Imagining the End: Visions of

maskilim

, some of

whom lose their lives in the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes. In

ancient Israel, premature death was an unqualified disaster. The martyrs of

the Maccabean era, however, are assured that they will be exalted to the stars,

and become companions to the angels. They can afford to lose their lives in

this world, because they have a greater destiny beyond death.

The transformation of  values entailed by the hope of  an angelic immortality

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75

Eschatological Dynamics in Early Judaism

is also evident in contexts where martyrdom is not an issue. In the 

Book of

the Watchers

, the sin of  the fallen angels is that they have abandoned the

angelic life:

Why have you left the high, holy and eternal heaven, and lain with the women

and become unclean with the daughters of  men, and taken wives for yourselves,

and done as the sons of  the earth and begotten giant sons? You were spiritual,

holy, living an eternal life, but you became unclean upon the women, and begat

children through the blood of  flesh, and lusted after the blood of  men, and

produced flesh and blood as they do who die and are destroyed … You formerly

were spiritual, living an eternal, immortal life for all the generations of  the

world. For this reason I did not arrange wives for you because the dwelling of

the spiritual ones is in heaven. (



 Enoch 



)

Enoch’s career is the exact opposite of  that of  the Watchers. He is a

human being, taken up to heaven and, at least in later apocalypses, transformed

into an angel.

29

 He is paradigmatic of  the righteous. In the Gospels we are

told that in the next life people will neither marry nor be given in marriage,

but will be like the angels in heaven. It is not difficult to see how such a

utopian ideal could lead to an ascetic life-style, perhaps even to the adoption

of  celibacy. We shall return to this issue below apropos of  the Qumran

community.

In light of  the discussion so far, we can begin to appreciate how the

eschatological dynamics of  this literature worked. Perhaps the clearest case is

provided by Daniel or by the 

Testament of Moses

, where, in a time of  per-

secution, a man called Taxo and his sons purify themselves and die, so that

the kingdom of  God may appear and Israel be exalted to the stars.

30

 In the

face of  a crisis where there is imminent danger of  death, the apocalyptic

revelation reassures the reader that the threat is not ultimate, or rather that

the ultimate threat is not death but eternal damnation in the hereafter. For

one who believes this, there is no reason to break the law or to compromise

one’s religious commitment in any way. Life is lived with an eye to the Final

Judgment, and the criteria for that judgment are of  paramount importance.

In a situation of  persecution, time and duration are also important issues.

Daniel is the only Jewish apocalypse that tries to calculate the time of  the

‘end’, or divine deliverance. We can readily understand why. The more

extreme the crisis, the more urgent the need to know when it will end.

Not all apocalypses were written in situations of  persecution. Some twenty

years ago, I edited an analysis of  ancient apocalypses, published in 

Semeia

 



,

that proposed a definition and described what we called ‘the morphology of

a genre’.

31

 The aspect of  that analysis that drew most criticism at the time

was that we did not include a statement of  function in the definition. The

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76

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

point, of  course, was not that apocalypses did not have a function, or that,

as one critic put it, the genre did not do anything;

32

 rather, the point was

whether all apocalypses necessarily function in the same way. Our refusal to

include a statement of  function in the definition was in large part a reaction

against the common view of  apocalypses as crisis literature in a narrow sense,

written in the heat of  persecution like Daniel, and supposedly but question-

ably, Revelation. Several apocalypses were written in situations of  lesser

urgency, and in calmer tones. In light of  the subsequent discussion, however,

I would agree that one may generalize that apocalypses were written to console

and exhort and, in the case of  the Jewish apocalypses from antiquity, addressed

crises of  some sort.

33

 These generalizations, however, are in need of  some

qualification.

First, crisis, like beauty, is in the eye of  the beholder. The crisis in Daniel

is obvious enough, and this is also true of  the apocalypses written after the

destruction of  the temple in 



 



. In the