Michael Zank

Before we look at history we need to know why we need to look at history.

In discussion, when I asked about students’ prior experience with the Bible, students said they became familiar with Bible stories through their upbringing. (A few said they were “Christians” and read the Bible every day.) Their interest in the class was to approach the Bible from a different angle and learn what it was all about. Here is my first stab at such an angle.

One of the things we do before we read any biblical texts is to look at the history and geography of the place from which the Bible emerged. Thinking about the relationship between the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern history may seem self-evident to someone trained in biblical studies, but this may not be so for a beginning student. While it is widely accepted that everything is in some sense “historical” and “contextual,” we must not think that history and context “explain” everything there is to know about a thing or a text. Texts are realities in their own right that respond to other texts. They are written by people who, while writing for a particular time, audience, and purpose, may not be in complete command of the material they put on paper. I am not thinking of divine revelation in the sense of prophets being the mere stylus or fountain pen for a divine author, passive recipients of visions or auditions that they merely repeat orally or in writing, without any input of their own minds and hearts. What I am thinking of is that, as some of the great Romantic savants have argued, language is always more than the person who speaks or writes. Speech, oral and in writing, has a life of its own. Through it we can glimpse the inventions, discoveries, customs, beliefs, affects and aspirations of generations of others than the speaker him- or herself. Where, as in the case of the Bible, most writing is transmitted anonymously, without ascription to an author, we are dealing with the product of layers of scribal communities in the service of purposes and interests we must guess at from the writing itself.

Where writing is the product of institutions, we must consider the political, sacerdotal, socio-cultural, economic, and other institutional contexts. To imagine these institutions responsible for the production of biblical texts requires knowledge, understanding of the methodology by which it is produced, as well as its limitations. In this class, because we can no more than get a very general idea of what biblical literature is about before we delve into the texts themselves, we will largely rely on very basic historical information: What do we know about the history and geography of the people whose history is told in the Bible? What are some of the assumptions shared by the nations of the Ancient Southern Levant about the causes of the historical fates of nations, including their own? What were their major institutions? What were the major historical events to which they responded both in real terms and in form of major bodies of text that accompanied and interpreted their historical experience?

In most basic terms, the Bible is a record of the responses of a nation to the historical experience of emergence, consolidation, growth, crisis and destruction. The force of the Bible rests on the fact that this ancient nation survived the destruction of its major institutions and went on to create a literature of response to destruction that has had a profound impact on the imagination not only of the descendants of that ancient Middle Eastern nation but on people across the globe. The histories that chronicle the rise and decline and destruction of ancient Israelite and Judahite kingdoms, the prophetic books that presaged that fate but also produced oracles of return and conciliation, the covenantal law that served as blueprint for reconstruction, the psalms, wisdom literature, and festal scrolls that lament destruction, celebrate survival, and mark the joyous occasions of harvest and ingathering are claimed not just by the Jews but also by the non-Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth they call “the Christ.”

The primary sacerdotal institution founded on these scriptures, the Jerusalem temple, was destroyed a second time (in 70 CE) when the Roman Empire brutally crushed the Jewish uprising that began under Emperor Nero and his inept procurators, and ended with the newly proclaimed Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus needing not just a victory but money to buy the support of the People and Senate of Rome. Proceeds from the destruction of the Jerusalem temple provided the burse for the building of the Colosseum and many other well-known Roman monuments. Jews and non-Jews refusing to bow to the Emperor drew the ire of provincial administrators. The early Christians were a mix of Jews and non-Jews who denied the emperor the title of “son of a divine one” by applying it to a Jewish messianic redeemer who was expected to return with clouds to judge the living and the dead. While Jews were exempted from Emperor worship, non-Jewish Christians were not. The reward for this defiance was martyrdom. Only later, in the 4^th century BCE, did this church surface from the catacombs of Rome and hand the mantle of vicarious divine kingship on earth to the Emperor himself. The triumphant elevation of Christ, “ruler of everything,” conferred Christian sanction on the Emperor Constantine (d. 338) and it changed the Christian movement from a persecuted minority to the dominant political religion of the Roman Empire.

The Bible is the foundational library of several distinct communities. Over the course of the centuries following the second destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the banishment of the Jews from Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jewish tradition divided into two major strands that both affirmed the authority of the ancient scriptures but interpreted them differently, namely, the Karaites and the Rabbanites. Jews lived in the Land of Israel that the Romans renamed “Palestine” to erase the memory of the Jews, but they also lived in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where Jewish communities had resided since before the first destruction of Jerusalem in 586BCE. In addition, there was a sizable Samaritan community around the ancient Israelite sanctuary of Mt. Garizim (near modern-day Nablus). The Samaritans held on to the Pentateuch, the laws of Moses, and to this day celebrate the Passover, as commanded in the Torah.

The Arab Conquest of Syria (635 CE) brought an end to Christian rule in the Holy Land and saw the eventual return of Jews to Jerusalem and even a kind of rebuilding of the Solomonic temple, in form of the Dome of the Rock that graces Jerusalem’s temple mount to this day. The early Islamic tradition saw itself as restoring the religion of Abraham, or Nebi Ibrahim, which Muslims saw as the first and most simple universally valid belief in one God, Creator of all. With this creed they hoped to settle the perennial quibbles between Christians who asserted that God was three in one, and Jews, who believed that YHWH, the God of Israel, was One, and they alone were the chosen people. The Qur’an, the holy book of Muslims, draws on shared antecedents: the story of Moses and the Israelites, the long line of prophets and messengers from the beginning down to the Prophet Muhammad, the Virgin Mary and even Alexander the Great. Christians, a movement that began with a failed Jewish messiah who was condemned by a Jewish court as a rabble rouser and executed by Roman prefect Pontius Pilate around 30 CE, adopted the ancient Jewish scriptures as their own, as from its prophecies, rightly understood, they could derive that Jesus of Nazareth was not just “son of (the) divine” but also son of David and hence called upon to rule and judge the living and the dead. Their claim to the providential suffering, death, and resurrection of the Messiah/Christ Jesus was justified from Scriptures that were beyond reproof: scriptures that were all the more reliable because the Christians had no hand in producing them. It was from Jewish and Roman sources that they could argue that Christ was the child, the son of man, presaged from the beginning to put an end to sin, death, and the rule of darkness over the lives of men.

When we think about biblical texts and their contexts, it is therefore not enough to consider origins: when, under what circumstances, by and for whom were the traditions formed that crystallized into the bodies of written text that have come down to us? We must also ask, how were these texts received, transformed, combined, rewritten, and interpreted so as to become constitutive for the beliefs and practices of Jews, Christians, and Muslims? We will attend to both of these considerations, the origin and reception of texts, over the course of the entire semester and for each text we will read.

As we think about history and context, and before we delve into further details of ancient history as we now understand it on the basis of centuries of discovery and study of the Ancient Near East through archaeology, epigraphy (inscriptions), and historiography, we should clarify – or at least state – a fundamental issue. Why does history matter? Is it only an “auxiliary” science that adds to our understanding of where texts originate? Or is there something more essential here to the character of the texts and their implicit and explicit claims to truth?

We can read the Homeric epics without recourse to history. In order to get a sense of the literary character of the Iliad we don’t need to know whether Troy existed. We take it for granted that Agamemnon, Menelaos, Helen, Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus are characters in an epic poem. It matters little whether they really existed because they are present to our imagination through the art of Homeric storytelling. Roman imagination inscribed itself into that ancient story by making Aeneas, prince of Troy, the founder of Latium and hence Romans the descendants of that ancient and noble people, forced to abandon their home and to migrate to a new, and now once again glorious, home and called upon to rule the world. While the Rome of Virgil and Augustus is real, it matters little whether Troy is more than a myth invoked to glorify the Romans. Not so with the Bible.

On the most basic level, the Bible claims and wants its readers to believe, that YHWH, the God of Israel, is real, that the covenanted children of Israel, the sons of Jacob, the original twelve tribes, or the sacred remnant that survives the destruction of Israel, or those who returned from the Babylonian exile and rebuilt Jerusalem, or another, more narrowly defined group of saints and martyrs, will be the seed from which the God of Israel will rebuild the nation and establish the kingship of God on earth. While not entirely dissimilar to Virgil’s appeal to the noble origins of Rome, biblical history makes the claim that everything depends on worshiping YHWH alone, on worshiping Him the right way, and not the wrong way. Homer is about nobility of character. Virgil is about nobility of descent. The Bible is about the will of a mysterious God whose name translates as “I will (cause to) be what I will (cause to) be.” As the Qur’an emphasizes recollection of the many times God, in his inscrutable mercy, called upon humans to convey his will and intention for them, the Bible as well insists that God not only created the world for humans (and all creatures) to thrive in harmony but, following man’s falling out with his God through disobedience (or some other typically human behavior), that God (the only real one) did not remain aloof but passionately engaged with the human family through the particular calling of a single individual, Abraham, and his descendants. The Israelites, enslaved in Egypt, were called to freedom through Moses who was called by YHWH who heard the cry of the Israelites and recalled his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. YHWH prevents Moses from entering the promised land, but he empowers his successor, Joshua, to lead the Israelites in conquest. After these stories, the deity recedes and only interacts with Israelites through their leaders, the judges, the kings, and most importantly through generations of prophets. After the demise of the kingdom, prophets, too, begin to disappear and are replaced by texts: the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings. It is through the voice of those texts, and through the voices in those texts, that the deity remains present and his demands urgent. The promises remain in force and the fate of the nation remains dependent on people hearkening to the voice that speaks through those texts.

History is relevant because of the claims to historical causality made in the biblical texts themselves. The texts proclaim that the God who created heaven and earth made a covenant with Israel. Therefore Israel’s fate is an indicator of God’s presence in history. This claim did not fail to impress those Christians who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the real intention behind that ancient covenant, that in Christ a new covenant was made. The claim to Israel signifying God’s presence in history, the presence of the only God who is living, real, who hears, rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, also impressed itself on the Arabian prophet who was approached by the biblical angel Gabriel, or Jibril, and told to “recite,” launching the movement of Islam (literally “submission”).

What distinguishes Homeric epic and biblical telling is the biblical claim to reality, authority, and truth of its proclamation. We will see how this plays out. But it also makes testing biblical claims against what we know from other, independent sources of history all the more important. By necessity, this historicizing approach will relativize biblical claims in many ways. What appears as prophetic speech that seems to speak across times will appear as topical advice to an ancient king in a particular situation of threat where the king’s behavior will determine the immediate outcome in military, political, and economic terms. What appears as a timeless command to honor the seventh day may show traces of Babylonian influence and hence allow us to speculate on the cultural origins of a divine commandment. What appears as a story reflecting Bronze Age history may inadvertently point to the Iron Age, centuries later, as the true setting of the narration. What seems a divine premonition of a future age may turn out to be a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy in hindsight, told to show that a king’s revolutionary reforms were not innovations but divinely intended acts, commanded and prophesied generations earlier.

This approach will at first be confusing as it runs counter to pious and naïve assumptions we may bring to the text. Once we become habituated to thinking in these terms, however, we will develop a new respect for the texts and their authors who did not write to deceive but to educate and to build up their community, to instill norms of righteousness, justice, purity, and a fear of God they regard as “the beginning of wisdom.” In other words, the texts were meant to build up the hope, confidence, faith, and devotion of a nation that looked back at its own humble origins, the rise and fall of its institutions of independence, and forged a way of life that preserved them under ever new and changing circumstances.

Ultimately, the question I will ask is not, is the Bible “believable,” but is the Bible “meaningful.”

I haven't done a word count, but just looking at the size of Charlesworth's edition of the OT Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, it seems obvious that, sometime, during the late Second Commonwealth, Jewish culture exploded into a burst of literary activity. I am not even thinking of the Alexandrian Jews, most prominently among them Philo of Alexandria (c 20 BCE to c 40 CE), who lived in multinational royal metropolis and had access to the greatest library ever assembled. (Eat your heart out, Widener.) Alexandria gave us the first Greek translation of Jewish sacred scriptures whose allegorical interpretation paved the way for the dissemination of the Christian way among Greek speaking god-fearers. The world's most successful persuasive literature, the Christian New Testament, would not have become the bestseller it is without those antecedent scriptures and interpretive traditions.

But that's not what this post is about. I am thinking of the plethora of writings produced in Hebrew and Aramaic in the Land of Israel, many of which were damaged or lost in the devastations that followed the Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, some of which was hidden away and unearthed later, or preserved in translation and Christian and other sectarian adaptations. Examples include the Book of Jubilees, apocalyptic Enoch literature, the Damascus Document, the Testaments of the Patriarchs, the Apocalypse of Moses (Life of Adam and Eve), and many others. We have long used the term "pseudepigrapha" for many of these writings, a term of classification that files these books (as opposed to biblical literature) as circulating under false authorial ascriptions. Whether or not this is the most helpful classification does not matter to me. It points to a difference between biblical literature and those many other works that begin to appear around the second century BCE. My question is: why then? Here are a few reasons.

1. One answer is Greek paideia. While we think of priests neglecting their sacrificial duties to run to the Jerusalem gymnasium where they would exercise in the nude, we should also think of other aspects of Greek education, such as literacy. While, until the advent of the Greeks, literacy may have largely been the purview of professional scribes, Hellenism may have given scribal culture a boost. Acquisition of Greek was necessary for administrative reasons. But it may also have boosted "indigenous" or traditional scribal practices. This brings me to the next point.
2. Resistance to "Hellenism" gives rise to a self-conscious culture of "Judaism." The term, and its juxtaposition with hellenismos, first appears in Second Maccabees. But what did it signify? Aside from the "household Judaism" (Andrea Berlin) that seems to have taken root under the Hasmoneans, the same age (late 2nd c BCE) also sees the return of Paleo-Hebrew on Hasmonean coinage. Hellenization proceeded here and elsewhere by way of such juxtapositions. The same Ptolemaic and, later, Roman rulers acted as Pharaoh's toward their Egyptian subjects and as Macedonians or Romans toward their Greek-speaking subjects. In Ioudaia/Yehud this system of government seems to have given rise to a culture of repristination that included bringing back (or manufacturing) ancient Hebrew literature and script; a fostering of non-Hellenistic household practices; a veneration of the ancestral laws, and the like. The Jews were not alone in this new emphasis on antiquity. (See Gardner, Gregg, and Kevin Lee Osterloh. Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.)
3. The new focus on the ancestral laws and prophetic literature gave rise to different interpretations, criticism of the ruling family whose right to serve as high priests and quasi-kings was questioned on the basis of the sacred literature they fostered, and social movements that turned hostile toward the presence of foreigners and foreign rule. We have an echo of this in the Jewish prayer, al kis'o lo yeshev zar. 
4. Apocalyptic literature is only one among many genres, some of which thrived and took off, while others eventually withered. We know that some Jewish writers of that age turned the story of Moses into verse drama (Ezekiel the Tragedian).  Others wrote Psalms or rewrote sacred history to fit into fifty-year periods (Jubilees, cf. the genealogy of Joseph in Matthew 1), introduced new characters into the world of Jewish imagination (Mastema in Jubilees), or gave a more prominent role to angels. Some latched on to priestly notions of purity and holiness, others were attracted to preachers of repentance who proclaimed the imminence of divine kingship.

As a result of these and related developments, Jewish writing proliferated. One of the ironies: by way of Greek, Ethiopic, Syriac, and other translations, Jewish literature became popular far beyond the borders (however defined) of the Land of Israel. Pilgrims flooded to Jerusalem. The royal house of Adiabene even built a palace there and supported the Jewish uprising against Rome. Jerusalem turned into a symbolic center onto which people from many nations could project notions of resistance to evil, impurity, and the dominance of Rome. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yesterday, a much hyped appearance of Ben Shapiro at BU came and went, and we are all left to puzzle what this performance was all about. By performance I mean everything that came before and the event itself. By the time I was thinking of attending the event had sold out. Sold out lectures are a rarity here at BU. Name recognition helps, as apparently does notoriety. But let me get to the main point.

Black BU folks demonstrated against the lecture because of its title. The title of the talk suggested that Shapiro was going to argue that "America was not built on slavery but on freedom." But if the reports on his lecture are accurate, that's not what he said. In his lecture he allegedly acknowledged the evil of slavery and acknowledged the ills of Jim Crow segregation. From what I gather where he differs is that he wants people to distinguish the present from the past and recognize that America has changed to be a more inclusive and post-racial society than people sometimes want to believe. In other words, Shapiro came across as a liberal rather than a conservative. But the title was formulated to provoke a strong reaction and it did, because it is offensive. What I don't understand, if Shapiro is not a racist or a white supremacist, who acknowledges the evils of slavery and argues for freedom for all, and if this represents the views of the student group that invited him, then why the offensive title? Bait and switch? Signaling to the alt-right while appearing as a mere conservative?

To say that America was not built on slavery but on freedom is an absurd statement because it was built on slavery and freedom, namely freedom for slavers and others who benefited from the economic wealth created by the enslavement of Africans who were deprived of their basic rights. And to say that this is a matter of the past willfully ignores the lasting and ongoing effects of slavery and segregation. The Elie Wiesel Center held a series of events on economic racism and we clearly need to educate our students and the public further on this subject.  We cannot speak of freedom as a fact either. Freedom is an aspiration, not a fact. Economic racism is.

You can read Joel Brown and Amy Laskowsky's report on the event HERE.

UPDATE: On December 9, the Elie Wiesel Center, along with the BU African American Studies Program and the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies program, organized a response to Ben Shapiro. You can read about it HERE.

The term apocalyptein (Greek), means to uncover or reveal. At the heart of apocalyptic writing is the imminent vindication and grand reversal  that will put a religiously committed community, now persecuted, in a position of power.  The historic situation of the apocalyptic community is characterized by trials and tribulations, persecution and repression, or war and destruction. The visionary anticipates (or describes) thr present (in disguise of a foreseen future) in bewildering visions and symbolic representations of the passage of historical or cosmic time in precisely measured intervals. The era closest to the moment of divine intervention on behalf of his trusted servants is  unlike anything  ever been seen before. These tribulations and their "end" are disclosed ("revealed") as having been presaged by earlier prophets and sages of old, such as Enoch or Daniel, and they attest to the hidden works of divine providence in the face of experience to the contrary. Fourth Ezra (aka 2 Esdras), an apoclypse written around 100 CE,  reiterates, for its own situation, the question asked in the Book of Daniel, written during the tribulations of Seleucid-Hellenistic interference with the traditional worship at the Jerusalem temple, namely, the question: how long?

Redemptive divine intervention on the historic plane on behalf of a persecuted minority community and culminating in a grand reversal of power is also the expectation of the earliest Christians, living in expectation of the parousia or second coming of Christ. As Jesus puts it in the NT gospels, "the last will be the first, and the first will be last" (Matthew 20:16). As the theologian, physician, and musician Albert Schweitzer noted a century ago, we need to understand the apocalyptic mind in order to understand early Christian writing, including the letters of the Apostle Paul. And as August Gfrörer, founder of the modern historical study of apocalypticism, noted in the nineteenth century, apocalypticism allows us to see the continuity between certain forms of Judaism and early Christianity. Simplifying we might say that instead of the Old Testament as such it is apocalyptic literature more than anything else that prepared the ground and provided the matrix for the emergence of the Christian proclamation.

Much like earlier historical and prophetic writing, apocalyptic literature speaks to the fate of a community troubled by internal and external threats. In this regard it conforms to the social and political norms of earlier Israelite and Judahite literature. However, in contrast to the earlier prophetic tradition, late-second-commonwealth apocalyptic writing shows distinctly different literary characteristics, represents a new, more dualistic way of thinking, and concerns itself with the wellbeing of a community of "saints" or chosen ones from among the nation. It is not simply a "sacred remnant" that will escape the coming wrath, a remnant or shoot from which the whole may be rebuilt. Rather, apocalyptic writing makes vindication dependent on belonging to a group or movement of individuals who excel in piety, devotion, and obedience to a particular "teacher of righteousness," as in the Qumran community or early Christianity. Compared with older genres of biblical literature rooted in the experiences of the Israelite and Judahite monarchies it thus constitutes an innovation. It presupposes the conditions of diversification and contestation of the Israelite/Jewish heritage that is typical of the late second commonwealth and manifest in the widely attested sects of the time, such as the Pharisees, Saducees, and the Essenes mentioned by Philo of Alexandria and Josephus Flavius.

The only true apocalypse in Tanakh is found in the Book of Daniel. Only Daniel 7-12 are fully apocalyptic in literary character. The early chapters of Daniel constitute a Persian-age diaspora narrative about Jewish piety in the Babylonian exile. Some stylistic antecedents to the Daniel apocalypse can be found in the visions of Ezekiel as well as in parts of Isaiah and the prophet Joel. The exact relation between apocalyptic and prophetic genres is a matter of debate.

The date of Daniel 7-12 has long been established as the late first half of the 2^nd century BCE (c. 165 BCE), the time of Seleucid king Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” and the changes in the YHWH cult of Jerusalem imposed by Antiochus and the Hellenizing faction of Judahite priests, events also reflected in Maccabean literature (esp. 1 and 2 Maccabees) and described by Josephus Flavius in the Antiquities of the Jews. An important Jewish apocalypse from the time (c. 100 CE) following the destruction of the second temple (70 CE) is Fourth Ezra, now part of the Book of Esdras , which can be found among the Old Testament Apocrypha as well among the historical books of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox editions of the Old Testament.

Apocalyptic texts include a review of history up to the time of the writing in form of a foretelling. (A non-apocalyptic foreshadowing of futures past can be found in Genesis 15:13-16). What makes these texts puzzling and bewildering to uninitiated readers is the use of cryptic imagery as well as unfamiliarity with the historical particulars referenced in these writings. The schema in Daniel and elsewhere is that a pious visionary of old is given a preview of future history in veiled images that are subsequently interpreted by an angelic guide. (In the so-called Enoch literature, the ante-diluvial figure of Enoch, transformed into an angelic being called "Metatron," serves as the interpreter for the human visionary.)

To the community of learned readers for whom such texts were produced,  this history is a known past that leads up to their own moment of tribulation, and offers them the hope of an imminent divine intervention, an end to their suffering, removal and punishment of a violent regime, and the advent of a just and divine ruler. The text ends with predictions of an imminent end to the present age, which is governed by evil forces, the sudden appearance of a divine redeemer, and scenarios of a grand reckoning (e.g. “last judgment”), with punishment for the wicked and reward for the righteous few. The focus of this literature is thus on the historical experience of the community and the hope for providential intervention on their behalf.

It is in apocalyptic literature that we first encounter ideas about a sequence of world-ages or aeons (Greek aion), which gives us the popular motif of a “dawning of a new age” and creates an understanding of history as divided into epochs running toward historic completion (“end of history”), rather than circular, repetitive, or illusory. Some apocalyptic literature shows the influence of astrological speculation. While this indicates a turn from restorative concepts of history to utopian, future oriented ones, the apocalyptic future is essentially scripted or fated in heaven, not open for humans to change, influence, or delay. The only escape from the imminent judgment may be individual repentance and/or joining the preferred movement of saints and martyrs.

Apocalyptists see history as unfolding on two plains: a lower world of injustice and suffering of the righteous and their oppression by a sequence of evil regimes, and a hidden upper world where divine righteousness prevails that will eventually become manifest on earth as a “kingdom of heaven” (malkhut ha-shamayim). This replaces the older view where collective suffering of a nation was motivated by the anger of the nation’s god who allowed, or called upon, others to wreak punishment for the sins of the nation. This older view of the fate of the nation and its causes is evident not only in the Bible, as in the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 27-28, but also in the Moabite Stone. It was part of an Iron Age koine (a common symbolic vocabulary or system of interpretation) by which states explained periods of misfortune.

A major difference between the older view and that espoused by the apcalyptists is that the earlier view reflects a national (or monarchical) perspective, whereas the latter reflects the view of a party without direct access to power, in other words, it is by nature “sectarian,” namely, it represents the view of a party or social-religious movement that finds itself on the margins of power but hopes to be vindicated and restored or elevated to power. The marginality or outside view of the apocalyptists may also explain literary recourse to the device of speaking about the present in form of a pseudo-prophetic revelation received long ago that alludes to contemporary affairs in veiled imagery. Expressing the view of a powerless minority, the apocalyptists must have labored under the pressures of censorship or outright persecution. Apocalyptic writing became popular among many groups and movements, including – over time – marginalized Christian and Muslim communities, who counted themselves among the righteous few and hoped to be vindicated in the end. The attractiveness of the apocalyptic genre is rooted in its appeal to the pious persecuted and suffering saints.

The message of apocalyptic writing is directed to people who have no direct influence or agency on the historical plain, who find themselves in the position of mere observers or victims of violence enacted upon them by others, including powerful opponents within their own community. Having apocalyptic visions that speak to them directly in the voice of a time long past puts the group "in the know," whereas others–though now in power– walk around in darkness and ignorance. A striking aspect of this literature is the vindication of suffering and the passivity with which the divine intervention is hoped for and expected. There is thus a Stoic element in this literature that echoes with the attitude emphasized and promoted in other, non-apocalyptic works of  late second temple literature, such as Fourth Maccabees, which promotes the stoic virtue of the individual in the face of painful foreign government-imposed torture and proclaims the immortality of the soul.

Daniel 12:3 also provides us with the first attestation of the belief in the reward of those killed in religious wars. The divine judgment that will put an end to the evil also a personal resurrection of the righteous few who keep the faith during the present times of repression and tribulation, and "everlasting shame" for the wicked. This should be compared with other late second commonwealth Jewish writings, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, that promote belief in the immortality of the soul. The two beliefs (resurrection and immortality) are not identical and there seems to have been an ongoing debate on the correct view. (Cf. Jonathan Klawans, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism, chapter 3). Belief in an immortal soul entered the Jewish religious imagination through Greek cultural influence. Belief in bodily resurrection and posthumous judgment has a Hebraic foothold in the prophetic vision of Ezekiel 37 (Valley of Dry Bones), was debated between Pharisees and Saducees, and later became orthodox rabbinic Jewish belief. The doctrine of posthumous judgment was firmly rooted in Egyptian religion, which preserved the body as a precondition for the successful passage of the Ka or spiritual essence of a person to the hereafter where a person’s deeds were weighed on a scale of justice. Egyptian religion became thoroughly popularized over the course of the first millennium BCE and it is possible that it exerted a quiet influence on the Judahite population, esp. during the century of Ptolemaic Egyptian rule that preceded the turmoil caused by the Seleucid conquest of Jerusalem (198). While the Book of Daniel is composed in the Persian-age lingua franca of imperial Aramaic, the apocalyptic worldview it represents may well have been influenced by other sources as well.

In addition to the canonical Book of Daniel, examples of Jewish apocalyptic writing include works attributed to the biblical figure of Enoch (cf. Gen 5:24; cf. Hebr 11:5), the Book of Watchers from Qumran (incl. in the Ethiopic version of Enoch), Fourth Ezra (part of Christian 2 Esdras), 2 Baruch, and others adopted by var. Christian traditions. Christian versions of Jewish apocalyptic texts, among them parts of the Book of Revelations, the only apocalyptic book included in the New Testament, and 2 Esdras, underwent Christian editing and include additions and interpolations that give the text a Christian orientation.

The apocalyptic genre helps us to understand many of the literary tropes that are prominent in the New Testament and some of the fundamental beliefs proclaimed by early Christians, including John the Baptist preaching repentance and immersion for purification in anticipation of an imminent judgment, apocalyptic scenarios (e.g. Matthew 24; Revelation), Paul’s urge to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth in anticipation of the second coming of Christ, the idea of the Christian community as a new humanity, a sacred remnant that embodies the righteous few to be saved in the coming judgment, heavenly visions and other apocalyptic revelations in Paul, Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of god, the title “son of man” (a reference to Daniel 7), and the belief that Christ conquered death/was resurrected/could not be killed. This list also shows that there were various competing versions and interpretations of the events associated with Jesus, many of which resonated with the apocalyptic frame of mind.

Among the more recent and ongoing consequences of apocalyptic literature is the use made of this literature by various modern fundamentalists. Evangelical Christians are thoroughly enamored with the idea that the apocalyptic predictions of Daniel and Revelations are as yet to be fulfilled. Many believe that they are in fact being fulfilled in our own days and that the second coming of Christ (an apocalyptic belief) is imminent. The Apostolic Church as well as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also more “mainstream” Evangelicals, are apocalyptic in their outlook on history and in how they view their own place in history. This attitude already played an important role in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English philo-Semitism which influenced British foreign policy, including the British government's support of the Zionist project. This reflected the belief that the English were called upon, as a Christian nation, to hasten the second coming of Christ by helping the Jews to return to their ancient homeland and rebuild their commonwealth. Today, similar beliefs are espoused by many American Evangelicals, including members of CUFI (Christians United for Israel), in their support for Zionism, the State of Israel, and initiatives to build the Third Temple. This kind of political activism is not, strictly speaking, apocalyptic, but is empowered and driven by the belief that God’s “plan” is being implemented and that the “end times” are near. The popularity of the Left Behind series indicates the popularity of this kind of thinking in terms of end-time scenarios among American readers.

In recent politics, the word “transactional” has been used a lot. Transactional politics are rootless politics where everything is governed by the self-interest of the moment. The opposite of transactionism are politics governed by policies and relationships by contracts. Transactional politics atomize relationships into moments of transaction. Non-transactional politics seek continuity and predictability.

If we apply this to the study of religion, especially to the relationship between a human being and her god, we can perhaps understand the fundamental difference between magic and religion. Let us say all religion is driven by human interest in self-preservation. We project an image onto the screen of heaven (or other locations of divine presence) that is either transactional or non-transactional, depending on whether we believe that the powers on the other side, on whose benevolence we depend, relate to us in a transactional or a non-transactional way. Are they seeking momentary advantages and can they be bribed by gifts (sacrifice) or are they interest in a long-term relationship? Self-interested powers that can be bribed provide the basis for all magic. Relationships between us and such powers are atomistic, occasional, as needed. The veneration of saints, the conjuring of spirits, and other manifestations of shamanism are purely transactional.

In contrast, gods interested in relationships are profoundly political. They aim at the endurance of a family, a city, a dynasty, a state, or an empire, but in any case, their goal is for a collective entity to succeed, to attain an enduring earthly existence. Non-transactional religions usually condemn and repress shamanism, namely, when they perceive transactionalism (do ut des) as an insult to the majesty and purpose of deity, a purpose these order-seeking religions want to make pervasive. Hence the repression of paganism.

This is not to say that all political religions are necessarily ethical or non-transactional in character. Some are fully blown systems of repression, forcing subjects (subdued collectives, conquered populations) into submission and imposing fear even when they employ the language of love and loyalty. The Assyrians were like that. Their chief god Asshur was like that. He acted out of self-interest. He was transactional. He did not last.

Biblical covenantalism initially employs summo-deism (“no other gods before me”) and later absolute exclusivism (“I am He, there is no Other”) to establish the collective identity of “Israel” as a covenanted nation. The prophetic campaign against Baalism is not just about idolatry (no images) but also about exclusivity and hence about identity established by ritual action. (You shall not act that way.) The purpose of biblical religion, if one can speak in such anachronistic and generalizing terms (the people described in biblical literature for the most part had no “Bible”), is ultimately about the correlation between the God of Israel and Israel, two ideal entities whose boundaries are constantly negotiated and modified in light of changing realities. But there would be no mutual responsiveness between Israel and the God of Israel if the relationship between God and nation were merely transactional. The predictability of the downfall of the nation depends on the predictability of the nation’s God. The relationship is casuistic: blessing follows obedience to the laws (not sentimental piety but persistent lawfulness of society is at stake here); curses threaten increasingly severe failures of society. (See Deuteronomy 27-28)

Where does the individual come into play? Is personal prayer inevitably transactional? I am reminded of the collective confession of sin in the scripted prayers for the Day of Atonement. It is we who have sinned (not I), and the purpose is not just to seek forgiveness and life for the individual (which is certainly implied in the myth of God’s opening books to inscribe each individual and fix their fate for the next year; a “memento mori”) but to indemnify both ourselves (from futile vows; Kol Nidre) but ultimately to accept God’s sovereignty over the world (creation and kingship are the themes of New Year/Rosh Hashanah), life and death of individuals (Yom Kippur), and the thriving of the community (Sukkoth). All this culminates in a celebration of the Torah (Simchat Torah). The covenant is fixed in a book that assures us that the relationship between Israel and the God of Israel is not transactional but affirmed forever.

Chag sameach!