Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [304]
Like the ascent vision in 1 Enoch, the ascent in Testament of Levi interrupts the narrative.24 It begins in a prophetic dream while Levi, the ancestor of the priestly line, is tending his flocks. An angelic guide brings him through the heavens, pointing out the cosmological features that most people of that time assumed to be there: the treasuries of rain, snow, fire, ice, and the brightness, placing the superior moral machinery higher than the merely meteorological machinery. At the beginning of chapter 5 the angel shows Levi God sitting on the throne and this exquisite sight is the sign that he will be given “the blessing of the priesthood until I shall come and dwell in the midst of Israel.” It was the priests’ job to see God. Theophany and priesthood go together because it was the priest who entered the holy of holies on the Day of Atonement.
The angel gives him a shield and sword to execute vengeance on Shechem, a key issue that may help understand the social location of the Testament. It seems to rely on the story of the destruction of Shechem and the sons of Hamor (Genesis 34) as a typology for some contemporary event (see also Josh 24:32, Judg 9:28, and Acts 7:16).
In chapter 8, we resume the vision narrative, suggesting that the story of Shechem was meant to have special import. When the vision continues, Levi is enthroned with all the honors of the high priesthood. But the writer is also seeking to legitimate his own community in his own day:
“Levi, your posterity shall be divided into three offices as a sign of the glory of the Lord who is coming. The first lot shall be great; no other shall be greater than it. The second shall be the priestly role. But the third shall be granted a new name, because from Judah a king will arise and shall found a new priesthood in accord with the gentile model and for all nations. His presence is beloved, as a prophet of the Most High, a descendant of Abraham your father. To you and your posterity will be everything desired in Israel, and you shall eat everything attractive to behold, and your posterity will share among themselves the Lord’s table. From among them will be priests, judges, and scribes, and by their word the sanctuary will be controlled.” When I awoke, I understood that this was like the first dream. And I hid this in my heart as well, and I did not report it to any human being on the earth. (T. Levi 8:11-12)
Few have suggested how much this prophecy helped the gentile Christian church understand itself in contradistinction to the Jewish (and perhaps some in the Jewish-Christian) community. If the passage is using the story of Shechem as a typology, the vengeance taken against the circumcised might be a the result of a deliberate Biblical typology (symbolic reading of the Bible with a later incident in mind) predicting the lack of acceptance among the Jews of the Judaized Christians who thought to join the new Israel by circumcision through the story of Shechem. The narrator’s point is that this replicates the pattern set in the Old Testament when the Israelites on one occasion unjustly attacked Canaan. Obviously, this was not the original interpretation of that story. The innovation emphasizes that one need not keep the special rules of Jewish diet. So this seems to be an explicitly gentile Christian revelation.
Daniel 5:11ff. was originally an independent apocalypse. The preserved are called “the souls of the saints.”25 The life to come is described as “rest” and “eternal peace” (v 11), probably attesting to contact with the book of Hebrews in the New Testament and as the definite liberation