Professor Christine Hayes: All right,
let's go ahead and get started; there's a lot to cover.
But I want to try to unite a lot of these disparate parts of
the Bible, the many small books clustered here at the end that
we'll be considering.
I'm going to try to unite them by elaborating certain themes as
we move through them.
But as you can see, from this giant chart,
there's quite a bit.
First, let's begin with the Book of Ruth.
The Book of Ruth is set in the days of the Judges;
that's the opening line of the book.
It tells you that this happened in the days of Judges,
but it was certainly written later,
and whether it was post-exilic or pre-exilic is not certain,
so we're going to be asking the questions of a canonical critic.
Whatever its origin, how did this book function for
Second Temple Jews?
As the story of a foreign woman, whose foreign status is
continually emphasized throughout the book,
(Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the Moabitess)-- as a
foreign woman who acts nobly and enters the community of Israel
by choice, this story would have stood in
opposition to the negative view of foreigners,
the ban on intermarriage and the purely genealogical
definition of Israelite identity that was promulgated by Ezra and
Nehemiah in the post-exilic period.
So in the story you have a famine in Judah and that causes
a Bethlehemite man, Elimelech and his wife Naomi,
and their two children to leave Judah.
They're going to reside in the country of Moab,
where the Moabites live, and their two sons marry
Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth.
You have to consider the effect that these opening verses would
have had on an ancient Israelite listener or reader.
Moab was a hostile neighbor on Israel's southeastern border.
And the Moabites were hated for their ill-treatment of the
Israelites when they were traveling to the Promised Land.
Their lack of hospitality had already led to a prohibition of
intermarriage in the Torah itself.
So the Moabites and Ammonites are two foreign groups that are
explicitly prohibited from entering the congregation in
Deuteronomy 23. The Israelites' low opinion of
the Moabites is also expressed in Genesis in the very degrading
story of Moab's descent from the incestuous relationship between
Lot and one of his daughters, after the fall of Sodom.
And yet here we read, in the opening lines of this
story a man from Bethlehem, who travels to Moab,
and his two sons marry Moabite women!
Then in short order Elimelech and his two sons (who are
appropriately named Sickness and Death, by the way,
in Hebrew) they die.
And the Israelite widow, Naomi, is left now with no
blood relation, no blood male relation,
only her two Moabite daughters-in-law.
And Naomi weepily tells the girls that they should return to
their father's home.
She's poor, she'll never be able to support them as a poor
widow, she has no further sons to give to them,
and clearly they have no legal or moral obligation or tie to
Naomi. And we'll pick up the story
then in chapter 1:11: But Naomi replied,
"Turn back, my daughters!
Why should you go with me?
Have I any more sons in my body who might be husbands for you?
Turn back, my daughters, for I am too old to be married.
Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I married
tonight and I also bore sons, should you wait for them to
grow up? Should you on their account
debar yourselves from marriage?
Oh no, my daughters!
My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord
has struck out against me."
They broke into weeping again, and Orpah kissed her
mother-in-law farewell.
But Ruth clung to her.
So she said, "See, your sister-in-law has
returned to her people and her gods.
Go follow your sister-in-law."
But Ruth replied, "Do not urge me to leave you,
to turn back and not follow you.
For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge,
I will lodge; your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die, and there I will be
buried. Thus and more may the Lord do
to me if even death parts me from you."
When [Naomi] saw how determined she was to
go with her, she ceased to argue with her;
and the two went on until they reached Bethlehem.
All of the names in this story are wonderfully symbolic.
Sickness and Death – it's like they walk on the stage with
a big sign saying "I'm in a bit part and I'm ready to die."
Orpah's name means the back of the neck because she turns her
back on her mother-in-law as well.
It's a wonderful story with lots of name symbolisms.
But by the force of sheer conviction, Ruth joins herself
to the people of her mother-in-law.
Back in Judah, Ruth supports her mother-in-law
and herself by gleaning the fallen sheaves behind the
reapers in the field.
Because according to the Pentateuch, the sheaves that
fall behind the reapers must be left for the poor to collect;
you don't go back and collect them.
So Ruth gleans, and she gleans in the field of
a kinsman named Boaz, and he's described as a man of
substance and she's very diligent and she soon comes to
his attention. He's very kind to her,
he looks out for her safety among the rough field workers.
He provides water for her.
He's heard of what Ruth has done for Naomi;
how she left her home and left her family to come to a people
that she really didn't know, and he blesses her.
He says, "May the Lord reward your deeds.
May you have a full recompense from the Lord,
the God of Israel, under whose wings you have
sought refuge!" chapter 2:12.
He increases his generosity; he shares his meal with Ruth
and gives her from the heaps of grain in addition to the
gleanings that she's collecting.
So Naomi is very delighted with Ruth's gleanings,
they more than suffice for their needs.
But she's even more pleased to learn that Ruth seems to have
found favor in the eyes of Boaz.
He's been very kind and generous, and she points out:
you know he is among our redeeming kinsmen.
Now the term here, the Hebrew term is goel.
Goel means redeemer.
In fact, in a lot of the Christian language later,
this is the word they're using when they talk about "my
redeemer liveth."
It's simply this word goel, and the goel
is a person who as the nearest relative or as a close relative,
has certain legal obligations to another person.
Those obligations--the primary obligations are three:
(1)To redeem the person or their property if they've been
sold to a stranger due to poverty.
So to redeem them from debt servitude essentially.
So your goel should do that for you.
(2)To marry a childless widow.
So if a man dies and his wife is childless the goel is
supposed to marry her, provide seed,
and the firstborn son will be named after the name who is
dead. So he's supposed to marry a
childless widow and produce offspring for the deceased;
usually, that falls first to the brother;
And then (3) in the case of the blood redeemer,
also the redeemer is supposed to avenge the blood of a
kinsman. So if you are killed your
redeemer is supposed to seek vengeance for you.
Boaz is a somewhat distant relative, but Naomi believes
he's the answer to their dual problem of poverty on the one
hand, and Ruth's widowhood on the
other hand. So in chapter 3 she urges Ruth
to make a visit to Boaz.
He's winnowing barley on the threshing floor and Ruth is
supposed to bathe herself, anoint herself,
dress up and go out at night to the threshing floor.
You should know that biblically, threshing floors
tend to be places of revelry at the end of the harvest time and
they are often frequented by prostitutes.
But Naomi seems to be planning Ruth's seduction of Boaz.
She instructs Ruth not to reveal herself until Boaz has
finished eating and drinking, and when he lies down,
Ruth is to approach him and uncover his feet--this is
possibly a sexual euphemism--and lie down,
and he will tell her what she is to do.
So Ruth follows these instructions exactly.
In 3:7-11: Boaz ate and drank,
and in a cheerful mood went to lie down beside the grainpile.
Then she went over stealthily and uncovered his feet and lay
down. In the middle of the night,
the man gave a start and pulled back--there was a woman lying at
his feet! "Who are you?" he asked.
And she replied, "I am your handmaid Ruth.
Spread your robe over you handmaid, for you are a
redeeming kinsman."
[a goel] He exclaimed,
"Be blessed of the Lord, daughter!
Your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first,
in that you have not turned to younger men, whether poor or
rich. And now, daughter, have no fear.
I will do in your behalf whatever you ask,
for all the elders of my town know what a fine woman you
are." So Ruth's request is that Boaz
act as her redeemer and spread his robe over her,
which is a formal act of protection and espousal.
And Boaz assures her that he will redeem her.
He then goes on to point out, however, that there is another
kinsman who is actually a closer relation,
and therefore has the first right of refusal,
and Boaz will settle the matter legally in the morning.
And we're left wondering what transpired in the night.
In chapter 4 we read the legal proceeding by which the other
kinsman is freed of his obligation and his claim to Ruth
and this then clears the way, enables Boaz to marry her.
But the punchline to the whole story is yet to come and that
occurs in chapter 4, verses 13-17,
So Boaz married Ruth; she became his wife,
and he cohabited with her.
The Lord let her conceive, and she bore a son.
And the women said to Naomi, "Blessed by the Lord,
who has not withheld a redeemer from you today!
May his name be perpetuated in Israel!
He will renew your life and sustain your old age;
for he is born of your daughter-in-law,
who loves you and is better to you than seven sons."
Naomi took the child and held it to her bosom.
She became its foster mother, and the women neighbors gave
him a name saying, "A son is born to Naomi!"
They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse,
father of David. So David, God's anointed king
over Israel; David, with whom God covenanted
that his house should reign forever;
David, from whose line would come the messianic king to rule
in the final age--This David is said to be the direct
descendant, the great grandson of a foreign
woman from a country of idol worshippers, and a Moabitess no
less. So it seems that this very
short and very moving story represents a strand of thought
that stood in opposition to the line of thinking found,
for example, in Ezra's call for a ban on
intermarriage as the only means of insuring faithfulness to
Israel's God. Not only is Ruth,
the Moabitess, not guilty of abominable
practices, she is the ancestress of Yahweh's chosen monarch.
And she's praised in the story by all who know her as a paragon
of hesed, this quality of steadfast love
and covenantal loyalty that binds the members of the
covenant community to one another and to God.
Ruth, the Moabitess, stood by an elderly widow to
whom she had no real legal obligation and she was accepted
into the covenant community.
The acceptance of foreigners is well documented in post-exilic
Judaism, despite Ezra's polemical efforts to exclude
foreigners from the community.
It's important to remember that Ezra's reforms never became
normative for the entire community.
Post-exilic, and later rabbinic Judaism,
never adopted the purely genealogical definition of
Jewish identity. They allowed for the phenomenon
of conversion and marriage into the covenant by persons of
foreign birth who accepted the God of Israel;
a possibility that Ezra completely forecloses.
Ezra's extreme views were popular among sectarian groups,
so Ezra and exclusivism is championed, for example,
in writings that are found at Qumram.
It exerted some influence on early Christian bans on
marriage, absolute bans on marriage between believers and
unbelievers, but it's the Book of Ruth that
features prominently in the Jewish conversion ceremony to
this day. We have a different kind of
acceptance of foreigners that's voiced by prophets of the
restoration period.
So these are prophets, fifth century--late sixth and
fifth century. We're going to look now briefly
at some of the last prophetic books, and these are writings
that date to the time of the first generations of returned
exiles and on. Earlier prophets in the
pre-exilic period--the classical prophets we've already looked
at--they had spoken of a remnant that would be restored and would
be restored gloriously to its land,
but the returned exiles faced a life of great hardship.
The reality of poverty and the difficulties in rebuilding the
temple, and the hostility of the Judeans who had remained behind,
as well as the hostility of the surrounding peoples,
the absence of any real political independence under a
Davidic King--all of these things fell far short of the
early prophets' glorious descriptions of this restored
remnant. So new prophets in the period
of the Restoration have to address the community's
disappointment. The short Book of Haggai
contains the words of the Prophet Haggai,
spoken primarily to Zerubabbel, (Zerubabbel is the governor of
Judea). Haggai prophesies around 520,
and he declares that all of the difficulties the community was
facing, the agricultural setbacks and
the famines, these were all signs of God's displeasure that
the temple hadn't been completed.
Zerubabbel is convinced by this, the people return to their
task enthusiastically, and as we know,
the temple is rebuilt as Haggai promised.
He says it's a humble structure but soon it's going to be filled
with treasures flowing in from all nations.
And the promises of the Restoration that were made by
the prophets of old are just around the corner.
So Haggai longed for a rebuilt temple.
But not only that, also for the re-establishment
of Judah's independence under a Davidic King.
And he held out hope for Zerubabbel, the governor,
who was, after all, a descendant of David,
through the last king that went into exile.
He hoped that he would serve as God's messiah,
or appointed king.
That hope is even stronger in the work of Haggai's
contemporary, the prophet,
Zechariah. Zechariah is 14 chapters long,
and the first eight chapters contain the prophecies of the
historical Zechariah around 520 or so.
The last chapters--chapters 9 through 14, this is known as
Second Zechariah--these chapters contain obscure writings from a
later hand and they are of a very different type or genre.
They are written in the apocalyptic vein,
so we won't talk about those now, we'll consider those
momentarily. I'm going to be talking about
apocalyptic for the last half of the lecture.
So for right now I'm interested, however,
in the first eight chapters which represent the oracles of
the historical prophet Zechariah around 520.
He preached and prophesied for about two years.
He urges in these chapters the rebuilding of the temple.
The first six chapters contain a series of elaborate and
symbolic visions, eight different visions that
are revealed by an angel and/or a divine messenger.
That's a mode of revelation that's going to be standard in
apocalyptic literature, as we'll soon see.
Earlier prophets received a word or a vision but as we move
towards apocalyptic literature and later literature,
prophets often receive messages from God through an angel or a
messenger. These visions focus hope on
Zerubabbel, the governor, and on the priest Joshua,
the high priest Joshua.
And the idea is that they'll rule in a kind of diarchy as
monarch and priest.
At the same time, however, it seems that the
Persians got rid of Zerubabbel.
He was ousted perhaps because messianic hope was starting to
gather around Zerubabbel.
So Zechariah's prophesies seem to be adjusted to refer solely
to Joshua. Although they originally
referred to Zerubabbel, and although chapter 6 in
particular seems to refer originally to Zerubabbel,
it is altered so that it now depicts Joshua as a shoot or a
branch from Jesse's stock--Jesse's stock,
meaning a Davidide.
(David's father was Jesse; so to say a root from Jesse's
stock is to say a Davidide.) It says that Joshua will rebuild
the sanctuary; he will wear the royal
insignia, although he is the priest.
The elevation, however, of the high priest is
a feature of the post-exilic period.
It's a feature of Judah in the post-exilic period,
the high priest coming to take some of the trappings of royal
office. Chapters 7 and 8,
declare God's promise to turn and to do good things in
Jerusalem and the House of Judah,
so long as the people will turn from their unjust and evil ways.
And Zechariah points forward to the glorious day when all the
nations of the world will eagerly come to seek the Lord in
Jerusalem and to entreat his favor.
So we read in Zechariah 8:23, "Thus said the Lord of Hosts:
In those days, ten men from nations of every
tongue will take hold--they will take hold of every Jew by a
corner of his cloak and say, 'Let us go with you,
for we have heard that God is with you,'" and thus this
Restoration period, you can see,
features prophets who envision other nations joining Israel in
the worship of Yahweh.
They will come to rally around and join Israel in the worship
of God in Jerusalem.
The last wave of prophetic writings that we have addresses
the disappointment and the disillusionment of late sixth-
and fifth-century Judeans.
What was the message of these writings?
The basic message was that the earlier prophets,
their promises of future glory for the restored remnant--these
were all true. The future just isn't now.
It's only going to happen in the eschaton,
the final day. Only then will the glory of
Jerusalem and a messianic ruler be restored, and the hope that
has to sustain the community through the bleak present is
therefore an eschatological hope,
a hope that focuses on an ideal account of the end,
(eschatology = an account of the end).
Because in the end of days everything will be set right.
So as we move later into the period, we find increasingly the
hope for the community is thrust off into the future,
in an eschatology.
Parts of Third Isaiah depict the bitter reality of life in
post-exilic Judah and advance in eschatology.
You remember the Book of Isaiah, which is 66 chapters,
we divided into three parts: 1 through 39,
which is the historical Isaiah; then we have Second Isaiah;
and then ThirdIsaiah, we're dealing with now--that's
chapters 56 to 66.
The anonymous prophetic author of these chapters denounces the
failings of the exiles, but does hold out an
eschatology; a doctrine of final things that
depicts what's going to happen in the end of days.
This kind of eschatology differs from the depiction of
Zion's future glory that we had in the early classical prophets.
The earlier prophetic pronouncements generally
referred to a re-establishment of Judah's fortunes in
historical time, but eschatological works like
Third Isaiah look beyond historical time.
They're looking to a time of a new heaven and a new earth,
when Judah's sins will be forgotten.
The land will become an earthly paradise transformed,
and blessed with peace and prosperity and length of days.
This is from Isaiah 65:17-25, For behold!
I am creating A new heaven and a new earth;
The former things shall not be remembered,
They shall never come to mind.
Be glad, then, and rejoice forever
In what I am creating.
For I shall create Jerusalem as a joy,
And her people as a delight; ...
Never again shall be heard there The sounds of weeping and
wailing. No more shall there be an
infant or graybeard Who does not live out his days.
He who dies at a hundred years Shall be reckoned a youth,
And he who fails to reach a hundred
Shall be reckoned accursed.
…For the days of My people shall be
As long as the days of the tree, My chosen ones shall outlive
The work of their hands.
They shall not toil to no purpose;
They shall not bear children for terror,
But they shall be a people blessed by the Lord,
And their offspring shall remain with them.
Before they pray, I will answer; While they are still speaking,
I will respond. The wolf and the lamb shall
graze together, And the lion shall eat straw
like the ox, And the serpent's food shall be
earth.In all My sacred mount Nothing evil or vile shall be
done--said the Lord. See this interesting notion of
a completely new, transformed heaven and earth.
The lion is vegetarian again, the serpent no longer
is--there's not this animosity between the serpent and humans
as was decreed at the end of Genesis with the curse on the
serpent. They're going to just be eating
earth and there will be no danger.
Third Isaiah also sounds this theme of openness,
reassuring foreigners and eunuchs who have joined
themselves to Yahweh that they'll be welcome in the Holy
Temple to serve God and to offer sacrifices.
Now, this is significant.
Again, remember that Deuteronomy 23 right in the
heart of the Pentateuch, bans eunuchs specifically,
and certain foreigners--Moabites,
Ammonites--from entering the congregation.
Remember also that Ezekiel explicitly excluded foreigners
from the restored temple in his visions at the end of the book.
This is also clearly the policy of Ezra and Nehemiah.
They had an Ammonite who had his lodgings or office or room
in the temple--they had him thrown out of that area in the
temple. Third Isaiah seems to oppose
such restrictions.
Isaiah 56:3-7: Let not the foreigner say,
Who has attached himself to the Lord,
"The Lord will keep me apart from his people";
And let not the eunuchs say, "I am a withered tree."
For thus said the Lord: "As for the eunuchs who keep My
sabbaths, Who have chosen what I desire
And hold fast to My covenant-- I will give them, in My House
And within My walls, A monument and a name
Better than sons or daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
Which shall not perish.
As for the foreigners Who attach themselves to the
Lord, To minister to Him,
And to love the name of the Lord,
To be His servants-- All who keep the Sabbath and do
not profane it, And who hold fast to my
covenant. …I will bring them to My
sacred mount And let them rejoice in My
house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and
sacrifices Shall be welcome on My altar;
For My House shall be called A house of prayer for all
peoples." So on this issue clearly the
post-exilic community was quite divided.
Now, there's only one biblical book, which pretty much in its
entirety, belongs to the genre of literature known as
apocalyptic. Not in its entirety,
but it is the most significant and through-going apocalyptic
book in the Bible.
The term apocalyptic derives from the Greek word
apocalypsis.
An apocalypsis is a revealing, so something that's
apocalyptic is a revealing.
Apocalypse is a revelation of things to come,
and as apocalypses generally predict the end of historical
time and the beginning of a new world order,
they are generally concerned with eschatology;
so apocalyptic works tend to be eschatological.
That doesn't mean all eschatological work is
apocalyptic. Apocalyptic literature within
the Bible, and then much more significantly outside the Hebrew
Bible, is characterized by certain
distinguishing features which I've thrown up in brief note
form over here. So apocalyptic literature is
always eschatological, deals with the end of time.
But to be apocalyptic a work has to have certain kinds of
features and not all eschatologies have these
features. This is what they are.
Most apocalyptic writings are pseudonymous.
They're generally attributed to important figures of the past,
Enoch or Abraham or someone.
They tend to also feature a revelation by a heavenly
messenger, an angel who comes in a vision or a dream to deliver
some sort of message.
In general, the message is highly symbolic.
It's coded and often the symbolism is quite bizarre.
You'll have surreal images of beasts and monsters and usually
these depict foreign nations.
The visions tend to be chronological.
They tend to be a systematic chronology of past,
present and future events that represent the march of history,
in coded form again, and so it tends to require
interpretation. And that's usually given by the
divine messenger, who reveals the symbolic
chronological code.
Fourthly, apocalypses tend to predict a series of
catastrophes. These are signs of the coming
of the end, that final point in the march of history that's
being laid out. You have motifs from ancient
myths very often used to describe these catastrophes.
I'll come back to that in a minute.
Apocalypses also tend to be what I call morally dualistic.
They tend to divide humankind into two mutually exclusive
groups; the righteous which is always a
tiny minority, and the wicked,
which is always the vast majority.
There's going to be some final public judgment and the
righteous will be saved and the wicked will be destroyed.
In this respect, especially later apocalypses
show the influence of Persian thought.
Persian thought is also quite dualist in nature,
with oppositions of light and darkness, or good and evil,
and life and death and so on.
So there does seem to be some Persian influence and of course
we're well into the Persian period at this point.
A sixth feature is that God generally appears in apocalyptic
literature as an enthroned king.
He brings all of history to a crashing end,
and demonstrates his sovereignty.
He confounds the wicked; he does all of these things at
the same time. He confounds the wicked and
establishes himself as the sovereign and enthroned king,
in control. Seventh, apocalyptic
literature, as I briefly mentioned before,
often incorporates mythological motifs and imagery,
especially the motif of a battle between God and
primordial, chaotic elements.
And that will often be the imagery that's used in depicting
the final battle with the godless or the wicked.
Apocalypses also generally depict a judgment of the
individual dead, followed by everlasting life or
punishment. So again, apocalypses develop
quite substantially outside the writings of the Hebrew Bible;
and in the Bible, we have a few scattered
apocalyptic elements and then much of the Book of Daniel.
And so we don't see the idea of life after death really in the
Hebrew Bible until this very late apocalyptic book of Daniel.
The idea is very influential in the Dead Sea Scrolls (they are
very dualist) and in the writings of the New Testament of
course. So a belief in personal
immortality, a belief in a general resurrection of the
dead--these arise from a negative view of this world as a
place where justice can be obtained.
So apocalyptic writers examined the world they lived in;
they drew the conclusion that reward and punishment were going
to be made in an afterlife.
They were certainly not doled out in this life,
as Israel suffered.
This is a marked break from the general conviction of the Hebrew
Bible that human life is limited to this world,
and that the fundamental concern of humans and God is
morality in this life and not immortality in another.
I think apocalyptic literature can be described as a literature
of hope and despair.
It's a literature of despair or pessimism because its basic
premise is that this world holds out no promise for the
righteous. It's a literature of hope or
optimism because it affirms that God will intervene.
He will intervene in human history, he'll set everything
right, he'll interrupt the natural order,
he's going to destroy this broken world as we know it,
and he'll do so in order to rescue the righteous and
humiliate the wicked, and if you've already died
don't worry there will be a resurrection,
it will all be made right.
But this hope for supreme and ultimate vindication is thrust
off into the future.
So apocalyptic constitutes yet one more response to the
traumatic events, the crises, and the
disappointments of Israel's history.
In a second we'll get to Daniel, but there are a few
apocalyptic passages of varying length in other post-exilic
books. I'll just touch on them very
quickly. SecondZechariah and,
a little bit, the book of Joel,
just to prepare us for Daniel.
Second Zechariah.
Now, these are chapters 9 through 14.
We talked about the historical Zechariah, chapters 1 through 8,
so this is Second Zechariah, chapters 9 through 14,
and it's a collection of diverse oracles,
probably fifth-century or later,
that contain these strange visions and predictions.
Their meanings cannot always be fathomed, but they seem to focus
on the Day of the Lord, and the restoration of
Jerusalem, and the rise of a new and humble king who will reign
in peace, really over a new world order.
Chapter 14 is a vision of this global battle that will bring
history to an end.
God is going to bring all the nations to Jerusalem where they
will plunder the city, they will kill almost all of
the inhabitants and then at the last moment when things look the
most desperate, God will intervene and he'll
fight for Israel and exact revenge on her enemies.
And it's after this final battle that God will transform
the earth into a paradise.
So Israel's enemies will rage against one another,
the surviving nations will pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Again, Jerusalem now is elevated above all cities,
and these nations will come to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh at
his temple, and Yahweh will be sovereign
over the world. Joel, a very short little book,
probably the latest prophetic book, also contains apocalyptic
material. The versification of Joel
varies tremendously in different English translations,
so I'm using the verse markings that are in the Bible you have.
But if you consult another Bible some of them only have
three chapters, some have four--it can be
confusing. But we can divide Joel into two
parts. Up to chapter 2,
verse 27--that's the first part, from 1:1 to 2:27 (or 1:2
really). And that contains a description
of a military invasion.
It's symbolized by an army of locusts.
And this invasion--this army of locusts--is interpreted as a
divine punishment that is necessary or that must come
before the day of the Lord.
The second part of Joel which begins in verse 28 of chapter 2
is a fully apocalyptic description of the final day of
terror. Reading from chapter 3:3-4,
Before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes,
I will set portents in the sky and on earth:
Blood and fire, and pillars of smoke;
The sun shall be turned to darkness
And the moon to blood. Before the great and terrible
Day of the Lord comes--but the righteous are going to survive.
This is pointed out in chapter 3:5, "But everyone who invokes
the name of the Lord shall escape;
for there shall be a remnant on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem,
as the Lord promised."
As we move into chapter 4 of Joel, the Day of the Lord is
envisaged as a judgment day for all peoples.
So this is increasingly the view of the eschaton:
a final battle and also a judgment day,
and that judgment day will then issue in a new age.
This is an idea that the book of Daniel will elaborate on in a
minute, not to mention the apocalyptic writings that are
outside of the Hebrew Bible.
In this judgment day, God will summon all of the
godless nations to the valley of judgment,
Jehosaphat which means "God will judge", so the Valley of
Jehosaphat. And here the final battle
between good and evil will take place, and after that God's
people will be blessed and the Holy City will never again
suffer shame.: For lo!
in those days And in that time,
When I restore the fortunes Of Judah and Jerusalem,
I will gather all the nations And bring them down to the
Valley of Jehosaphat, There I will contend with them
Over My very own people, Israel, Which they scattered among the
nations. Towards the end,
then, of the book we read, Let the nations rouse
themselves and march up To the Valley of Jehosaphat;
For there I will sit in judgment Over all the nations roundabout.
Swing the sickle, For the crop is ripe;
Come and tread, For the winepress is full,
The vats are overflowing!
For great is their wickedness.
… But the Lord will be a shelter
to His people, A refuge to the children of
Israel. …
And Jerusalem shall be holy; Nevermore shall strangers pass
through it. And in that day,
The mountains shall drip with wine,
The hills shall flow with milk, And all the watercourses of
Judah shall flow with water; A spring shall issue from the
House of the Lord And shall water the Wadi of
Acacias. …
But Judah shall be inhabited forever,
And Jerusalem throughout the ages.
So we see a lot of eschatological features in the
Book of Joel. You have, first of all,
the series of disasters; they signal the impending wrath
of God. You have a cosmic battle in
which Yahweh triumphs over Israel's enemy.
And we see in apocalyptic literature in general,
a facile equation of the righteous and the wicked with
Israel and other nations.
Then also we have this outpouring of blessings on God's
people, city, and land.
And finally, God's continued protection and
presence; and nations who are not
Israel's enemies join in the worship of God in that final
time. Again, note the important
difference between classical prophecy and the apocalyptic
literature. Both of them speak about final
things; both of them speak about an
end-time. But the classical prophets did
not in general expect that the course of human affairs would
come to an end. Only that Israel's rebellion
would end or that Israel would live under a perfect king
anointed by God. In the apocalyptic imagination
history itself is a closed process;
it will end, and then a new age,
a new world order would begin.
And the present age and the new age are qualitatively distinct.
The present age is under the dominion of evil powers.
We see it particularly in the apocalyptic writings outside of
the Bible and in the New Testament.
That power that has dominion over the present age is Satan.
Satan is the arch enemy of God.
The age to come will be free of all evil, moral corruption,
and death; Satan will be defeated.
But God himself is the one who has to do this.
God must intervene to bring the present age to a crashing halt
and initiate this new world order.
So let's turn now to Daniel for a full apocalyptic work.
Daniel also can be divided really into two parts and the
first six chapters have often been described as heroic
fiction. They're a bit like the book of
Esther that we'll be talking about on Wednesday.
Just a good story.
(Esther particularly has a lot or irony and is very,
very funny.) But like the book of Esther,
Daniel features a Jew who lives in a Gentile court and he's
saved from disaster.
I've listed the kings who are discussed in the Book of Daniel.
These chapters tell of Daniel's adventures under two Babylonian
kings, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar;
the text says two Babylonian kings,
Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; a Median king Darius who
happens to be unknown to history, a Persian king
Cyrus--that's a whole lot of years!
The historical inaccuracy of the work, right?
You have the chronology of more than a century being telescoped
here! There're other inaccuracies.
Belshazzar was actually never a king;
he was sort of a prince regent.
He was defeated by Cyrus, not by Darius,
so there are tremendous historical inaccuracies and this
is a sign that this was written at a much later time,
looking back when the history of a period 300 years ago was
very confused. There's no clear historical
knowledge of the Babylonian and Persian period.
So the book, we know, was written quite
late, perhaps the end of the third century,
those first six chapters.
We have a better idea about the remainder of the book.
Chapters 7 through 12 are fully apocalyptic in genre and they
were composed between 167 and 164--I don't know if I wrote
that up there, yeah, 167 and 164 BCE.
This was a time when Jews were suffering intense persecution at
the hands of the Seleucid King of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes,
Antiochus IV. And so Daniel is the latest
book of the Hebrew Bible.
It was chronologically the latest book, written between 167
and 164 BCE. But the author writes in code.
He writes in code so that some hostile person would not be able
to understand. The author disguises his
references to contemporary historical events and
personalities in these visions, these symbolic visions that are
attributed to a remote era of the past.
Let's go back and look at the contents of these two sections.
In chapters 1 through 6, Daniel is represented as a
loyal Jew who's living in the exile in Babylonia,
sixth-century exilic period among idol worshippers.
He refuses to bow down to any other god.
He observes the dietary laws and he prays facing Jerusalem.
He seems to occupy a position of some honor in the court.
He has the power to interpret dreams and to predict the
future, and although he's severely tested he remains true
to Yahweh and Yahweh aids him in more than one miraculous escape
from danger. The main themes of this first
section of the book of Daniel are Daniel's interpretations of
the dreams of these kings (Nebuchadnezzar) and his
allegiance to his God.
In chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of a
huge statute. It has a head of gold,
has a torso and arms of silver, the belly and the thighs are of
bronze, the legs are of iron,
and the feet are of mixed iron and clay.
I've kind of given you a little grid and in a minute we're going
to have another symbolic dream that's going to use animals to
represent the same things that are being represented here by
the metals. So you have this statue with
these metals and iron and clay feet.
Then a great stone that's uncut by human hands flies from heaven
and smashes the clay feet of the statue,
and the statue crumbles and this stone becomes a mountain
that fills all the earth.
Daniel decodes the dream's symbolism;
and it's a historical symbolism, the march of history.
Each metal represents a kingdom that ruled the Ancient Near
East. Daniel only explicitly mentions
gold as Babylon, but we can figure out the rest.
Silver is Media, bronze is Persia,
and iron is Alexander's Greece, right, Macedonian Greece that
conquered the Ancient Near East in the 330's,
and brought Hellenism, and introduced the Hellenistic
period into Ancient Near Eastern history.
After Alexander's death, his empire was divided into
smaller Hellenistic kingdoms.
The ones of greatest relevance to us are Ptolemaic Egypt and
Seleucid Syria because as you can imagine Palestine is caught
between those two great powers.
So it's going to be fought over by those two great powers.
So you have Egypt ruled by the Ptolemies;
you have Syria ruled by the Seleucids;
they're wrangling for control of the land of Israel that's
lying between them.
So the iron and clay feet of the statue in Daniel's dream
represent these lesser Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt
and Syria that succeeded Alexander's empire and are a mix
of Hellenistic and Eastern elements.
The stone from heaven represents the future kingdom of
God. It's going to come and destroy
these godless kingdoms and fill all of the earth forever.
Chapter 3 tells the story of Daniel's three companions who
refuse to worship a giant gold statue and they get themselves
thrown into a fiery furnace.
When they emerge unscathed the king is greatly impressed and so
he acknowledges the God of Israel.
In chapter 4 there's a second dream.
It's interpreted by Daniel as a sign that Nebuchadnezzar will be
struck down seven times.
He's going to lose his reason, he's going to lose his throne,
until he realizes that God is the source of all divine and
human power. When this in fact comes to
pass--Nebuchadnezzar seems to suffer a fit of insanity that
drives him from society--the king then praises the God most
high as the universal king.
In chapter 5, Daniel's enemies at court trick
the Median king (now Darius, so we're moving to different
kings). They trick him into issuing an
edict against those who pray to anyone but the king.
This is a problem for Daniel.
Daniel violates the edict, of course, and he's arrested
and he's thrown into a den of lions.
But he emerges unharmed, and the result is,
again, that the foreign king, in this case Darius now,
recognizes the supremacy of Yahweh and orders all in his
kingdom to revere the Jewish God.
There is, of course, no historical merit to these
stories of Babylonian and Persian kings acknowledging or
adopting the God of the Jews who lived in exile among them.
These stories seem to give voice to the hope or the fantasy
that a cruel and impious monarch might be taught humility by
Yahweh. They also provide a model for
life in the Diaspora.
Jews can live in the Gentile world but they must never forget
God and his laws.
Then we move into the second half of the Book of Daniel,
chapters 7 to 12.
As we move into this part of Daniel we switch from the third
person into the first person, so Daniel 7 to 12 is written in
the first person and it's fully apocalyptic.
Here Daniel has a series of visions and dreams that are
interpreted for him by an angel, and again, that's a classic
feature of the apocalyptic genre.
And these visions, again, survey Ancient Near
Eastern history from the sixth to the second centuries.
Chapter 7 again represents the succession of kingdoms,
the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian,
the Macedonian Empires, but this time as beasts.
So you have a lion, a bear, a winged leopard and an
ogre. The ogre has horns and the
horns of this ogre then represent these two lesser
Hellenistic kingdoms, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the
Seleucids of Syria.
The boastful little horn is the Syrian king, Antiochus
Epiphanies, himself.
In a second vision, the "ancient of days,"--this is
the term that's used, it seems to be God in a white
robe and a beard seated on a fiery chariot throne,
but--"the ancient of days" confers glory and kingship on
one like a Son of Man.
Now in Daniel, this phrase,
the Son of Man--which generally means mortal as opposed to
divine in the Bible, but--in Daniel the phrase seems
to refer to a figure that's in human form, but more than a
human. Probably an angel like Michael
or Gabriel. (Both of them are represented
as leaders against the forces of Persia and Greece.) And this
figure establishes an everlasting kingdom to replace
the bestial kingdoms that have preceded it.
So the Son of Man overwhelms the little horn Antiochus,
who is said to be making war on saints (that's a code for loyal
Jews), who is said to have been trying
to change their law and abolish their religion--and we know that
these were parts of the persecution in 167 to 164 by
Antiochus. He tried to stop worship in the
sanctuary and so on.
In a third vision then, the horn that represents
Antiochus is said to trample the land of splendor (Israel),
to challenge the army of heaven, to remove the perpetual
sacrifice (Antiochus did halt the sacrificial service in the
temple) and to set up an "abomination of desolation" on
the sacrificial altar (and we know that Antiochus set up some
kind of pagan altar on the sacrificial altar in the temple
in Jerusalem and erected a statue of Zeus in the
sanctuary). So this depiction of the
persecution under Antiochus is presented here,
but it's presented in veiled form for reasons of safety.
In chapter 9 we have a moving prayer for deliverance.
The Angel Gabriel assures Daniel that the end is near,
and that the end was even predicted by Jeremiah who had
said that Jerusalem would lie desolate 70years,
you will recall. Now, Jeremiah prophesied--I'm
going to do some math now, so this is dangerous.
Jeremiah prophesied in the early sixth century and the
chapters of Daniel were written many centuries later,
someone can figure it out, in the 160's.
So was Jeremiah prophesying falsely when he said that God
would deliver Israel from her enemies and establish a kingdom
in Judah in 70 years?
No, not according to the book of Daniel, because in the book
of Daniel it's said that Jeremiah also was speaking in a
code. Jeremiah meant that 70 weeks of
years, which is to say 490 years, would pass before the
consummation of all things.
And the last week was the reign Antiochus Epiphanes:
we are in the last week of these years now.
So the writer is maintaining that he is living in the last
days, in the final moments of the last week of years,
and this is very typical of apocalyptic literature.
The time is at hand, we are in the final stage,
this is now all the birth pangs of the Messiah,
these terrible things that are being visited upon us,
and God is soon going to win victory through a mighty act and
introduce the Messianic Age, ending Israel's long years of
desolation. So apocalyptic literature sees
history as determined.
It's a closed drama that must be played out,
requiring no action on the part of humans except faithful
waiting. God's kingdom will come solely
by God's power, but it has to be preceded by
this time of trouble.
These troubles are nothing but the birth pangs of the Messianic
Age and the faithful whose names are recorded in God's book will
be rescued. Chapter 12 imagines a
resurrection of the dead as a compensation to those who died
under the persecutions of Antiochus.
It's a clear attempt to deal with the injustice that mars
this world, and it's the only passage of the Bible to
explicitly espouse the idea of an individual life after death,
and as I say, breaks with a longer Israelite
tradition that's vague or silent on this issue.
Not all Jews accepted the idea, but it would be essential to
the rise of Christianity which is deeply indebted to
apocalyptic thinking.
And through Christianity, it came to have a very
far-reaching impact on Western civilization.
The Book of Daniel is a response to specific historical
circumstances. It's a response to the crisis
of persecution and martyrdom that was going on in the second
century. That was a new kind of crisis
that led to a new kind of response, because the earlier
crises of 722 and 586--they could be explained as punishment
for sin and faithlessness.
But now in the second century, Jews were dying not because
they were faithless but precisely because they were
faithful; because they refused to obey
the decrees of Antiochus and to violate their law and covenant
and they were dying.
So this new phenomenon of martyrdom, really for the first
time, required new responses and the book of Daniel provides a
fully apocalyptic response.
Remain faithful, wait, Daniel urges,
know that this will all be set right by God,
not in this world but in an ultimate and cataclysmic triumph
of life and faith over death and evil,
and it will be soon.
Daniel emphasizes God's firm control of history and so
bolsters loyal Jews who are suffering indignities and
torture and even death all around him because of their
faith. So we've seen the zealous
fifth-century response of Ezra and Nehemiah to the fateful
events of Israel's history.
They believed Israel's rededication to God and the
covenant involved as a first step,
cessation of intimate relations with foreigners,
separation from their abominable practices.
We've seen very different views that would integrate foreigners
in the worship of Yahweh.
We've seen also the later emergence of apocalyptic as an
expression of present despair and future hope that entailed
the divinely orchestrated and cataclysmic defeat of the wicked
enemies who persecuted Israel.
And in the last lecture we're going to look at two books of
the Hebrew Bible that take very different approaches,
the Book of Esther and the Book of Jonah.