptions of the Pharisees’ doctrines change in the direction of a softening of the hard resurrection belief, he does not ascribe to them the fully-blown Hellenistic view which he is happy to postulate of the Essenes.

The most strikingly Hellenized account of life after death in Josephus is put on the lips of Eleazar, the leader of the Sicarii on Masada. Advocating mass suicide, Eleazar urges his followers to embrace death as that which gives liberation to the soul:

Life, not death, is man’s misfortune. For it is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity; but so long as it is imprisoned in a mortal body and tainted with all its miseries, it is, in sober truth, dead, for association with what is mortal ill befits that which is divine. True, the soul possesses great capacity, even while incarcerated in the body … But it is not until, freed from the weight that drags it down to earth and clings about it, the soul is restored to its proper sphere, that it enjoys a blessed energy and a power untrammelled on every side, remaining, like God himself, invisible to human eyes … For whatever the soul has touched lives and flourishes, whatever it abandons withers and dies; so abundant is her wealth of immortality.¹⁴³

No Stoic rhetorician could have put it better. That is probably the point. Josephus is almost certainly putting into the mouth of this rebel leader a speech which would endear itself to a respectable Roman audience, to whom the arguments (and the poetic allusions, e.g. to Sophocles)¹⁴⁴ would be quite familiar. It is remarkable that in the following passage Eleazar goes on to speak of sleep as an analogy to death, and instead of drawing the point that those who sleep will wake again (cp. 1 Corinthians 15:20; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–15, etc.), he employs the thoroughly pagan idea that during sleep humans become independent beings, conversing with the deity, ranging the universe, and foretelling the future.¹⁴⁵

If Josephus describes the Sicarii chieftain Eleazar, almost certainly quite wrongly, as having used language appropriate to paganism and particularly Stoicism, it is interesting, finally, that when he creates another speech about facing death, this time on the lips of those he knows to be Pharisees, he draws back from such an extreme position. The learned doctors who incited the young men to pull down the eagle on the Temple, he says, urged that even if the action should prove hazardous,

it was a noble deed to die for the law of one’s country; for the souls of those who came to such an end attained immortality and an eternally abiding sense of felicity.¹⁴⁶

Immortality here is a gift to the virtuous, not an innate property of the soul; it is still immortality, not (apparently) resurrection, but there is no talk of the soul being weighed down by the body. The later account of the same incident puts the point thus: that

to those about to die for the preservation and safeguarding of their fathers’ way of life the virtue acquired by them in death would seem far more advantageous than the pleasure of living. For by winning eternal fame and glory for themselves they would be praised by those now living and would leave the ever-memorable [example of their] lives to future generations. Moreover, they said, even those who live without danger cannot escape the misfortune [of death], so that those who strive for virtue do well to accept their fate with praise and honour when they depart this life.¹⁴⁷

From this passage we would not glean any hint of resurrection, but nor would we have inferred the presence of the Stoic view, that one should simply be prepared to die for the cause of virtue. Because we know on other grounds that the teachers were Pharisees, we are able to see behind the smokescreen of Josephus’ apologetic stance. Josephus is trying to tell his Roman audience that the teachers were urging their followers to die in a noble cause, much as a good Roman might have done. What they were actually saying, we may be sure, was this: Die for the law, and you will receive resurrection when our god vindicates his people! They might have been reading 2 Maccabees.

Josephus, then, is valuable in this discussion in two ways. First, on occasion he clearly states a doctrine of bodily resurrection. Second, he demonstrates equally clearly that such a doctrine could quite easily be described, for rhetorical reasons, in language which by itself could easily be taken to refer to the immortality of the soul. We thus see, in the work of one writer, what we observed above in the transition from 2 Maccabees to 4 Maccabees.

Where on this scale should we put the Psalms of Solomon?

The destruction of the sinner is for ever,

and God will not remember him when he visits the righteous.

This is the portion of sinners for ever;

But they that fear the Lord shall rise to life eternal,

And their life shall be in the light of the Lord, and shall come to an end no more.¹⁴⁸

R. B. Wright, commenting on this passage, says that it is unclear whether it refers to the resurrection of the body (rising from the grave) or the immortality of the spirit (rising to god), or if indeed the author necessarily distinguished the two.¹⁴⁹ The same question faces the reader of the Solomonic Psalms 14:10 and 15:13, and indeed the older belief that these propounded a doctrine of resurrection may have been based on the belief that they were Pharisaic, rather than the other way round. It is, however, perhaps asking too much to expect doctrinal precision from this sort of poetry. The Psalms are quite compatible with the resurrection belief of 2 Maccabees and the explicit passage in Josephus, but by themselves they cannot be forced to yield a clear statement.

Whatever we think about the Psalms of Solomon, it is clear from Josephus, the New Testament, and the later rabbinic evidence that the resurrection was one of the principal distinguishing marks of the Pharisees. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was the denial of the resurrection that became one of the chief distinguishing marks of the Sadducees, the arch-opponents of the Pharisees.¹⁵⁰ As we saw earlier, this dispute between Pharisees and Sadducees is not an isolated point of disagreement, but is exactly cognate with their major bone of contention: the Pharisees looked for a great renewal in which the present state of things would be radically altered, while the Sadducees were content with the status quo. To that extent, it is not surprising that Acts depicts the early Christians as being opposed by Sadducees precisely because they were ‘announcing the resurrection of the dead by means of Jesus’.¹⁵¹ This has the stamp of early tradition upon it: in later periods, the name of Jesus would have been the problem, but in the early days of Christianity those in power were more worried about an excited announcement of resurrection, with all the socio-political connotations that might have. This also helps to explain John’s story about the chief priests wanting to kill Lazarus after Jesus had raised him from the dead.¹⁵² The early Christian writings bear witness to the same spread of belief in resurrection: speculation that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead is something that the early church is unlikely to have made up, and it could only have arisen in circles where the idea of resurrection was held as a distinct (though not clearly defined) possibility.¹⁵³ It seems, in fact, that Sanders’ view here is correct: the great majority of Jews of the period believed in some sense or other in the resurrection.¹⁵⁴ Only those who had gone some way towards assimilation, and who therefore adopted a belief in the immortality of the non-physical soul, or those who for socio-political reasons were committed to denying any speculation about a future life, held back.¹⁵⁵

This widespread belief in resurrection can be seen in a range of apocalyptic texts from roughly the first century BC/AD. The Life of Adam and Eve¹⁵⁶ states clearly that the creator god promised to Adam that he would raise him on the last day, in the general resurrection, with every man of his seed, and envisages the archangel Michael saying to Adam’s son Seth that all dead humans are to be buried ‘until the day of resurrection’, and that the sabbath day is ‘a sign of the resurrection’.¹⁵⁷1 Enoch speaks of Sheol and hell giving back their dead, with great rejoicing on the part of the whole of creation;¹⁵⁸ 4 Ezra, of the earth giving up those who ‘are asleep in it’;¹⁵⁹ the Testament of Judah, of the patriarchs being raised to life, at a time when

those who died in sorrow shall be raised in joy;

and those who died in poverty for the Lord’s sake shall be made rich;

those who died on account of the Lord shall be wakened to life.

And the deer of Jacob shall run with gladness;

the eagles of Jacob shall fly with joy;

the impious shall mourn and sinners shall weep,

but all peoples shall glorify the Lord forever.¹⁶⁰

In all of these texts, which can scarcely be thought to come from one single sect alone, we see a well-shaped belief. The righteous will rise to life in the age to come, so that they can receive their proper reward. This belief functions within the context of suffering and martyrdom for Israel’s god and his law, and hence as an incentive to a more serious keeping of that law and a more zealous maintenance of all that Judaism was and stood for.¹⁶¹ Thus, as we shall see presently, belief in resurrection, though often thinking particularly of individual human beings and their future life, was not divorced from, but was rather a quintessential part of, the overall belief, hope, and worldview of a major segment of second-temple Judaism.

It is common to suggest that the Wisdom of Solomon speaks of a blessed, but not physical, future. This is usually illustrated by the following passage:

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.

and no torment will ever touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,

and their departure was thought to be a disaster,

and their going from us to be their destruction;

but they are at peace.

For though in the sight of others they were punished,

their hope is full of immortality …¹⁶²

I suggest, however, that this quite clearly refers, not to the permanent state of the righteous dead, but to their temporary home. The passage, which we quoted earlier in another connection, continues:

Like gold in the furnace he tried them

and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.

In the time of their visitation they will shine forth,

and will run like sparks through the stubble.

they will govern nations and rule over peoples,

and the Lord will reign over them forever …

The righteous who have died will condemn the ungodly who are living …

For [the ungodly] will see the end of the wise,

and will not understand what the Lord purposed for them,

and for what he kept them safe.

[The ungodly] will come with dread when their sins are reckoned up,

and their lawless deeds will convict them to their face.

Then the righteous will stand with great confidence

in the presence of those who have oppressed them

and those who make light of their labours.

When the unrighteous see them,

they will be shaken with dreadful fear,

and they will be amazed at the unexpected salvation of the righteous …

But the righteous live forever,

and their reward is with the Lord;

the Most High takes care of them.

therefore they will receive a glorious crown

and a beautiful diadem from the hand of the Lord,

because with his right hand he will cover them

and with his arm he will shield them.¹⁶³

These passages, it seems to me, demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the ‘immortality’ spoken of in the first passage is the same as the temporary rest in ‘heaven’ of which Josephus spoke as preceding the resurrection itself. There is a clear time-sequence: first, the righteous die, and the unrighteous celebrate; then, a further event at which the unrighteous will discover their mistake when confronted with the righteous as their judges. No doubt some Hellenistic readers of the Wisdom of Solomon might have missed the point in a casual reading. But against the full Jewish background the book seems to represent the majority position rather than a Hellenization.¹⁶⁴

If we want to find the latter, we turn, not surprisingly, to Philo:

When Abraham left this mortal life, ‘he is added to the people of God’ [quoting Genesis 25:8], in that he inherited incorruption and became equal to the angels.¹⁶⁵

[Moses] represents the good man as not dying but departing … He would have the nature of the fully purified soul shewn as unquenchable and immortal, destined to journey from hence to heaven, not to meet with dissolution and corruption, which death appears to bring.¹⁶⁶

When people die, much of the personality is laid in the grave with them;

but if anywhere … there grows up a virtue-loving tendency, it is saved from extinction by memories, which are a means of keeping alive the flame of noble qualities.¹⁶⁷

This perspective was not confined to Hellenistic, or Alexandrian, speculative philosophers. It also emerges, for instance, in an apocalyptic work: in the Testament of Abraham, the angels are instructed to take Abraham into Paradise,

where there are the tents of my righteous ones and [where] the mansions of my holy ones, Isaac and Jacob, are in his bosom, where there is no toil, no grief, no moaning, but peace and exultation and endless life.¹⁶⁸

There appear, then, to be three basic positions taken by Jews in our period, with, no doubt, minor modifications within each. The Sadducees stand out as unusual in that they will have nothing to do with a future life, neither with immortality nor with resurrection. No doubt a substantial and perhaps growing minority of Jews, including those who have quite clearly drunk deeply from the Platonic and general Hellenistic well, could write of the immortality of the soul. But the majority speak of the bodily resurrection of the dead, and frequently address the problem of an intermediate state; this last point is itself strong evidence for belief in bodily resurrection, since only on this premise is there a problem to be addressed. Sometimes, in describing this latter state, they borrow Hellenistic language which in its own context denotes a permanent disembodied state; but they still make it clear that bodily resurrection is the end they have in sight.

Why did the belief in resurrection arise, and how did it fit in with the broader Jewish worldview and belief-system which we have sketched in the preceding chapters? Again and again we have seen that this belief is bound up with the struggle to maintain obedience to Israel’s ancestral laws in the face of persecution. Resurrection is the divine reward for martyrs; it is what will happen after the great tribulation. But it is not simply a special reward for those who have undergone special sufferings. Rather, the eschatological expectation of most Jews of this period was for a renewal, not an abandonment, of the present space-time order as a whole, and themselves within it. Since this was based on the justice and mercy of the creator god, the god of Israel, it was inconceivable that those who had died in the struggle to bring the new world into being should be left out of the blessing when it eventually broke upon the nation and thence on the world.¹⁶⁹

The old metaphor of corpses coming to life had, ever since Ezekiel at least, been one of the most vivid ways of denoting the return from exile and connoting the renewal of the covenant and of all creation. Within the context of persecution and struggle for Torah in the Syrian and Roman periods, this metaphor itself acquired a new life. If Israel’s god would ‘raise’ his people (metaphorically) by bringing them back from their continuing exile, he would also, within that context, ‘raise’ those people (literally) who had died in the hope of that national and covenantal vindication. ‘Resurrection’, while focusing attention on the new embodiment of the individuals involved, retained its original sense of the restoration of Israel by her covenant god. As such, ‘resurrection’ was not simply a pious hope about new life for dead people. It carried with it all that was associated with the return from exile itself: forgiveness of sins, the re-establishment of Israel as the true humanity of the covenant god, and the renewal of all creation.¹⁷⁰ Indeed, resurrection and the renewal of creation go hand in hand. If the space-time world were to disappear, resurrection would not make sense. Alternatively, if there was to be no resurrection, who would people the renewed cosmos?

Thus the Jews who believed in resurrection did so as one part of a larger belief in the renewal of the whole created order. Resurrection would be, in one and the same moment, the reaffirmation of the covenant and the reaffirmation of creation. Israel would be restored within a restored cosmos: the world would see, at last, who had all along been the true people of the creator god.¹⁷¹ This is where the twin Jewish ‘basic beliefs’ finally come together. Monotheism and election, taken together, demand eschatology. Creational/covenantal monotheism, taken together with the tension between election and exile, demands resurrection and a new world. That is why some of the prophets used gorgeous mythical language to describe what would happen: lions and lambs lying down together, trees bearing fruit every month, Jerusalem becoming like a new Eden. This, too, was simply the outworking, in poetic symbol, of the basic belief that the creator of the universe was Israel’s god, and vice versa. When he acted, there would be a great celebration. All creation, in principle, would join in.

To write this seems almost uncontroversial as a historical summary of Jewish belief. Dozens of texts of the period point this way; we are on absolutely firm historical ground. Sanders, summarizing the Jewish hope in this period, writes:

Many Jews looked forward to a new and better age … The hopes centred on the restoration of the people, the building or purification of the temple and Jerusalem, the defeat or conversion of the Gentiles, and the establishment of purity and righteousness … The hope that God would fundamentally change things was a perfectly reasonable hope for people to hold who read the Bible and who believed that God had created the world and had sometimes intervened dramatically to save his people.¹⁷²

What Sanders never does, however, is to draw out the highly polemical nature of this claim in the context of the twentieth-century reading of first-century Jewish texts, including the texts of those first-century Jews who called themselves Christians.¹⁷³ But the point must surely be drawn out. Within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, covering a wide range of styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they, like Jeremiah and others before them, knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events. There is almost nothing to suggest that they followed the Stoics into the belief that the world itself would come to an end; and there is almost everything—their stories, their symbols, their praxis, not least their tendency to revolution, and their entire theology—to suggest that they did not.

What, then, did they believe was going to happen? They believed that the present world order would come to an end—the world order in which pagans held power, and Jews, the covenant people of the creator god, did not.¹⁷⁴ Sects like the Essenes believed that the present order, in which the wrong Jews held power, would come to an end, and a new world order would be inaugurated in which the right Jews, i.e. themselves, attained power instead. We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that some Jews believed that the physical world would come to an end, just as we cannot rule out the possibility that some Jews thought there were five gods, or that the Egyptians were the one chosen people of the creator god. But such views are marginal not only to the literature of all sorts that we possess from the period, but to the worldview of the great majority of (non-writing) first-century Jews, which we can reconstruct from their symbols, their stories and above all their praxis. Jews simply did not believe that the space-time order was shortly to disappear.

At a seminar at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in November 1989, I listened to Professor John Collins expound a view of Jewish eschatology not dissimilar to that which I have just outlined. At the end I suggested that if Albert Schweitzer had heard that paper a hundred years ago, the entire course of New Testament studies in the twentieth century would have been different. Collins, with due modesty, agreed that that might well be the case.¹⁷⁵ Schweitzer was right, I believe, when at the beginning of the twentieth century he drew attention to apocalyptic as the matrix of early Christianity. It is now high time, as the century draws towards its close, to state, against Schweitzer, what that apocalyptic matrix actually was and meant.

It should be noted most emphatically that, although ‘resurrection’ is naturally something that individuals can hope for, for themselves or for those they love, the belief we have studied is always focused on a general resurrection at the end of the present age and the start of the age to come. This will be a raising to life in which all Israel (with suitable exceptions, depending on one’s point of view) will share. Seen from one angle, it will constitute Israel’s salvation: after the long years of oppression and desolation, she will be rescued at last. From another angle, it will constitute Israel’s vindication (or ‘justification’): having claimed throughout her history to be the people of the creator god, the resurrection will at last make the claim good. Creational and covenantal monotheism, and the eschatology to which they give birth, thus form a context within which what is sometimes called ‘Jewish soteriology’, the beliefs that Jews held about salvation, may be situated accurately and fruitfully. It is important that we spell this out a little further.

6. Salvation and Justification

The word ‘salvation’ would denote, to a first-century Jew, the hope which we have studied throughout this chapter, seen particularly in terms of Israel’s rescue, by her god, from pagan oppression. This would be the gift of Israel’s god to his whole people, all at once. Individual Jews would find their own ‘salvation’ through their membership within Israel, that is, within the covenant; covenant membership in the present was the guarantee (more or less) of ‘salvation’ in the future.

We have already seen how first-century Jews understood covenant membership. The whole Jewish worldview, with its stories, its symbols, and its praxis, gives a clear answer. The covenant was entered through Jewish birth or proselyte initiation; it was sealed, for males, in the fact of circumcision; it was maintained through fidelity to the covenant document, Torah. This is most significant: as Sanders has argued extensively, membership in the covenant is demonstrated, rather than earned, by possession of Torah and the attempt to keep it. When the age to come dawns, those who have remained faithful to the covenant will be vindicated; this does not mean ‘those who have kept Torah completely’, since the sacrificial system existed precisely to enable Israelites who knew themselves to be sinful to maintain their membership none the less. And the attempt to keep Torah, whether more or less successful, was normally and regularly understood as response, not as human initiative. This is Sanders’ thesis, and, despite some criticisms that have been launched, it seems to me thus far completely correct as a description of first-century Judaism.¹⁷⁶

It is within this context that there arose, within our period, debates as to who precisely would be vindicated when the covenant god finally acted to liberate Israel. ‘All Israel has a share in the age to come’; but not Sadducees, not those who deny Torah, not Epicureans.¹⁷⁷ The sectaries who wrote the Scrolls would have agreed with the sentiment, but with a different list of exclusions: they and they alone were ‘Israel’, and the Pharisees (‘the speakers of smooth things’) and the official Temple hierarchy were definitely to share the lot of the Sons of Darkness. We can be fairly sure that the different factions in the war threw similar anathemas at one another.

The first-century question of soteriology then becomes: what are the badges of membership that mark one out in the group that is to be saved, vindicated, raised to life (in the case of members already dead) or exalted to power (in the case of those still alive)? For the Pharisees, there was a programme of intensification of Torah. For the Essenes, there was a (varying) set of communal rules, and an appeal to loyalty to a Teacher. For many rebel groups, there were subtly differing agendas, probably including, in the case of the Sicarii, loyalty to a would-be dynasty, and, in the case of the Zealots in the narrow sense, loyalty to a particular agenda and, at one stage at least, to a particular leader (Simon bar Giora). For Josephus, it was quite different: rescue, in the very practical sense, came by acknowledging that Israel’s god had gone over to the Romans, and by following suit.

In all of these cases we are witnessing different interpretations of the fundamental Jewish soteriology. The sequence of thought is precisely that of the many stories we examined earlier as representative of the basic Jewish worldview, and may be set out logically as follows:

a. The creator god calls Israel to be his people;

b. Israel, currently in ‘exile’, is to be redeemed, precisely because she is the covenant people of this god;

c. Present loyalty to the covenant is the sign of future redemption;

d. Loyalty to this covenant is being tested at this moment of crisis;

e. At this moment, what counts as loyalty, and hence what marks out those who will be saved/vindicated/raised to life, is … [with the different groups filling in the blank according to their own agendas].

We have already seen that a great deal of Jewish literature of the period tells this story in some shape or form.

What matters, then, is not simply (in Sanders’ categories) ‘getting in’ (how one becomes a member of the covenant) and ‘staying in’ (how one remains a member of the covenant). What matters, when Israel’s symbols are under threat—when the question of what it means to be a Jew is everywhere raised and nowhere settled—is staying in at this time of crisis; or, to put it another way, staying in when there was a risk of finding oneself suddenly outside, or, perhaps, getting back in after finding oneself suddenly excluded.¹⁷⁸ That is the situation that sects exploit. It is exactly the situation that we find in first-century Palestine.

What counts above all at a time like that is adherence to the right symbols: not simply the mainline symbols of Temple, Torah and Land, because the rival groups claim them as well, but the symbols which show that one is a member of the correct sub-group. Those who die a martyr’s death rather than break Torah will receive their bodies again (said the Maccabaean martyrs).¹⁷⁹ Those who ‘have faith in’ the Teacher of Righteousness will be delivered (said some of the Essenes).¹⁸⁰ Those who pull down the eagle from the Temple gate can look forward to a glorious resurrection (said the teachers who were egging them on).¹⁸¹ Those who follow Menahem will be vindicated when the war is won (said his Sicarii followers).¹⁸² Those who follow our strict interpretation of Torah, according to the tradition of the fathers, will be vindicated as true Israelites (said the rabbis, and some of their putative Pharisaic predecessors).¹⁸³ This is soteriology in practice, first-century style. It has little or nothing to do with moralizing or the quiet practice of abstract virtue. It has to do with life after death only to the extent that, if one dies before the great day dawns (especially if one dies as a martyr in the struggle), one needs to be assured that one will not be left out when salvation arrives, complete with restored Temple, cleansed Land, and Israel exalted at last over her enemies.

This is the point when a vital theological move can be made. When the age to come finally arrives, those who are the true covenant members will be vindicated; but, if one already knows the signs and symbols which mark out those true covenant members, this vindication, this ‘justification’, can be seen already in the present time. Covenant faithfulness in the present is the sign of covenantal vindication in the future; the badges of that present covenant faithfulness may vary from group to group, but those who wear the appropriate ones are assured that the true god will remain faithful to them and bring them safely into the new world that will soon be ushered in. We may again take the Essenes as an example. To suffer with the elect, to cling to the Teacher of Righteousness, and to abide by his teaching—this would be the sign in the present that one belonged to the group which, though marginal for the moment, would be vindicated as the true Israel in the future. The covenant god had renewed his covenant with this group, and they could therefore trust his covenant faithfulness (tsedaqah, ‘righteousness’), that he would vindicate them, giving them favourable judgment (mishpat, ‘justification’) as his new-covenant people, when his action, at present secret, at last became public:

As for me,

my justification is with God.

In His hand are the perfection of my way

and the uprightness of my heart.

He will wipe out my transgression

through his righteousness.

From the source of His righteousness

is my justification

and from His marvellous mysteries

is the light in my heart.

As for me,

if I stumble, the mercies of God

shall be my eternal salvation.

If I stagger because of the sin of flesh,

my justification shall be

by the righteousness of God which endures for ever.¹⁸⁴

Justification is both future (the vindication, the ‘judgment’, when Israel’s god finally acts) and present. Both depend on the divine covenant faithfulness; both will occur despite the continuing sinfulness of the worshipper. The present justification is secret, and depends simply on maintaining valid membership in the sect. The justification to come will be public, and will consist of the victory of the sect, and the establishment of its members as the true rulers of Israel and hence of the world.

How then does one become a member of the group that will inherit this glorious destiny, and who may perhaps believe that the future vindication can be anticipated, albeit secretly, in the present? Clearly, in the case of a sect, it is a matter of choice. To the extent that the Essenes were celibate, one could not join by birth. But the Scrolls teach quite clearly that this choice reflects an antecedent divine choice. This is simply the natural extension of regular biblical teaching. Deuteronomy made it quite clear that Israel was the people of the creator god, not because Israel was special, but because this god simply loved her.¹⁸⁵ The Essenes were, they believed, the true Israel; therefore, what was true of Israel was true of them. They were the elect ones, chosen to bear the destiny of Israel into the age to come.¹⁸⁶ There is no reason to suppose that any Jewish group or sect would have thought any differently.

Salvation, then, was a matter of a new world, the renewal of creation. Within this, Israel’s god would call some from within the nation to be a new Israel, the spearhead of the divine purpose. Within this again, this renewed people were to be the holy, pure, renewed human beings, living in a covenant fidelity which would answer to the covenant faithfulness of the creator god, and which would end in the renewal, i.e. resurrection, of human bodies themselves. When this god acted, those who belonged, by his grace alone, to this group, would be rescued, and thereby vindicated as the true people of god that they had claimed to be all along. Those who had died in advance of that day would be raised in order to share it. It is thus, within the context of the entire future hope of Israel, and in particular within the context of the promise of resurrection, that we can understand the essentially simple lines of second-temple Jewish soteriology. The doctrines of justification and salvation belong within the story we have seen all along to characterize the fundamental Jewish worldview.