Overview

Today’s preeminent authority on Jewish apocalyptic literature, John Collins, says “several key features of the historical apocalypses were paralleled in Persian writings already in the Hellenistic age, notably the periodization of history, eschatological woes, resurrection, and the supernatural forces of good and evil.” Notwithstanding such Zoroastrian influences, which over time were “adapted to the needs of Jewish monotheism,”¹ Judaism has made extraordinary, foundational, and expansive contributions to humanity’s conceptualizations of these notions, which are also cornerstones of Christian and Islamic eschatology. These contributions and some of their spectacular influences across the ages are the focus of this chapter.

Its scriptural taproots are found in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible (which Christians often refer to as the “Old Testament”), especially in the book of Daniel. Daniel was the last text to be incorporated into the Tanakh, making it part of the canon, or canonical. It was predated by a similar apocalyptic text called the “book of the watchers” (the first thirty-six chapters of the book of Enoch). For whatever reason, the “book of the watchers” was not included in the Hebrew Bible, making it an apocryphal text, or part of the vast body of religious literature known as the Apocrypha. Called by Collins “a major collection of apocalyptic literature,”² the book of Enoch was well known to many authors of the Bible and is cited therein. After centuries of Jewish contemplation of ritual practices related to these texts, the notions of the apocalypse and the resurrection were amplified in the Zohar, a thirteenth-century C.E. compilation of mystical texts. The Zohar helped inspire several messianic movements in medieval and modern Judaism, none more notable than that led by Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676), “The Mystical Messiah.”³

This chapter considers all of this, but first let us introduce the remarkable and influential religion of Judaism, oriented by three of Ninian Smart’s dimensions of religion: Narrative and Mythic, Ethical and Legal, and Social and Institutional.

Dimensions of Judaism

Narrative/Mythic

Spanning millennia and countless geocultural/ethnic milieus, Judaism is a rich and diverse religion, and its diversity cannot be fairly reflected in an introductory text, but let us try. Unifying this diversity is an anchoring in texts, as Judaism is a profoundly scriptural religion (or, as one leading scholar says, “Jews love their books”).⁴ Although Judaism has an exceedingly rich philosophical history, one would be mistaken to think of it as an extensively doctrinal religion, hence our omission of Smart’s doctrinal/philosophical category. To quote the eminent late scholar Solomon Schechter, “With God as a reality, revelation as a fact, the Torah as a rule of life and the hope of redemption as a most vivid expectation, they [Jews in antiquity] felt no need for formulating their dogmas into a creed – which is repeated – not because we believe but that we may believe.”⁵ Still, laws and ethics, to which we turn our attention later in this chapter, are of great importance in Judaism. And many of these laws are expressed in the religion’s rich scriptures, especially the Tanakh.

Composed of twenty-four books, including the Torah, or Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers)—the Hebrew Bible is the source of some of the most widely known and beloved stories and beliefs ever recorded. From a scientific or historiographical perspective, many of these stories are mythic, but that does not change the fact that they have for ages offered humans profound lessons on the meaning of life and how we should live. The first of these stories that involves human characters, of course, is that of Adam and Eve, in the book of Genesis. Mythology is an important component of most religions, and it generally functions to foster meaning, to establish values and guidelines by which to live rightly, and, especially in Judaism, to create and perpetuate collective identity—in this case, across millennia, continents, cultures, and ethnicities. The question of whether myths in religion are “true,” or if the stories recounted in the Bible actually occurred, is less interesting than the values and orientational senses that they bring to people’s lives across the ages, for religion is much more about meaning than truth.

The great Spanish philosopher George Santayana defines mythology simply as “an observation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramatic fantasy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the root and raw material of both.”⁶ Philosophically speaking, its “function was [is] to show us some phase of experience in its totality and moral issue . . .  to present and interpret events in terms relative to spirit.”⁷ In the case of Judaism, it is also “the root and raw material” of law and collective identity, a common function of mythology in the human religious experience. According to Smart, “That sense of a collective past gives identity to a group.”⁸ Take the Garden of Eden story, for instance, in which the first humans, Adam and Eve, are created by God (Yahweh). They are provided for and instructed about the importance of law, in the form of the prohibition against eating the apple. Their breaking of this law has consequences, of course, and the rest is history. Noah, meanwhile, kept faith in God’s word and warning and saved humanity and the animal kingdom during the Flood. Moses received the most important of God’s laws while leading his people in exile, circa 1446 B.C.E., and parting the Red Sea to liberate the Israelites from bondage. For our purposes, it is notable that each of these myths reflects not only the upmost importance of divine laws, but also the promise of redemption, and that ultimately redemption will occur at the End of Time, with the coming of the Messiah (mashiach) and the restoration of God’s kingdom on Earth.

Judaism’s narrative arc is fluid, living, deeply historical, and vast, but much of it cannot be categorized as mythology. Narratives take many forms in religious scriptures, and some of the most important in Judaism are the proclamations of the prophets. The most important of these prophets is Moses, as stated by the great medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135?–1204). He summarizes the thirteen key principles of Judaism as follows:⁹

1. 1. That God exists

   2. That God is one

   3. That God is incorporeal

   4. That God is eternal

   5. That God alone may be worshipped

   6. That prophecy exists

   7. That the prophecy of Moses is superior to all other prophecy

   8. That the Torah was divinely revealed

   9. That the Torah is immutable

   10. That God knows the deeds of men

   11. That God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked

   12. That the Messiah will come

   13. That the dead will be resurrected

It is noteworthy for our purposes that the last four of these principles pertain to eschatology—that God knows our deeds, that the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished, that the Messiah will come, and that the dead will be resurrected. No prophet, even Moses, left us teachings about the End of Time more captivating than Daniel, who was not a prophet per se, nor is the book of Daniel a prophetic text “in the Jewish canon.”¹⁰ But his apocalyptic vision is of momentous importance in Judaism, so we discuss Daniel at length in this chapter. But first, let us turn to the ethical dimension of Judaism, something of paramount and literally global and eternal importance.

Ethical/Legal

Judaism is an ancient monotheistic religion that pivots on four fundamental concepts: God, land, law, and people. The land, Israel, was promised to the chosen people, the Israelites (the Promised Land), while they were in exile under the leadership of Moses, who, on Mt. Sinai, received the most important component of the law, the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20: 3–17):

1. 1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

   2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

   3. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

   4. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

   5. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

   6. Thou shalt not kill.

   7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

   8. Thou shalt not steal.

   9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

   10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.¹¹

Prophetic echoes of Judgment Day are clear in the third commandment, while in the Bible these world-transforming, divinely decreed laws are immediately followed by a passage that powerfully presages the apocalypse: “And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.”

There are literally hundreds of other laws (mitzvah) in Judaism (613, to be exact), but these ten are clearly the most important. They also serve as an ethical foundation for Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. A key point here is that since before the biblical era, Judaism has placed “emphasis . . . upon deeds, the Halakha [Jewish law], and external behavior,”¹² which are oriented by the mitzvah put forth by God and God’s prophets in scripture.

While the Ten Commandments and other laws are found in the Tanakh, many later laws are stated, often debated, and updated in a later body of Jewish scripture known as the Talmud. The word Talmud means “teaching,” and the text was written by learned rabbis and completed by the fifth century C.E., though commentaries were added for the following two centuries:

It includes the Mishnah (oral law) and the Gemara (“Completion”). The Mishnah is a large collection of sayings, arguments and counter-arguments that touch on virtually all areas of life. The Gemara is known as a “sea” of learning, a collection of stories about biblical characters, sober legal arguments and fanciful imaginings of the world of old and the world to come.¹³

Too vast and complex to adequately summarize here, let us consider briefly the Talmud’s eschatology and its remarkable teachings about the meaning of life and how God commands us to live it. In this vein, importantly, the text speaks of “sins that incur divine punishment,”¹⁴ while offering reflections on resurrection, judgment, and the afterlife, “the world to come.” More so than the Torah, the Talmudic “eschatological speculations are extensive and intensive.”¹⁵ Here, the world to come is described as follows, per David Novak:

This world is not like the world-to-come. In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no mating, no trading, no jealousy, no hatred, and no enmity; instead, the righteous [tsaddiqim] sit with crowns on their heads and enjoy the splendor of the divine Presence [ziv ha-shekhinah]. As it is said: “They beheld God and they ate and they drank” (Exodus 24:11).¹⁶

This Talmudic notion of heaven (samayim, pronounced shamayim), ­“the realm of the gods” or “the atmosphere or celestial realm,” expands upon ideas found in the Hebrew Bible. This includes diverse representations and is a place ruled by God and a host of angels and other divine beings (and, at one point in the history of Judaism, of other gods). This concept is rather vague.¹⁷ Likewise, the Talmud also amplifies the somewhat nebulous notion of hell (she’ol) in the biblical texts, in which it “means a kind of amorphous oblivion, having no specific opprobrium attached to it; rabbinic teaching, with its more intensive concept of hell (gehinnom), sees she’ol as the place where the otherworldly punishment of the wicked will take place,” as Novak explains.¹⁸ Alan Bernstein outlines the rabbinic, or Talmudic, teachings about gehinnom:

The Talmudic sources present four main positions: 1) Wicked people may be excluded from the world to come, but it is unclear whether they will be annihilated or punished. 2) There is an actual place for postmortem suffering called Gehinnom, which is the locus of eternal punishment for some but purification for others. 3) Gehinnom truly exists; it has three gates and seven names, but there are ways to get out. 4) There is no physical Gehinnom; its functions are accomplished by other means.¹⁹

Like in Zoroastrian eschatology, here our ultimate fate is determined by how we choose to live, even if God already knows the outcome. As one of the greatest rabbis recorded in the Talmud, Akiva (50–135 C.E.), puts it, “Everything is foreseen [by God], but free will is given [to man].”²⁰

As in Zoroastrianism, in Judaism it is widely believed that the dead will be resurrected for final judgment. Overseeing this momentous drama will be the Messiah, the “anointed one,” who is a descendant of King David. The Messiah is a human being, a priest and a prophet, and the one who leads the righteous on the path to the world to come. This will be a new world on the earth we now inhabit with a heavenly orbit for the redeemed. This is a central theme in Talmudic eschatology, based on extensive rabbinic reflections on passages in the Hebrew Bible that mention the messianic idea, especially in the book of Daniel, which we summarize later. For now, the key point is that God provides humanity with laws, and whether we follow them will determine our ultimate fate. The laws are many, of course, but are powerfully summed up by another key Talmudic author, Hillel the Elder (110 B.C.E.–10 C.E.): “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Do and study it.”²¹

Social/Institutional

Hillel places the Golden Rule at the heart of Judaism; it is a religion that on a fundamental level is about respect for humanity, respect for all of God’s people, and social justice, for God is a God of laws and calls the faithful to be righteous and to love one another. Both the mythic/narrative and the legal/ethical dimensions that were just covered are deeply intertwined with the social/institutional dimension, so this section will be short and perhaps a bit redundant. For Judaism is not a centralized religion and takes numerous forms, normally and nominally categorized as Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. The latter is the most liberal, and it emerged in the United States, home to more Jews when it emerged there in the twentieth century than any other country.

The chief institution in Judaism is the synagogue, which is usually a space where Jews gather for worship, a temple, but the meaning of the word synagogue is much broader than that. The term may also refer simply to “a collective of Jewish community members who constitute a congregation.” Hence, it refers not just to a constructed temple but also a gathering of the faithful, as reflected in its Greek etymological origin: “gathering” or “assembly.”²² There are also numerous Jewish seminaries, universities, and colleges throughout the world, as Judaism highly values learning, but there is no centralized hierarchy in the religion, unlike Roman Catholicism.

For the sake of brevity, let us conclude this section with the teachings of one of the most influential Jewish leaders of our age, Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983). Though raised Orthodox and having served as a rabbi in that tradition, Kaplan “recognized that Judaism is not simply a ‘religion’ in the conventional sense of the word – meaning a system of beliefs and practices. In his brilliant explanation of the origins and nature of religious identity, Kaplan recognizes that all religious identity is formed from the three “B’s” of “Believing, Behaving, and Belonging.”²³ Belief is foregrounded in Roman Catholicism, for instance, where at every Mass believers recite the Apostle’s Creed. Islam emphasizes the belief that submission to Allah is the chief orientation for life. For Kaplan, Judaism instead foregrounds belonging and behaving, as beliefs are varied, and even the belief in a supernatural, supreme God is unnecessary to be a faithful Jew. Furthermore, Kaplan identifies God as the “power that makes for salvation.” As Rebecca Alpert puts it:

Kaplan’s most influential idea, which was central to his platform of reconstruction, was that the Jews were neither solely a religious group nor a nation, as they were constituted in prior eras, but a people. He suggested that belonging to the Jewish people was what bound Jews together, even if they disagreed about belief and practice.²⁴

Of course, there are many other interpretations of what Judaism centrally means, but for Kaplan it is belonging and behaving that are foregrounded, with believing less emphasized than in, say, Catholicism or Islam. But belief in the validity of the law and of divinely ordained values is a taproot of both belonging and behaving in Judaism, for which the Hebrew Bible is the foundation, its ultimate scripture.

The Book of Enoch

Also called 1 Enoch, the book of Enoch “is actually a collection of ancient booklets written at different times by several authors, almost all of them composed in the Aramaic language.”²⁵ Despite its multiple authorship, the book has long been widely attributed to Enoch, as reflected in its title, making it, like many biblical texts, an example of pseudepigrapha, books written by unknown authors but attributed to kings, prophets, patriarchs, and apostles. Pseudepigraphic manuscripts are “texts that were cast as the word of famous deceased figures” throughout the Ancient Near East.²⁶

Though neither the book of Enoch nor the accounts of his “otherworldly journeys” are in the Bible, Enoch is mentioned several times and inspires a great deal of apocalyptic contemplation among authors and readers of the Hebrew Bible. This is true despite Enoch’s being “a highly enigmatic” figure in the biblical texts.²⁷ The book of Genesis, for instance, tells us that Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, was his father, while this is twice contradicted later in the text. Such unclarity notwithstanding, for our purposes what is most important is the passage in Genesis (5:24) that states that “Enoch walked faithfully with God, then he was no more, because God took him away.” While this might be interpreted to mean that Enoch lived a very long life (over three hundred years)²⁸ and that it ended when “God took him away,” Collins argues that “this brief notice does not imply the full account of Enoch’s otherworldly journeys which we find in 1 Enoch, but is rather the seed from which later [Jewish apocalyptic] speculation grew.”²⁹

Though not compiled in its entirety until the period between 200 and 50 B.C.E., the earliest texts in the book of Enoch were likely written as early as seven hundred years prior.³⁰ A complete copy of the text has never been discovered by biblical historians or archaeologists. The first section of the book, one of the oldest, is often referred to as the “book of the Watchers” and opens with a declaration that Enoch was “blessed” to have his “eyes opened by God” to receive a “vision of the Holy One in heaven,” which was orchestrated by angels.³¹ With that, Enoch launches into his dramatic prophecy of God descending onto Earth from the heavens, smiting all who live with fear, and “the Watchers will quake,” as recorded in verses 6–9:

And the high mountains shall be shaken,

And the high hills shall be made low,

And shall melt like wax before the flame

And the earth shall be wholly rent in sunder,

And all that is upon the earth shall perish,

And there shall be judgment upon all.

But with the righteous He will make peace.

And will protect the elect,

And have mercy upon them.

And they shall all belong to God.

And they shall all be blessed.

And He will help them all,

And light shall appear unto them,

And He will make peace with them.

And behold! He cometh with ten thousand of His

holy ones

To execute judgment upon all,

And to destroy the ungodly:

And to convict all flesh

Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have

ungodly committed.

And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have

spoken against him.³²

With these opening verses, Enoch captivates its reader with both terror and hope, poetically emitting a clear message of the End of Time and the fate of us all, which are central ideas in apocalyptic thought to this day. The Persian, or Zoroastrian, influences on these passages are clear, from the melting hills and judgment to the light brought to the righteous and the destruction of the wicked.

Remarkably, sections of the book of Enoch were unknown to modern biblical historians until they were found in a cave in the Holy Land, a place called Qumran. These were among the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered from 1947 to 1956, shortly after World War II. Eleven copies of Enoch were among them. They were evidently made for the apocalyptic Jewish monastic community that lived and meditated in this cave and adjacent ones, the Essenes.³³ Members of the community were known as the “sons of light,” hermits who immersed themselves in asceticism and prayer in preparation for the End of Time, which would be heralded by an “earthly war” that “was to last no less than forty years, with a sabbatical interlude every seventh year.”³⁴ Norman Cohn summarizes the Essenes’ apocalyptic vision:

Angelic armies under the command of Israel’s patron angel Michael . . . would fight demonic forces led by Beliar, also called Melkiresha (‘my king is unrighteousness’). . . . In the end, God would intervene to annihilate all evil . . . [and] there would be a Last Judgment, when Michael/Melchizedek would recompense the ‘holy ones of God’ and exercise vengeance on Satan and his lot.³⁵ 

The Essenes “expected its final victory to be immediately followed by a messianic age” and a “Renewal,” when sinners will be cast into hell and the righteous “will be rewarded with ‘healing, great peace in a long life, and fruitfulness, together with every everlasting blessing and eternal joy in life without end.’”³⁶ Many of these reflections were inspired not only by Enoch but by Daniel, to whom our attention now duly turns.

The Book of Daniel

“Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations,” writes Gershom Scholem, “has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community.”³⁷ This redemption has, furthermore, a “catastrophic character” that “finds manifold expression: in world wars and revolutions, in epidemics, famine, and economic catastrophe.”³⁸ In other words, it will happen in the here and now, on Earth and during someone’s lifetime, and it will be explosively dramatic, to say the least. Judaism’s greatest expression of this is found in the book of Daniel, the last book to be incorporated into the Hebrew Bible.

During a half millennium, from 250 B.C.E. to 250 C.E., apocalyptic literature flourished among Jewish and early Christian authors, yet Daniel is the only one represented in the Hebrew Bible (the “book of the watchers” missed out), with Chapters 7–12 being the climax. There are, to be sure, other apocalyptic references in the Tanakh (e.g., Zech. 9–14), but Daniel is the most forceful and influential, historically speaking. Interestingly, the most important apocalyptic book in the Christian Bible, Revelation, was also the last text to be incorporated into the canon, a subject to which we return in the next chapter.

Apocalyptic and messianic references are found in rather scattered form throughout the Hebrew Bible, though early on “the notions of chaos, cosmos and the world to come that they express had no place in official Judaism as it had developed since” the reception of the Torah, as Cohn explains: “The earliest of the writings to which modern scholars have attached the label ‘Jewish apocalypses’ were produced in Palestine in the third and second centuries” B.C.E.³⁹ The book of Daniel is the most important of these writings, a text that “has had a powerful effect on the religious imaginations of Judaism and Christianity.”⁴⁰

Who wrote this momentous book and when? As Martha Himmelfarb explains, “Daniel takes as its hero a famous figure of the past, a wise and righteous man about whom many stories were already in circulation…. But whatever his origins, by the middle of the second century B.C.E. Daniel had been naturalized as a Jew.”⁴¹  Daniel means “God is my judge” in Hebrew, and the visionary by this name was seemingly a legendary heroic figure who was well known in tales in Aramaic and Hebrew throughout the region.⁴² Many beliefs and aspirations among Jews (and it is possible that the original Daniel was actually not Jewish) were grafted onto him in the Hebrew Bible and in subsequent Christian scripture.

The book of Daniel is written largely in the first person, as is often the case with pseudepigraphic literature. Early sections of Daniel are also examples of what scholars call “court tales,” for they are stories that Daniel recounted, in exile, to the Babylonian court, like “Daniel in the fiery furnace” and “Daniel in the lion’s den.”⁴³  The book of Daniel is the culmination of Jewish apocalyptic literature, most important because of its canonical status, and contains all of the eight clusters of this literature identified by Collins:

1) urgent expectation of the end of earthly conditions in the immediate future 2) The end as a cosmic catastrophe; 3) periodization and determination; 4) activity of angels and demons; 5) new salvation, paradisal in character; 6) manifestations of the kingdom of God; 7) a mediator with royal functions; 8) the catchword ‘glory’.⁴⁴

With any apocalyptic text, it is important to consider the historical/political context in which it was written. Sociologists and social historians have established that distressing social conditions, like colonization, slavery, and other acute forms of oppression, fertilize communities with an expectant receptivity toward doomsday prophecy.⁴⁵ Daniel writes in Chapters 2 and 7 of “four kingdoms,” seemingly reflecting on political changes that he viewed as signs of the End of Days. As Himmelfarb explains, Daniel’s “visions … place great emphasis on the evil of the eschatological villain Antiochus IV” who had “issued a decree prohibiting the practice of Judaism.”⁴⁶ Antiochus was a Macedonian Hellenistic king of the Seleucid Empire from 175 to 164 B.C.E. As for the four kingdoms: “The idea of four world kingdoms to be followed by a final kingdom in which righteousness triumphs probably originated in Persia.”⁴⁷ This final kingdom would be bequeathed by God to the “holy ones”—to angels, who would gather the righteous to join them eternally in paradise on Earth.

Furthermore, “there are two strands of tradition in the Jewish apocalypses, one of which is characterized by visions … while the other is marked by otherworldly journeys.”⁴⁸ Both are also found in earlier Persian tradition, though scholars debate their influence on Judaism. Take Arda Viraf, for instance, whom we met in the previous chapter, “a [Zoroastrian] priest who drugged himself to release his spirit to explore the fate of the dead.”⁴⁹ Visions have been received by select mystics throughout the ages, and on occasion they are described in writing, as in the book of Daniel. While in bed, Daniel receives a vision of a tumultuous sea, from which emerge four beasts, one of which has ten and then eleven horns. And a vision of thrones, one occupied by the “ancient of days,” who orders that the horned beast be burned to death. Next, he sees a ram, a vision interpreted for him by the angel Gabriel, then Gabriel himself, and finally a figure robed in white linen, whose eyes are “like torches of fire.”

The terrifying visions of beasts subside, and then Daniel sees God, called here “the one ancient of days” (7:9). God resides in a palace, seated on a throne with books open before Him. The throne has wheels, furthermore, and its occupant is robed in white and has a long white beard. Thousands are gathered before God, and the whole scene is overwhelmingly bright. By then, “the fourth beast is destroyed and eternal dominion is given to ‘one like a son of man’” (7:13), who rides on clouds.⁵⁰ A key passage in the text concerns judgment:

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? (4:35).

Another of the crucial lessons for Daniel is that his God delivers the faithful, whether from a furnace, a lion’s den, or Armageddon. Daniel and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, refuse to worship at the statue of King Nebuchadnezzar, and the latter three are tossed into a furnace to suffer and die. (It is not clear where Daniel is when this happens.) Daniel is later pitched into the lion’s den because he worships his own God instead of the king. In both cases, these faithful Jews are delivered by YHWH, one of the most important teachings not just of Daniel but of the entire Bible. This is reflected in Chapter 10, where Daniel is told: “Do not fear, greatly beloved, you are safe. Be strong and courageous.” Daniel takes this quite to heart and goes off to fight on behalf of his people, transmitting for the ages this extraordinary message of redemption (12:1):

And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

Sabbatai Sevi and Apocalyptic Kabbalah

Multitudes in Europe and the Middle East thought that the end was at hand in 1666, when one of the world’s largest cities, London, burned, leaving nearly 100,000 people hungry in the charred streets. “What happened on the streets of London,” writes Charlotte Sleigh, “had significance for the fate of the earth – the cosmos.” The Dutch and the English, the Spanish and the Portuguese, and the Polish and the Lithuanians were at war, furthermore, hurricanes swept the Caribbean, and a church steeple in Riga collapsed, killing eight people. “Catholics and Protestants, and their royal proxies, had slaughtered one another around Europe, and bubonic fleas crawled from body to body as fast as heresy could be whispered.” Those fleas especially proliferated in England, where the plague then killed 100,000, the same year the strongest tornado in English history devastated County Lincolnshire. All surely signs that the end was nigh, that “the Jews would be restored to Zion and ‘wicked empires’ destroyed,” yet above all it was the number of the year that signaled the dawn of the apocalypse.⁵¹

Though the number 666 has no significance in Jewish scriptures, by the Middle Ages its Christian conceptualizations, rooted in the book of Revelation, had become well known to many Jews and stirred their apocalyptic reflections, especially during times of tumult, oppression, and uncertainty. By then, certain Jewish sages had become steeped in the Zohar, the basis of Judaism’s remarkable mystical tradition Kabbalah (lit., “tradition”; “receive,” “accept”). This spiritual movement “appears to have emerged suddenly in the thirteenth century,”⁵² though earlier influences are believed to have been revealed to and by the prophet Elijah.⁵³ In due course, Kabbalah’s apocalyptic inflections inspired one of the most popular messianic movements in Judaism’s long history, that led by Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century. It is to Sabbatai and Sabbatianism (or Sabbateanism), “the most important messianic movement in Judaism since the destruction of the second temple,”⁵⁴ that our attention turns in this section, but first some important historical background.

“When the Messianic idea appears as a living force in the world of Judaism – especially in that of medieval Judaism – which seems so totally interwoven with the realm of the Halakhah – it always occurs in the closest connection with apocalypticism,” writes Scholem.⁵⁵ This erudite scholar rightly attributes the emergence of messianic movements in Judaism to prophecy and social conditions. The great biblical seers, like Daniel, and apocryphal prophets, like Enoch, offer “predictions and messages” that “come to an equal degree from revelation and from the suffering and desperation to those whom they addressed.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, though such prophets “do not yet give us any kind of well-defined conception of Messianism,” they do provide the basis for a “utopian impulse – the vision of a better humanity at the End of Days – [which] is interpenetrated with restorative impulses like the reinstitution of an ideally conceived Davidic kingdom.”⁵⁷

When believers in the coming of the Messiah and the End of Time are persecuted, expectancy of the End of Days is fertilized. Under the oppressive rule of the Greek emperor Antiochus IV, Jews were prohibited from openly practicing their faith. This occurred at a time in Judaism when “there rose an emphasis upon apocalyptic social movements and ideologies, which escalated and excited group philosophies and their emphases upon boundaries between member and nonmember and upon a divine battle between good and evil being fought on behalf of the righteous community,” as Jeremiah Cataldo explains. This led to a popular conceptualization of the Messiah and the prophet being one.⁵⁸ Enter Judah Maccabee, who from 167 to 164 B.C.E. led a revolt against the oppressors that resulted in the restoration of the kingdom of Judea and the return of the beloved temple in Jerusalem to Jewish control, an epochal event that is celebrated during Hanukkah.

Under subsequent Roman rule, some two hundred years later, after the Christian movement had begun within Judaism, Jews had tragically lost the temple, while Romans imposed a harsh system of crop taxation on peasants in the region surrounding Jerusalem, or Judea. Thus provoked, a largely peasant revolt ensued, in 66 C.E., tinged with apocalyptic and messianic fervor, with “independent armed militias [springing] up across the country.”⁵⁹ Some of these Jewish militias stationed themselves in the hills and effectively repelled Roman counterattacks with “javelins and slingshot,”⁶⁰  setting up the fateful Battle of Beth-Horon, a victory of resistance against oppression for the ages, as Neil Faulkner explains: “It was the greatest Jewish victory for 200 years, and it sounded through the hills of Palestine like a clarion call to holy war. This, surely, was God’s work, the beginning of the End of Days, the inaugural event of the Rule of the Saints.”⁶¹  Roman counterinsurgencies would be met with Jewish guerrilla resistance in the ensuing years, culminating in the events at Masada in 73 C.E. Since the uprisings against Roman oppression began, a fortified commune of roughly a thousand Jews, known historically as Zealots and the Sicarii, lived for several years atop a mountain called Masada, in the Judaean Desert. “They were the last holdouts of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, which had ended three years earlier, in 70 C.E., with an unimaginable disaster,” Jodi Magness explains. “The destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple.”⁶² Much earlier, under King Herod, the Romans had built a garrison there, high atop Masada, which was seized by Jews during the uprisings. Among them were guerrilla warriors poised to carry on with the resistance struggle. Stormed by a force of 15,000 Roman soldiers, who finally breached the walls surrounding the summit of Masada, however, the entire commune committed redemptive, revolutionary mass suicide, though much of this story may be shrouded in myth.⁶³

The Maccabean Revolt and Masada are important historical contexts for understanding the rise of Christianity. Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement under the heels of colonialist oppression, with “restorative impulses” spurring the emergence of what is today the largest religion in the world. Jesus was a faithful Jew throughout his life, a rabbi and an apocalyptic visionary who preached more about the End of Days than anything else. Though he never claimed to be the Messiah, this role was thrust upon him posthumously by his followers. Hence, the Gospel of Matthew opens with an attempt to place Christ in the lineage of King David, as a redeemer who will see through “the reinstitution of an ideally conceived Davidic kingdom.” Jesus did not achieve the long-standing Jewish aspiration that the Messiah would restore the kingdom and the temple, however, or go forth to rule the new era among the righteous from Jerusalem. This is the principal reason that Judaism and Christianity have been different religions since the period when the Gospels were written. Most Jews could simply not accept that the anticipated Messiah would arrive in Jerusalem so humbly on a donkey only to be crucified three days later. No kingdom restored, no heaven on Earth, no redemption, no liberationist aspirations realized. So the hope carried on, and most Jews looked elsewhere.

For several hundred years after Masada and the rise of Christianity, Judaism witnessed sporadic millenarian movements, like one in Crete in the sixth century,⁶⁴ but this all changed dramatically in the Middle Ages. Stephen Sharot defines millenarianism as follows:

Millenarianism is the belief that the world will undergo a fundamental transformation, ultimate and irrevocable. This change is immanent, to occur during the lifetime of most believers, this-worldly, involving the union of the terrestrial and the transcendental on this earth, and collective, merging the redemption of the individual with the group of the faithful or with all of humanity. Millenarianism often includes the figure of the Messiah who will bring about redemption.⁶⁵

These beliefs captivated Jews, especially from the eleventh century to the seventeenth century C.E., with significant millenarian movements emerging among them in Iberia and Italy. For example, early during the twelfth century in Cordoba, “Jews in the city had calculated by astrology that the Messiah would appear in a certain year and they had chosen a one Ibn Aryeh as the messiah.”⁶⁶ Meanwhile, in the late thirteenth century, “in Avila a reputed illiterate indicated that angels had revealed a treatise to him indicating the imminent future kingdom. . . . Many prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, and giving charity; and on the announced day they rose early, dressed in white, and went to the synagogue to await the signal.”⁶⁷

But, excepting nascent Christianity, no Jewish millenarian movement was as captivating as that led by a Sephardic rabbi from Turkey named Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century. Some scholars consider the material causes of the Sabbatian movement, especially attuned to “the terrible catastrophe that had overtaken Polish Jewry in 1648–1649 and had shaken the very foundation of the great Jewish community in Poland.”⁶⁸ But it was descendants of Jews from Spain—who had settled in Turkey after being expelled from Iberia during the Inquisition of 1492—who became “the main bearers of the Sabbatian movement.”⁶⁹ The movement was thus international, drawing into its vortex Jews from as far as Tangiers, Sevilla, and Amsterdam—“the rich and the poor … the ruling class and the masses” alike. They traveled to the Holy Land, Jerusalem, driven by the hope of redemption and the belief that the Messiah, Sabbatai Sevi, had been chosen and that the End of Days was at hand.⁷⁰ What the diverse Jewish population throughout Europe and North Africa had in common was a culturally and spiritually rich sense of identity, faith, and inspiration derived from Kabbalah. They were especially inspired by the Zohar and its interpreters from Safed, a small city located in Galilee, in today’s northern Israel, the highest city in the nation.

The Zohar is Judaism’s greatest mystical work and has been momentously influential in the religion. There is no way to understand Kabbalah or Sabbatianism without considering its central teachings. A complex text that is attributed to a second century C.E. Palestinian rabbi named Shimon bar Yohai, the Zohar was most likely written by numerous sages across hundreds of years. It is composed of “rambling compositions” that “fill well over a thousand pages of densely written Aramaic,” as Pinchas Giller explains.⁷¹ The texts had been in circulation for generations but not compiled until the late thirteenth century, by a Sephardic Jew in Spain named Moses De León (1250–1305), who may have authored the book in its entirety. Two centuries later the Zohar would be taught by its most important interpreter, the Jerusalem-born, Safed-based rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572). His teachings on the text were so dominant that the term “Lurianic Kabbalah” is commonly used to discuss subsequent Jewish mysticism, especially the form that served as the philosophical and spiritual foundation and fuel for Sabbatianism.⁷² This is true, although Sabbatai was more of an original interpreter of the Zohar than a Lurianic acolyte. As Scholem explains, “When Sabbatai began his kabbalistic studies, Lurianic kabbalism was in the ascendant and practically all students of kabbalah immersed themselves in the writings – printed and in manuscript – of the Safed mystics.”⁷³

Initially Kabbalism was not primarily concerned with eschatology, for “in its original setting it concentrated less on the end of the world than on the primordial beginning of creation.”⁷⁴ This would change dramatically, however, in the late Middle Ages, when it became deeply apocalyptic. Most of the key ideas in Kabbalism lent themselves very well to messianic and millenarian thought and inclinations. It holds, after all, that God’s essence, Ein Sof (the Infinite), is unknowable but that God’s knowable manifestations are the sefirot, which Giller characterizes as follows:

These sefirot are the emanating aspects of the divine. They make up the metaphysical underpinnings of the created world, the processes of the divine, and the human soul. The interplay of the sefirot underlies the dance of the divine into corporeal reality.⁷⁵

Unfortunately, the sefirot, in the form of immanent divine sparks, are widely contained and restrained in material shells, kelippot, that need to be burst open for the Messiah to complete the work of redemption and for God to become wholly self-realized. Most importantly, we humans have a role to play in making this happen. We are called to struggle against kelippot and bring forth the liberation of the sefirot, and thus the End of Time and the restoration of God’s kingdom of heaven on Earth for all eternity. The righteous will be ever gathered there, led by the Messiah. In the seventeenth century, that Messiah was widely believed, among Jews throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, to be Sabbatai Sevi. Word of his appearance spread rapidly, and the faithful abandoned everything to flock to the Holy Land, Jerusalem, to prepare for the End of Time.

A notion with Talmudic roots, the sefirot are collectively symbolized in Kabbalah as the shekhinah, a Hebrew word meaning “presence” or “indwelling,”⁷⁶ which was conceived of as a feminine aspect of God and sometimes as the bride of God. It is portrayed in Kabbalah as something of a divine tree, the linked attributes of God that dwell in the world and are intrinsically and historically present in the lives, plights, and redemption of His people, the Jews. These ideas witnessed such an eschatological intensification with the growth in popularity of the Zohar and the teachings of Luria that by the seventeenth century the symbol of the shekhinah was as prominent among Jews as the Star of David.

Who was Sabbatai Sevi? In August of 1626 the future Kabbalist was born on the Sabbath, a day of rest in Judaism, just as God had rested on the seventh day after creating the world. He was born in the Greek port city of Smyrna, in what is today Turkey, on the Aegean Sea; the city is now called Izmir. His father, Mordecai Sevi, was “a poulterer and egg dealer but later became a broker and agent for some English merchants in Smyrna,” a place that was “an important center for trade with Europe, and the insignificant Jewish community rose to prominence there in the years 1625–30.”⁷⁷ Little is known about Sabbatai’s mother, Clara, unfortunately, though she would become mythologized in Sabbatianism, while his two brothers would become important members of the messianic movement that Sabbatai was destined to lead, which emerged after the deaths of their parents (1663).⁷⁸

Either as a mystic or as a sufferer of mental illness (or some combination thereof), from very early in life, Sabbatai Sevi received remarkable visions, some of which were apocalyptically inflected and surely heralded to him that he was being called by God to an important mission:

When he [Sabbatai] was six years old a flame appeared in a dream and caused a burn on his penis; and dreams would frighten him but he never told anyone. And the sons of whoredom [the demons] accosted him so as to cause him to stumble until they beat him, but he would not hearken unto them. They were the sons of Na’amah, the scourges of the children of man, who would always pursue him so as to lead him astray.⁷⁹

The dualism between good and evil, between divinity and demons, is clearly reflected in this vision, but the demons—even their queen, Na’amah—would not succeed in leading Sabbatai astray. He immersed himself in study and spirituality, eventually having another vision of himself being anointed as the Messiah by the patriarchs.⁸⁰ While growing up in Smyrna, Sabbatai “seems to have passed through all the stages of a traditional education and to have been encouraged to concentrate on his rabbinic studies when he showed signs of talent.”⁸¹ This he did, as Sabbatai became a rabbi while a teenager and a scholar of some renown in his young adulthood. When Sabbatai had completed his studies, he was inspired to embark on a path of “abstinence and solitude.”⁸² His family by then had become wealthy and evidently supported him, as the future false messiah never took up a formal post as a rabbi or engaged in any other form of employment. Instead, he immersed himself in the study of Kabbalah and developed a “habit of taking frequent ritual baths,” perhaps also fasting often and self-flagellating, as was then common practice among Kabbalists and would later become hallmark rituals in the Sabbatian movement that he was soon to lead.⁸³

By the time he turned twenty, Sabbatai Sevi had developed a following of Kabbalist disciples and took the first of his three successive wives, though his asceticism never permitted the consummation of any of his marriages. One of them was declared by the “Holy Spirit” to be “not his predestined mate,” hence she was spurned. But Scholem argues that by this point in his life Sabbatai was suffering from mental illness: “There is no doubt that Sabbatai Sevi was a sick man…. His contemporaries speak of him as a madman, a lunatic, or a fool, and even his followers admitted that his behavior . . . provided ample reasons for these appellations.”⁸⁴ Although psychiatry did not yet exist and mental illness was, in his day, often assumed to be the result of demonic possession, it is likely that Sabbatai Sevi suffered from bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression.⁸⁵ People with bipolar disorder sometimes experience intense episodes of mania, during which they are hyperactive, exalted, and exuberantly confident, and intense episodes of depression, during which they are withdrawn and agonized, and they might feel persecuted and perhaps suicidal. For a brilliant bipolar rabbi to immerse himself in deep meditations on an apocalyptic, dualistic text such as the Zohar amounted to a recipe for the disaster that the Sabbatian movement would become. We know today, for instance, that “hyper-religiosity” is often one of the symptoms of mania.⁸⁶ This could be why Sabbatai Sevi was known to frequently recite Isaiah 14:14 from the Hebrew Bible: “‘I will ascend above the heights of the cloud; I will be like the most high,’ and once it happened that he recited this verse with such ecstasy that he imagined himself to be floating in the air.”⁸⁷

One of his most important disciples, Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680), helped Sabbatai come to realize that his radical fluctuations in mood and his visions made perfect sense spiritually: “All the sufferings of Job really refer to him [Sabbatai] who has suffered many great afflictions by all kinds of qelippoth [kelippot].”⁸⁸ Recall that Kelippot are shells or “husks that imprison divinity and must be broken open in order to bring forth God’s completion and the messiah on earth.”⁸⁹ As Nathan, also a brilliant scholar and respected rabbi, became close to Sabbatai Sevi, he convinced the latter that Sabbatai Sevi was the Messiah and was waging the final war against kelippot to bring forth the End of Days and lead their people to redemption. Nathan interpreted Sabbatia’s episodes of mania and depression through applying Kabbalistic explanations—mania was a form of ecstatic experience of the sefirot, while depression was a necessary form of the Messiah’s culminating struggle to shatter the kelippot and to usher in redemption.

Many great religious leaders throughout history have been considered to be mad, of course, including Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), and Sabbatai’s manic behavior did not deter the growth of his following. His periods of depression and anxiety compelled his self-seclusion for sometimes weeks on end, and his followers began interpreting all of this in decidedly Kabbalistic terms. He was suffering such “severe afflictions, immense to be conceived,” as one contemporary observer and follower put it, “on behalf of the Jewish people.” By 1648 Sabbatai seemingly experienced inklings that he might actually be the Messiah and revealed as much to his followers. In 1651 they, along with their beloved, erratic rabbi, were banished from Smyrna for heresy and excommunicated. They made their way to Salonika, then an important center of Kabbalism. Sabbatai’s erratic behavior there—like performing a wedding ceremony between himself and the Torah—soon so “deeply shocked” the rabbis that he was once again banished,⁹⁰ but not without having gained many new followers. He went from there to Athens, then to Constantinople (where he was whipped for his “strange actions”),⁹¹ and to Cairo. He lived in Cairo for two years before moving on to Jerusalem in 1663, on the eve of the explosion of his movement, where he intensified his ascetic practices.

Though initially accepted among the rabbis in Jerusalem, Sabbatai also managed to get himself banished from the Holy City for his unusual and seemingly heretical behavior. Eventually, he made his way back to Smyrna, now enjoying a considerable amount of political power, thanks to his ever-amplifying reputation as an ascetic sage and as the Messiah. His return to his hometown was short-lived, however, and early in 1666 he returned to Constantinople, only to be promptly arrested by the Islamic caliph, Mohammed IV. By then, tens of thousands of Jews had left their homes in far-off reaches in Europe and North Africa for the Holy Land to await the resurrection of the dead, Judgment Day, the Messiah’s defeat of evil, and the restoration of God’s kingdom on Earth. Per Scholem:

The movement had swept the whole Diaspora into its orbit and had struck deep roots in the soul of the masses. The sheer quantitative magnitude of the revival had become a qualitative factor. Something had happened in the souls of the believers, and these new, inner “facts” were no less decisive than the external historical happenings.⁹²

These historical happenings included the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, as many of Sabbatai’s followers in Turkey were descendants of that purge. They also included the massacre of Jews in Poland in 1648, known as the Chmielnicki massacres, during which as many as 100,000 Jews were killed,⁹³ and “subsequent disturbances that continued until 1655, [which] fell as a stunning blow upon Polish Jewry.” Remarkably, and adding fuel to the messianic fire, the Zohar had predicted that 1648 was to be the year of the resurrection of the dead and Judgment Day.⁹⁴

For numerological and biblical reasons, 1666 was also a year of apocalyptic expectation, among not just Christians but also Jews, who had suffered tremendous persecution in Eastern Europe in previous decades and their expulsion from Iberia two centuries prior. The number 666 is indicated to be satanic in the book of Revelation, which is not part of the Hebrew Bible. The number has no tumultuous meaning in Jewish scripture, but it was taken up among Kabbalists, making 1666 a ripe year for the End of Days. It was an expectant time, and signs that the End of Days was at hand abounded. This contributed to the “penitential enthusiasm” that Scholem identifies as one of the key “inner ‘facts’” explaining the emergence of the Sabbatian movement. This enthusiasm grew as Nathan of Gaza’s writings circulated throughout the Diaspora, especially a text titled Treatise on the Dragons, which has been lost to history. It evidently foregrounded apocalyptic and messianic notions in Kabbalah.⁹⁵ Nathan also emphasized the crucial importance of repentance, which “appealed to the noblest longings in every Jewish heart, but this time it was coupled to the very specific purpose of shortening the messianic woes and hastening the advent of redemption.”⁹⁶

Such a hastening required repentance, fasting (sometimes for an entire week), self-flagellation, purification baths, frequent prayer, meditations, and the confession of sins, both to prepare one’s soul for judgment and to contribute to the breaking open of kelippot and the advent of redemption. The Sabbatians also courted controversy by flouting many traditional Jewish laws and because of allegations of sexual libertinism. Sabbatai also raised eyebrows by marrying a sixteen-year-old girl, a reputed “harlot” named Sarah (“Queen of Palestine”), who had received visions that she was called to marry the Messiah. Occasionally he also demanded that his adult followers send their virgin daughters to him, although Sabbatai evidently remained celibate throughout most of his life. Nonetheless, Sarah bore him a son around the fateful year of 1666.⁹⁷

That year was critical both for Sabbatai Sevi and for Judaism. Following the “mystical Messiah’s” arrest in Constantinople, the caliph sought to bring Sabbatai’s movement to an end, as it was proving to be a strain on the economy of the Ottoman Empire. Its cities, especially Jerusalem, were being overwhelmed with expectant Jews from all over Europe awaiting the End of Days and the resurrection of the dead. There was also some uproar over the Messiah’s peculiar behavior and frequent receptions of the virgin daughters of his followers.⁹⁸ In September of that year, he was sent to prison in Adrianople (today Eirdne, Turkey), some 200 kilometers northwest of Constantinople, where authorities contemplated his execution, “lest they make a new religion.”⁹⁹ They relented, however. Sabbatai was then brought before a jury and “offered a choice between being put to death forthwith or converting to Islam, ‘in which case we shall petition the padishah (the sultan) to have mercy on you.’”¹⁰⁰ He was also invited to prove that he was the Messiah by performing a miracle, though during his trial Sabbatai denied ever having claimed to be the redeemer. As this choice was presented to the would-be Messiah, throngs of his Jewish followers gathered outside the prison, on prayer rugs in the city streets, and awaited the next twist in this incredible saga.

It is fascinating to contemplate what might have been running through Sabbatai’s mind when faced with this decision. The miracle proposed was that he be fired upon with arrows by the sultan’s archers and survived unharmed, so that must have seemed uninviting to the potential Messiah, to say the least. Like Jesus before him, who evidently had an opportunity to escape his crucifixion, Sabbatai might have considered accepting the fate of execution, in which case Judaism, and likely the entire world, would have taken quite a different course since 1666. After all, had Jesus not been crucified, Christianity would likely never have happened, or it would have developed in considerably different forms, devoid of central Christian notions of redemptive sacrifice and the resurrection. There was literally an entire world at stake in Sabbatai’s decision.

So, what did Sabbatai Sevi decide? “Sabbatai made a simple declaration signifying his readiness to embrace Islam.” And with that, one of the greatest messianic movements in world history came crashing down, as few of his followers could believe that the Messiah could be a Muslim, an apostate. (Nathan kept the faith, though, and worked hard to explain it all in his writings): “The sultan graciously accepted the convert, permitted him to assume his name, and appointed the onetime Sabbatai and now Mehemed Effendi . . . to the honorary office of kapici bashi (keeper of the palace gates).” He was taken to bathe and given new robes and a turban, more fitting for a Muslim, and he would spend the rest of his life either at the royal palace in Adrianople, as a gatekeeper, or as an exile in Albania. He died in 1676 in what is today Montenegro. This hardly seems to befit King David’s messianic descendant, who was prophesied to appear on Earth to reconquer Jerusalem by force and bring forth redemption. It was an utter tragedy, underscoring the dangers of apocalypticism and messianism.

Conclusion

Martin Kavka writes, “Anticipation of a messianic figure who brings peace and political autonomy to Israel is also anticipation of God’s nearness to the nation, mediated through the human figure of the messiah.”¹⁰¹ It is also anticipation of redemption, a redemption rooted in thousands of years of hope in the faithfulness of God. As the calamity of seventeenth-century Sabbatianism illustrates, furthermore, it is a dangerous form of anticipation, one that has led so many people across the ages to abandon everything, including their lives, in its name. This eschatological expectancy has gone far in governing the course of world history, though, as without it there would be no Christianity, the religion to which our attention turns in the following chapter.

Notes

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Glossary

Akiva (50–130 C.E.)

Rabbi and one of the greatest contributors to the Talmud and to the understanding of Judaism. A mystic and brilliant legal mind. Born and died in the Holy Land; lived to nurture thousands of students. ↵

Antiochus IV (215–164 B.C.E.)

“Antiochus the Great” ruled the Seleucid Empire from 175 to 164 B.C.E.; suppressor of Judaism, which led to the Maccabee revolt for Jewish independence. ↵

Apocrypha (Greek adj: Apocryphal)­ 

From the ancient Greek word apokryptein, which means “to hide away,” the apocrypha are texts in a range of religions that were never incorporated into canonical scripture; in the case of Judaism, such texts, including the book of Enoch, are not in the Hebrew Bible. ↵

Armageddon

The catastrophic battle at the end of time between the forces of God and good and the forces of Satan and evil. Likely derives etymologically from the Hebrew term for Megiddo, a place between Syria and Egypt; in today’s Israel, it is likely Tel Megiddo. Mentioned in the book of Revelation (16:16). ↵

Book of Daniel

A book in the Hebrew Bible. The most important apocalyptic text therein; likely pseudepigraphic, or written by others but attributed to Daniel, a pious and righteous Jew in the Babylonian diaspora, in the second century B.C.E. ↵

Book of Enoch

Apocryphal text and an important source of Jewish eschatology. Though not in the Hebrew Bible, it is cited therein and was well known to some of the Bible’s authors. Written by multiple authors in Aramaic between 900 and 50 B.C.E. ↵

Book of the Watchers

The first section of the apocryphal book of Enoch, this apocalyptic text prophesies that at the End Time “the watchers will be awakened,” hence its title. ↵

Canon (adj: Canonical)

From the Greek canon, meaning “cane,” “stick,” “measure,” “rule”; in religion this connotes texts that are formally recognized as authoritative and incorporated into scripture. ↵

Chmielnicki Massacres

As many as 100,000 Jews were massacred in Poland in 1648. This tragedy in part led to the messianic movement of Sabbatianism. ↵

Conservative Judaism

Emerging in Germany in the nineteenth century, Conservative Judaism is a major branch of the religion that seeks to balance tradition with ever-changing social and cultural realities. ↵

Dead Sea Scrolls

Also referred to as the Qumran Scrolls, after the place that they were discovered, above the Dead Sea, these biblical-era texts were found in the late 1940s; scrolls full of the wisdom of the monastic community that resided in the caves, the Essenes. ↵

De León, Moses (1250–1305)

Sephardic Jew and influential rabbi who complied a range of Kabbalistic teachings into a single text known as the Zohar, one of the most influential books in the history of Judaism. He may have been the actual author, although he attributed the writings to others. ↵

Ein Sof

Literally “the Infinite.” In Kabbalah this is the ultimately unknowable essence of God. ↵

Eschatology

Religious teachings and beliefs about the End of Time and the hereafter. ↵

Essenes (“Sons of Light”)

The apocalyptic monastic community that lived in the caves of Qumran during the biblical era; authors and keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ↵

Gehinnom

A purgatorial destination of most souls after death, where they are purged and prepared to enter heaven. A hell of sorts, where one is punished for one’s sins, but it is a temporary experience (though evidently permanent for the most wicked). More a Talmudic than a biblical notion. ↵

Gemara

Part of the Talmud that contains legal arguments and philosophical interpretations of Jewish law and history; the “Completion.”

Golden Rule

A central ethical teaching of Judaism, based on this passage in Leviticus (19:18): “Love your fellow as yourself.” ↵

Halakhah (Halakha)

Derived from a root term meaning “to walk,” the totality of Jewish law, according to which Jews strive to live. Touches upon all facets of life. ↵

Hanukkah

High Jewish holiday that commemorates the success of the 162 B.C.E. Maccabee revolt against oppression; also known as the Feast of Dedication, a celebration that involves the lighting of the menorah (lit: “lamp”). ↵

Hillel the Elder (110 B.C.E.–10 C.E.)

One of the most influential of all authors and interpreters of the Talmud, Hillel placed the Golden Rule at the very center of Judaism. ↵

Ibn Aryeh

A pious Jew and rabbi who was thought to be the Messiah in the twelfth century in Spain. ↵

Judea

The ancient Jewish community in and surrounding Jerusalem, descendants of Yehuda; roughly from the tenth to the sixth century B.C.E. ↵

Kabbalah

Leading school of Jewish mysticism. Emerged in the late Middle Ages and remains the preeminent consortium of mystical knowledge into the Divine in Judaism. ↵

Kaplan, Mordecai (1881–1983)

Influential rabbi and Jewish theologian who founded the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism in the United States. Emphasized behaving and belonging as more central to Judaism than belief. ↵

Kelippot (Qelippoth – various spellings)

Mystical concept in Kabbalah; material shells or husks that need to be burst open for the Messiah to complete the work of redemption and for God to become liberated and complete. Often associated with evil. ↵

King David

Biblical figure believed to have been the leader of Judea and Israel during the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C.E. Prophesied to be the progenitor of a future king who would restore the Jewish nation and become the Messiah. ↵

King Herod

Also known as Herod the Great, appointed Roman king of Judea in the first century B.C.E. Learned of the birth of the future king of the Jews, and hence ordered all Jewish newborns slaughtered, an event called the Massacre of the Innocents. ↵

King Nebuchadnezzar

Seventh and sixth century B.C.E. Babylonian king who is believed to have conquered Judea, destroyed King Solomon’s temple, and initiated the Babylonian captivity. A figure of significance in the book of Daniel. ↵

Luria, Isaac (1534–1572) 

A rabbi and the most influential interpreter of the Zohar, or the key mystical text of Kabbalah. So influential that scholars speak not just of Kabbalah but of Lurianic Kabbalah. Also known as Ha-Ari, or the Lion; the key figure among the Safed mystics. ↵

Maccabee, Judah (190–160 B.C.E.)

Leader of a revolt against Roman oppression that resulted in the restoration of the kingdom of Judea and the return of the beloved temple in Jerusalem to Jewish control, an epochal event that is celebrated in Judaism as Hannukah. ↵

Maimonides, Moses (1135? –1204)

One of the greatest of all Jewish philosophers (of all philosophers, really); author of the influential Guide to the Perplexed (circa 1190, original in Arabic) and outliner of the Thirteen Principles of Judaism. ↵

Masada

A fortified compound of Jews, atop a mountain of the same name, staving off Roman oppression; first-century C.E. insurgents also known as Zealots, who may have committed mass suicide rather than succumbing to defeat. ↵

Messiah (Meschiach, or Mashiach)

A future king of the Jews who is expected to appear on Earth and usher in and rule during the messianic period of redemption. A descendant of King David, as well as a prophet and priest. ↵

Millenarianism

The belief that the world is going to end soon. Tied to the notion of the millennia (1000 years), though open to a wide range of interpretations; often understood in terms of the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. ↵

Mishnah

Part of the Talmud, or extra-biblical Jewish scripture; literally means “oral argument” and is composed of debates and reflection on the laws of Judaism, or the Mitzvah and its totality, the Halakhah. ↵

Mitzvot (Pl. Mitzvah)

Literally meaning “commandment,” laws that Jews are commanded by God to obey, 613 in all, including the Ten Commandments; collectively they and commentaries/interpretations thereof are known as Halakhah. ↵

Mohammed IV (1642–1693)

Also known as Mehmet IV; Ottoman emperor, or sultan, who had Sabbatai Sevi arrested in Istanbul under the pretext that the latter was a false messiah and that his movement was threatening the stability of the former’s rule. ↵

Moses

The greatest of all prophets in Jewish history, believed to have received the Ten Commandments from God in the fifteenth century B.C.E. and to have led his people from bondage to liberation.

Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680)

Influential seventeenth-century Kabbalist theologian and rabbi who proclaimed Sabbatai Sevi to be the Messiah and wrote extensively about the latter’s meaning and teachings. ↵

Orthodox Judaism

The oldest and most conservative branch of Judaism; one of the four major forms of Judaism in the world today, along with Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. ↵

Pentateuch

Literally “five books” or “five scrolls,” in the Greek original; the Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. ↵

Promised Land

Key theological concept in Judaism; the land promised to God’s chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, in the book of Genesis. The Promised Land is described as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Also promised to Moses in the book of Exodus. ↵

Pseudepigrapha (adj. Pseudepigraphic)

Literally “written under a false (name)” in the Greek original; biblical and extra-biblical texts written by unknown authors but attributed to kings, prophets, patriarchs, apostles, or other esteemed ancestors. ↵

Qumran

Name of a village inhabited by Jews in biblical times; located on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea; in its caves were discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. ↵

Reconstructionist Judaism

Founded in the United States by Mordecai Kaplan in the 1920s, the youngest and arguably most liberal branch of Judaism, placing an emphasis on culture and community over and above doctrine and belief. ↵

Reform Judaism

A liberal branch of Judaism that began in Germany in the eighteenth century; generally questions traditional notions like the authority of the Talmud and relaxes ritual obligations among its congregants; also promotes cultural assimilation among Jews wherever they happen to live. ↵

Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676)

Sephardic Jew and ordained rabbi from the ancient Turkish city of Smyrna (today’s Izmir). Sevi (also spelled Tzvi, Zevi, etc.) was a renowned and charismatic Kabbalist who was identified by Jews around him as the Messiah, meaning that the End of Days was at hand. Converted to Islam in 1666 while under arrest. ↵

Sabbatianism (Sabbateanism)

The largest messianic movement in Jewish history after the emergence of Christianity, Sabbatianism flourished in the mid-seventeenth century, centered on the belief that Sabbatai Sevi was the Messiah and that the End of Days was at hand. ↵

Safed

Small hilltop city located in Galilee in the north of the modern nation-state of Israel. Home to an ancient community of Jews whose leaders would become the most influential interpreters and teachers of Kabbalah by the sixteenth century. ↵

Samayim

Heaven, the eternal realm of the righteous ruled by God after the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of the living and the dead. This notion originates in the Hebrew Bible but is expanded considerably in the Talmud. ↵

Sefirot

The ten characteristics of qualities of God, from the Hebrew safar (“to count”); these include Crown, Wisdom, Mercy, etc. and are what we can know mystically about God. Connected, they make up the substance of the central Kabbalist notion of the shekhinah. ↵

Seleucid Empire

Vast Macedonian empire centered in Babylon that emerged after the collapse of Alexander the Great and endured from 312 to 64 B.C.E. ↵

Shekhinah

Literally in Hebrew “dwelling” or “settling,” the collective emanations of God that infuse the universe. The idea does not appear in the Hebrew Bible but emerges in the Talmud and becomes the central notion in Kabbalist thought, symbology, and apocalypticism. Uniter of the sefirot and the female aspect of God. Conceptualized as a Divine Tree. ↵

She’ol

Hell in Jewish belief, a place of punishment for the wicked; only vaguely discussed in the Hebrew Bible but expanded upon considerably in the Talmudic discussions of gehinnom, a purgatory of sorts where the wicked are purified or punished eternally. ↵

Shimon bar Yohai

Second century C.E. Palestinian rabbi to whom the authorship of the Zohar was attributed in the thirteenth century by Moses De León. A preeminent disciple of Akiva and among the most influential rabbis of his age. ↵

Synagogue

In some circles also called a temple, a synagogue is a place of gathering for Jews to worship, study, and commune with one another. The Greek origin of the term simply means “gathering” or “assembly,” and it need not be a building (the usual association of the word today), but simply a gathering of at least ten adult (usually male) Jews. ↵

Talmud (adj: Talmudic)

Literally meaning “teaching,” a vast corpus of rabbinic commentaries, teachings, and debates on a wide range of topics of concern in Judaism. A scriptural corpus surpassed in importance in Judaism only by the Hebrew Bible. Compiled by the fifth century C.E., though commentaries were added for the following two centuries. Consists of the Mishnah (Oral Law) and Gemara (Completions). ↵

Tanakh

Hebrew term for the Hebrew Bible, which is commonly referred to by Christians as the “Old Testament.” ↵

Ten Commandments

The most important of all Jewish laws; believed to have been received by the greatest of all of Judaism’s prophets, Moses, inscribed on tablets by God on Mt. Sinai, as recounted in the book of Exodus (20:1–17) and the book of Deuteronomy (5:1–21). ↵

Torah

The first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers; account of history from God’s creation of the world through the prophecies of Moses, as well as a compilation of definitive Jewish law. Original Hebrew meanings: “teaching,” “instruction,” or “law.” ↵

Yahweh (YHWH)

The name of God in ancient Hebrew, as revealed to Moses. ↵

Zealots (also known as the Sicarii)

Community of roughly a thousand Jews who occupied a garrison atop Mount Masada in the Judaean desert and resisted Roman oppression by collectively committing suicide rather than being further oppressed by their invaders/occupiers. ↵

Zohar

The most influential collection of Jewish mystical texts; compiled (or authored) in Spain by Moses De León in the thirteenth century, though many of its sections and teachings had been in circulation among Jews for generations. ↵