God's Problem (29 page)

I should stress that this is a Christian view that was not shared by most ancient writers—especially the vast majority of ancient Jewish writers. The book of Job, for example, is quite explicit that Job was righteous before God and suffered
even though
he was innocent. The entire point of the book would have been lost if Job had deserved what he got (then, for example, his so-called friends would have been right after all). He did not deserve it, and the book tries (in at least two different ways) to explain why, then, he suffered.

So too with ancient Jewish apocalypticists. They also recognized the historical reality that Jewish people sometimes behaved righteously but suffered nonetheless. These thinkers did not take the views of Job, however, that it was all a test or that it was not a matter that can be explained to mere mortals by God Almighty. These thinkers believed that God had, in fact, explained the matter to them. And that is why scholars today call them apocalypticists. The word comes from a Greek term,
apocalypsis,
that means a “revealing,” or an “unveiling.” Jewish apocalypticists believed that God had revealed or unveiled to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of earthly realities. In particular, they believed that God had shown them why his righteous people were suffering here on earth. It was not because God was punishing them. Quite the contrary, it was because the enemies of God were punishing them. These were cosmic enemies. They were obviously not making people suffer for breaking God’s law. Just the opposite: as God’s enemies, they made people suffer for
keeping
God’s laws.

For apocalypticists, cosmic forces of evil were loose in the world, and these evil forces were aligned against the righteous people of God, bringing pain and misery down upon their heads, making them suffer because they sided with God. But this state of affairs would not last forever. Jewish apocalypticists thought, in fact, that it would not last much longer. God was soon to intervene in this world and overthrow the forces of evil; he would destroy the wicked kingdoms of this world and set up his own kingdom, the Kingdom of God, one in which God and his ways would rule supreme, where there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering. And when would this kingdom arrive? In the words of the most famous Jewish apocalypticist of all, “Truly I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God having come in power” (Mark 9:1). Or as he says later—to those who were standing right in front of him—“truly I tell you,
this generation
will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:30). These are the words of Jesus. Like other apocalypticists of his day, Jesus believed that evil forces were causing suffering for the people of God but that God was about to do something about it—soon, within his own generation.

Before we discuss the views of Jesus himself, as portrayed in our earliest Gospels, it is important to see more specifically where apocalyptic views came from, historically, and to sketch out the major tenets of Jewish apocalyptic thought as a kind of ancient “theodicy,” an explanation of how there could be suffering in the world if a good and powerful God was in charge of it.
¹

The Origins of Apocalyptic Thought

By the days of Jesus, Jewish apocalyptic thought had become a widespread and highly influential perspective among Jews, especially those living in Palestine. We can trace its roots to a period some 150–170 years before the birth of Jesus, during the events known to history as the Maccabean Revolt. This was a period of intense persecution of the Jews of Palestine by its non-Jewish ruler,
the monarch of Syria (who controlled the promised land at the time). To make sense of this persecution—and the Jewish response to it in the development of an apocalyptic worldview—we need to have a bit of background.
²

As we have seen, little Israel was constantly at the center of international struggles for domination of the eastern Mediterranean. The country was overrun, and its armies defeated, by one superpower after another: the Assyrians (722
BCE
), the Babylonians (586
BCE
), the Persians (539
BCE
), the Greeks. The Greek armies were led by Alexander the Great (356–323
BCE
), who conquered the Persian Empire and helped spread Greek culture throughout much of the region east of the Mediterranean. When Alexander died an untimely death in 323
BCE
, his large empire, which extended from Greece as far east as the Indus River, was divided among his generals. Palestine—the later name for the land area that today we think of as Israel—was ruled by the Egyptians until it was wrested from their control by the Syrians in 198
BCE.

It is hard to know how most Jews felt about foreign domination during this entire time: for more than half a millennium the “promised land” was not controlled by the chosen people but by foreigners. No doubt many Jews resented it, but we have few writings from the period and so it is hard to know. What is abundantly clear is that matters got progressively worse under Syrian domination, particularly when the ruler Antiochus IV, otherwise known as Antiochus Epiphanes, came to the throne. Antiochus was not a benevolent ruler with a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lands that he controlled. He was intent on extending his kingdom as far as possible—he added much of Egypt during his time on the throne—and on bringing a kind of cultural hegemony to the lands that he conquered. In particular, he was interested in forcing Greek culture—the form of culture thought to be the most advanced and civilized—on the peoples under his rule. This, of course, created enormous conflicts for Jews living in Palestine, who were trying to follow the Law of Moses, which stood seriously at odds with the
dictates of Greek culture. Jewish males, for example, were circumcised, something that most Greeks thought was bizarre if not downright hilarious; food laws were observed; sabbath day and certain festivals were honored. And above all, only the God of Israel was worshiped—not the foreign gods found in Greek cults scattered around the Mediterranean.

Antiochus, however, wanted to change all that, in his effort to make all the lands under his control consistent in terms of religion and culture. The account of his interactions with Israel is recorded for us in a Jewish writing known as 1 Maccabees, which is a detailed description of the violent uprising that began among the Jews in Palestine in 167
BCE
against the policies of Antiochus. The book is named after a Jewish family responsible for starting the uprising—the Maccabees, based on the nickname of one of their leading men, Judas Maccabeus (i.e., Judas the “hammerer,” presumably because he was a tough guy); the family is also known as the Hasmoneans, based on the name of a distant ancestor. For our purposes, what matters is not so much the course of events that eventually led to a Jewish victory and the establishment of an independent Jewish state, after all these centuries, in the promised land (a state that would last nearly a century, until the land was conquered by the Romans in 63
BCE
under the general Pompey); rather, what matters to us here are the events that led up to the revolt, the attempt of Antiochus to rid Israel of its religion and culture.

According to 1 Maccabees, when Antiochus IV assumed the throne in 175
BCE
, some “renegade” Jews in Israel eagerly supported the idea of converting the people of Israel to the ways of Greece. These men pushed Greek culture on other Jews; they built a Greek gymnasium (a kind of Greek cultural center) in Jerusalem, and even had operations to “remove the marks of circumcision” so that they could participate in sports without the embarrassing sign of circumcision there for all to see (1 Macc. 1:11–15). Not everyone was happy with this state of affairs. Eventually, Antiochus came up against Jerusalem and attacked it, defiling the Temple and removing
from it the furniture and utensils used by the priests in offering sacrifices to God as prescribed in the Torah (1 Macc. 1:20–23). As the author of the account tells us, Antiochus “shed much blood and spoke with great arrogance” (1 Macc. 1:24).

Two years later Antiochus attacked the city a second time, burning parts of it, tearing down houses, and taking captive women and children (1 Macc. 1:29–31). Then, in order to bring cultural unity to his entire kingdom, he sent out a message that everyone was to “give up their particular customs” (1 Macc. 1:42); in particular, the sacrificial practices of the Jewish Temple were forbidden, the Temple was defiled, Jewish parents were forbidden to circumcise their baby boys, and no one was allowed to follow the dictates of the Mosaic Law, on pain of death (1 Macc. 1:44–50). Then began a horrible persecution: pagan sacrifices were offered in the Temple, altars to pagan gods were built throughout Judah, books of the Torah were collected and burned, anyone found with a Torah scroll was executed. And worse: “According to the decree, they put to death the women who had their children circumcised, and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers’ necks” (1 Macc. 1:59–61).

How was one to make sense of this horrifying situation? Here was a case of people suffering not because God was punishing them for breaking the Law but because God’s enemies were opposed to their
keeping
the Law. The old prophetic view seemed unable to accommodate these new circumstances. A new view developed, the one that scholars today call apocalypticism. This view is first clearly expressed in a book that was produced during the time of the Maccabean uprising, the final book of the Hebrew Bible to be written, the book of Daniel.

Daniel’s Night Vision

In some ways a complicated text, the book of Daniel contains a number of stories about the prophet and wise man Daniel, said to have lived in the sixth century
BCE
during the time of the Babylo
nian exile and the Persian kingdom. Scholars are unified in thinking, however, that the book was not actually produced then. For one thing, a good portion of the book is written in Aramaic and in a late form of Hebrew—suggesting a much later date. More important, the book’s symbolism is directed, in no small part, against Antiochus Epiphanes and his repressive measures against the Jews. And so the book is normally dated to the mid-second century
BCE.
³

The first part of the book, chapters 1–6, tells stories about Daniel, a Jewish exile in Babylon, and his three Jewish friends, all of whom are supernaturally protected from harm during their various escapades in a foreign land. The second part of the book records visions that Daniel has, and it is this part of the book that especially interests those concerned with the rise of apocalyptic thought in ancient Israel.

Possibly of greatest significance is the vision that Daniel reports in chapter 7. In his vision Daniel sees the four heavenly winds “stirring up the great sea” (Dan. 7:2), and then he sees four terrible beasts arising out of the sea, one after the other. “The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings” (Dan. 7:4); it eventually becomes like a human. The second “looked like a bear” with three tusks coming out of its mouth. This one is told to “arise, devour many bodies” (Dan. 7:5). The third beast appears like a leopard with the wings of a bird and four heads. We are told that “dominion was given to it” (Dan. 7:6). And then Daniel sees the fourth beast, which he describes as “terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong” (as if the others weren’t). This beast “had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet” (Dan. 7:7). It had ten horns, and then another horn appeared, uprooting three of the others; this horn had eyes and “a mouth speaking arrogantly” (Dan. 7:8).

Next the author sees a heavenly scene in which the Ancient of Days (i.e., God) ascends to his spectacular and awe-inspiring throne, with multitudes worshiping him. The divine “court sat in judgment and the books were opened” (Dan. 7:10). The final beast with the arrogant talking horn is put to death and burned with fire. The
other beasts have their dominions taken away. And then Daniel saw “one like a human being [literally: one like a son of man] coming with the clouds of heaven.” This one appears before the Ancient of Days and is given eternal dominion over the earth:

And that’s the end of the vision. As you might imagine, Daniel wakes up terrified, wondering what it all means. He approaches an angelic being, who happens to be there and who interprets the dream for him. The interpretation is short and sweet: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever” (7:17–19). In particular, though, the prophet wants to know about the fourth beast. The angelic interpreter tells him that it represents a fourth kingdom that “shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces.” This beast has ten horns to represent the ten kings that will govern it, until the little horn appears, which “shall speak words against the Most High, shall wear out the holy ones of the Most High, and shall attempt to change the sacred seasons and the law” (7:25). In other words, this little horn will be a foreign ruler who tries to overthrow the worship of God, change the laws to be followed by the people of God, and persecute them to the death. If this sounds a lot like Antiochus Epiphanes, well, it is.