preoccupations and expectations 209
allowed for human free will. As Josephus observed, lamenting the fail-
ure of the Jews to recognize the divine signs warning of the disastrous
destruction of the Temple if they did not change their ways, ‘reflecting
on these things one will find that God has a care for men, and by all
kinds of premonitory signs shows His people the way of salvation,
while they owe their destruction to folly and calamities of their own
choosing.’ It is remarkable however that even this balance, which might
seem implicit in the whole biblical narrative of God’s relation to Israel,
was disputed in Josephus’ day by the Sadducees, as we have seen in
Chapter 6. According to the Mishnah, R. Akiva was to say in the second
century ce that ‘all is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.’^13
The problem of linking the human to the divine sphere was in part
tackled by speculation on the role of angels, which had been ill defined in
the Bible but became increasingly precise in the last centuries of the
Second Temple, expanding into speculation on the nature of a whole
divine world, replete with angels of different orders. We have seen in
Chapter 6 that such angels are envisaged in the Songs of the Sabbath Sac-
rifice found among the Dead Sea scrolls as intensively engaged in worship:
‘The [cheru]bim prostrate themselves before him and bless. As they rise, a
whispered divine voice [is heard], and there is a roar of praise. When they
drop their wings, there is a [whispere]d divine voice. The cherubim bless
the image of the throne- chariot above the firmament, [and] they praise
[the majes]ty of the luminous firmament beneath His seat of glory.’^14
Angels are active in the eschatological battle alongside the Sons of
Light against the Sons of Darkness in the War Scroll. They are envisaged
as organized in hierarchies, led by the archangels Michael, Gabriel,
Raphael and Uriel, and functioning as priests in the heavenly temple:
‘He gave us the sabbath day as a great sign so that we should perform
work for six days and that we should keep sabbath from all work on the
seventh day. He told us – all the angels of the presence and all the angels
of holiness (these two great kinds) – to keep sabbath with him in heaven
and on earth.’ But angels also played an important role in bringing
before the Lord the prayers of the righteous, and in intervening on their
behalf in the world. Hence the extraordinary story found in III Mac-
cabees, with a fictional setting in the third century bce, of the foiling of
an attempt by the king Ptolemy Philopater to have Jews trampled to
death in the hippodrome by elephants:
Just as Eleazar was ending his prayer, the king arrived at the hippodrome
with the animals and all the arrogance of his forces. And when the Jews