this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God … Bless shall you be in the city, and bless shall you be in the field … The Lord will establish you as a people holy to himself … And the Lord will make you abound in prosperity … And the Lord will make you the head, and not the tail; and you shall tend upwards only, and not downward .… But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field … Cursed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground … Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and frustrations in all that you undertake to do until you are destroyed and perish quickly .… And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you .… ” (Dt. 28:1-68). This very explicit advice to obey the Lord, and the even greater detailing of the consequences of disobedience, sets up retributive justice as the Lord’s way of dealing with the people of Israel. But when personal individual experience proved that this type of justice was not working, it brought about a major theological crisis. It became necessary to justify the ways of an Almighty God, something quite unnecessary when the present sufferings were understood to be caused by the sins of ancestors.
The end of the Exile did not mean the restoration of the Kingdom of Judah. Most of the descendants of the Hebrews who had been exiled to Babylon had become established in their new home and decided to stay in Mesopotamia. In Palestine there were remnants of the people who had been defeated by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., now known as Samaritans, or people of Samaria. The Jews who decided to settle in Judah were now subjects of the Persian satrap of the region. They did not establish an independent kingdom. Under these circumstances, prophecy could not fulfill its traditional role as the Word of the Lord defending the weak against the abuses of the powerful, or as the adviser of kings in matters of diplomacy and war. Under Persian rule the priests and a new class, the scribes, came to positions of prominence, as demonstrated by Ezra and Nehemiah. Kings and princes were no longer in power over the people.
Also to be noticed is that the compilation of the Pentateuch, beginning just before and during the Exile, gave the people “the Scriptures.” At the same time, the oracles of the prophets were being compiled into books by anonymous editors. Guidance as to how to live under conditions different from the ones in which they had lived before the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple was to be gained by the study and interpretation of “the Torah” (That which has been said and taught authoritatively). The scribes who interpreted the Scriptures took the place of the prophets who spoke the Word of the Lord. The shift from an oral Word of the Lord to a written word that needs interpretation for its reapplication was another major shift in the religious life of the Israelites. The Pentateuch became the Scriptures studied and interpreted by the scribes. Traditional prophecy was now preserved in books; therefore, it came to an end. Besides, the construction of a new temple in Jerusalem (520–515 B.C.E.) gave the priests a new base of operations. A high priest, rather than a king, was the local leader of the people. The Jewish governor was a servant of the Persian satrap. Expectations for a full restoration of life under a royal figure enjoying all the blessings that God had promised them, therefore, were ever-present. These expectations, however, were not being fulfilled. Nathan’s promise that a descendant of David would be seated on a throne in Jerusalem forever (2 Sam. 7:11, 16), or Moses’ promise of a prophet “like me” (Dt. 18:15), were spelled out in different versions of the role of the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed. It became the task of scribes to formulate how the promises of the Scripture would come to pass, and to tell the people how to obey the will of God while living under circumstances quite different from the ones in which their ancestors had lived both as sojourners in the desert and as farmers or merchants dependent on the military protection of judges or kings. The written law envisioned circumstances that no longer existed.
The expansion of Greek culture after Persia took its armies into Europe and later Alexander the Great took his to Mesopotamia and India brought with it a new cosmopolitan class with broader horizons. The exile of the Jews in Babylon had put them in touch with another vibrant culture and its religious manifestations. There they had learned the views of Zoroaster. Among them, his dualistic understanding of the human predicament as life in the midst of cosmic forces of good and evil. Traditional stories of creation had told how the gods who created the present world had to conquer evil gods. In other words, a chaotic situation under the rule of evil powers had to be dismantled before cosmos could be established. In the case of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, Marduk had defeated Tiamat, the Deep Sea, and used her body to build the cosmos. The armies of the defeated god or goddess, however, may still be about enticing human beings to do evil. This means that human beings live subject to external forces which try to control their behavior.
This is something unknown to the prophets of Israel. According to them, evil impulses acting in the heart of human beings are somewhat of a puzzle. Human beings have the power to decide whether to obey God or to worship idols. Even though the Psalms, for example, admit the existence of the council of the gods, and Yahveh is exalted above all the other members of the council of the gods, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets do not know of supernatural beings who are engaged in causing human beings to disobey God, or to worship Baal, Astarte, Ammon or Tammuz. Jeremiah, the most introspective of the prophets, wonders about the fact that human beings lack chesed, covenant loyalty. Loyalty to their God should be natural in them, but it is not. He asked, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” The answer, of course, is no. If it were possible for them to do it, “then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer. 13:23). For Jeremiah, evil is a problem that resides inside human beings. It causes them to develop bad habits. Observing what is true in the case of migratory birds, Jeremiah laments that what is true with other animals in the natural world is not true with human beings. “Even the stork in the heavens knows her times; and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming; but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord” (Jer. 8:7). A mechanism that works in birds and keeps them on course does not work in men and women who constantly deviate from their commitments. Jeremiah makes this point again with another rhetorical question and a metaphor also taken from nature, “Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me” (Jer. 18:14-15). Mountain snows keep melting into streams year-round; they never run dry. This time, what is not the case in nature is the case among God’s people. That people forget their God is a puzzle, especially after each individual has sole responsibility for his/her actions. For the prophets, the Israelites’ forgetfulness, lack of loyalty, rebellion against God are a puzzle. Such behaviors do not make sense. They do not envision evil supernatural forces at work causing human beings to be disloyal to the covenant with their God.
Contrasts between prophetic and apocalyptic texts
Several factors came together to give rise to the apocalyptic perspective. Like prophecy, it was not a peculiar phenomenon to the Israelites, or the Jews. Apocalyptic literature is known from all the surrounding nations in antiquity, and most students of apocalyptic texts are concerned with the exploration of their features in different cultural situations. These studies come to different conclusions as to the distinctive features all apocalypses have in common. Among the most prominent are an emphasis on a final judgment, the revival of the language of creation stories and a predetermined understanding of history. The classification of apocalyptic and prophetic texts according to characteristics has been difficult; therefore, my use of characteristics in order to contrast apocalyptic and prophetic texts is purely heuristic.
As stated already, the apocalypticists were the descendants of the prophets, but they faced a problem which the prophets did not encounter. That Yahveh is a God of justice who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked was an observable truism for the prophets who worked within a corporate personality understanding of identity. The apocalypticists had to find a way to affirm God’s retributive justice within the new understanding of the self as an individual person. To affirm that an almighty God deals with his creatures according to retributive justice became problematic when it was disproved by personal experience.