The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  To make matters worse, later prophets themselves seemed increasingly to be looking over their shoulder at their predecessors,50 borrowing specific expressions and motifs from earlier prophets. Thus, chapters 40–66 of the book of Isaiah are widely attributed today to an unknown prophet active during the Babylonian exile and the period of return that followed it. These chapters are among the most moving in the Hebrew Bible, informed with a Hebrew style unmatched elsewhere.51 Yet, consciously or otherwise, their author seems to have been deeply influenced by the language of his predecessors, particularly by the prophet Jeremiah, but also here and there by the books of the Pentateuch, Psalms, Lamentations, and Isaiah 1–39.52 Sometimes, indeed, this anonymous writer seems in virtual dialogue with his predecessors. Here Jeremiah asks a rhetorical question:

  Can a young girl forget her jewels, or a bride her adornments? Yet my people have forgotten Me for days without number. (Jer 2:32)

  This accusation seems to be consciously answered by the anonymous prophet called Second Isaiah:

  Can a woman forget her baby, and not have compassion for the child of her womb? Even if she might forget, I [God] will not forget you. (Isa 49:15)

  A similar instance: the book of Jeremiah included this prediction:

  As I live, says the LORD: If you, O King Coniah [i.e., Jehoiachin], son of Jehoiakim of Judah, were a signet ring on My right hand, I would tear you off and hand you over to the ones who are trying to kill you. (Jer 22:24–25)

  It is probably no accident that his words were echoed by the prophet Haggai:

  On that day, says the LORD of Hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel, My servant, the son of Shealtiel, says the LORD, and make you like a signet ring; for I have chosen you, says the LORD of Hosts. (Hag 2:23)

  Zechariah was clearly thinking of Second Isaiah when he uttered these words:

  The word of the LORD concerning Israel: Thus says the LORD, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth, and formed the human spirit within. “See, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of reeling for all the surrounding peoples.” (Zech 12:1–2)

  Each of the marked phrases has its equivalent in Second Isaiah. Thus, Zechariah’s “stretched out the heavens and founded the earth” calls to mind Isa 42:5, “Thus says GOD, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it . . .” Zechariah’s additional phrase describing God, “who formed the human spirit/breath (ruaḥ) within,” modifies the continuation of this verse in Second Isaiah, “who gives spirit/breath (neshamah) to the people upon it.” Next, Zechariah’s warning, “See, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of reeling for all the surrounding peoples” evokes Isa 51:17, “Wake up, wake up! Stand up, Jerusalem! You who have drunk from the LORD’s hand the cup of His wrath, you have drunk to the bottom the flagon cup of reeling.”

  There is scarcely a better example of this new sort of phrase-borrowing prophecy than the New Testament book of Revelation. Nearly every page contains allusions and echoes of earlier prophets, and sometimes Revelation’s author, John of Patmos, seems quite consciously to be evoking a particular book or even a specific chapter from an earlier prophet, as if to say, “What he said back then is happening now.” Such is certainly the case with the following:

  Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: “See, the tabernacle of God is among men, He will dwell amidst them; He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more; for the former things have past away. (Rev 21:1–4)

  Every one of the indicated phrases is an allusion to a biblical verse, most of them from chapter 65 of the book of Isaiah. Thus, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth” in Rev 21:1 evokes a famous verse in Isa 65:17, “For behold! I am creating a new heaven and a new earth.”53 The “new Jerusalem” in the next verse echoes the promise of Isa 65:18, “I will [re]create Jerusalem as a joy, and her people as a delight.” Jerusalem being “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” echoes Isa 61:10, “Let me rejoice in the LORD, let me delight in my God, for He has clothed me in garments of triumph, wrapped me in a robe of victory, like a bridegroom adorned with a turban, like a bride bedecked with her finery.” God’s instruction to the Israelites to construct the wilderness tabernacle, “Let them build Me a sanctuary so that I may well in their midst” (Exod 25:8) is reprised in the next verse of Revelation, “See, the tabernacle of God is among men, He will dwell amidst them.” “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes” in the next verse of Revelation is like Isa 25:8, “My lord GOD will wipe the tears away from every face” just as the next phrase, “Death will be no more,” echoes the continuation of this same verse in Isaiah, “He will destroy death forever” (Isa 25:8). “Mourning and weeping and pain will be no more” alludes to Isa 65:19, “Never again will the sound of weeping or crying out be heard there,” and, “for the former things have passed away” picks up Isa 65:17, “The former things will not be remembered, they will never come to mind.”54

  No one would say that these or the other echoes and allusions to earlier Scripture are the product of chance. Clearly, the words of earlier prophets are cited so as to connect them to the present day, as if the events of the day were nothing less than the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. But in citing them, latter-day prophets and visionaries may have unwittingly confirmed in some people the feeling that true, reliable prophecy had come to an end. References or allusions to the prophets of old may well have led at least some to conclude that the prophets of the past were the real thing, and their later successors a pale imitation.

  Is it not often the case that tumultuous changes in society can make the very people who initiate those changes nostalgic for some of the things that were before? It is said that the leader of the Russian Revolution, V. I. Lenin, once attended a poetry reading being given by the best known poet of the Revolution, the modernist Vladimir Mayakovski—but Lenin suddenly walked out in the middle. When the reporters covering the event ran out after him to ask why he was leaving, Lenin said simply: “I prefer Pushkin.”55 If the various bits of evidence examined above are any indication, it is not hard to imagine how some Judeans must have reacted to the newfangled prophets and seers who arose in post-exilic times, with their weird, otherworldly concerns, including the apocalyptic “time of the end,” their citations and allusions to earlier Scripture, along with their angelic intermediaries and interpreters. Certainly not all of the returnees declared prophecy to have ended, but no doubt more than one or two must have muttered the post-exilic Judean equivalent of “I prefer Pushkin.”

  Daniel the Re-interpreter

  Certainly the best known biblical example of the tendency of later prophetic figures to reinterpret existing Scripture is found in the book of Daniel. Daniel relates that on one occasion he “consulted the books concerning the number of years that, according to the word of the LORD that had come to Jeremiah the prophet, were to be the end of Jerusalem’s desolation, seventy years” (Dan 9:2). This introduction in itself is surprising. The book of Jeremiah does indeed report that the prophet had said that in seventy years, the Babylonians would be punished and Israel’s fortunes would be restored (Jer 29:10; cf. 25:12)—and this, give or take a few years, is exactly what happened. So what was Daniel consulting the books for? Seventy years are seventy years. But then the angel Gabriel appears and informs Daniel of the real meaning of Jeremiah’s promise: he didn’t mean seventy years, but seventy groups of seven years apiece, making for a total of 490 years:

  While I was still speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, setting my supplication before the LORD my God on my God’s holy mountain—while I was still in the midst of praying, the “man” Gabriel, whom I had seen in the earlier vision, was sent forth
in flight and reached me at the time of the evening offering. He spoke to me enlighteningly and said: “Daniel, I have come to you now to give you insight and knowledge. At the start of your prayer, a word went out, and I have come to tell it . . . Seventy groups of seven years have been decreed for your people and your holy city. (Dan 9:20–24)

  As was seen above, the notion of 490 years exactly was not unique in Second Temple Judaism, and the reason is not hard to find.56 Biblical law stipulates that the jubilee year is to come around once every forty-nine years (Lev 25:8);57 the number 490 is simply one jubilee multiplied by ten (which comes out to be the same as Daniel’s seventy “weeks of years” that is, the seventy units of sevens in Dan 9:24). So it came about that 490 years also appears here and there as a mega-unit of time in the Dead Sea Scrolls58 (some of them contemporaneous with the book of Daniel).

  In any event, this last-cited passage from Daniel recalls a number of themes already seen above: (1) the prophets of old (in this case, Jeremiah) had prophesied, but they themselves didn’t understand the hidden message of their prophecies; (2) this in turn reflects the fact that most prophets are actually long-range predictors, their predictions having to do with times far distant from their own; (3) an angel (here, Gabriel) is needed to explain the significance of an ancient prophet’s (here, Jeremiah’s) words. It should be mentioned, moreover, that the whole book of Daniel embodies another phenomenon already discussed, pseudepigraphy. “Dani[e]l” was the name of an ancient, perhaps legendary, sage (he is mentioned in passing in Ezek 14:14). An anonymous author in the middle of the second century BCE chose this ancient sage to be the central figure of the book of Daniel, situating him in the Babylonian exile—thereby also turning his book into yet another collection of long-range predictions, some of which had already occurred or were coming to pass in his own time.

  A Widening Gap

  What can these various characteristics of the Second Temple period prophet/visionary tell us about how God was encountered in Second Temple times?

  Perhaps the most striking element is the great distance that now seems to separate God from even those human beings who are held to be closest to Him, His prophets. It is not only that in this period He is often conceived to speak indirectly, through an angelic intermediary; equally significant is the content of the message that prophets now heard, since it, too, bespoke a great gap between humans and God. Thus, in pre-exilic times, the voice that prophets heard spoke of the immediate: “This is what God told me to tell you. It all has to do with the Assyrians. (Or the Egyptians, or the Babylonians, or Edom, Aram, Ammon, or Moab. Or with you, O king.) If they/you don’t do as God says, this or that terrible thing will occur.” Now, the message was different: “I saw this amazing sight. An angel explained to me that it all had to do with what will happen in the time of the end; reality as we know it will change forever. God is in charge, even though it is not always obvious. So keep the faith.”

  Other developments likewise bespeak the growing distance between God and humanity. In pre-exilic times, there was usually nothing obscure in what God told His prophets to say. So, for example, Isaiah had stressed just how obvious things were, at one point somewhat sarcastically suggesting to God, “Make the minds of these people impenetrable, and their ears hard of hearing, and their eyes sealed up tight; otherwise, they will see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and their minds will understand—and [they will] then change their path and be made right” (Isa 6:10). But in Second Temple times, nothing was obvious. The future was hidden even from the visionary himself: he needed to have it deciphered and explained to him. Joseph and Daniel were both dream interpreters—but consider the difference between them. Pharaoh tells Joseph his dream, and then Joseph explains what it means. King Nebuchadnezzar, by contrast, demands of his wise men first to tell him what he dreamt—and only Daniel, with divine help, can meet this challenge. The king’s demand is actually paralleled by the “handwriting on the wall” incident in Daniel chapter 5. There, a human hand suddenly appears and writes something on the wall of King Belshazzar’s palace, but none of his wise men can even read the letters—until Daniel is summoned. (He can indeed read the writing, but he still has to explain what the cryptic words mean.) In both these cases, it is not enough for Daniel to be a clever interpreter. He must first supply the text to be interpreted.* [. . .]

  In considering the foregoing, it would be easy for a modern naysayer to exclaim, “Aha! It was all a bluff. That’s why these pseudo-prophets and sages had to keep invoking some future Big Bang that will turn everything around, and why in the meantime God was always claimed to have arranged things in incomprehensibly huge patterns, while prophetic visions and ordinary reality are glimmering with secret meanings that only the initiates can understand.” But to say this is, I think, to utterly misconstrue the minds of the people involved. To begin with, they weren’t modern Westerners. God, or His angels, regularly did all sorts of things on a daily basis that would otherwise be quite inexplicable. How could one begin to understand the operation of the world without recognizing God’s role and ultimate control of everything beyond human reach, sun and moon and stars, wind and rain and dew? And then there were those wicked powers, the evil ruḥot: how could one account for the sudden death of a man or woman in the prime of life without referring to those evil spirits as the ultimate cause? Why were some people suddenly struck dumb, their faces contorted into a grotesque rictus, or made unable to walk or even roll over in bed? And who but those wicked angels could kill a newborn baby, exacting revenge for some unknown deed, or else just being evil? No, there was no denying the divine (benign or satanic) in everyday life. What the Second Temple sages sought to do was what sages always try to do, to understand, to fit one observed fact with another. In the meantime, their oft-repeated prayer was: “Do not let the evil spirits rule over me,” “Do not let Beliar/a satan take over my mind.” The semipermeable mind was alive and well.

  But even if all this is so, why were so many of these sages patent liars, writing books in which they pretended to be Moses or Enoch or Ezra? Wouldn’t any honest person start with the truth of who he or she was?

  This too misconstrues the mental world of these ancient sages. To begin with, authorship is a modern concept, as many studies (some quite unrelated to the Bible) have shown.59 To superimpose this later concept onto compositions in which the very idea of authorship is absent guarantees misunderstanding. However, what the author himself believed about his own text is a very different question, and its answer will certainly vary from text to text. To mention a specific case: I have often been asked what the author of the Book of Jubilees thought he was doing. Here he was, in the second century BCE, writing a text that claimed to have been written a thousand years earlier, and written by Moses at the dictation of the Angel of the Presence, who in turn had been commissioned by God to dictate the book to him—who did he think he was kidding? I believe that I have come to know this author rather well over the years, and so I think I am right in saying that he didn’t think that he was kidding anyone. The setting of his book may have been a fiction (although, for the reason mentioned above, he himself wouldn’t put it that way), but I think I know that he was quite convinced that every word of his book had come to him from God. And the same might be said of a great many Second Temple period prophecies.60

  PART IV

  In Search of God

  The transformations explored in the preceding section all reflect a growing sense of God’s distance from humanity, and along with this, an increasing focus on the inside, on what ultimately became the soul. The soul was not God but God’s, the special part of a human’s insides allied with and devoted to Him. These changes then took on new forms of expression and led to a new kind of divine encounter.

  14

  The Elusive Individual

  COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT; SELF-REFLECTION IN LATE BIBLICAL TEXTS; TELLTALE CHANGES IN RETOLD STORIES

  Biblical texts from post-exilic times attest to a gradual mov
e away from what had existed in an earlier day. Considered together, do these suggest a new focus on the importance of a single human life and a person’s own virtues and vices?

  I have read quite a few studies that seek to date “the emergence of the individual.” Depending on who you read, the individual first emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, or perhaps in classical Greek civilization, or, no, in post-exilic Israel, or else in imperial Rome; make that the early Church, the rise of Islamic science, in thirteenth-century western Europe, the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and so forth.1 On balance, it seems unwise to approach this matter in terms of the individual; a closer look reveals that such an absolute creature does not exist even today, and as for its “emergence,” it seems to come and go even within a single society in a single period.

  A potentially more fruitful undertaking might be to look at a number of specific changes in belief or practice as evidenced in the Bible, which together may shed some light on the overall subject of the present study.2

  Achan’s Kin

  One item related to this inquiry has repeatedly been the subject of scholarly scrutiny, ancient and modern: Who should be punished for committing an offense?3 The Bible is notoriously inconsistent on punishment. On the one hand, a number of passages seem to presume that it is perfectly natural for people to be killed for something that they personally did not do. Take, for example, the story of Achan (Joshua 7):4 After the Israelites entered the land of Canaan, they were mysteriously defeated in a confrontation with the men of Ai, whom they had expected easily to overcome. Upon investigation, the reason becomes apparent. One of the Israelites, a certain Achan, had secretly taken some of the spoils of battle for himself instead of leaving them to be destroyed as God had instructed. Confronted with his crime, Achan confessed: “It is true. I have sinned against the LORD, the God of Israel” (Josh 7:20). The punishment for his crime was not slow in coming: