Chapter 1
THE OLD WORLD
Living with Radical Monotheism
Understand that I am He: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no savior.
ISAIAH 43:10–11, KJV
THE OLD TESTAMENT offers many unequivocal proclamations of monotheism. According to the book of Deuteronomy, Moses himself recites the wonderful deeds of the Lord, YHWH, who alone is God: “There is none else beside him” (4:35). Yet however uncontroversial such words may sound today, they stand in marked contrast to other biblical verses that situate YHWH in the company of other deities. Psalm 82 depicts God taking his place among the council of gods, ready to pronounce judgment. Other verses likewise have God speaking in the plural (“Let us make man in our own image” [Gen. 1:26]). Even in Deuteronomy, one passage shows YHWH being allocated Israel as his own people, the implication being that other deities had their own nations (32:8–9).
With varying degrees of success, scholars through the centuries have struggled to reconcile such texts with a monotheistic view. The most likely interpretation is that in early times, YHWH was seen as one deity among several, and only gradually did his followers claim his unique and exclusive divinity. God was many before he was One. Over time texts were edited to eliminate embarrassing contradictions, but many older passages and hymns were simply too well established and too cherished simply to be discarded.1
But monotheism had implications that went far beyond the editing of texts. The shift from multiple gods to one absolute deity transformed attitudes toward belief and practice, which provide the essential foundation for developments in the ensuing Crucible era.2
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS alike believe their doctrines derive from “the Bible,” however they define the limits of that term. Through the centuries, Christians and Jews alike have ransacked the Old Testament for passages and texts to justify their beliefs. They claim, for instance, that some particular verse describes the origins of human sinfulness, or defines Satan, or foreshadows the Messiah. Christians have regularly read Christ back into the Old Testament, sometimes by means of optimistic mistranslation. In practice, such exegesis demands a great deal of special pleading, of varying degrees of plausibility, and many such conclusions would have baffled Hebrew writers of the First Temple era (ca. 950–587 BCE).
However much later believers claim continuity from the sacred text, the differences of belief and practice are at least as marked as the similarities. Mainstream religious life in biblical times was very different from most later concepts of Judaism. Some themes were constant, including dietary laws and the practice of circumcision, but the older religion was grounded in sacrifice and firmly rooted in the land.
No less striking are what seem to us to be puzzling omissions from biblical-era religion. The biblical view of the divine world was, by later standards, quite limited, and the heavens were relatively depopulated. Angels do feature in the Old Testament as divine envoys and as mighty figures in the celestial court, but most references are plain and even curt. Angels played no discernible role in the divine plan, they had no individual identity, nor were they given specific functions, such as guardianship over regions or natural phenomena. Satan, likewise, enjoyed no independent existence, nothing like his later role as a rebellious leader of evil forces. We can readily supply a list of negatives for other concepts that in retrospect appear central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, including Heaven, Hell, the afterlife, and the final Judgment, to say nothing of the Messiah or resurrection.3
Even in the fifth century BCE, when the Hebrew Bible was theoretically closed, few of those ideas were present in Jewish thought—but they assuredly were by the mid-first century, and they utterly dominate the world of the New Testament. What had happened in the meantime—the crucial difference that permitted those plots and characters to enter fully into the action—was a tectonic theological shift that has left its indelible mark on the scriptures.
THE BIBLE TELLS a story. In fact, it tells an abundance of stories, often in multiple versions that clash with each other. I will present the familiar account found in the Bible as we know it before offering some alternative interpretations.
The biblical story begins with the origin of humanity and the making of civilization. Through successive generations, YHWH made covenants with different people and, through them, their descendants. With Noah, after the Flood, he made a covenant applicable to all humanity. With Abraham, he made the pact from which the Hebrew people emerge, ordaining the law of circumcision. In Moses’s time, around 1200 BCE, the Sinai Covenant established the strict monotheistic law to which the Hebrew people would thereafter be subject, as the foundation of faith and practice.4
Much of the biblical text describes the kingdoms that emerged in the land of Canaan after the Hebrews invaded and occupied it in the twelfth century, and the principle of monotheism is central to that narrative. Hebrew kingdoms rose and fell between roughly 1000 and 587, beginning with the mighty sovereigns David and Solomon and the foundation of the First Temple. Again according to the received history, those regimes varied in their faithfulness to divine ordinance. Some obeyed the one God and followed his Law, while others permitted and even welcomed foreign deities, polluting the sacred land with polytheism and improper sacrifices. From the ninth century BCE, prophets regularly arose to denounce the abuses of their time. To use a common prophetic metaphor, Israel was pledged to God as a faithful spouse, but time and again it betrayed monogamy by whoring after foreign gods. Persistent infidelity had real-world consequences, as God punished the erring with invasion and disaster. From the end of the eighth century, a sweeping revival urged a return to stark monotheism and the laws of the Mosaic covenant. Even so, that proved inadequate to stay God’s wrath, and the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 587, taking the people into exile.5
However familiar the story may be, it must be approached in terms of how and why it was constructed and written. Although some isolated biblical sources may date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, much of the narrative was composed between the eighth and fifth centuries, and some material is later than that. The writers at that time were not only recording history but using it as an ideological weapon in ongoing struggles in which they were passionately engaged. They were activists at least as much as recorders of sober fact, and it is futile to expect objectivity.
Many of the biblical writers lived during the seventh-century religious revival that so earnestly preached monotheism and the Mosaic covenant, and they back-projected those values into history—arguably into periods in which such values and institutions had scarcely existed. To take an example, one of the best-known biblical stories is that of the Covenant at Sinai, with Moses’s encounter with God, and the giving of the Ten Commandments. How can we imagine the biblical story without such a linchpin? But an ancient creedal statement preserved in Deuteronomy (26:5–10) tells how God rescued the Hebrew people from Egypt and brought them into the land of Canaan, without once mentioning the Sinai story. In itself that absence does not mean that the story was not known or believed in that early era, but it does imply that over time the account of the Sinai Covenant became much more significant than it had once been.6
An alternative view of the nation’s religious history would suggest that originally, it was much more akin to that of its neighbors, including the Canaanites, and Israel had emerged from that people. Instead of monotheism—belief in one God alone—we should speak rather of henotheism, the belief in a God who is supreme but by no means alone among deities, or of monolatry, the conscious decision to worship one particular God among many. The God of the Hebrews was YHWH, just as their Moabite neighbors followed Chemosh, and both deities were equally valid in their respective homelands. Even in the Ten Commandments, God does not declare that he is the sole Lord, but rather demands, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Only a God concerned about potential rivals would be portrayed as “jealous.” A common biblical word for God is elohim, used in the singular, but it originally referred to plural beings.7
The Hebrew God had once been one deity among several who was worshipped together with his goddess consorts. Only from the end of the eighth century did militant reformers develop the now familiar idea of implacable monotheism, a rigid creed to be demanded of all true members of Israel. Those reformers earned the support of various kings, whom the Bible remembers as noble heroes, leaders like Hezekiah (ca. 720–686) and Josiah (ca. 640–610).8 A key moment in the great reform occurred about 620, when priests claimed to have found in the Temple an ancient book of the Law (2 Kings 22–23). When the king, Josiah, read it, he was appalled to see the differences that existed between this divine blueprint and the actual society of his own day, and he launched a sweeping (and bloody) reform. Supported by his clerical allies, he sacked and desecrated pagan temples and shrines, slaughtering their priests. Such activities focused on the veneration of ancestors, leading to the disruption of tombs and shrines. Josiah struck especially at the images of the Asherah, the goddess.9
THE TEXT THAT inspired Josiah’s actions was all but certainly what is today called Deuteronomy. Rather than being an authentic ancient rediscovery, this text was actually written not long before Josiah’s time. Scholars today link the work with a group or movement pledged to a stern reformist agenda, and this school of thought was political in nature, as well as literary and historical. That Deuteronomistic movement is credited with much of the historical writing presently found in the Bible, as well as the work of prophets like Jeremiah.10
Throughout the ensuing struggles, the revolutionaries asserted that they were introducing no innovations; rather, they were restoring things to the way they should have been, and they produced scriptures to prove it. In the century after 650 BCE, priests and scribes engaged in a massive revision of the Jewish religion, writing and reediting many scriptures that today constitute the core of the Hebrew Bible. Among other changes, tales of Moses and the Exodus were rewritten to become far more central to the religious narrative.11
Later generations read the earlier history of Israel through the histories created by those revolutionaries. That retroactive attitude extended to lived Hebrew religion, which had once covered a much wider range of beliefs and practices than the existing biblical text might reveal. When reformers denounced the pagan shrines and sacred groves, they were in fact attacking ancient manifestations of their own religion of the land and people. As history was rewritten, those aspects of ordinary everyday religion had to be reinterpreted as syncretistic borrowings from foreign paganism. During the Babylonian captivity, scholars and prophets sustained the religious project begun in the previous century and gained an intellectual hegemony over the nation’s religious life. The sixth century was the era of such celebrated prophets as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah. That process continued unchecked when, in the 530s, the new Persian Empire of Cyrus permitted the Jewish people to return to Palestine, where a Second Temple arose. The land remained under Persian rule for a full two centuries, until the 330s. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell us about the attempts to restore “normality” in the new Persian order. The holy people were back in their land, their religious life was concentrated in the Second Temple, and strict monotheism was the order of the day.12
THE NEW MONOTHEISM of the Second Temple era—and it was new—demanded a frontal attack on older religious traditions, which in turn sparked a wide-ranging cultural transformation. I will focus here on five critical aspects of the change, namely, the growth of intermediary spiritual beings, the decline of classical prophecy, the quest to explain the origins of evil, a growing belief in an afterlife, and the rise of belief in a Last Judgment. In rudimentary form, those changes were already emerging in a series of innovative biblical texts written after the return from Exile in Babylon. These late-written (“post-Exilic”) books included Zechariah, Joel, and Job.13
Monotheism profoundly affected patterns of worship. Not only should one god alone be worshipped, but there were strict limitations to how he could be imagined and portrayed. True worship could not involve visual or material depictions of the deity; it must be imageless, “aniconic.” God could not even, properly, be named. Although the dating of the change is uncertain, at some point in this era it became strictly prohibited so much as to pronounce the once commonly used four-lettered name of God, YHWH. The book of Ruth (3:13) implies that the term was still spoken at the time that text was written, in the fifth or fourth century, but by the second century Jews were increasingly using euphemisms like “Heaven.” Early in the Common Era, rabbinic scholars declared an absolute prohibition on uttering so sacred a name, except by the high priest himself. In later centuries, pious Jews have commonly referred to God only as “the Name,” haShem. Even God’s name became inaccessible and perilous.14
But exalting one deity in such an unprecedented way posed multiple intellectual difficulties for believers. If God was in fact so transcendent, how could he interact with his Creation? In most ancient societies, the idea of such interactions is commonplace. Pagan deities converse directly with humans, and they issue commands. Gods intervene directly in human affairs; they fight on battlefields, often against rival deities; and they speak through chosen seers or prophets. But is such mundane behavior feasible for the Lord of the whole universe? Only in eliminating the multiplicity of gods do we realize how useful a pantheon can be in explaining many otherwise mysterious aspects of reality.
Theophanies, divine appearances, had once been common in the Hebrew tradition, but in the new environment they had to be treated very cautiously and selectively. Just how sensitive the matter might be is apparent from a story in chapter 13 of the book of Judges, in which Manoah and his wife are told of the greatness of their unborn son, who would become the legendary hero Samson. As the surviving story tells us, the message is carried by an angel, who ascends to Heaven when the couple carry out a sacrifice. At that point, and for no reason apparent to modern readers, Manoah suddenly realizes that he has actually been talking directly with God and fears immediate death. The inconsistencies arise from merging different versions of an ancient story. In an original version, God himself presumably visited the couple, but any hint of such a personal and intimate divine encounter was unacceptable in Deuteronomistic times, when the story was revised and edited. In this instance, as in many others, God’s presence has been camouflaged by substituting an angelic figure.15
The Second Temple period, then, was marked by an ever-growing emphasis on intermediary figures who serve God and transmit his commands. Yet they did not partake directly of his nature, because any such sharing of divinity would violate his absolute quality. Angels increasingly formed a complex heavenly hierarchy and came to serve many of the functions that would earlier have been served by God personally. (I will discuss this trend more in Chapter 8.)16 If there was one God, then of necessity he must have a great many messengers.
HOW, THEN, COULD a mere mortal dare claim to have spoken with or for God? In early tradition, humans often conversed with God. Moses did so, and the prophets boldly prefaced their remarks by saying, “Thus says the Lord,” or confidently announcing, “The Word of God.” Over time, though, claims of direct contact with deity became troubling.
Prophecy had to change over time. During the great age of Hebrew prophecy, between the ninth and sixth centuries, God inspired the prophet to speak on his behalf, in order to guide and correct his people. His goal was not so much to foretell the future, but rather to highlight failings of the nation and community and to urge the people to return to the ways of righteousness in a public act or declaration. Prophetic books were associated with named individuals, whether any particular person authored part or whole of the work attributed to him or not.17
In this classic format, prophecy became much scarcer after the fifth century BCE. One critical source on these matters is the historian Josephus, and as I will often have cause to cite his works, it will be useful here to describe the man and his background. Josephus (37–100 CE) was an insurgent commander in the Jewish revolt of the 60s, but a timely defection allowed him to survive the catastrophe. He then reconstructed himself on Roman lines as Flavius Josephus. He published his account of The Jewish War around 75, and by 94 he published Jewish Antiquities (Ioudaike Archaiologia). That work reported and summarized biblical history, presenting it in the most favorable and benevolent manner for a cultured Greco-Roman audience. He devoted careful attention to the Hebrew scriptures and to claims for their authority. On the issue of prophecy, he dated the end of the legitimate sequence of prophets to the fifth century, specifically around the time of the Persian king Artaxerxes (465–424). That did not mark the end of prophecy as such, but rather concluded the social consensus surrounding the legitimate claimants.18
Later writers accepted that true prophecy had become rare and even consigned it to the distant past. The book of 1 Maccabees reports Jewish leaders in the 160s tabling decisions on some issues until a true prophet should appear, with the suggestion that such a development was not expected anytime soon. The same book records that “there was great distress in Israel, such as had not been since the time that prophets ceased to appear among them” (9:27). Later rabbis remained firm on this question of termination, largely in reaction to early Christian claims that the prophetic tradition continued in that community.
In fact, prophecy of the old kind can be traced throughout the Second Temple period and beyond, but it changed in both substance and format. As I will show, prophecy merged into the strikingly different mode of apocalyptic, that is, End Times visions that gave cosmic significance to earthly struggles. (The word “apocalyptic” comes from the Greek for “revelation,” as in the New Testament book of that name.) Of course, the Old Testament contains a lot of prophetic passages that look somewhat like the apocalyptic literature we know, but those later apocalyptic works differed in certain key ways from this classic model. In the new world, writers reported insights received not from God directly but from intermediary figures, either angels or else patriarchs of former times. The newer form is also distinguished by the question of authorship. While prophets like Amos or Isaiah spoke through their own names, apocalyptic works are anonymous or pseudepigraphic, that is, attributed to some mighty sage of bygone centuries, such as Enoch or Daniel.19
Nor do apocalyptic writers address the whole community in the mode of the old prophets. The newer literature was fundamentally a revelation of a secret, in declarations passed through an inspired seer. Instead of being ringing public declarations, these texts are cryptic, ambiguous, and of necessity open to debate and interpretation. The fact that something was “revealed” of itself implies concealment, further suggesting that the world’s great truths are hidden from the masses. This is bookish, esoteric literature, and it is designed to be read, not proclaimed.20
The transition from classical prophecy did not occur at any one historical moment, but one text in particular signals the change in progress, namely, Zechariah. This book is generally divided into two sections, which were written by separate individuals at some distance in time; just how far they were separated is a matter of lively debate. Respectively, they are known as First Zechariah, which was written at the end of the sixth century BCE, and Second or Deutero-Zechariah, which is probably three centuries younger.
In its way, each section of Zechariah marked a critical religious transition. First Zechariah (c.520 BCE) offers a curious mixture of old and new styles, with some portions looking back to the earlier prophets, while others foreshadow later genres. Angelic themes predominate, and the twenty references to “angels” in this one short book constitute almost a fifth of all such citations in the whole canonical Old Testament. The text begins conventionally enough for prophetic works, as the Word of the Lord tells Zechariah of his displeasure with Jerusalem. Soon, though, Zechariah is receiving his messages from an angel, together with the first recorded examples of the conversations characteristic of the later apocalyptic genre. Typically, the angel asks whether the prophet recognizes the meaning of some sign, the prophet declares his ignorance (“No, my lord!”), and the angel then explains (6:12–14). For the reader, the lesson is to underscore the lack of direct inspiration claimed by the prophet. Adding to later resonances, Zechariah sees a vision of the angel of the Lord together with Satan, that centerpiece of much later religious writing. In its highly allusive and symbolic content, First Zechariah looks forward to countless successors, from Daniel through the book of Revelation and beyond. There are four horsemen as well as flying scrolls and four mysterious horns that symbolize nations or rulers. As read by later generations, one passage about the coming of a future “Branch” points to messianic ideas (6:12–13).21
From the third century BCE onward, apocalyptic became a hugely popular genre of religious literature, which had a very long afterlife. In terms of the nature of religious authority, the shift from prophecy to apocalyptic signified a restriction of popular access to the divine and a new emphasis on formal channels, whether priestly or scriptural.
GIVING SUCH AN absolute and solitary role to one God raised other problems in terms of explaining injustice or evil. If God was only one deity among many, then evil acts or misdeeds were easily explained in terms of the malice of powerful rival forces. When his people were suffering in Egypt, YHWH had to struggle against the gods of that country who presumably were to blame (Exod. 12:12). But how was such suffering possible under the rule of an omnipotent deity, who lacked either colleagues or foes? Why did the righteous suffer on earth, while the wicked self-evidently prospered? This is the classic issue of theodicy, of understanding God’s justice in the face of the gross evils in the world he supposedly created. Now, not all believers saw an impenetrable mystery in these matters. Generations of prophets explained the evils suffered by the Hebrew nation in terms of the sinfulness of the people. In that vision, outside enemies like the Babylonians became divine scourges, whips used to beat and punish stubborn sinners. Fathers whipped their disobedient sons, and God chastised his rebellious people. But that was not the only conceivable solution, nor was it the most attractive.22
Yes, God was all-good and all-powerful, but the same could not be said of those subdivine intermediary figures who now proliferated. Belief in angels was quite acceptable, so was it legitimate to blame some of them for worldly evil and the existence of human sinfulness? No later than the mid-third century, speculations about rebel angels were becoming commonplace. Increasingly, too, one particular intermediary was being identified as an evil overlord, under various names that included Satan, Mastema, and Belial. If that figure was not (yet) an evil counterpart of God himself, then writers were well on their way to such a construction. Such speculations were already beginning to appear in the book of Job, which probably dates from the fifth or fourth centuries BCE. (We will return to that work shortly.)23 In the centuries following the “closing of the Bible,” then, not only was there an upsurge in the number of angels and other intermediary figures, but those figures spanned a whole spectrum of morality and malice.
ANOTHER APPROACH TO divine justice was to relocate to another life the vindication of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked. That in turn demanded a much stronger belief in the afterlife.
In the canonical Hebrew Bible, concepts of the afterlife are pallid and indistinct. In the pre-Exilic Jewish world, individuals who died survived at best as shades who had little distinct identity, and in the grim words of Psalm 115, “The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence” (17). The Bible refers often to Sheol, the place of the dead, but this miserable place was not reserved for notorious sinners or wrongdoers. Regardless of one’s virtue or piety, the ultimate fate of humanity was the grave, with its maggots and worms. In the third century BCE, the author of Ecclesiastes reflected the traditional view when he wrote that the same fate ultimately came to righteous and evil alike, to the pious and blasphemous. All go down to the dead, to Sheol, where “the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.… [T]here is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” Hence, “to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion” (9:5–10). The fact that the book was notionally credited to King Solomon helped ensure that such a materialist manifesto remained within the biblical canon.24
Escape from Sheol was not a realistic possibility. The book of 1 Samuel (28:3–25) tells how King Saul used a medium or witch to summon the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, but even such a glorious figure had not been granted anything like heavenly rest or bliss. He was a pathetic shade. Given such dreary prospects, biblical authors could never use the afterlife as the solution to the dilemma of why many good people died miserably, while the evil enjoyed their splendor and comfort until their last moment. Some passages portray Sheol as an entity or even a deity, but these statements are metaphorical rather than theological. As a state of nonexistence, Sheol is not an enemy whom God will someday defeat or subdue.
Only a few statements in the Hebrew Bible itself point to any more optimistic outcomes, and they were isolated outliers or literary metaphors rather than statements of doctrine. Although they are difficult to date, two psalms (49:15 and 73:24) both imply that good and evil had different destinies after death, so that the righteous went to God, while the evil descended to Sheol. The psalmist could even hope that “God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave; for he shall receive me.” A few texts hint at resurrection, albeit communal rather than individual, but again these are outliers. The prophet Ezekiel reported the baffling vision of the valley of bones and skeletons, who would one day be raised from their graves and returned to the house of Israel (37:1–14). A Christian reads this in terms of the resurrection at the Day of Judgment, but in context the passage refers to a national restoration and revival without any suggestion of individual postmortem continuity. Such passages raise an issue that we will encounter repeatedly, namely, that Hebrew thinkers sometimes used the image of a person or a man to represent a whole community or nation, commonly Israel itself. It is tempting, but misleading, to understand such accounts as if they refer to individuals rather than communities.25
The older view of the afterlife changed utterly in the centuries following the Bible’s supposed “closure” during the Second Temple era. Sheol is a major theme of the book of Job, which was written during the Persian rule over Palestine, and that Persian connection might have contributed to a new interest in the afterlife. Whatever its origins, Job is by far the most direct and sustained consideration of theodicy in the whole Bible, using a dramatic story to frame weighty questions of moral vindication and divine righteousness. Job begins the work possessed of great riches and happiness. In order to test Job’s faith, God allows his servant or minister Satan to destroy Job’s family and belongings and to inflict terrible diseases on him. Most of the book comprises Job’s attempt to comprehend what has happened to him and to reconcile that with a belief in God’s goodness.
Those meditations involve discussions of the afterlife. In an extraordinary passage, Job expresses the hope for survival after death and even for resurrection:
If a man die, shall he live again?
All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.
Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee. (14:13–15, KJV)
The exact meaning of the text is controversial, but a later passage has Job proclaim:
For I know that my redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though after my skin worms destroy this body,
Yet in my flesh shall I see God. (19:25–26, KJV)
The text can be translated in many ways, and I am deliberately here using the King James version, which unabashedly brings out Christian resonances. But implications of resurrection are clearly present in the text. Christians love these words and have no problem in identifying the redeemer as Christ. “I know that my redeemer liveth” is a beloved hymn, while the second part seems to confirm the idea of resurrection. Unlike in Ezekiel, moreover, this expectation is expressed in the first person, suggesting an individual resurrection.26
But if such ideas were not yet official doctrine, at least they were being contemplated as a necessary solution to the quandaries of monotheism. By the third and second centuries BCE, visions of Heaven and Hell became commonplace, with holy figures and sinners consigned to their appropriate eternal destinies. In both cases, heavenly and hellish, angels served as custodians as well as messengers. For most Jews (if not all), the afterlife became a natural expectation, to the point that a text like the book of Wisdom (first century BCE) offers a telling parody of the Ecclesiastes text we noted earlier. As the author of chapter 2 of Wisdom asks: So you believe that we are shadows that just fade away and nobody returns after death? So what is to prevent you from committing every form of sin and exploitation?27
In the third century CE, Jewish oral traditions were collected and transcribed in the Mishnah, a text that became a foundation of rabbinic Judaism. When it listed the deadliest errors that could separate a Jew from the world to come, it specifically condemned “one who says that [the belief in] resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah.” How could anyone ever have doubted so fundamental a belief?28
REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS could take many forms, but commonly they were associated with a special Day of Judgment, the grand climax of history. As in the case of resurrection and the afterlife, such ideas grew steadily in significance from the fifth century BCE onward.29
The theme was not wholly new. Later readers could authentically look back to biblical passages that warned of a Day of the Lord, when God’s justice and power would break into human affairs and overwhelm human arrangements and power structures. The image drew on the ancient mythology of YHWH, the warrior king, conquering and defeating his enemies. Such an idea already appeared in the eighth century in the prophecies of Amos and Isaiah. Isaiah warns of a time of imminent battles and catastrophes, the mighty Day of the Lord, when sinners will be destroyed and the heavens will tremble. It is a day of wrath and reckoning, “to make the earth a desolation, and to destroy its sinners from it” (13:9–11).
But the differences with later images are also striking, especially Isaiah’s concentration on how divine wrath will strike one particular place, in this instance Babylon. Despite some universal language, it is not obvious that Isaiah is referring to anything like the Day of Judgment as known in later religions. The identity of those being rewarded and punished is also critical, as there is no sense of individuals being sorted and certainly not of the dead being summoned to answer for the misdeeds they committed during their lives. As in most such early accounts, the beneficiary of God’s intervention is the nation of Israel as a whole rather than singularly moral or righteous individuals. What had made Amos so subversive in his day was that he actually challenged Israelites to ask themselves if they would survive a day of righteous judgment that might claim sinful Jews alongside wicked Gentiles.30
The most compelling biblical vision of judgment is found in the prophet Joel, whose well-developed scenario for the End Times meshes readily with later apocalypses: “And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD come” (2:30–31, KJV). Nations that had maltreated and exploited Israel would be subjected to a formal trial. Even so, salvation would still be available to a remnant of true believers, those who called on God’s name. So well did this text harmonize with later views that it formed the basis for the first recorded Christian sermon preached in Jerusalem after Jesus’s death and resurrection, on the Day of Pentecost. Joel is very difficult to date, but the most probable setting is the fifth century, after a captivity affected Judah and Jerusalem and “Greeks” were a known part of the Jewish world.
Like Job, Joel stands at a point of transition, reflecting ideas that were stirring and gaining in popularity but as yet held nothing like mainstream status. By the third century, that transformation was complete, and visions of judgment are central to the works of that period attributed to Enoch.
FOR CHRISTIANS, JEWS, and Muslims alike, religious practice assumes individual behavior and individual responsibility. Individual people pray, they commit sins, and they are rewarded and punished accordingly, in this world or the next. That idea seems so obvious that it is difficult to imagine any alternative approach, but such was not always the case. The book of 1 Samuel depicts a woman praying silently in the sanctuary of Shiloh, in a scene set around 1000 BCE. As she was “speaking in her heart,” with her lips moving, the priest naturally assumed that she was drunk and rebuked her accordingly (1:13). True worship, he knew, was public, communal, and sacrificial, leaving no room for private or individual devotions.
The reform era of the seventh century BCE witnessed a steady movement toward concepts of the individual in religion and a consequent decline in collective and communal identity. Such notions were novel at a time when guilt and sin were seen as a collective matter for the family and the clan. In older scriptures, God punished whole communities and the descendants of wrongdoers. In later texts, rewards and punishments fell to individuals alone, with no ramifications for their heirs. No, said the prophets, each individual must bear full responsibility for fulfilling God’s covenant. In the 580s, Ezekiel mocks the traditional idea that the child will suffer for the sins of his ancestors. Why, asks God, do you quote the proverb “The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”? “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins, it shall die” (18:1–4). That doctrinal change had a material side as well, as people increasingly received individual burial rather than merely being laid in the tombs of clans or tribes, “gathered to his ancestors.”31
Individual humans confronted a solitary God, who judged their individual sins. Such an unprecedented concept subverted all older religious notions and opened the door for revolutionary change. Ultimately, it would allow the individual the prospect of eternal life, when he or she might be rewarded or punished according to the principles of cosmic justice.
WHILE RELIGIOUS IDEAS were changing, so too were the forms in which religious knowledge was being developed and passed on. The growing role of sacred scripture in these centuries did not necessarily follow from the growth of monotheism, but it closely accompanied that trend and reinforced it. In the story of Josiah’s reformation, the crucial moment occurred with the alleged finding of the ancient scripture and the king’s decision to value this above any and all tradition or conventional practice. The monotheistic program was asserted in a body of writings collected and collated during the sixth century or no later than the fifth. Increasingly, a division was being drawn between what was and was not sacred scripture. Religion was becoming textualized and scripturalized.32
Later tradition declared that the broad outlines of the canonical Bible had achieved some degree of consensus by the fifth century, specifically the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in the restored Jerusalem.33 Theoretically at least, the canonical Bible/Old Testament was “closed,” or finished. That statement needs to be qualified, though, because several books were added after that date and earlier books were revised and expanded (see Table 1). At the Qumran settlement, probably founded in the 150s BCE, sect members voraciously explored scriptural texts with little sense of dealing with a closed canon. But if the formal limits of scripture remained quite fluid for centuries, closure was coming. The process of canonization was well under way no later than the third century BCE, when Egyptian Jews realized that translating the sacred books into Greek (the Septuagint) was essential to preserving their religion, and they had to decide exactly which texts belonged to this collection. At the start of the second century, the book of Sirach refers to a biblical canon very much like what would be known in later centuries and lists the great patriarchs and prophets found in it. Later in that century, the Letter of Aristeas first refers to the Hebrew scriptures as the Books, ta Biblia, and, indeed, as scripture (Sirach 44–50).34
But whatever the exact limits of the Bible might be, scriptural authority as a concept was acknowledged and respected. When Ezra and Nehemiah reconstructed the Temple and purified the religion of the land (as they saw it), they consecrated their action by a mass public reading of the Law. Scripture became the criterion by which to assess popular ritual life and devotion—in this instance, in the harshest possible manner.
The rise of scripture reflected a wider transformation of sensibility, a new proclamation of the means by which holiness could be explored and expressed. The main expression of religious worship continued to be sacrificial, but beyond that there was a new emphasis on the internal and spiritual rather than material or sensual forms. If it is too early to use the later Protestant criterion of religious authority as sola scriptura (scripture alone), then the concept was at least recognizable. And as in later Reformation times, the growth of reading in the ancient world contributed to new patterns of private devotion and of individual religiosity. No later than the second century, the Hasidim were “pious” individuals who lived by what they found in the scriptures and organized their lives around the commandments and rules of purity they found there. Some of their heirs became famous as the Pharisees, others as the Essenes.35
The emphasis on text contributed to the decline from the charismatic guidance claimed in earlier centuries, as the rise of scripture established a body of divine truth that any would-be prophet contradicted at his peril. It seemed outrageously bold, if not blasphemous, to offer anything that might be taken as a new scripture or pseudoscripture, and any such act demanded subterfuge. Biblical scholar Ronald Hendel speaks of “the textualization of prophecy,” which encouraged new generations to attribute their own would-be revelations to already established heroes or prophets of bygone days.36
Reading could of itself be a holy act, and texts might be sacred objects. The written word revealed the divine Word. That principle opened the way to new forms of religious inquiry, including seeking sacred truths in the text itself, in the patterns of written letters. Whole new areas of mystical contemplation now became possible. The emphasis on reading placed a whole new premium on literacy and on offering the educational means necessary to achieve it. Scribes and schools gained a whole new importance. In the early second century, Jesus ben Sira, author of Sirach, ran an academy for young members of the Jerusalem elite. Religion became at once more literate and more literary.37
The movement toward text had potent political implications. As Protestant Christians have long known, a book-based faith is likely to be both diverse and sectarian. In sacred books—in the “Bible”—the faithful read, meditated, and found explanations for the evils that they saw around them (among other things). This increased the likelihood of sectarian division, as different groups read scriptures differently. They found independent justifications and interpretations and wrote their own religious texts. By the second century, schools of interpretation were evolving into sects, with some entering into formal schism and declaring themselves the true core of faith.
THE NEW APPROACH to reading and text opened the door to literary creativity. The grandson of Ben Sira recorded that his ancestor, “when he had much given himself to the reading of the Law, and the prophets, and other books of our fathers, and had gotten therein good judgment, was drawn on also himself to write something pertaining to learning and wisdom” (Sirach/Ecclus. prologue, KJV). Reading begat new writing. Authors used the process of narrative writing to explore religious ideas and dilemmas, commonly for the purposes of improvement, but also to tell good stories. Authors situated their stories in the acknowledged world of sacred history, during the time of a particular known king or prophet. The book of Tobit was written around 200 BCE, but it situates its action in the time of “Shalmaneser of the Assyrians” (1:2), who lived a half millennium before and is recorded in the biblical book of 2 Kings. Other second-century texts, such as Judith and Daniel, placed their action in the time of the Babylonian Exile, some four centuries previously. Such authors were assuming the existence and significance of scripture and slotting their own works into that canonical tradition. Instead of consciously writing history, then, authors sought to fit their stories into an established historical record that they already knew from reading, and they did so by giving their works a spurious antiquity. Historical fiction was born.
Even if the canon was closed (or closing), that did not prevent later writers from expanding and commenting on established texts in order to present new stories that, over time, came to be regarded as de facto part of the original scripture. The Bible is taken as a given and used as a springboard for development and elaboration. To take one example, the book of Genesis tells us very little about Terah, father of Abraham, except that he lived in the Mesopotamian city of Ur. No later than the 160s BCE, the expansion of Genesis known as the book of Jubilees (chap. 12) records that Terah was by profession a maker of idols and that early in his career Abraham burned those images as a rejection of idolatry. That story subsequently became a mainstay of rabbinic tradition, and in later centuries it has often been cited as if it was part of the original Genesis narrative. In that form, Terah’s story found its way into the Qur’an.38
In Jubilees the Terah story was a mere chapter in a much larger work, but similar curiosity about the unexplored reaches of scripture inspired full-length freestanding accounts. Between the fifth and second centuries BCE, there appeared such inspired fiction as the books of Job, Ruth, Judith, Tobit, Esther, and Daniel, all of which were accepted as canonized scriptures in at least some Bibles. That tradition of religious fiction continued prolifically for a millennium afterward.
Such texts never admitted their fictional quality, and the quest to assert authenticity was intimately linked to new constructions of the heavenly hierarchy. Just why should readers accept the spiritual credentials of a recently written book that lacked any claim to respectable antiquity? One common solution to that question lay in claiming angelic guidance or inspiration. We have already seen the significant role that angels played as conveyers of heavenly truths in First Zechariah. Later visionaries usually claimed to have truths from writings or tablets that were revealed to them in Heaven or via angels, who were lovingly described. And once the scriptural canon was closed and venerated, later authors needed special warrants to justify their own literary and theological contributions. Angels and heavenly messengers became a rhetorical necessity to demonstrate how and why those writers had obtained the religious texts and messages they were revealing to the world.39
WHEN RELIGIOUS FORMS and practices changed, so did the definition of the people following that distinctive way of life. New concepts and definitions of ethnicity transformed the meaning of such basic terms as “Jew” and “Israelite.”
In earlier times, the Hebrew people had been divided into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. After the Exile, the southern land of Judah confronted the Samaritans, with their rival cult and Temple. Much has been learned about the Samaritans in recent years, and we now have a stronger sense of their significance. The canonical Bible states that the Assyrian invasion of the eighth century BCE devastated the northern land of Israel, so that most of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, to be replaced by newer pagan migrants. These, allegedly, were the ancestors of the half-breed Samaritan people, and any reader of the New Testament knows the bitter hostility that separated Jews and Samaritans in Jesus’s day. What a miracle that there could be a good Samaritan!40
In reality, that historical picture reflects later polemics and mythmaking. The people of Samaria never lost their basic Hebrew and Yahwistic heritage, the same sense of inheritance from Moses and Aaron, and always upheld their claim to be the true Israel. They continued to share cultural and religious affinities with the Jews of Judea, and Jews and Samaritans communicated and interacted with each other. And far from being reduced to a marginal minority, Samaritans usually outnumbered Jews, at least from the seventh century BCE through the second. In the mid-fifth century, Samaritans built their own Temple on Mount Gerizim, which they understood to be the true intended site of the institution ordained in the Torah.41
The people of Judah acquired their own ethnic label. In the Persian Empire, they belonged to Yehud Medinata, the province of Judah, and increasingly the term “Judah/Judea” came to mark the territory of a religion rather than merely an ethnic group. In anything like its modern sense, the word “Jew” appears as an ethnic or religious term in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The classical world was well used to the idea of particular nations or peoples with their characteristic customs and their known homeland, so it made excellent sense to refer to a Ioudaios, which might mean a Jew or Judean. Soon, the distinctively religious elements of this label were emphasized, and in the second century BCE the second book of Maccabees coined the word “Judaism” to describe a package of religious customs and beliefs in a sense we can recognize today. And if Judaism was a distinct thing, then a new concept was needed for those groups and characteristics that did not belong to it. The term “goyim” shifted its meaning from the “nations” and their inhabitants to the nations that did not follow Judaism: the Gentiles.42 Jews, as newly defined, assuredly traced their inheritance through the biblical patriarchs and prophets, but their religious system was nothing like a simple continuation of those older patterns.
ALREADY DURING THE Persian period (539–332 BCE), religious life was being transformed through the sweeping internal changes we have already noted. In the 330s Alexander the Great conquered and absorbed that older empire, including Palestine. Globalization and imperial rivalries posed alarming questions of resistance or assimilation. The revolutionary cultural consequences added vastly to internal conflicts and debates and sped the religious transformation.