Last time we saw how the experience of Exile had a profound and transformational impact on Hebrew religion. While any statement generalizing the beliefs of tens of thousands of people is going to be oversimplified, we might say that the old Judaite elite left a destroyed Jerusalem monolaters of a local god they believed had abandoned them and their covenant, and came back to rebuild it as proud ethical monotheists believing in a God who was the Creator, King, and righteous Judge of the whole world. So great were these changes that it’s only after they happened that we start to talk not of ‘Judaite religion’ but of ‘Judaism’. As huge and important as these changes were, they weren’t the last ones. In fact, the roughly five centuries that make up the Second Temple period, and which saw the Jewish people under the thumb of a succession of powerful empires, were arguably the most creative and diverse in the long history that makes up the Jewish tradition. While I won’t be able to cover all of the different ideas that popped up to shaped Judaism in this period, today I’ll do my best to hit the most important highlights.
While YHWH-worship developed in and was shaped by the diverse, polytheistic context of ancient Canaan and, later, Babylonia, its followers encountered something quite different in the religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism. This faith has polytheistic, dualist, henotheistic, and monotheistic elements, so is hard to classify. But essentially, it believed in one high God, who was served by many lower divinities and powers, but who is also opposed by a powerful force of evil. This cosmology strongly influenced Judaism in the Persian period, in the form of angelic and demonic speculation and an increased profile for Satan. If we look back at the pre-Exilic Biblical religion, there are definitely angels, who often act as messengers, or even avatars, for YHWH, but Satan and the demonic have only a very minor presence. But in the Second Temple period, interest in angels, now named and ranked, exploded, and personified evil takes on a much bigger role.
With the increased interest in evil came the rise of Apocalypticism. As I’ve previously noted about this important trend in early Judaism (especially for the later development of Christianity):
Apocalyptic is a literary genre that emerged out of the prophetic genre either during the Exile or early in the Second Temple period. Its name comes from the Greek word meaning ‘unveiling’, and therefore ‘revelation,’ and the name is fitting, since Apocalyptic is about unmasking or revealing truths that are hidden in day-to-day reality, generally by means of visions or dreams. It envisions current events, particularly frightening ones, as immediate expressions of the battle between good and evil, as a means of resistance and hope for oppressed people. The consistent message of Apocalyptic is: Things are awful now and may get worse, but God is in control and will vindicate the faithful. Apocalyptic therefore has an interesting relationship with history; on the one hand, it is rooted in the circumstances in which it was written and is most helpfully understood in that context, but on the other hand, those circumstances are discussed in such an abstract and symbolic way (and often in the future tense!) and the message is so consistent, that it becomes universal and ahistorical. It is through this understanding of current events as revelatory of God’s universal and ultimate purposes that Apocalyptic has received its connotations of being about ‘the end times’.
It’s impossible to determine where exactly Apocalyptic came from, but it seems safe to say that at least three factors contributed to its development: the continued foreign domination of the people of God and their homeland, the gap between the vision of the Prophetic oracles and lived reality, and the exposure to Zoroastrianism, the faith of the Persian Empire, which features a strong opposition between good and evil and a complex cosmology involving heaven and hell and ranks of angels and demons.
While by far the most important and influential piece of apocalyptic writing in the Bible is the book of Revelation (its Greek name rendered into English is in fact ‘Apocalypse’), there are other apocalyptic texts, particularly parts of Daniel and the Gospels, with some proto-Apocalyptic in prophets like Joel and Isaiah. But what one might not know is that there are substantial amounts of apocalyptic literature outside the Bible; in fact, it was the most popular and influential genre of Jewish spiritual writing during the over four centuries known as the Second Temple period. So, far from representing a strange and niche book at the end of our Bibles, Apocalyptic was a very big deal for a very long time. The apocalyptic sections of the Bible are therefore small parts of a much bigger puzzle.
Some of the major features of Apocalyptic as a literary genre include:
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- Visions as a literary framing device
- Exploitation of ‘gaps’ in the biblical witness (e.g., God’s ‘taking’ of Enoch and Elijah, Melchizedek’s lack of genealogy, the disappointing in-time fulfillment of the oracles in Isaiah about the coming king and glorious return of the people to the land)
- Angelic mediation
- Descriptions of heavenly mysteries
- Coded language (especially numerology and animal symbolism)
- Heightened symbolic language
- Dualism between good and evil, with good winning in the end
- Extreme pessimism about the world, which is more to be endured than to be contributed to
- Conflation of past, present, and future time
- God’s action understood in terms of a decisive moment that ends or redefines time, rather than unfolding within time
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Apocalyptic was also the origin of messianism, belief that God would send a figure — envisioned variously as a king, a priest, a prophet, or an angelic being — to vindicate the righteous once and for all.
After the Persian Empire was defeated by Alexander the Great’s armies, Judea fell under Greek domination and was, for the first time in centuries, pulled into the broader Mediterranean, rather than Mesopotamian, cultural sphere. The universal God able to be experienced anywhere in the world whom Jews discovered in the Exile meant that religion was no longer a barrier to migration, and large diaspora communities developed around the Greek-speaking world. For our purposes, the most interesting thing about this development was that it introduced Jews, especially in intellectual centres like Alexandria, to Greek philosophy. This produced a new, intellectual and systematized, Jewish theology, that wrestled with the Scriptures using the rigour, categories, and ideas of Greek philosophy. Moreover, for many Jews (including, later, the writers of the New Testament), the Bible they knew and loved was now in translation, a text known as the Septuagint.
By the time Rome rose to power in the Eastern Mediterranean region, Judaism had become an incredibly diverse phenomenon. While Apocalypticism was highly symbolic, there are always those who take symbolism literally, and the genre’s pessimism about the world caused some communities of Jews to withdraw as much as possible from the wider world. Others were inspired by the genre’s violent imagery and were prepared to force God’s hand to intervene by provoking open rebellion. These are a far cry from the Jewish philosophers in Alexandria, or Jerusalem’s priestly ruling elite, the Sadducees, who sought to appease Rome in order to keep the rebuilt Temple open and undefiled. And then there were the Pharisees, who were kind of middle-of-the-road in all of these culture wars, but who also insisted on a strict adherence to not only the Torah, but also to their own oral traditions designed to create a fence around it.
What can we say then about how the people understood God and their relationship to God during this period? What seems to have united the Jews of the Second Temple period was a renewed confidence that God was with them and that they were God’s people. While they still maintained a strong religious connection to their land and Temple, their universal God who was in direct relationship with them as persons and communities of faith could be worshiped anywhere. Thus the synagogue, which seems to have first emerged during the Exile, overtook the Temple as the primary environment for faith, theology, and Scripture, to be engaged with and taught. But this religious confidence ran up against the harsh realities of living under the thumb of foreign, ‘heathen’ powers. Assimilation and revolution were always temptations, but most people found themselves somewhere in between these extremes.
This was the state of Judaism when Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene, and, for Christians, changed the narrative completely. The subsequent development of Jewish conceptions of God will fall out of scope for this series, but suffice it to say that in the aftermath of the disastrous Jewish Wars, Apocalyptic lost its appeal. And, the destruction of the Temple rendered the priestly concerns of the Sadducees moot. The only voice that remained was that of the Pharisees, out of whom emerged the rabbinic tradition that defined what Judaism would become.
Next time we’ll turn our attention to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity.
Matthew Root 