RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 81the rule of Evil accords with an inviolable but inscrutable divine plan in books
like Jubilees, whose interest in chronology not only is scholastic but also re-
flects an attempt to discern a symmetry in God’s plan, and so predict the time
of its de ́nouement.^77 It is also important in the ideology of the Dead Sea sect.
That is, for the sectarians and others, the harmonization of the systems, me-
chanical as it may seem to us, was not simply a matter of producing an orderly
piece of metaphysical speculation. They meant it with utter seriousness.
The repeated juxtaposition of the covenant and the myth in ancient Jewish
writing indicates that though the systems are logically incongruous, they did
not for the most part generate social division. That is, the literary evidence
provides no grounds for speaking of an “apocalyptic Judaism,” or even “apoca-
lyptic conventicles,” constructs that were once popular among scholars.^78
Apocalyptic Judaism’s opposite number, “covenantal Judaism,” may have ex-
isted but is marginal in the literature. Only a few books written between 200
B.C.E. and 100C.E., most notably Ben Sira, 1 Maccabees, and the works of
Josephus (and the last not very rigorously), lack clear traces of the influence
of the myth, either because their authors rejected it or because they had no
taste for its esotericism or considered it unsuitable for their audience. The
Sadducees are said to have denied resurrection and angels (Acts 23:8): if this
report is accurate, it may imply rejection of the myth as a whole. However, if
Jean Le Moyne’s interpretation of this passage is correct and the Sadducees
rejected not angels but only their role in resurrection, then even the Saddu-
cees may have acknowledged some version of the myth.^79
Thus, by the first century, if not earlier, the myth was a more or less fully
naturalized part of the ideology of Judaism, although there remained, at least
(^77) This concern is present in much apocalyptic literature: see J. Licht, “The Attitude to Past
Events in the Bible and in Apocalyptic Literature,”Tarbiz60 (1990): 1–18, especially 5ff.
(^78) Davies, “Social World,” pp. 252–53; Collins, “Genre, Ideology,” pp. 23–24. Michael Stone
has argued that 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Ascension of Isaiah, all texts of the later first century
C.E., showthat apocalyptic visionaries,though they maysometimes have enjoyedwide popularity,
often had small circles of followers to whom alone they revealed their esoteric knowledge. This is
not quite the same thing in social terms as the conventicle, implying a small but institutionalized
organization;see “OnReadingan Apocalypse,”inMysteries and Revelations,76–7. G.Boccaccini
(Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism
[Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998]) has no wrevived the idea of an “Enochic Judaism,” by
which he apparently means a social organization; but Boccaccini has generally adopted bad habit
shared by Neusner and some Ne wTestament scholars of assuming that books correspond to
groups, or “Judaisms”: see his methodological reflections on pp. 8–11.
(^79) See J. Le Moyne,Les Sadduce ́ens(Paris: Gabalda, 1972), pp. 131–35; as Le Moyne observes,
angels are mentioned in the Pentateuch, so it would have been difficult for the Sadducees to
deny their existence. Some scholars think that Judaism in the first century basically was covenan-
tal. Sanders,Judaism: Practice and Belief, p. 8, dismisses apocalypticism in a paragraph and, as
far as I can tell, fails even to mention its more embarrassing, because less systematic, cousins
magic and demonology.