preoccupations and expectations 213
Eschatology and Messianism
The messages conveyed to the pseudonymous sages in these apocalypses
after they had ascended to heaven sometimes concerned the fate of indi-
viduals. In the Testament of Abraham, a remarkable text from the fifth
century ce preserved by Christians in various languages but probably
originally composed in Greek by an Egyptian Jew in the first or early
second century ce, the author imagined, with some humour, the last
days of Abraham and portrayed the patriarch learning from the arch-
angel Michael about the inevitability of death and the operation of divine
judgement. But most apocalypses known from the late Second Temple
period concern revelations of a new age or world order which will over-
whelm the present age with its glory.
The prevalence of these eschatological notions in the major Jewish
apocalypses preserved by Christians, such as I Enoch and IV Ezra, may
reflect Christian concerns for insight into the mysteries of the cosmos
and its future. But the discovery of some of these apocalyptic texts, such
as I Enoch, at Qumran, along with fragments of previously unknown
apocalyptic writings, shows that eschatological speculation was also
found among other Jews. The Qumran sectarians looked forward like
other Jews to ‘the end of days’. Even Philo speculated on the nature of
the end time, when all who return to the law of God will assemble in the
holy land:
For even though they dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, in slavery
to those who led them away captive, one signal, as it were, one day will
bring liberty to all. This conversion in a body to virtue will strike awe into
their masters, who will set them free, ashamed to rule over men better than
themselves. When they have gained this unexpected liberty, those who but
now were scattered in Greece and the outside world over islands and con-
tinents will arise and post from every side with one impulse to the once
appointed place, guided in their pilgrimage by a vision divine and super-
human unseen by others but manifest to them as they pass from exile to
their home ... When they have arrived the cities which but now lay in
ruins will be cities once more; the desolate land will be inhabited; the bar-
ren will change into fruitfulness; all the prosperity of their fathers and
ancestors will seem a tiny fragment, so lavish will be the abundant riches
in their possession, which flowing from the gracious bounties of God as
from a perennial fountain will bring to each individually and to all in