Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  In the following year, Judas, now with ten thousand at his side and invoking the great name of David, Jerusalem’s beloved warrior-king, defeated a Greek force that was more than six times the size of the Jewish army. Then, keeping the army of the Acra at bay, he entered Jerusalem to undo the blasphemy. The sanctuary of the Temple was deserted, the altar horribly desecrated, the gates burned down, the courts as filled with vegetation “as it might in a wood or on some mountain.” The Jews “prostrated themselves on the ground, and when the trumpets gave the signal they cried aloud to Heaven.” Priests who were “blameless and zealous for the Law” removed the “stones of the Pollution” to a cesspool. The Jews pulled down the profaned altar of burnt offering and “deposited the stones in a suitable place … to await the appearance of a prophet”—sadly, there was none—“who should give a ruling about them.” They made a new altar from unhewn stones, restored the Holy of Holies, forged new sacred vessels, lit the lamps of the great menorah, and made an eight-day celebration, singing psalms and playing music “with rejoicing and with gladness.” This is the Feast of Hanukkah (or [Re]Dedication), to which the pleasant legend later attached that there was found in the Temple a cruse of oil sufficient for only one night’s illumination, but the miraculous oil burned for eight nights, inspiring the Jewish domestic custom of lighting lamps during the eight nights of the commemoration.

  This festival marks an extraordinary moment in the history of the ancient world, a triumph over the prevailing religious indifferentism and over the tyrant’s assumed right to regulate the heart as well as the realm. What is most inspiring about Hanukkah is that it memorializes the first clear victory in history for freedom of worship, a celebration that, as contemporary rabbis point out, belongs to all religious people.

  THE STORY OF THE MACCABEES (Judas’s nickname was eventually used of his whole family) has more to impart to us than a simple tale of victory over tyranny. The chronicler’s exacting Greek method of approaching his material shows how far alien techniques and ideas had penetrated Jewish society by the end of the second century B.C. and that, no matter the vigilance of any ethnarchy, it cannot withstand the siren song of the larger society that encompasses it. Even the most faithful Jews were now part of the Greek world; and, like it or not, by adopting its techniques, they were adopting at least some of its values.

  Judas, though he created a new balance between believing Jews and their Greek overlords, did not succeed in wresting the Acra from the Greeks and could not, given his limited resources, overcome Greek power permanently or establish a new political order. His later campaigns, however, which broadened the territory under direct Jewish control, grew more savage, taking up the Alexander principle of putting whole cities to the sword and dealing mercilessly with whoever dared defy him. The militancy of the Maccabees not only divided Jewish society but led to the rise of the Zealots, the armed revolutionaries who would at last draw upon Judah the unwonted attentions of an empire far more powerful than even the Greeks could have imagined, an empire that would in A.D. 70 crush Jerusalem like a gnat, leaving “not a stone upon a stone.” The leveled city would not again know Jewish ownership till our day, when the Maccabees were “rediscovered” by Israeli Zionists, who made them culture heroes once again and gave them new legitimacy.

  Ironically, however, the later Maccabees would hardly join the revolution their ancestors inspired. Instead, they became the disappointing Hasmoneans, a dynastic family whose prede-cessors sprang from an unimportant line that had made no mark on Jewish history prior to the Maccabees. Thus, they had no legitimate claim to the offices they came to occupy—of local ruler and high priest, both offices at times devolving on one man—because they descended neither from the seed of Aaron, Moses’s brother and the first high priest, nor from the seed of David, the champion who had once united the Twelve Tribes of Israel into one great kingdom. The “legitimacy” of the Maccabee-Hasmoneans rested rather on their complicity with the monarch of the moment. Judas had taught the king a lesson that subsequent Greek and Roman leaders did not forget. Future rulers would normally come to the sensible conclusion that it is better not to stir the pot of Judah unnecessarily but to put a Jew in charge, especially one as accommodating—and enthusiastic about imperial taxation—as the Hasmoneans gradually became. The majority of Jews came to view these Jewish overlords as oppressors. The last and least distinguished of the line are well known to us: the Herods.

  This sorry state of affairs poisoned even the atmosphere of the holy Temple, held hostage to a gang of priest-pretenders who, like so many Renaissance cardinals, had little interest in God or prayer, whose interest in wealth and ignorance of religion led them to take rigidly conservative positions, and whose piety was not so much suspect as nonexistent. But a people so absorbed with God cannot be left so spiritually poor. In reaction to the Hasmonean dilution of Judaism, countermovements developed.

  The members of one of these movements abandoned the Temple and took to the desert. They were called Essenes,3 and we knew little about them before 1947, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy who, idly throwing stones into a dark cave near Qumran, south of Jericho, heard an unexpected clunk—the sound of his stone fracturing an ancient urn, which turned out to be one of scores of such urns filled with hundreds of scrolls. Almost all scholars now agree that these scrolls (and fragments) of papyrus and leather are the remains of an extensive Essene library, squirreled away for safekeeping in eleven separate caves during a time of civil unrest (perhaps in Jerusalem’s last hour) and successfully hidden from view for nineteen hundred years. The scrolls, containing biblical books in versions far more ancient than anything we previously possessed, have also yielded documents unknown till now, giving rich evidence of the elusive community that preserved them.

  To all intents and purposes, the Essenes were celibate Jewish monks, permanently severed from a society that had grown degenerate, and they were a shocking development within a religion that had come close to worshiping generativity and worldly involvement. Abraham had been promised progeny; and all the promises God had made to the Jews revolved around the ultimate success of “their seed” within the confines of this world. How, then, could a movement of pious Jews forsake the obligation (and concomitant pleasure) of sexual reproduction and the joys of material life? If this strikes one as grotesque, almost as remarkable is the evidence, contained in the scroll entitled The Manual of Discipline, that in addition to chastity, the Essenes were effectively vowed to poverty (or the community of goods) and obedience, submitting to near-military control by the Essene leaders.

  Because God’s Temple, now in the hands of time-servers and worse, had been irreparably compromised, there was only one course the righteous could take: to withdraw from the world, since it must be coming to an end. The high priest of the Temple, the “Wicked Priest,” though “called by the name of truth when he first arose,” had betrayed God and built “with blood a city of vanity,” a city that robbed the poor to fatten the rich. There is good reason to identify this priest with Jonathan Maccabeus, Judas’s younger brother, who was appointed high priest after Judas’s death and played footsie with the Seleucids. His opposite number in the Dead Sea Scrolls is “the Teacher of Righteousness,” a kind of abbot of the community, of whom we know nothing outside the Scrolls. All indications pointed in the direction of a final battle, which the Essene community believed would soon be waged, between “the Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light,” who would have the archangel Michael as their champion. It was this proximate apocalypse that supported the Essenes’ radical lifestyle: if the world was about to end, generativity, property, and personal freedom were beside the point. What evidence we have also suggests that John the Baptizer, Jesus’s immediate predecessor, whom the gospels locate in the same Judean desert that the Essenes called home, was once part of this community and shared its vision of a coming conflagration.

  The underlying reason for the exclusion of the Maccabean material from the
canon of the Hebrew Bible was not that the Jews lacked a version in Hebrew. At least in the case of First Maccabees, they once possessed the Hebrew original. The reason it was lost is that the early rabbis did not value the material, which glorified the exploits of the Maccabees, because they had no use for the Maccabees’ descendants, the Hasmonean dynasty. The rabbis—or “teachers” of Israel, who are first mentioned in this post-Alexandrine period and who are with us to this day—tried in many ways to steer a middle course between the absolute purity of the Essenes and the smarmy pragmatism of the Hasmoneans. They loved the Law in all its details; and this was their focus, not fanciful predictions of apocalypse. They would not be pushed out of society; they would live normal lives as normal men but with a reverence for the Law more elaborate than anyone had ever attempted before them. Paradoxically, they were called “Pharisees” (or “Separate Ones”), but this may be a name given them by enemies. It is among their ranks that we should probably seek one of their less distinguished (and abnormal) colleagues, Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers called him “rabbi.”

  The world in which this Jesus grew to manhood, a world of now-extinct “Judaisms,” was not very like any Jewish environment that we know of in more recent times. After all, the ancient Temple cultus and its priesthood, however compromised, were destroyed completely in the catastrophe of A.D. 70—about four decades after Jesus. The Essenes disappeared about the same time beneath the desert sands. Of all these divergent “Judaisms” the one we know least about is Sadduceeism. The Sadducees, who seem to have departed the scene about the same time as the Essenes and the Hasmonean high priests, had links to the priesthood and appear to have been, in the main, wealthy, influential men. Almost the only things we know for certain about them are that they sometimes clashed with the Pharisees over interpretation of the Law and that they did not believe in an afterlife.

  The idea of continued life for human beings after physical death is unknown in the earliest—and most important—documents of Judaism, the Torah and the Prophets. Enslaved Israel’s brush with Egyptian religion, when the Israelites in the second millennium B.C. were forced to build mausoleums for dead pharaohs, may have been enough to keep the Jews away from all that woo-woo “spirituality” about the Mummy’s Curse and the floating and immortal souls of dead kings and their retinues. Israelite religion was about land and progeny, thank you all the same—not the unreal realms of the dead, backed up by creepy movie music. But it was also about good and evil actions, about justice to the poor, and fidelity to God. The Ten Commandments, which came to the Jews through Moses, but ultimately from God, give scant promise of reward for doing right. One must love justice and mercy for their own sake—and for God’s—not because one receives heavenly upgrades for good behavior. Of course, leading a good life, a life in accordance with God’s justice, will normally lead to all the good things: children, honor, prosperity, and serene old age.

  But what of those who suffer? What of those, like Job, who lose everything despite their faithfulness? Are their lives merely evidence that God is not the God of Justice but of Injustice? Such thoughts troubled the Jews (as they still trouble us); and in the later writings of the Hebrew Bible, as well as in the writings of this period that were not accepted into the Hebrew canon, they worried over this dilemma.

  One solution was, as we have seen, Apocalypse: a universal Dies Irae that would get the wicked and vindicate the good guys. The later chapters of the Book of Isaiah—which do not come from the pen of the prophet but from an unknown writer who lived after the return of the Jews from Babylon in the period before the Hasmoneans—begin to speak of the redemptive power of suffering and of a “suffering servant” who will in his meekness redeem his people, that is, ransom them from slavery and sin. The Book of Daniel contains a prophecy about “one like a Son of Man”—that is, a human being—almost certainly an image of Israel, rescued by God from its sufferings and exalted among the nations after the successive collapse of each of the world’s empires. All these prophecies are couched in ambiguous symbolic language, and all seem to assume that the coming Good Time must be preceded by the Day of God’s Wrath.

  The Second Book of Maccabees, which covers much the same material as First Maccabees but in a far more florid style, recounts the Gothic tale of a woman who, during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, was made to watch as her seven sons, who had refused to taste pork, were whipped and scourged. Antiochus (who would hardly have been present in a sordid Jerusalem torture chamber but would rather have been found far from this scene in one of his palaces at Antioch or Babylon) is depicted as mad with rage, ordering that pans and cauldrons be heated till they are red-hot. He commands that the spokesman for the brothers have his tongue cut out, his head scalped, and his extremities cut off. What is left of the poor man is then fried in a pan. His brothers know that the same fate awaits them if they again refuse the forbidden food. “The Lord God is watching,” encourages their mother, “and certainly feels sorry for us, as Moses declared in his song, which clearly states that ‘he will take pity on his servants.’ ”

  You can almost hear the writer’s mental gears turning: if good people, the best people, are made to die in this way, death cannot be the end of everything. The saints must prevail—but how? The mother, as she witnesses successively the torture and death of each son, does not try to intervene but encourages each “in their ancestral tongue,” a telling detail, because by this time the Jews no longer spoke Hebrew but Aramaic, the dominant tongue of the Near East, which the Greek Seleucids had grudgingly adopted as their language of administration after they became the kings of Alexander’s Asia. Antiochus, who is counting on at least one recantation to make his day, is distraught when he finds he is now down to the youngest son, who is proving as inflexible as his freshly executed brothers. The king appeals to the mother to give her one surviving son some sensible, motherly advice. But the mother, leaning over her son, “fooled the cruel tyrant with these words,” uttered, of course, in excellent Hebrew, which the king, nodding his enthusiastic assent, could not understand: “ ‘My son, have pity on me; I carried you nine months in my womb and suckled you three years, fed you and reared you to the age you are now, and provided for you. I implore you, my child, look at the earth and sky and everything in them, and consider how God made them out of what did not exist, and that human beings come into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner, but prove yourself worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that I may receive you back with them in the day of mercy.’ ” The last son is slaughtered, and then the mother.4

  The saints will prevail “in the day of mercy.” But all these images and prophecies of eventual victory seem to require a preliminary “judgment on the wicked” (as the last son prophesies)—a prior cataclysm, something that more moderate believers were, understandably, loath to entertain. (I recall a zonked British rocker in the late sixties urging me to cancel a trip to California because, according to the prophecies of Nostradamus, that state was about to be divided from the mainland and slip into the Pacific. Well, perhaps Nostradamus was merely off by a few decades or—more likely, in my opinion—true prophets are few and far between and, in any case, notoriously unreliable when it comes to actual dates.) Balanced believers who had productive lives and investments in family and property and who did not especially welcome the fiery end of everything found a variant way to answer the question of how the suffering of good people can be justified, a way that did not insist so extravagantly on universal destruction: the just—those who had lived by the Word of God and treated their fellow man fairly and mercifully—would live forever with God, so their earthly suffering was but a prelude to their everlasting glory.

  It is often asserted that this idea of everlasting life is a borrowing from the Greeks, who thought the body but a prison that enclosed the immortal butterfly of the soul. But the Greek idea of immortality was very different from the evolving Jewish idea that there must be life beyond this life—if life is to make sense.
For one thing, the Greeks imagined that the soul had existed forever, prior to its imprisonment in a body. The Jews could never countenance such ethereal blather. God had created each individual at one particular time as a body born of woman; there could be no possibility of anything like preexistent spirit. Each person was exactly what you saw and smelled: a body of flesh and blood.

  Job, at the lowest point of his hideous suffering, his children dead, his property gone, his body covered in sores, screams out his justification:

  This I know: that my Avenger5 lives,

  and that he, the Last, will take his stand on earth.

  After my awaking, he will set me close to him,

  and in my flesh shall I see God!

  On earth. In his flesh. Within the classic Jewish worldview nothing else is possible, no merely spiritual vindication. “Heaven,” boasted the third son of the mother of Second Maccabees, “gave me these limbs; for the sake of his laws I have no concern for them; from him I hope to receive them again”—not float around as a disembodied soul.

  But, gradually, even this possibility of “resurrection to new life,” as the fourth son termed it, gave way to a more nuanced interpretation, based neither on Platonic metaphor nor on Jewish theological speculation, but on what the Jews had always relied on, their faith in their God. Someday, somehow, there will be a final accounting, which must, of necessity, include a resurrection of the bodies that have turned to dust—a resurrection “in my flesh.” Beyond the grave, the good will be rewarded as they never were in life; and the evil ones, who seemed to own the world, will be hurled into unimaginable perdition. But there must be a place—outside time—where the souls of the just are kept, awaiting their final resurrection and vindication. We cannot understand these matters, for they lie beyond our ken. But we believe that God is just and that even after death we are, as we have always been, in his hands. Thus, this passage from the Book of Wisdom, written by a Jew of Alexandria in the decades just before Jesus and so hopeful that it has been read at funerals ever since: