214 A History of Judaism
common a deep stream of wealth leaving no room for envy. Everything
will suddenly be reversed ...Other expectations, found scattered through texts from the Qumran
War Scroll to the apocalypses and early rabbinic literature, speculate on
the confusion before the last days, the great battles against hostile pow-
ers, and the eventual renewal of Jerusalem, the gathering of the dispersed
and a kingdom of glory in the holy land: ‘You, O Lord, you chose David
king over Israel, and you swore to him concerning his offspring forever,
that his palace would never fail before you ... And he shall gather a
holy people whom he shall lead in righteousness, and he shall judge the
tribes of the people that has been sanctified by the Lord, his God.’^18
There are no good reasons to believe that such speculation about the
eventual fate of Israel, however common it may have been, played a
dominant role in the religious life of many Jews in the late Second
Temple period. Philo at least, despite his interest in the end time, was
content to wait for the divine timetable. Early Christians (who preserved
many of these texts) were unusual in defining their world outlook through
the prism of the last days which they believed had already arrived. On the
other hand, the behaviour of some other Jewish groups in first- century
Judaea suggests similar urgent expectations. A certain Theudas in the
mid- 40s ce gathered a crowd of followers and persuaded them to take
up their possessions and to follow him down to the Jordan, claiming
‘that he was a prophet and that at his command the river would be
parted and would provide them with an easy passage’. The effort was
thwarted by Roman cavalry and the capture and execution of Theudas,
but the enthusiasm generated implies expectations of a miraculous
change, even if, as the Pharisee Gamaliel is alleged to have said to the
Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the uprising came to nothing because the under-
taking was of human origin and not ‘of God’. A decade later, a Jew from
Egypt, similarly declaring himself a prophet, gathered a large number of
supporters in the desert, intending to lead them to the Mount of Olives,
asserting ‘that he wished to demonstrate from there that on his com-
mand the wall of Jerusalem would fall down, through which he promised
them an entrance into the city’. Once again the Roman authorities inter-
vened before the claim was put to the test.^19
Neither Theudas nor the Egyptian was said by Josephus to have pre-
sented himself as a messiah, and it is clear that messianism in the narrow
sense, involving identification of an individual as a messiah, was much
less common than a general belief in eschatological redemption. This is