Chapter 6
DANIEL’S REVOLUTION
Visions of Cosmic Warfare
And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.
DANIEL 2:44, KJV
WHEN ANTIOCHUS IV tried to stamp out Jewish customs, faithful Jews suffered en masse for their refusal to obey. The book of 2 Maccabees tells the story of a young man being tortured to death for refusing to eat pork. With his last breath, he addresses his Greek tormentors: “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the king of the universe will raise us up to live again forever, because we are dying for his laws” (2 Macc. 7:9). A modern reader finds those heroic words a quite conventional sentiment. In the context of the time, it was anything but that, with its declaration of faith in the novel doctrine of individual resurrection for the righteous dead. We see here two ideas that have become central to the modern religious worldview, which might be summarized as “The world is not my home” and “Death is not the end.”
Earthly conflicts during that nightmare century encouraged the potent new belief in wars in the heavens. The worse the situation appeared, the greater the despair about worldly outcomes, the more fervently writers turned to visions of apocalyptic judgment and rescue and, increasingly, to messianic hopes. Such motifs had been central to the Enochic literature, but they now became a major feature of Jewish thought. Out of these agonies came so many key beliefs of later religious movements, including the afterlife and resurrection.
THROUGH THE CENTURIES, prophets had envisioned the fate of the world through the microcosm of Jerusalem, the site of God’s presence. God’s anger or pleasure was reflected through the state of his holy city, and descriptions of the End Times were precise in their sense of the city’s geography. When the prophet in Second Zechariah foretells the terminal crisis, he does not merely say that disaster will overwhelm Jerusalem. Rather, he proclaims very specifically, “the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.… All the land shall be turned as a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem: and it shall be lifted up, and inhabited in her place, from Benjamin’s gate unto the place of the first gate, unto the corner gate, and from the tower of Hananeel unto the king’s winepresses” (14:4–10, KJV).
Under Antiochus IV, the material city was literally overcome by destruction quite as horrendous as the prophets had foreseen. In the Maccabean years, people saw the Temple plundered and ruined: “And when they saw the sanctuary desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burned up, and shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest, or in one of the mountains, yea, and the priests’ chambers pulled down, they rent their clothes, and made great lamentation, and cast ashes upon their heads, and fell down flat to the ground upon their faces, and blew an alarm with the trumpets, and cried toward heaven” (1 Macc. 4:38–40, KJV). How could such a moment be understood except in cosmic terms?
Some incidents almost demanded a religious framing, and they easily lent themselves to apocalyptic readings. At one point during the Maccabean revolution, high priest Alcimus sought to divide the opposition by offering peace. Maccabee diehards resisted these blandishments, but others were open to negotiation. These included the scribes and the Hasideans, who were content to see a high priest of legitimate descent. Alcimus granted them safe conduct for the negotiation but then executed sixty of them in a single day. Reputedly, one of the victims was Yose ben Yoezer, one of the legendary sages of the time, who was celebrated as “the pious of the priesthood.” Such atrocities were commonplace in ancient warfare, but in this instance the victims and their friends belonged to a literate class deeply immersed in scriptural interpretation and memory. Accordingly, they interpreted the massacre through the lens of Psalm 79, a plea for God to avenge the slaughter inflicted on Jerusalem, his Temple, and his holy people: “Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them” (3). That psalm ends with a cry for bloody vengeance against oppressors.1
As an imaginative exercise, let us suppose that Yose’s friends had chosen to present their grief and anger in a somewhat different form and had used storytelling to convey theological argument. As we have seen from works like the book of the Giants, this was a culture that loved to tell stories and to elaborate on familiar tales and myths. As far as we know, no extant writing specifically refers to Alcimus’s crime, but we can easily reconstruct what such a tract would have looked like. Instead of merely pleading for vengeance, the Hasideans would have portrayed a near-future divine intervention in which such vengeance would actually be inflicted. Such a work might be put in the words of some ancient seer foretelling the future, almost certainly through the revelation of some mighty angel. The hypothetical text would describe the history of future generations, until the rise of evil men serving foreign lords who slay the righteous. Many real individual characters would be represented by symbolic figures, commonly animals. Yose himself might have featured as a glorious lion. The work would end with a vision of the vindication of the slain righteous, whose enemies were consigned to everlasting torment. Although this particular apocalypse remains in the realm of fiction, it is very close to numerous works that actually did appear between 200 BCE and 200 CE.
Among the wave of actual pseudoprophecies and neoscriptures directly inspired by the Maccabean revolution, by far the most important was the book of Daniel. Daniel is, in fact, the charter text of later apocalyptic, as well as the foundation for so many later ideas about messianic figures, the Antichrist, and the Day of Judgment. Unlike many other compositions of these years, moreover, Daniel entered the biblical canons of both Jews and mainstream Christians. Similar ideas and images had already appeared in Deutero-Zechariah and 1 Enoch, but Daniel popularized these themes. Moreover, it did so in a unified and systematic form canonized in scripture.2
Because it was so significant, this multilayered work needs to be analyzed in some detail. In the usual translation, Daniel has twelve chapters. (That chapter division, of course, is not original.) Through the centuries, Daniel has circulated in various versions, some of which include extraneous material that has become attached to the text. The Greek version includes several short passages that are difficult to date, the so-called Greek Additions, which are accepted as canonical by Catholic and Orthodox churches but not, generally, by Protestants. We will return to them shortly.
The book’s core is clearly divided into two sections. Most scholars agree that the first portion is older than the second, but it is not evident whether this means by a few years or by some decades. The early section tells of a group of aristocratic young Jews who are exiled to Babylon in the sixth century BCE together with the rest of their nation.
The stories concern Daniel himself but also three Hebrews named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and the different legends might have originally circulated independently. Together and separately, these Jewish heroes have many interactions with the kings of Babylonia Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar and their Persian successor Darius, most involving the Hebrews’ ability to interpret royal dreams and visions. In the process, we encounter some of the Bible’s most celebrated tales and some of those most often represented in visual art through the centuries. This includes Daniel in the lions’ den (Dan. 6), the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace (Dan. 3), and the writing on the wall at the royal feast. The action throughout takes place in Babylon, which in this context has a double valence. Beyond being the center of the Exile in the sixth century, it also points to the strictly contemporary Seleucid metropolis. Contemporary analysis masquerades as historical narrative.
The stories suggest the debates over the Jewish relationship with Hellenism that were raging in the years before the great revolt. They show the Jews’ superior wisdom and access to divine favor, allowing them to succeed where the collective pagan wisdom of Babylon has failed. In each case where the Hebrews counsel or assist a king, he comes to confess the mighty works of the God of Israel. That theme is familiar from many alternative writings in the Second Temple era, but there are also signs that Jewish life was facing an existential crisis at the time the book was written. Repeatedly, and unsubtly, the author uses his heroes as examples that faithful Jews should follow when facing pressure or persecution. Daniel stubbornly refuses to abandon his dietary restrictions in order to eat the rich food set before him at the Babylonian court. The three Hebrews are thrown into the furnace for their refusal to fall down and worship a golden idol.
That context becomes much more apparent in Daniel’s second and more phantasmagoric section, which can be dated precisely to 165 BCE. Although nothing can be said about the book’s authorship, it is tempting to see a connection with the Hasideans, who were both militant warriors and learned defenders of the Law.
Like its countless successors and imitators through the centuries, Daniel presented current events—wars, rumors of wars, revolutions—as precursors to titanic changes in the world order and God’s judgment. The story is told throughout in allusive form, using animals to symbolize real individuals (8:5–9). Daniel, notionally writing in the mid-sixth century, claims to be baffled by the visions he receives of future events. What does it mean to say that there would be a mighty two-horned ram, which would in turn be overthrown by a shaggy goat? Or that after the goat, there would be four broken horns? Throughout, angels and other supernatural characters appear to expound the mysteries. The ram, they clarify, represents the kings of Media and Persia, while the goat is the king of Greece, that is, Alexander. The four lesser horns denote the successor kingdoms, none of which would ever fully reproduce his glory.
These histories form a prologue to the book’s main subject, which is Antiochus IV himself and his hatred for Jews and Judaism. The prophecies warn of a future being, an evil king, a “horn,” who “shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time, and times, and the dividing of time” (7:25, KJV). The pseudoprophecy makes the king a diabolical figure, a master of deceit and deception. As such, Antiochus became the forefather of all later apocalyptic tyrants. He supplied the matrix into which Beastly villains like Herod, Nero, and Domitian could be fitted, not to mention such later candidates as the papacy, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and, assuredly, other political leaders yet unborn. Antiochus’s crimes would provoke the final catastrophe: “The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him” (9:26–27, NIV).3 The abomination alluded to here is the pagan altar that Seleucid forces erected in the Temple. Conceivably, too, the mysterious “covenant” cited here is the king’s alliance with Hellenizing Jewish factions. (The enigmatic “sevens” are weeks or time periods, which the reader was meant to translate into actual dates.)
However dreadful the threat, however, God would intervene to help his people and establish his rule. The physical conflict in Palestine would escalate to a full-scale supernatural war, a moment of ultimate judgment and of bodily resurrection. Even after “a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then,” there would still be hope for “every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.” Playing his role in the cosmic drama would be “Michael, the great prince who protects your people,” while the angel Gabriel also counsels Daniel (12:1–3).
One key passage shows how, almost by accident, particular historical individuals gained a new significance in the universal scheme: “From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’… After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary” (9:25–26, NIV). The Anointed One is, literally, a messiah, and he will be put to death. Not surprisingly, later believers have found here a ringing prophecy of the Crucifixion; the King James Bible even uses the words “Messiah, the Prince.” But the author of Daniel had no such messianic intentions. Rather, his retroactive prophecy concerns an individual who was a significant player in the affairs of his own time, but who today is recalled only by the very narrow band of specialists in that era. The reference is to the former high priest Onias III, who was murdered in 170 as a result of court intrigues. Because he had served as high priest, Onias was “anointed,” the word translated as “messiah,” so that the allusive passages describing his murder receive eschatological significance. This was by no means the only instance in which a sordid sectarian conflict was projected into cosmic affairs and remembered in that context for millennia afterward.
READING DANIEL TODAY, it is tempting to see analogies with modern-day anticolonial and anti-imperial writings. However different the settings, some of the characteristic features of such modern writings do apply remarkably well to the ancient examples. Then as now, occupied peoples reasserted their identity in the face of empires that claimed a universal authority and absolute cultural hegemony. As so often in modern contexts, the main arena of conflict was that of history or of competing histories. While imperial authorities presented themselves in terms of liberation and enlightenment, the underdogs reclaimed their own history by denigrating that of the masters. Far from bringing civilization, the empires in this vision were blundering, destructive beasts or mythical monsters. Not only were subject peoples morally superior to their masters, but the whole of history lay at the direction of their specific God, who would shortly restore the natural balance of the universe. Far from being “lesser breeds without the law,” they actually had a monopoly on Law. History, in other words, was God’s, and it was theirs. The apocalyptic framework was endlessly malleable and could be adjusted to accommodate each new horror or portent—the coming of the Romans, the Parthian wars, and ultimately the fall of the Second Temple.4
But the book of Daniel was not an isolated monument, nor was it the only work to present these emerging religious ideas. Several other scriptures of catastrophe have been assigned to these years, usually on the basis that the savage persecutions that they describe fit neatly into the revolution against Antiochus IV. Writing around 160, the author of Jubilees presented a trenchant manifesto for the Maccabean cause and a diatribe against Gentiles. He held ferocious views on the issue of circumcision, a detonator for the revolution, and he claimed to cite a prophecy from Abraham’s time that foretold that “the children of Israel will not keep true to this ordinance, and they will not circumcise their sons according to all this law… and all of them, sons of Beliar, will leave their sons uncircumcised as they were born” (15:33). (Beliar is an Aramaic form of the name also encountered as Belial.) God’s wrath would be turned against those who “have treated their members like the Gentiles, so that they may be removed and rooted out of the land.” The main lesson that Jubilees draws from the story of the Garden of Eden is that Israelites should avoid nudity and cover themselves properly, as the Gentiles did not. We recall that public nudity in the gymnasium was a major grievance preceding the revolt.
On occasion, the accounts are allusive, and they could be just as applicable to any number of other people or episodes. Among the strongest candidates for a Maccabean date are some of the Greek additions originally written separately from Daniel but appended to that book in some traditions. One of these, Bel and the Dragon, mocks idolatry and the worship of pagan images. Using familiar arguments against graven images, Daniel easily convinces the Babylonian king that the image of the god Bel has no life of its own; only the deceit of the priests makes it appear that it eats and drinks the offerings set before it. Furious, the king kills the priests and their families. Although allegedly concerned with Babylonian affairs, the message would apply equally to Greek rulers and believers, especially those who tried to impose their false ideas on Jews.5
Another such Greek Addition is the Prayer of Azariah, which in some versions becomes part of the story of the fiery furnace. In his suffering, Azariah utters a psalm that would be singularly appropriate during the time of Antiochus IV. Bemoaning the sins of the Hebrew people, he admits that God has treated them justly by punishing them: “Thou hast given us into the hands of lawless enemies, most hateful rebels, and to an unjust king, the most wicked in all the world” (1:9). (“Lawless” was a standard way of denouncing the Hellenizers.)
Other evidence comes from the Sibylline Oracles, a source that is cryptic even in a literature that delights to mystify. In Roman and Greek lore, the sibyls were prophetic female figures who foretold coming events, and many of their oracles circulated through the centuries. A large surviving collection of these texts shows clear signs of Jewish and Christian influence, even if their actual date and origin has long been debated. Most were written between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. As in the case of the Enochic writings, even some of the oracles that look explicitly messianic might in fact be pre-Christian in date, but this is difficult to determine with any certainty.6
For present purposes, the most significant sections of the Oracles are found in book 3, most of which was written by an Egyptian Jew in the mid-second century BCE. Conceivably, it might even be the work of that Onias who fled Jerusalem in order to establish a new Temple at Leontopolis. Like Daniel, this oracle offers a description of the Hellenistic empire, and it shows how deeply Seleucid aggression had aroused eschatological hopes and fears. The oracle portrays an imminent crisis and the destruction of invading pagan forces. When God uttered judgment with a mighty voice, all creation would tremble; mountains would be split asunder. All would end “by fire and by overwhelming storm, and brimstone there shall be from heaven:”7
And all the unholy shall be bathed in blood;
And earth herself shall also drink the blood
Of the perishing, and beasts be gorged with flesh.8
But if cosmic warfare was indelibly established on the religious agenda, it was far less certain who the enemies of righteousness would be in such future struggles. Would it always be Gentiles, or might this language be applied to other Jews? As protest mounted during the Hasmonean era, so did the explicitly religious nature of rhetoric, as so many political battles occurred within a sacred context. In most conflicts, after all, control of the Temple was a primary goal, and priests and high priests were leading protagonists on both sides of partisan battles. In such a setting, writers denounced their (Jewish) opponents not merely as vicious and corrupt but as servants of Satan or the forces of Darkness. Each side in the deeply fractured Jewish polity read its rivals out of the Jewish world.9
Not all these polemical texts opposed the dynasty, and the author of Jubilees was sympathetic to the Hasmoneans. One of that book’s stories tells of Levi’s visit to Bethel: “Levi dreamed that they had ordained and made him the priest of the Most High God, him and his sons for ever.” This seems like a standard expansion of the familiar biblical text, but the specific phrase “priest of the Most High God” was an official title claimed by the Hasmonean rulers. The author was thus giving ancient sanction to the regime and its sacred pretensions. Other texts were much more incendiary, using long-dead patriarchs and prophets as the ostensible authors of subversive tracts. In the first century BCE, the Hasmonean title appears again in the Testament of Moses, but this time in an unflattering context: “Then there shall be raised up unto them kings bearing rule, and they shall call themselves priests of the Most High God: they shall assuredly work iniquity in the Holy of Holies.”10
Several other works demonstrate the use of apocalyptic and diabolical language against fellow Jews, and most derive from the century after the 160s BCE. Seditious words are found in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a work with a very long history in Judaism and Christianity. Supposedly the last words of the sons of Jacob in around 1500 BCE, they were actually written in the century or two before the Common Era. Some, at least, were heavily Christianized, and in that form, they enjoyed a long afterlife in Christian Europe, where optimistic churchmen treated them as the authentic words of ancient patriarchs. Scholars debate to what extent the early Jewish originals can be reconstructed, but the presence of early materials is confirmed by the close resemblance between the Testaments and several writings from the Crucible years, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book of Jubilees, and the Enochic writings.11
The Testament of Levi attacks evil priests, in words that many modern editors apply to the priest-king Alexander Jannaeus, around 90 BCE. That would fit the charges of widespread sexual immorality with Jewish and Gentile women, as well as his alleged acts of theft and corruption. As Levi thunders, “And ye shall be puffed up because of your priesthood, lifting yourselves up against men, and not only so, but also against the commands of God. For ye shall contemn the holy things with jests and laughter.”12 If in fact that is the correct context for Levi, that would also provide a setting for the extensive apocalyptic themes that run through the work. The author saw the world as dominated by “the spirits of deceit and of Beliar” and knew that God and his angels would soon intervene against them: “Now, therefore, know that the Lord shall execute judgment upon the sons of men. Because when the rocks are being rent, and the sun quenched, and the waters dried up, and the fire cowering, and all creation troubled, and the invisible spirits melting away; and Hades [Sheol] takes spoils through the visitations of the Most High, men will be unbelieving and persist in their iniquity. On this account, with punishment shall they be judged.”13 As so often in these years, hatred of the oppressive dynasty justified extreme and apocalyptic language, and helped popularize the attendant religious system.
The Dead Sea Scrolls offer some of the clearest examples of this new religious approach, which was so rooted in the partisan conflicts of the day. Like the Testament of Levi, the Qumran sect looked harshly on the nation’s rulers. As we will discuss in the next chapter, the Qumran movement owed its existence to a schism from the Hasmonean Temple order in the 150s. The group never reconciled themselves to what they saw as an irredeemably tainted institution. Around 90 BCE, one Qumran document denounced King Jannaeus the crucifier as a “Wrathful Lion… who hangs men alive.” The sect developed elaborate theologies of holy warfare against enemies domestic and foreign, ideas that would become very influential during the era of Roman rule.14
AND WHAT OF the victims who fell in these struggles against God’s enemies? The story of the young man defying his torturers points to the historically new concept of martyrdom, of righteous death in the service of God and his Law. Older Hebrew literature certainly had its stories of individuals who served God faithfully at the cost of their lives. Now, however, martyrdom and its rewards became a central concern in ways that would be instantly comprehensible to early Christians.
Alongside martyrdom there developed a much firmer and more explicit belief in the afterlife and in the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. Such ideas are not necessarily connected to martyrdom, and people might well lay down their lives for the general good, without any hope of individual survival. Historically, though, the ideas tended to evolve in close parallel. Especially during the Maccabean years, such beliefs offered hope for an individual to survive death rather than merely forming part of a collective resurrection of the entire people. This new hope resolved the ethical dilemma of seeing so many heroic figures dying for the godly cause, whether as soldiers or martyrs. Did these individuals really have no hope of reward or vindication, beyond the collective good of the people? But of course they did, if you assumed an afterlife and a resurrection to Judgment. In the fourth century, a glorious afterlife was a distant aspiration; by the second, the idea became an urgent necessity.15
The strongest evidence of these changing ideas about martyrdom and the afterlife also emerges from the books of Maccabees. While 1 Maccabees pays virtually no attention to the supernatural, to the point of not even using the word “God,” 2 Maccabees is thoroughly immersed in otherworldly interpretations, suffused with omens and visions. When the Seleucid king sends his envoy Heliodorus to seize Temple treasures, the attempt is thwarted by divine intervention, manifested by a miraculous horseman and warriors, presumably angels. Much like the pagan kings in the Greek Additions to Daniel, Heliodorus now “recognized clearly the sovereign power of God,” and he receives an angelic visitation (3:28).16
The book of 2 Maccabees recounts many stories of martyrdom, lauding the righteous who laid down their lives for the wider community, in acts of vicarious sacrifice. When one martyr has his hands severed, he declares that he will receive them again after his death. His brother not only proclaims a similar faith, but warns his persecutors that they, unlike he, will have no resurrection to life to which they can look forward. As seven brothers are killed in turn, their mother urges them to remains constant so that one day they will all be reunited. The book’s language of a “resurrection to life” (anastasis eis zoen) sounds very close to later Christian usage, but the author takes them for granted as standard Jewish beliefs of his own time (2 Macc. 7).
After Judas achieves victory, he collects money to be sent to the Temple for a sin-offering for those who had fallen in heroic battle. The author praises his deed, which he holds out as an example for others to follow: “For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. And also in that he perceived that there was great favor laid up for those that died godly, it was a holy and good thought. Whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin” (12:44–45).17 Alternatively, he “made atonement for the dead,” but still with the goal of freeing the dead from their burden of sin. The doctrines expressed here are surprising in light of the Old Testament precedents we have seen that paid such scant attention to the afterlife. Remarkably, they rather sound akin to ideas of later Catholic Christianity, including the Communion of Saints and the practice of prayer for the dead.
Jubilees offers a like hope of future survival. After depicting a series of crises and disasters, God promises that “the righteous shall see and be thankful, and rejoice with joy for ever and ever, and shall see all their judgments and all their curses on their enemies. And their bones shall rest in the earth, and their spirits shall have much joy” (23:30–31). The promise of bodily resurrection is explicit in the Testament of Judah, in the context of a glorious future age. Again, it is specifically the martyrs who will win resurrection: “There shall be one people of the Lord, and one tongue; and there shall no more be a spirit of deceit of Beliar, for he shall be cast into the fire for ever. And they who have died in grief shall arise in joy, and they who have lived in poverty for the Lord’s sake shall be made rich, and they who have been in want shall be filled, and they who have been weak shall be made strong, and they who have been put to death for the Lord’s sake shall awake in life” (25). Those assurances about future rewards sound very close to the Beatitudes of Jesus, who may have been recalling an early version of this text.
BEYOND PROMISING ETERNAL life, these new doctrines elaborated on the nature of survival. What, exactly, could or did survive death? This question was of paramount importance in distinguishing among the Jewish sects, as each followed a doctrine born of its role in the conflicts of these years. Josephus summarizes one position when he writes about the Essenes, in the context of the Jewish War of the 60s CE. (At different times in his life, Josephus had been affiliated both with the Essenes and the Pharisees.) Whatever the horrors they faced, he reports, whatever tortures and threats of death, Essenes greeted them with scorn and even joy. They gave up their souls precisely because they knew they would receive them again. As he explains, Essenes believed that their bodies were corruptible and impermanent “but that the souls are immortal, and continue for ever; and… are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward.”18 That imagery of the body as prison and bondage suggests Greek and Platonic influence, and the idea would also be integral to later Christian and Gnostic theories.
Again according to Josephus, the Pharisees held that all souls are incorruptible (aphtharton) and that human beings would be resurrected. Those beliefs might have arisen either during the Maccabean conflicts or the decades-long Hasmonean persecutions, and it is open to debate whether those ideas borrowed from Greek philosophical concepts. As in the world of 2 Maccabees, the sect needed to justify and explain the deaths of so many of its ardent partisans, making the promise of an afterlife overwhelmingly tempting. By the turn of the Common Era, that belief was a defining characteristic of the group and a critical division from its rivals. As the New Testament book of Acts noted, “The Sadducees say that there is no Resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits, but the Pharisees believe all these things.”
Christian writers long debated how the Sadducees could have formed their seemingly skeptical and materialist opinions. In fact, though, they were just following the older Jewish worldview described in the Hebrew Bible. It was the Pharisees who were the modernizers, who had absorbed all the innovations of the previous two centuries, especially the ideas associated with the Enochic writings. The Sadducees, by contrast, were conservatives who refused to accept those theological changes.19
Those partisan divisions also demonstrate the relative appeal of the different sets of beliefs. There is no doubt that it was the Pharisees who had the widest support beyond the elites. In religious terms, as much as any other, they were the People’s Party. We can debate how they had won this position. Perhaps the masses responded enthusiastically to their message of angels, afterlife, and resurrection, which they found appealing and attractive. Alternatively, the Pharisees won support for other reasons, including their more liberal approach to matters of law and halakhah and their lenient approach to matters of ritual purity. They then used their prestige to promote the new spiritual ideas among the masses. Through whatever means, the revolutionary new themes became the ordinary currency of thought and belief for Jews and ultimately for Christians as well.
WHETHER EARTHLY OR spiritual, warfare can take many forms and know many degrees. The ancient world knew limited wars of conquest and annexation, and on rare occasions, it also experienced desperate wars of massacre and annihilation. In the case of supernatural conflict, though, the language of battle escalated to depict adversaries in terms of absolute evil, of enemies demanding annihilation. For some thinkers, that imagery extended to naked warfare between the forces of Light and Darkness.