212 A History of Judaism
are numerous traditions from the end of the Second Temple that proph-
ecy had ceased some centuries earlier. Such traditions reflect an apparent
failure of religious nerve, which may also account for the attribution
of many of the apocalyptic texts that survive from this period to
ancient sages of the biblical past, such as Enoch, Abraham, Daniel and
Ezra. Josephus suggested obscurely that the ‘exact succession of the
prophets’ had been broken in the time of Artaxerxes five centuries
before he wrote. A similar tradition was recorded by the early rabbis
that ‘when the last of the biblical prophets died, the holy spirit ceased in
Israel’; from then onwards, ‘they were informed by means of a heavenly
voice.’
The tradition that true prophecy had come to an end some time in
the past was somewhat at odds with the activities, described by Jos-
ephus himself, of numerous prophets. Of these, the most evidently
accurate was Jesus son of Ananias (see Chapter 5), ‘a rude peasant’, who
stood in the Temple from the festival of Tabernacles in 62 ce to the
destruction in 70 ce predicting its downfall: ‘A voice from the east, a
voice from the west, a voice from the four winds; a voice against Jeru-
salem and the sanctuary, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride,
a voice against all the people’. It seems however to be significant that,
even though Josephus could proudly boast about his own ability to
interpret dreams and his skill ‘in divining the meaning of ambiguous
utterances of the Deity’ – a skill, attributed to his priestly descent, which
meant that he was ‘not ignorant of the prophecy of the sacred books’ –
he never calls himself a prophet any more than he calls Jesus son of
Ananias a prophet. On the contrary, he labelled numerous religious
leaders ‘ pseudo- prophets’ who led the people astray. Evidently contem-
poraries who claimed divine inspiration might expect scorn. ‘No prophet
is accepted in the prophet’s home town,’ as Jesus is said to have noted
ruefully, and pseudonymity or anonymity were safer. Most of the sect-
arian Dead Sea scrolls are in fact anonymous, and the practice of
pseudepigraphy for revelation was aided by its common use in other
genres. Wisdom was commonly assigned to Solomon, psalms to David
and legal interpretations to Moses, simply because such developments
of thought were regarded essentially as elaborations of the paradigms
created by the biblical founder figures.^17