Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [177]
On the other hand, the book of Daniel is full of supernatural interventions directly in history, all prophesied or divined ahead of time by special dreams and revelations. In fact, the military action of the Maccabees appears to be directly addressed in the book of Daniel-as another group allied to the sect and called the “little help” (Dan 11:34), evidently belittled out of disappointment and frustration. The group that produced Daniel cannot be the Maccabees but it may be something like the group of people called the Hasidim (“pious ones,” Hasideans in Greek) in 1 Maccabees 2.11 In 2:42, a group of Hasidim or Hasideans is described as joining the Maccabean cause, but some are subsequently martyred because they offer no resistance to military action on the Sabbath. They made a common cause with the more practical Maccabean soldiers but evidently gave up hostilities once the Temple was purified.
But trouble resumes, this time between the Maccabees and some priests, as the Maccabees get more and more ambitious when they become rulers. Evidently a priestly group broke decisively with the Maccabees in 142 BCE when Simon Maccabee was proclaimed “high priest forever, until a faithful prophet should arise” (1 Macc 14:41). The Maccabees came from a rural priestly family but they were not of the high priestly family. They were not eligible for the high priestly office so they took it by force. By 142 BCE they were very Hellenized themselves. Possibly they produced the short paean in Psalm 110, so important to later Christianity, which proclaims a new high priestly line forever, from the order of Melchizedek (literally: the righteous king). The Maccabees may propose Melchizedek as an alternative lineage to the high priestly lineage through Zadok which they usurped because they had become the kings of the country. If so, the sectarian group that produced Daniel may have assumed that the Mac-cabean high priest was actually Malkirasha (the sinful king) and that they themselves were the righteous ones. This is later characteristic of the Dead Sea Scroll community. There must be a relationship.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Daniel
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS give a totally unexpected glimpse of Jewish sectarian life, for they are concerned with the nature of the actual community as well as its apocalyptic expectations about the end of time. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect an Essene-like group, they make possible for the first time a view of the workings of an actual apocalyptic community, comparing the social organization described in the Dead Sea Scrolls with known and newly-found apocalyptic writings, and even, with some care, the descriptions which Josephus and Philo give us concerning the Essenes.
It is the Dead Sea Scrolls that give us the most hints as to the importance of the events described in Daniel for the millennialist sect. In the scrolls we find a number of different materials, some of which were important only to the sect while others were of more general interest to Judaism. Among the sectarian writings were a series of pesherim (pěšărîm, “solutions,” “interpretations”), which purport to give the full meaning of various prophetic texts. The full meanings tend to be hidden references to historical events which happened to the sect and which they then recognized as prophesied in the Bible. None would have been obvious to anyone outside the group and show how readily scripturally centered groups can reread texts so long as they serve as prophecies for events critical to sectarian history.
This underlies the constant use of Scripture to produce political ideology. In this respect, their interpretation of Scripture