Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the Devil and his angels.
MATTHEW 25:41
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW’S gospel, Jesus told the frightening parable of a man sowing good seed in a field. In the night an enemy sows tares (weeds) among the wheat, and the two kinds of plants grow up together. The farmer tells his servants not to try purging the tares immediately, lest they damage the wheat. Jesus explains his meaning:
He that soweth the good seed is the Son of Man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.… The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. (Matt. 13:37–43, KJV)
The rigorous determinism of this passage—the implication that humans are born good or wicked, with no ability to change their destiny—together with its hellfire imagery, makes it unpopular among modern-day Christian preachers.
As with so many such stories credited to him, Jesus used commonplace rural imagery. He framed it, though, in a worldview that made many assumptions about spiritual realities as well as the universe and its hierarchies. Forces of good and evil, light and darkness, contend in the world until God’s final victory. People must be urgently concerned about these conflicts because their conduct in the present world affects their fate in the afterlife. Although this parable is unusually explicit in its imagery, the basic ideas are quite unsurprising to anyone who knows the West’s religious heritage. Angels and Judgment, Messiah and Satan, Hell and demons—these are the familiar building blocks of Western religion. They are also staples of two millennia of Christian art. All are integrated into a complex mythological system.1
What few modern readers will understand from such a passage is just how new the themes were at the time Jesus preached. Clearly, we assume, the source for these ideas is “the Bible,” but however pervasive they are in the New Testament, they are not firmly rooted in the Old. During the period covered by the Hebrew Bible, up to around 400 BCE, few of those ideas existed in Jewish thought, and those that did were not prominent. By the start of the Common Era, these motifs were thoroughly integrated and acclimatized into the Jewish religious worldview. They have shaped Western faith and culture ever since.
So much of what we think of as the Judeo-Christian spiritual universe was conceived and described only after the closure of the canonical Old Testament text. Virtually every component of that system entered the Jewish world in the two or three centuries before the Common Era, and we can identify a critical moment of transformation around the year 250 BCE. These centuries constitute a startlingly little-known historical era that has seldom received the attention it deserves. It was in these years when the heavens and hells became so abundantly populated and when the universe was first conceived as a battleground between cosmic forces of Good and Evil. With the rise of Christianity, such Jewish-derived themes spilled forth into the wider world, becoming transcontinental. In the seventh century, Islam fully absorbed and incorporated these religious components as well. Today, these beliefs are the shared cultural inheritance of well over half the world’s people.
During the two tempestuous centuries from 250 through 50 BCE, the Jewish and Jewish-derived world was a fiery crucible of values, faiths, and ideas, from which emerged wholly new religious syntheses. Such a sweeping transformation of religious thought in such a relatively brief period makes this one of the most revolutionary times in human culture. These years in effect created Western consciousness. In terms of its impact on human culture, the Crucible era is at least as significant as the celebrated Axial Age, which had been identified several centuries earlier and produced great intellectual leaps in societies as diverse as Greece, India, and China.2 Just over two thousand years ago, a new universe was created, one that we still inhabit today.
THAT EMERGING BELIEF system—this new universe—was not the creation of isolated thinkers or writers who designed their religious system according to literary whim. On the contrary, these new ideas developed in direct response to cultural crises and political events of that era, and they can be understood only in that context.
The period began with the Hellenistic kingdoms that ruled the Middle East during the third century BCE, a Jewish encounter with globalizing modernity that produced both social tumult and effervescent creativity. These centuries were marked by such themes as the massive expansion of cities and of commercial economies, persistent conflict between native peoples and foreign rulers, and the growing importance of Diaspora communities. Throughout this period, Jews were in intimate contact with powerful religious and intellectual influences, from Mesopotamian religions and Persian Zoroastrian beliefs to the multiple philosophical currents of Hellenism.
Such intoxicating ideas could not fail to leave their impact on Jewish thinkers, but these new directions were not merely a response to foreign influences and imports. Yes, the Zoroastrian faith taught ideas of a Last Judgment and of something like the Devil and angels, while Jews and Christians borrowed from Greek terminology. But the picture is not as simple as scholars might once have believed. In the Zoroastrian case, we are much less confident than we might once have been about exactly when such religious themes emerged in the Persian setting and how they were transfused into the Jewish worldview. Similarly, with the Greeks, multiple schools of thought affected the Jewish world. Some—such as Platonism—were vastly more significant than others, such as Cynicism or materialist skepticism. It was not a question of whether external influences were available, but rather which of them appealed most to the needs and tastes of the potential recipients at a given time. The demand side of the equation mattered as much as supply.3
And the demand was high. These foreign currents flooded into a Jewish world that was, quite independently, in the course of its own religious reconstruction, a natural and logical outgrowth of strict monotheism. The growth of pure monotheism during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE raised troubling questions about the means by which God could act in history. Monotheism created an intellectual need for intermediary figures who enacted the divine will in his stead, and that necessitated a fast-growing belief in the reality and power of angels. Meanwhile, attempts to explain the existence of evil in a divinely ordained system inspired an obsessive interest in dark angels and in Satan himself. The need to see justice in the divine order inspired a vital new belief in concepts of the afterlife and resurrection, in ultimate rewards and punishments. (The study of the End Times—of Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—is called eschatology.) Persian and Greek worldviews were welcomed into a Jewish system that was already in headlong transformation, accelerating changes already in process.4
Jews were in frequent contact with other groups, and they had to decide how those strangers related to their own world and their own God. If there was one God, then he must in some sense be the God of the whole world. But universalism itself raised many questions. Was truth designed for only one racial group, or could others adopt it? Most daringly, might the spiritual universe expand to include other beings who could be understood as being godlike? Could Jewish rulers dare to appropriate Greek and foreign styles of authority, which raised kings to near-divine status (and sometimes not just “near”)?5 Such questions became acute when so many Jews lived outside Palestine, in a widespread Diaspora. Judaism was founded on the principles of one God and of one holy people in a sacred land. How far could the people sing the Lord’s song in the strange countries of the Diaspora?
Believers faced daily debates over exclusivism and universalism, and issues of ritual purity proved especially divisive. Some responded by stressing ethnic particularism, condemning the Gentile world as the realm of Darkness. Other thinkers, though, followed the implication of doctrines of God’s transcendent authority to preach a bold universalism. That view was symbolized in these years by a new emphasis on Adam, the parent of all humanity, whether Jewish or Gentile. At the same time, the ancient pre-Flood (and thus pre-Covenant) patriarchs became the subjects of extensive pseudoscriptural writings. So bitter did debates between various factions become that from the second century BCE onward, some thinkers whom we would undoubtedly call Jews were attacking others (who were no less certainly Jewish in our eyes) to the point of rejecting their religious identity altogether. Universalist approaches reached a new height in the early Christian world, when the apostle Paul extended to all believing Gentiles membership in a new Israel, under a New Covenant.6
I HAVE SPOKEN of a “revolution,” and the word demands definition. Over any period of several centuries, any culture will experience some changes, unless it is wholly cut off from other societies. No era should ever be labeled a “time of transition.” After all, what historical period was ever so moribund as to lack alteration or innovation altogether? In matters of belief or culture, ideas develop naturally over time, and they might be expressed through new literary genres or artistic forms. Of themselves, those changes would not constitute a revolution. That comment is all the more true of very lengthy periods like the sprawling Axial Age of ca. 800–200 BCE, which supposedly spanned some six centuries.
By “revolution,” then, I mean a fundamental shift in assumptions that affects most or all of the belief system, and one that occurs within a relatively short historical period. Those changes echo through the culture or faith in question, transforming belief and practice at all levels, for ordinary followers as well as elite thinkers. As Thomas Paine famously wrote, the American Revolution meant that “our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution.… We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and we think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.” A new consciousness takes hold. After the transformation has occurred, it simply becomes impossible to revert to the old order or even to comprehend it. So sweeping are the changes in their impact, so seemingly inevitable, that later generations cannot even imagine a time when matters had ever been different. Without any attempt to deceive, those later heirs to revolution commonly rewrite and reinterpret older texts and stories in light of the newer orthodoxies.7
In the case of the Crucible era, the events occurred within about two centuries. Both the pace and the intensity of change were at their height during a generation or so at the heart of this period, roughly between 170 and 140 BCE. We can without hesitation, then, describe these profound changes as a thoroughgoing cultural and religious revolution.
At first glance, this idea of a revolution might seem to contradict the notion presented earlier of a prolonged evolution from earlier trends. Theorists of biological evolution, though, deploy the idea of punctuated equilibrium, which offers many analogies to patterns of historical transformation. According to this theory, changes occur over long periods, but at very unequal rates. For long periods, biological changes are slight and gradual, to the extent that conditions appear almost static. That seeming stability masks the gradual changes that are accumulating powerfully below the surface, however. Under various external forces, such as a sudden dramatic climate crisis, the pace of change then accelerates intensely, with rapid and obvious development and diversification. As the crisis fades, conditions once more resume something approaching stasis or equilibrium. However short-lived those transformative eras might appear in the full span of historical time, their influence is profound and enduring. In mainstream history, they are called times of revolutionary change, of which the Crucible era is a prime example.
THE WORLD IN which these religious debates occurred was anything but one of tranquil intellectual exchange. So turbulent was this age, in fact, and so often scarred by political and social upheaval, that the older spiritual equilibrium could not have remained intact.
To illustrate this point, we might consider an era that at first glance looks like a near golden age of order and stability. Between about 215 and 185 BCE, the Jewish high priest was Simon II, who was probably identical with the legendary sage and moral exemplar Simon the Just, or Shimon haTzaddik. (Some link that title to an earlier incumbent of the high-priestly office, but the chronology fits this man vastly better.) Although later rabbis regarded him as one in a long line of scholars and thinkers who theoretically traced back to Moses, Simon’s rule effectively marked the beginning of a sequence of renowned pupils and successors. He even occupies a prestigious place in the beloved collection of ethical and moral teachings known as the Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers). On several occasions, his career touched on major events. His first cousin Joseph was a secular magnate in the region under the Ptolemaic Empire, one of the imperial superpowers of the day. Simon is even a named character in at least some versions of the Bible. As a revered spiritual ruler and an ambitious builder, Simon was the subject of a fulsome and near-messianic tribute in the Deuterocanonical book of Sirach, where he is “like the sun shining upon the Temple of the Most High, and like the rainbow gleaming in glorious clouds.” Simon features in heroic guise in the fictitious work 3 Maccabees, which describes the attempts of an Egyptian king to force his way into the Temple. According to this legend, Simon’s noble prayer persuades God to intervene and strike the king with paralysis (Sirach, chap. 50, RSV).8
On closer examination, this period of untrammeled glories looks much shakier and more perilous. Simon’s predecessor as high priest was his father, Onias II, who so infuriated the Ptolemaic king who then ruled Palestine that the king seriously considered displacing the Jews altogether and resettling the land with Greek military colonists. In the 190s, Simon himself led his people through a vicious civil war as well as a major clash between the Ptolemaic Empire and its deadly rival, the Seleucid realm. He had two sons, both of whom held the high priesthood but whose careers ended in disaster. One son, another Onias, was deposed and subsequently murdered as a result of plots and conspiracies among Seleucid officials. Simon’s other son, Jason, was an extreme Hellenizer whose accommodation with pagan and Greek practices threatened to subvert Judaism altogether. Jason’s actions provoked the nationalist revolution led by the Maccabees in the 160s, and he died in exile. (Simon and Onias will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 5.)
Such turmoil forces us to look again at the literary and religious heritage of Simon’s era, a cultural explosion that we would never guess from the bland adulation expressed in Sirach. It was during his tenure, in the late third and early second centuries, that there appeared some momentous texts that differed starkly from the traditions of the Hebrew Bible, such writings as 1 Enoch and the book of the Giants and possibly the book of Noah. The greatest of these was 1 Enoch, a sprawling collection of visions and meditations attributed to Noah’s great-grandfather. Seemingly without warning or precedent, Enoch’s visions suddenly plunge us into a phantasmagoric universe of angels and demons, judgment and apocalypse, Heaven and Hell. These wildly innovative works were the first to present those ideas in any detailed or systematic form in a Jewish context. They were the first to list the names of the great archangels, to imagine hellfire, to map the phases of the apocalypse, to depict evil figures very much like the later Satan in his demonic court. The book of 1 Enoch and its contemporaries also point to a current of Jewish thought deeply suspicious of the Jerusalem Temple and paying scant attention to such fundamental themes as the Covenant and Torah. (For the Enochic writings and their distinctive tendencies, see Chapter 3.)
Simon might have seen such works as poisonous or seditious. The circumstances of their writers remain wholly obscure—not just their identity, but whether they lived in any kind of sect or religious community. By some interpretations, the famous Essene sect commonly associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls emerged during Simon’s high priesthood, and that group almost certainly had some connections with the new speculations. But whatever their origins, Enochic ideas persisted for centuries and had a profound impact on both Judaism and later Christianity. Those writings are over and above the more orthodox scriptures of Sirach and the book of Tobit that themselves reflect the fresh currents reshaping Jewish thought. Whether Simon actually knew what was happening under his auspices, he was presiding over a critical moment in the religious history of the region and ultimately of the world.
ALL SOCIETIES HAVE their conflicts and unrest, and especially in the ancient world, these struggles often became violent. What was unusual in the Jewish context was the extreme frequency and severity of violence as well as the wearyingly persistent record of coups, riots, and massacres. To adapt the wry saying of the English writer Saki, the Jewish world in this era produced far more history than it could consume locally.9
The revolution of the 160s culminated in the establishment of rule by the Maccabean family, which history recalls as the Hasmonean dynasty and which endured until the establishment of Roman power in 63 BCE. Although the Hasmonean regime won major external victories, it was also marked by frequent civil wars and factional feuds. Making conflicts still more emotive, the family also held the high priesthood. Thus, the Hasmoneans were religious authorities as well as secular, and all protests against the regime therefore occurred in a sacred context. It was in protest against the Hasmonean priest-kings that the famous Qumran sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls abandoned the world, awaiting the imminent day of God’s Wrath.10
For centuries, Jerusalem was the setting for recurrent acts of conquest and civil war, as the Temple itself regularly witnessed political bloodletting. The historian Josephus reports one such incident of savage repression in the Temple precincts themselves, around 90 BCE. The king was Yannai (Jonathan), who had also taken the auspicious Greek name Alexander and is known to history as Alexander Jannaeus. As high priest, the king was celebrating the feast of Sukkot or Tabernacles. Protesters insulted the king and pelted him with the palm branches and citron fruits that they carried as part of the festival. Jannaeus responded by calling in his (Gentile) soldiers, who reputedly killed six thousand within the Temple precincts. The exact numbers are uncertain, but this was appalling bloodshed in the holiest of places.11
As scholars and thinkers tried to make sense of such convulsions, they developed the literature of apocalyptic. In their revelations, divine messengers used symbolic imagery to show how worldly events fitted into God’s plan, offering hope in desperate times. That apocalyptic genre encouraged a terrifying new eschatology, with the End Times understood in terms of cosmic warfare. From the second century onward, internecine battles repeatedly led sects to identify their heroes and leaders as messianic figures, while enemies were portrayed as servants of Belial or Satan. We can trace the kings who became the models for early concepts of Antichrist and the Beast, the priests and monarchs who supplied the blueprints for future messiahs, and the crises and catastrophes that inspired hopes of millennial kingdoms. In an era when so many thousands were being slaughtered in struggles against tyranny, new theologies sought to explain and justify the death of the righteous. Ideas of martyrdom became widespread, alongside audacious new concepts of the afterlife and the Last Judgment.
The sense of pervasive crisis did not end with the fall of the Hasmonean dynasty. In the century following 50 BCE, contemporaries found it difficult not to interpret the pagan Roman occupation and the Herodian tyranny in terms of supernatural evil and imminent apocalypse. Even before the start of the Common Era, what were once revolutionary religious ideas and expectations became commonplace, moving from the world of elite thinkers and priests to become the vernacular of ordinary people. Ideas of cosmic warfare and apocalyptic drove believers to militant and revolutionary action. They inspired radical sects and would-be messiahs and ultimately in the 60s CE provoked full-scale insurrection against the Roman Empire. This Jewish revolt resulted in national cataclysm and the fall of the Second Temple in 70.
The construction of the new Other world was anything but an otherworldly process.
SCARCELY LESS INNOVATIVE than the new insights about the worlds beyond were the means by which humanity learned such truths, namely, through the sacred texts and scriptures that presented divine revelations. Even if living teachers and charismatic prophets still mattered enormously in the Crucible years, religious belief was chiefly conveyed through scriptures, some of which enjoyed special status. Obviously, texts had played a sanctified role in previous centuries, but much closer attention was now paid to specifying and controlling the limits of approved scripture. Creating the concept of the Bible had a profound impact on the character of religious authority and the people or institutions qualified to exercise it.12
The new role of texts and scriptures also meant that religious debate and speculation would proceed through writings modeled on canonized Bible books. Although Christians call this period intertestamental—that is, lying between Old and New Testaments—it has left extensive records in the form of many texts presented in scriptural format, but nevertheless excluded from the scriptural canons of either Jews or (most) Christians. It was not that writers after 250 BCE ceased producing spiritual treatises. Rather, at least some religious groups made the gradual (and arbitrary) decisions to exclude these writings from the new category of scripture. Some of these texts are celebrated today because of their spectacular discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but many others also exist. (See Table 1.) The sheer volume of such writings in the second century BCE alone is impressive.
TABLE 1.1 MAJOR TEXTS AND SCRIPTURES
This table gives the dates and canonical status of selected ancient texts referred to in the present book. The dating attributed to particular works is often controversial, and equally credentialed experts might offer a wide range of likely time periods. That is especially true when a book is composite in nature, with different sections being composed many years apart from each other. Where such disagreements exist, I have tried to give the best consensus date. Dates that are particularly controversial are marked with a question mark, but similar punctuation could in fact be attached to a great many more of the statements and attributions here. The canonical status of a text is reflected as follows:
C canonical in Jewish biblical tradition and in the modern Protestant Old Testament
DC Deuterocanonical: fully canonical in the Old Testaments of Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, but apocryphal in Protestant versions
OTP Old Testament pseudepigrapha and apocrypha, not canonical in Jewish or most Christian traditions (although the highly distinctive Ethiopian church sometimes provides exceptions)
Q Dead Sea Scroll material found at Qumran
Likely date of composition: Early portions are late sixth century BCE, but “Deutero-Zechariah” is later, possibly late third century or early second century BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: Malachi
Likely date of composition: Mid- to late fifth century BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: Job
Likely date of composition: Fifth to fourth century BCE?
Canonical status: C
Text: Ruth
Likely date of composition: Fifth to fourth century BCE?
Canonical status: C
Text: Jonah
Likely date of composition: Fifth to fourth century BCE?
Canonical status: C
Text: Ezra/Nehemiah
Likely date of composition: Ca. 420–320 BCE?
Canonical status: C
Text: Books of Chronicles
Likely date of composition: Fourth century BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: Proverbs
Likely date of composition: Fourth to third century BCE?
Canonical status: C
Text: Ecclesiastes
Likely date of composition: Third century BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: Aramaic Levi Document
Likely date of composition: Third century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: Treatise of the Two Spirits
Likely date of composition: Third century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: Noah
Likely date of composition: Third century BCE; original text lost, but fragments survive in other works
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Esther
Likely date of composition: Third to second century BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: 1 Enoch
Likely date of composition: Different sections range from mid-third century BCE through first century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Tobit
Likely date of composition: Late third century to early second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Book of the Giants
Likely date of composition: Early second century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Sirach/Ecclesiasticus
Likely date of composition: Early second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Baruch
Likely date of composition: Mid-second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Jubilees
Likely date of composition: Mid-second century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Judith
Likely date of composition: Second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Daniel
Likely date of composition: First chapters are early second century BCE?; chapters 7–12 are from the 160S BCE
Canonical status: C
Text: Daniel (additions)
Likely date of composition: Bel and the Dragon is probably second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Sibylline Oracles
Likely date of composition: Ca. 200 BCE–600 CE, but the earliest oracles are second century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Likely date of composition: Second century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Likely date of composition: Composed and edited over a lengthy period, but the earliest materials are second century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Thanksgiving Hymns
Likely date of composition: Mid-second century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: Damascus Document
Likely date of composition: Mid-second century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: Community Rule (1QS)
Likely date of composition: Mid-second century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: 1 Maccabees
Likely date of composition: Late second century BCE
Canonical status: DC
Text: 2 Maccabees
Likely date of composition: Mid- to late second century
Canonical status: DC
Text: The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (War Rule)
Likely date of composition: Second to first century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: 4QInstruction
Likely date of composition: Second to first century BCE?
Canonical status: Q
Text: Pesher Habakkuk
Likely date of composition: Second to first century BCE?
Canonical status: Q
Text: Testament of Amram
Likely date of composition: Second to first century BCE?
Canonical status: Q
Text: 3 Maccabees
Likely date of composition: First century BCE?
Canonical status: OTP
Text: The War of the Messiah (Qumran)
Likely date of composition: First century BCE
Canonical status: Q
Text: Testament of Job
Likely date of composition: First century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Psalms of Solomon
Likely date of composition: Mid-first century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Wisdom of Solomon
Likely date of composition: 50 BCE–50 CE
Canonical status: DC
Text: Assumption of Moses/Testament of Moses
Likely date of composition: First century BCE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Testament of Abraham
Likely date of composition: First century CE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Life of Adam and Eve
Likely date of composition: First century CE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Joseph and Aseneth
Likely date of composition: First century CE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: Lives of the Prophets
Likely date of composition: First century CE
Canonical status: OTP
Text: 2 Enoch
Likely date of composition: First century CE
Canonical status: OTP
Political events and culture wars called forth literary responses, often framed in terms of visions credited to ancient prophets and sages. Enoch, Ezra, Baruch, and Isaiah were all reliable names to whom works could be credited. Contemporary writers also greatly expanded the already available biblical accounts of patriarchs like Adam, Seth, and Melchizedek. These texts are sometimes called pseudepigrapha, that is, falsely titled works, as opposed to being “false” in their nature or deficient in quality.13
Such works were very influential. Any attempt to understand the range of ideas available to Jews of the first century CE, and to the circle of Jesus himself, means reading not just such Deuterocanonical works as Sirach and Tobit, but also pseudepigrapha like 1 Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In terms of their subject matter, these works cover a huge spectrum. Some writings are political manifestos, others contain polemical material on the vices of a particular king or dynasty or high priest, while still others have no discernible relationship to current events. Taken together, they constitute a substantial written universe, demonstrating the enormous range of ideas in contemporary discourse.14
MANY OF THE motifs in these pseudepigraphic writings are familiar to us through the Abrahamic religions, while others now seem eccentric, even shocking. Certainly, such “marginal” or “sectarian” ideas do not fit in the established orthodoxies of any mainstream faith today. But the fact that they seem so strange and exotic is significant for what it suggests about how and why some of those Crucible-era themes triumphed, while others faded into obscurity.15
Judaism as we know it historically is the complex of religious beliefs and practices that were formulated and proclaimed by rabbinic scholars in the early centuries of the Common Era and developed over a long period in the Talmud. Those scholars were working after the great revolt and the loss of the Temple in 70 CE. As such, they were profoundly suspicious of apocalyptic, messianic, or millenarian ideas of the kind associated with political militancy. In consequence, many once popular texts and themes vanished from the Jewish heritage. A period of intense cultural rethinking fundamentally redefined the limits of acceptable religious faith, closing many of the intellectual avenues that had been so avidly explored during the Crucible years.
Any history of the Jewish world in the Crucible era itself must avoid hindsight in using such terms as “mainstream” and “marginal,” “normative” and “sectarian,” “orthodox” and “heretical.” Only retroactively were some “sectarian” movements and motifs consigned to the fringes of that broad cultural universe. That comment applies to many of the themes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Early Christianity itself was an authentic heir of the speculations and obsessions of the Crucible years. And through both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, such ideas shaped the nascent faith of Islam. All three were heirs of the same religious revolution and shared very similar beliefs about the spiritual universe. So also, indeed, was the now extinct dualist faith of Manichaeanism.
Even some of the ideas from the Crucible era that strike our modern eye as bizarre and extravagant proved remarkably durable. Still today, with some awe, historians are continuing to discover just how widely these concepts cast their influence. That process of historical development has affected our understanding of the relationship of emerging Christianity to its Jewish environment. Earlier generations of scholars sought to distinguish between “Jewish” and “Gentile” themes in early Christianity, arguing (for instance) that the gospel of Matthew was distinctly Jewish, whereas John’s gospel supposedly betrayed its Greek and Gentile biases. In fact, any such attempt to separate Jewish and Gentile elements is necessarily doomed. By the first century CE, ideas that originated in Hellenistic sources had already been long integrated into Jewish thought. Any sense of the religion in that era must take into account the spectrum of ideas and influences in a Judaism that displayed such polyphonic diversity. Actually, the range of influences was even broader than this would suggest, as both the Jews and the Greeks of this era had through the centuries borrowed so heavily from still other traditions, especially from Mesopotamia. That pattern especially applies to the Enochian literature that displays so many signs of its Mesopotamian character and origin. So what exactly was “Jewish” in the time of Jesus and Paul, and what was “Greek”?
THE CRUCIBLE ERA was incredibly fertile both in generating new spiritual concepts and in naming them. The rise of new spiritual and political worlds created an urgent need for new words, many of which remain at the core of the Western religious vocabulary. Even offering a brief list of such words in English gives a sense of how much we owe to this era, and some European languages include even more examples.
These centuries needed a term for the new and pervasive concept of “apocalypse” and also popularized the concept of “Armageddon.” Even when older Hebrew terms were translated more or less laterally into Greek, they could not fail to acquire many new trappings from Hellenistic thought and philosophy. Those additional meanings have been passed on to us today. Although the Jewish world had its notion of subdivine spiritual beings, it borrowed from Greek the terminology of “angels” and “demons,” with their elaborate hierarchies that included “archangels.” And although the concept of the Lord’s Anointed, the “messiah,” dated back at least to the sixth century BCE, its meaning was transformed into the later End Times image of the moshiach, or Christos—the Christ. That in turn generated other names for new things, such as for “Christians” and for the “Antichrist.” Both Christ and Antichrist would play their roles at the final “crisis,” the Greek word co-opted to portray the final Judgment. So would “Satan,” an old Hebrew word for “adversary.” The title in these years, however, applied to a specific and vastly threatening spiritual entity.
We observe the invention of the Bible itself and the idea of Scripture. It was the Crucible age that specified that certain texts should be defined as the definitive holy scriptures of the Jewish people. Moreover, these books (and no others) constituted “the Books” (Greek: ta Biblia). Only in this same era do we find a specialized word for those writings that made up scripture or the scriptures (he graphe, singular, or tes graphes, plural). Several books of the Bible composed long before the Crucible era bear Greek names that reflect their translation during these years, commonly the third and second centuries BCE. We think of works like Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy. The list of approved texts was the “canon,” whereas other works were “hidden,” or “apocryphal.” Those Greek Bible translations gave us many religious terms, including “blasphemy,” “diaspora,” “idol,” “paradise,” “holocaust,” and “proselyte.” The Septuagint Greek word diabolos gave us “devil.”
Although the Hebrew Bible includes the word “Yehudi,” it is only in our period, in the book of Esther (written during the third or second century BCE), that it comes to mean “Jew” in the historic ethnoreligious sense. A few decades later, the second book of Maccabees invented the word “Judaism” (with “Hellenism” thrown in for good measure to define its rival). Some words, like “rabbi” and “synagogue,” were invented to describe the new institutions of a developing faith. Some partisan or sectarian labels, such as “Zealots” and “Pharisees,” also entered general usage.
In other cases, words in general parlance came to be applied to particular religious concepts and innovations. This happened within Judaism at first, but it was soon adopted by Christianity. Examples included “apostle” (messenger), “baptism,” “disciple,” and “martyr” (witness). Jewish sects had their “episkopoi” before Christians did, and long before English speakers corrupted that title into “bishops.” The Greek term for “good news” was “evangelion,” which in turn gave rise to “evangelist” and “evangelical.” Translating that “good news” title into Old English gave us the word “gospel.” Jewish sectarians called the Therapeutae had a “monasterion,” a room for contemplation, which developed into the later concept of the “monastery.”16 We can scarcely imagine a time when religion lacked such foundational terms.
THE CRUCIBLE YEARS spanned a period of two centuries, from the mid-third century BCE through the mid-first. Of course, long-term cultural developments rarely coincided neatly with decades or centuries, and trends and ideas overlapped substantially.
Chapter 1 gives the essential background of the Jewish world from the monotheistic developments of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE to the Greek encounter of the late fourth century.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe how Greek, Jewish, and Eastern worlds interacted and began the process of cross-fertilization, with a clear cultural watershed around 250 BCE. Chapter 4 is devoted to the great surviving legacy of this encounter: the book of 1 Enoch.
The most intense and transformative period began with the Maccabean revolt. Chapters 5–9 address the critical revolutionary years between roughly 170 and 50 BCE and the maelstrom of bold ideas and worldviews that emerged in this time.
Chapters 10 and 11 show how these new insights and attitudes acquired mainstream status. They also gave rise to religious structures, including Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and Islam, as well as other movements that had a major impact in their time, such as Manichaeanism.
THOSE TWO CRITICAL centuries made the religious world the West has known ever since. Without this spiritual revolution, neither Christianity nor Islam would exist, and Judaism itself would have been unimaginably different. Just how thoroughgoing was the change in religious sensibility can only be understood if we look at the Hebrew Bible, which later faiths so often claimed to be following scrupulously.