In this respect prophecy was conceived to be a far narrower activity than in pre-exilic times. It no longer meant advising or rebuking the king, or urging the people to do something or refrain from doing it. Now its frequent purpose was predicting the future, and the long-range future at that, since seeing something that was already on the horizon may not have required anything beyond ordinary perspicacity.33 At the same time, however, all manner of sacred texts, such as the “Song of the Well” just seen, could turn out to be prophecies under a different name, presented in the form of narratives, or laws, or almost any kind of writing considered to be of sacred origin. Thus, the psalms of David might seem to be psalms, but in truth, they were the writings of an ancient prophet:
David the son of Jesse was wise and enlightened as the light of the sun, and a scribe and wise and unblemished before God and men in all that he did. And the LORD gave him a wise and enlightened spirit and he wrote psalms, three thousand and six hundred, and songs to be sung before the altar . . . for all the days of the year, three hundred and sixty-four, and for the Sabbath offerings, fifty-two songs, and [other] songs . . . so that the total was four thousand and fifty. All these he composed through prophecy, which had been granted to him by the Most High. (11QPsa David’s Compositions col 27:2–11)
David is never called a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, but here he has become one—indeed, a prophet of prodigious output. Nor is this text, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the only instance of “David the prophet.” Philo of Alexandria similarly refers to the author of Psalm 84—presumably David—as “a certain prophetic man.”34 Little wonder, then, that the New Testament book of Acts observes, “David . . . being thus a prophet, knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that He would put one of his descendants on the throne . . .” (2:29–30). So Josephus could write about King Solomon:
After this solemn appeal to God, he [Solomon] turned to address the multitude and made clear to them the power and providence of God, in that most of the future events which He had revealed to David his father, had actually come to pass, and the rest would also come about, and God Himself had given him his name even before he was born, and had foretold what he was to be called and that none but he should build Him a temple, on becoming king after his father’s death. And now that they saw these things being fulfilled in accordance with David’s prophecies, he asked them to praise God. (Jewish Antiquities 8:109–110)
Prophets with Pseudonyms
This new understanding of the prophet’s function as predicting went hand in hand with another characteristic of Second Temple period visionaries, the belief in an approaching “time of the end,” when life on earth would cease to exist as we know it. Such a belief inspired various writings in the late- and post-biblical periods: the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and the book of Revelation in the New Testament are two good examples of this form of writing. (The unifying theme of such compositions has been described by scholars as “apocalyptic eschatology”—our word “apocalyptic” comes from the Greek word for “revelation,” and “eschatology” is focused on the eschaton, Greek for “the last,” as in the end of time.)
Revealing secrets about the time of the end—and often, asserting that the time of its unfolding is not far off—was what many Second Temple visionaries did. But often, they did not do so in their own names; rather, they adopted the names of figures from the ancient past. Thus, various compositions were attributed to Enoch, the antediluvian sage who was said to have ascended bodily into heaven while still alive;35 he was said to have passed on some of the secrets of heaven to people on earth, who ultimately collected them into what is now known as 1 Enoch. (There is also a second and a third Enoch.) The same period gave rise to the Book of Jubilees (allegedly dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai), the Apocalypse of Abraham, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch (Syriac Apocalypse), the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and many more. Attributing such writings to figures from the ancient past was, of course, a way of appropriating their legitimacy as biblical figures;36 but claiming that Enoch, Baruch, and the others had authored these texts also had the effect of making the books look like truly long-range predictions, since these alleged authors had lived hundreds and hundreds of years before these books were actually written.37
It should be noted that the biblical figures chosen to be the pseudonymous authors of these books were often not prophets: Enoch, Baruch, and Ezra, for example, were known principally as scribes and sages (in fact, “scribe” was simply a synonym of “sage” in this period). This has led some scholars to argue that the true antecedent of this Second Temple apocalyptic literature is the sage rather than the prophet—that, in fact, many of these compositions were written by people who belonged to schools of sages and scriptural interpreters. It may be, on the other hand, that the choice of other biblical pseudonyms—Abraham, Jacob, and others, and even prophets like Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—suggests that any figure from the biblical past would do, so long as he or she could be plausibly presented as the recipient of privileged knowledge.38
The Messiness of History
Part of these texts’ concern with eschatology may have arisen, at least in part, as a reaction to what might be called the messiness of history.39 A Jew living in, say, the second or third century BCE would certainly have been puzzled by developments in his country’s recent past. Way back in the early days, history (at least as recounted in various ancient books) seemed to make sense to him. Genesis told how Israel’s most ancient ancestors had found favor with God and were rewarded. Exodus recounted the people’s miraculous escape from slavery and oppression, and how their God concluded a great covenant with them at Mount Sinai, choosing Israel as His own, special treasure. Israel’s conquest of Canaan and its subsequent flourishing under King David and King Solomon seemed to offer direct proof of God’s favor. If the northern tribes were subsequently conquered and exiled, surely this was a punishment for their sins—as was the Babylonian conquest of the southern Kingdom of Judah and the exiling of much of its population to Babylon. But the Babylonians themselves were swiftly overcome by the Persians, presumably a divine demonstration that Israel’s God had simply used them to discipline His own, favorite people. This ongoing divine favor was manifest in the fact that the Judeans did indeed return to their homeland as promised, and many of them likewise looked forward to a return of the northern tribes to their ancient homeland, a first step toward the establishment of David’s old empire redivivus.
But as decades turned into centuries, any hope for such an outcome began to fade. Judea was now simply part of the huge Persian Empire, and a rather unimportant part at that. How could one possibly believe that Israel was the favorite of the world’s one, true deity, the universal God, when that God did not seem to be doing anything to restore Israel to its former glory? Such doubts were only fueled by later events: the Persians were eventually expelled, but not by Israel’s God; rather, the armies of Alexander the Great conquered the whole region, and Judea came under the thumb of new foreign leaders, first Ptolemaic, then Seleucid. During this time, the “remnant of Israel” seemed to fare neither well nor badly; to some onlookers, this very fact—neither punishment nor prosperity—must have made it seem as if the whole idea of Israel’s God controlling their fate had been a mistake from the start.
From such a viewpoint, only some huge, momentous event, a Big Bang that would change everything, could redeem Israel’s traditional belief in its God’s special concern for its fate. We saw above how the chronology of the Book of Jubilees suggested that God’s true control of history was expressed not in centuries, but in huge units of time, like the 2,450 years (exactly fifty jubilees) separating the creation of Adam from the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan after the exodus from Egypt. So too, other apocalyptic writings sought to reaffirm God’s control of events by focusing on the longue durée: divine time was dealt out in chunks of centuries, so that the little ups and downs of any given period could only mislead people by having them fail to notice the l
arger, divinely created patterns.
One such pattern was the theme of the succession of empires in the biblical book of Daniel. It appears in different forms.40 Thus, in chapter 2, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar has a troubling dream, he demands of his sages not only to interpret its meaning, but to start by relating to him the content of the dream that he dreamt—a seemingly impossible task. But Daniel, with divine help, is equal to it. He not only is granted a knowledge of what the king dreamt in a night vision of his own, but also recognizes that the dream is actually a long-range prophecy about what will happen “in the end of days” (2:28). Having stated this as its true subject, he turns to the details of his dream:
O King . . . as you looked on, there appeared a great statue . . . The head of this statue was of fine gold; its chest and arms were of silver; its belly and thighs of bronze; its legs were of iron, and its feet part iron and part clay. Then, as you were watching, a stone was hewn out, but not by hands, and it hit [the] feet of iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were crushed, and . . . a wind carried them off until no trace of them was left. (Dan 2:31–35)
Such was the king’s dream; having recounted it, Daniel then explains its significance to the king. The head of gold, he says, represents Nebuchadnezzar himself.
But another kingdom will arise after you, inferior to yours [that is, a kingdom of silver]; then yet a third kingdom, of bronze, which will rule over the whole earth. Then the fourth kingdom will be as strong as iron: just as iron crushes and shatters everything . . . so will it crush and smash all these [others]. (Dan 2:39–40)
The very fact that there will be a series of four kingdoms is compared to the proverbial series of four metals: gold, silver, bronze, and iron (see Isa 60:17). This means that each kingdom will eventually be followed by one of lesser worth. Of course, living in their own particular time, people are usually so occupied with their daily affairs that they fail to see the larger patterns. But to Daniel, the divinely aided sage, it is clear that when the time of the fourth kingdom is over, everything will come to a dramatic end—and perhaps a new beginning.
In the latter part of the book of Daniel, it is Daniel himself who receives a prophetic vision, and its message is similar. He sees four “mighty beasts” coming up out of the sea: a lion with eagles’ wings; a bear “with three fangs in its mouth amidst its teeth”; a four-winged leopard with four heads; and then “a fourth beast . . . fearsome dreadful, and very powerful, with great iron teeth,” devouring, crushing, and stamping whatever was left (Dan 7:3–7). Now even Daniel needs an interpreter—and he gets one:
One like a human being came with the clouds of heaven: He reached the Ancient of Days [i.e., God] and was presented to Him. To Him are attributed sovereignty and glory and kingship. All peoples and nations of every language must serve Him. His sovereignty is an everlasting sovereignty that will not pass away, and His kingship is one that will never be destroyed. (Dan 7:13–14)
The “one like a human being” is, once again, an angel, who goes on to reveal the vision’s significance: “These great beasts, four in number, are four kingdoms that will arise out of the earth” (Dan 7:17).41
In short, the problem of the “messiness of history” was basically solved by kicking the can down the road. However inexplicable Israel’s current situation may have appeared to the Judean remnant, its ultimate resolution had been planned out long in advance and revealed in such works as the biblical book of Daniel or extrabiblical compositions like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and 4 Ezra.
The Flying Book
One more aspect of post-exilic prophecy and similar writings needs to be mentioned: its connection to a seemingly unrelated development in Israel’s social history, the increasing importance, and prestige, of literacy in Second Temple times.42 The rise of literacy in Second Temple times was simply one manifestation of the wider march of progress paralleled in other societies,43 but in Judea it turned out to have particular significance for what prophets perceived—and wrote down. A prime example comes from the prophecies of Zechariah.
Chapters 1–8 of the book of Zechariah consist principally of a series of eight visions that the prophet had, all in a single night. Time and again, the prophet “lifts up his eyes”* and sees some symbolic object or vista; then “the angel who was speaking with me” explains to him the significance of the vision. Particularly important for our subject is Zechariah’s report of his sixth vision:
And I lifted my eyes again and saw, and behold, a flying scroll. And he [the angel] said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see a flying scroll, twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide.” And he said to me, “This is the curse that is going out across the whole land: Anyone who has stolen and gone unpunished on the one hand, or anyone who has sworn a [false] oath and gone unpunished on the other—I am sending it forth says the LORD of Hosts, and it will enter the house of the thief and the house of the person who has sworn falsely by My name, and it will lodge in their houses and destroy them, wood and stones alike. (Zech 5:1–4)
A biblical “cubit” is about a foot and a half long (that is, a little less than half a meter). The flying scroll that Zechariah saw was thus about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide (9 by 4.5 meters)—in a word: huge. But it is not the scroll’s size alone that is important, but the mission that it has been sent to accomplish. It is to act as God’s “enforcer,” punishing thieves and those who have sworn a false oath.44
It is certainly significant both these particular crimes are among those mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Modern readers should remember that there was no police force in ancient Israel: victims of a crime and their families had to gather evidence on their own and then take the accused to court. In the case of theft, it certainly must have happened often that the thief was never found: it was relatively easy to conceal a stolen item or sell it even before the crime was discovered (Exod 22:7, cf. 21:37–22:1). Likewise, someone who swore a false oath (in court) had a good chance of going unpunished. Unless the judges managed to trap him in some inconsistency, his testimony would stand, and he (or perhaps his allies) would get whatever he was scheming for. By contrast, murder, adultery, and “coveting”—also mentioned in the Ten Commandments—usually had some background that made it easier to uncover the wrongdoer: simmering hatreds, semi-secret trysts and the like might more likely lead to a conviction. Hence the need for some divine intervention specifically to make unpunished thieves and perjurers pay for their crimes.
But why a giant flying scroll? Could not God Himself, or some avenging angel, strike down the guilty?45 An important message—beyond its prophetic content—seems to be contained in this vision. It is no longer God Himself, but His written word, that enacts justice. Thus, the flying scroll contains a “curse” (though “accusation” or “indictment” might be a better translation here)46 that will physically attack the houses of the guilty and cause them to crumble “wood and stones alike.” But that scroll is also apt to remind us of where these crimes are condemned, that is, in the Ten Commandments of sacred Scripture. In other words, God’s mighty arm has now taken on the contours of a book: it is the book that indicts and the book that punishes. What greater literalization could there be of “the word of God in action”?47 For a long time, the written word had probably been accessible to only a privileged part of Israel’s population. Exactly how large this privileged part was remains a much debated topic among scholars.48 But whatever the actual extent of reading and writing, evidence shows that both enjoyed widespread prestige after the Babylonian exile. This situation might be compared to that of computers in the U.S. circa 1970: while relatively few people in the overall population had the ability to use, not to speak of program, a computer, these new machines were already well on their way to conquering the imaginations of everyone. Computers had the ability to store, and to call up, vast quantities of knowledge; they had a speed and reliability unmatched by the sharpest human mind; most important, they already had a kind of metaphoric
al quality as the way in which information would be entered and remembered for future generations. These same things could be said of literacy in ancient Israel: people increasingly “conceived authority as bound up with writtenness.”49
Prophets on the Page
Reviewing all the above, one must conclude that prophecy did not exactly die in post-exilic times. The many neutral or positive references to living prophets in late Second Temple period texts, in the New Testament and early Christian literature, as well as in the writings of Josephus and still later figures, all give the lie to the notion that prophecy itself simply ceased after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. On the other hand, something like a reconfiguration of prophecy and prophets did take place. Prophets now were sometimes addressed not by God but by the “angel who was speaking to me,” and such angels not only answered the prophet’s/sage’s questions, but also acted as interpreters of visions and messages sent by God—in short, they were intermediaries between God and humans. Moreover, prophets were now long-range predictors, revealers of the great, divine plan. And along with all this, the growing cachet of the written word was having an effect. The very existence of written collections of pre-exilic prophets’ words no doubt added to their prestige, showing them as both authentic and everlasting. The comparison of these “classic” prophets with their post-exilic homologues may have diminished somewhat the standing of the latter.
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