preoccupations and expectations 217
‘Messiah of Aaron’, sometimes to the ‘king Messiah’, and sometimes to
both together, as in the injunction to the members of the community in
the Community Rule: ‘They shall depart from none of the counsels of
the Law to walk in all the stubbornness of their hearts, but shall be
ruled by the primitive precepts in which the men of the Community
were first instructed until there shall come the Prophet and the Messiahs
of Aaron and Israel.’
We have seen (Chapter 5) that Simon son of Gioras, commander- in-
chief of the Jewish rebels in the last days of the war against Rome, may
have believed himself a messiah, but no one really knew what the Mes-
siah would be like. When in the mid- first century ce Paul preached to
his non- Jewish Christian congregation as an ‘apostle of Christ Jesus’,
the word ‘Christ’ acted as a proper name, with no descriptive content. It
is hard to know why any of his readers would have interpreted the
appellation ‘Anointed’ as implying anything whatever about the last
days of the world. Millenarianism was in the air, but there is no reason
to think it was gathering force at the end of the Second Temple period.^23
Life after Death and Martyrdom
Eschatological speculation often included a general resurrection and
judgement of the dead. According to I Enoch, departed souls are held in
pens, ‘three dark and one light’ (with the light reserved for the good),
‘until the great day of judgement’. This notion of souls as sleeping until
the end of history was widespread. But many Jews also now began to
hope for individual resurrection after death before the last days,
although they differed in their expectations of the nature of this life. The
heroic mother of seven brothers put to death in the Maccabean persecu-
tion is portrayed by the author of II Maccabees as encouraging them
with an expectation of a return to physical life through God’s grace:
‘Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of
humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give
life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for
the sake of his laws.’ The story ends with the death of the mother too.
The author of Jubilees, also probably writing in the second century bce,
said of the righteous that ‘their bodies will rest in the earth and their
spirits will have much joy.’ The author of Daniel imagined that the wise
shall shine ‘like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to
righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever’. Both the author of