Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (6 page)

Because God’s Temple, now in the hands of time-servers and worse, had been irreparably compromised, there was only one course the righteous could take: to withdraw from the world, since it must be coming to an end. The high priest of the Temple, the “Wicked Priest,” though “called by the name of truth when he first arose,” had betrayed God and built “with blood a city of vanity,” a city that robbed the poor to fatten the rich. There is good reason to identify this priest with
Jonathan
Maccabeus, Judas’s younger brother, who was appointed high priest after Judas’s death and played footsie with the
Seleucids. His opposite number in the
Dead Sea Scrolls is “the Teacher of Righteousness,” a kind of abbot of the community, of whom we know nothing outside the Scrolls. All indications pointed in the direction of a final battle, which the Essene community believed would soon be waged, between “the Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light,” who would have the archangel Michael as their champion. It was this proximate
apocalypse that supported the Essenes’ radical lifestyle: if the world was about to
end, generativity, property, and personal freedom were beside the point. What evidence we have also suggests that
John the Baptizer, Jesus’s immediate predecessor, whom the gospels locate in the same Judean desert that the
Essenes called home, was once part of this community and shared its vision of a coming conflagration.

The underlying reason for the exclusion of the Maccabean material from the canon of the
Hebrew Bible was not that the Jews lacked a version in Hebrew. At least in the case of First
Maccabees, they once possessed the Hebrew original. The reason it was lost is that the early rabbis did not value the material, which glorified the exploits of the Maccabees, because they had no use for the Maccabees’ descendants, the Hasmonean dynasty. The rabbis—or “teachers” of Israel, who are first mentioned in this post-Alexandrine period and who are with us to this day—tried in many ways to steer a middle course between the absolute purity of the Essenes and the smarmy pragmatism of the
Hasmoneans. They loved the Law in all its details; and this was their focus, not fanciful predictions of apocalypse. They would not be pushed out of society; they would live normal lives as normal men but with a reverence for the Law more elaborate than anyone had ever attempted before them. Paradoxically, they were called “
Pharisees” (or “Separate Ones”), but this may be a name given them by enemies. It is among their ranks that we should probably seek one of their less distinguished (and abnormal) colleagues,
Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers called him “rabbi.”

The world in which this Jesus grew to manhood, a world of now-extinct “Judaisms,” was not very like any Jewish environment that we know of in more recent times. After all, the ancient Temple cultus and its priesthood, however compromised,
were destroyed completely in the catastrophe of
A.D.
70—about four decades after Jesus. The
Essenes disappeared about the same time beneath the desert sands. Of all these divergent “Judaisms” the one we know least about is Sadduceeism. The
Sadducees, who seem to have departed the scene about the same time as the Essenes and the Hasmonean high priests, had links to the priesthood and appear to have been, in the main, wealthy, influential men. Almost the only things we know for certain about them are that they sometimes clashed with the
Pharisees over interpretation of the Law and that they did not believe in an
afterlife.

The idea of continued life for human beings after physical death is unknown in the earliest—and most important—documents of Judaism, the Torah and the Prophets. Enslaved Israel’s brush with Egyptian religion, when the Israelites in the second millennium
B.C.
were forced to build mausoleums for dead pharaohs, may have been enough to keep the Jews away from all that woo-woo “spirituality” about the Mummy’s Curse and the floating and immortal souls of dead kings and their retinues. Israelite religion was about land and progeny, thank you all the same—not the unreal realms of the dead, backed up by creepy movie music. But it was also about good and evil actions, about justice to the poor, and fidelity to God. The
Ten Commandments, which came to the Jews through
Moses, but ultimately from God, give scant promise of reward for doing right. One must love justice and mercy for their own sake—and for God’s—not because one receives heavenly upgrades for good behavior. Of course, leading a good life, a life in accordance with God’s justice, will normally lead to all the good things: children, honor, prosperity, and serene old age.

But what of those who suffer? What of those, like
Job, who
lose everything despite their faithfulness? Are their lives merely evidence that God is not the God of Justice but of Injustice? Such thoughts troubled the Jews (as they still trouble us); and in the later writings of the Hebrew Bible, as well as in the writings of this period that were not accepted into the Hebrew canon, they worried over this dilemma.

One solution was, as we have seen,
Apocalypse: a universal Dies Irae that would get the wicked and vindicate the good guys. The later chapters of the
Book of Isaiah—which do not come from the pen of the prophet but from an unknown writer who lived after the return of the Jews from Babylon in the period before the Hasmoneans—begin to speak of the redemptive power of
suffering and of a “suffering servant” who will in his meekness redeem his people, that is, ransom them from slavery and sin. The
Book of Daniel contains a prophecy about “one like a Son of Man”—that is, a human being—almost certainly an image of Israel, rescued by God from its sufferings and exalted among the nations after the successive collapse of each of the world’s empires. All these prophecies are couched in ambiguous symbolic language, and all seem to assume that the coming Good Time must be preceded by the Day of God’s Wrath.

The
Second Book of Maccabees, which covers much the same material as First Maccabees but in a far more florid style, recounts the Gothic tale of a woman who, during the persecution of
Antiochus Epiphanes, was made to watch as her seven sons, who had refused to taste pork, were whipped and scourged. Antiochus (who would hardly have been present in a sordid Jerusalem torture chamber but would rather have been found far from this scene in one of his palaces at Antioch or Babylon) is depicted as mad with rage, ordering that pans
and cauldrons be heated till they are red-hot. He commands that the spokesman for the brothers have his tongue cut out, his head scalped, and his extremities cut off. What is left of the poor man is then fried in a pan. His brothers know that the same fate awaits them if they again refuse the forbidden food. “The Lord God is watching,” encourages their mother, “and certainly feels sorry for us, as Moses declared in his song, which clearly states that ‘he will take pity on his servants.’ ”

You can almost hear the writer’s mental gears turning: if good people, the best people, are made to die in this way, death cannot be the end of everything. The saints must prevail—but how? The mother, as she witnesses successively the torture and death of each son, does not try to intervene but encourages each “in their ancestral tongue,” a telling detail, because by this time the Jews no longer spoke Hebrew but Aramaic, the dominant tongue of the Near East, which the Greek Seleucids had grudgingly adopted as their language of administration after they became the kings of Alexander’s Asia. Antiochus, who is counting on at least one recantation to make his day, is distraught when he finds he is now down to the youngest son, who is proving as inflexible as his freshly executed brothers. The king appeals to the mother to give her one surviving son some sensible, motherly advice. But the mother, leaning over her son, “fooled the cruel tyrant with these words,” uttered, of course, in excellent Hebrew, which the king, nodding his enthusiastic assent, could not understand: “ ‘My son, have pity on me; I carried you nine months in my womb and suckled you three years, fed you and reared you to the age you are now, and provided for you. I implore you, my child, look at the earth and sky and everything in them, and consider how God made them out of what did not exist, and that human beings come
into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner, but prove yourself worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that I may receive you back with them in the day of mercy.’ ” The last son is slaughtered, and then the mother.
⁴

The saints will prevail “in the day of mercy.” But all these images and prophecies of eventual victory seem to require a preliminary “judgment on the wicked” (as the last son prophesies)—a prior cataclysm, something that more moderate believers were, understandably, loath to entertain. (I recall a zonked British rocker in the late sixties urging me to cancel a trip to California because, according to the prophecies of Nostradamus, that state was about to be divided from the mainland and slip into the Pacific. Well, perhaps Nostradamus was merely off by a few decades or—more likely, in my opinion—true prophets are few and far between and, in any case, notoriously unreliable when it comes to actual dates.) Balanced believers who had productive lives and investments in family and property and who did not especially welcome the fiery end of everything found a variant way to answer the question of how the
suffering of good people can be justified, a way that did not insist so extravagantly on universal destruction: the just—those who had lived by the Word of God and treated their fellow man fairly and mercifully—would live forever with God, so their earthly suffering was but a prelude to their everlasting glory.

It is often asserted that this idea of
everlasting life is a borrowing from the Greeks, who thought the body but a prison that enclosed the immortal butterfly of the soul. But the Greek idea of immortality was very different from the evolving Jewish idea that there must be life beyond this life—if life is to make sense. For one thing, the Greeks imagined that the soul had existed forever, prior to its imprisonment in a body. The Jews could never countenance such ethereal blather. God had created each individual at one particular time as a body born of woman; there could be no possibility of anything like preexistent spirit. Each person was exactly what you saw and smelled: a body of flesh and blood.

Job, at the lowest point of his hideous suffering, his children dead, his property gone, his body covered in sores, screams out his justification:

On earth. In his flesh. Within the classic Jewish worldview nothing else is possible, no merely spiritual vindication. “Heaven,” boasted the third son of the mother of Second Maccabees, “gave me these limbs; for the sake of his laws I have no concern for them; from him I hope to receive them again”—not float around as a disembodied soul.

But, gradually, even this possibility of
“
resurrection to new life,” as the fourth son termed it, gave way to a more nuanced interpretation, based neither on Platonic metaphor nor on Jewish theological speculation, but on what the Jews had always relied on, their faith in their God. Someday,
somehow
, there will be a final accounting, which must, of necessity, include a resurrection of the bodies that have turned to dust—a resurrection “in my flesh.” Beyond the grave, the good will be rewarded as they never were in life; and the evil ones, who seemed to own the world, will be hurled into unimaginable perdition. But there must be a place—outside time—where the souls of the just are kept, awaiting their final resurrection and vindication. We cannot understand these matters, for they lie beyond our ken. But we believe that God is just and that even after death we are, as we have always been, in his hands. Thus, this passage from the
Book of Wisdom, written by a Jew of Alexandria in the decades just before Jesus and so hopeful that it has been read at funerals ever since:

“K
NEW
YOU
NOT
P
OMPEY
?” exclaims Marullus, a tribune of the people
⁶
and supporter of the popular
Roman general, at the start of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar.
The Jews, who by the summer of 63
B.C.
had lived under the heel of successive conquerors for more than half a millennium, knew neither
Pompey nor his
Rome. They were about to learn.