The phrase, the kingdom of Heaven, appears on the lips of Jesus more than any other in the Gospels. He often speaks about it using analogy, “the kingdom of Heaven is like,” or in a manner that assumes his original listeners knew what he meant. Yet, for modern readers of the Gospels, including many New Testament scholars, the phrase remains elusive. Is it present? Future? Both? Does it represent the idea of one who sought to take up the sword against Rome? Or maybe, it refers to the apocalyptic end of the present world? The failure of modern readers to apprehend Jesus’ meaning of the kingdom reflects our distance from his world and faith, as well as a lack of understanding of the nuances of Jewish hopes of redemption. Today, we begin a three-part series on the kingdom of Heaven within ancient Judaism and Jesus.
By the 1st century AD, all Jews agreed upon three things: (1) There is only one god, the God of Israel; (2) Israel is his chosen people, and this relationship is codified by the giving of the Torah, which articulates God’s will and covenant with Israel (see Exodus 19:5-6); and (3) Only when Israel is free can she truly worship God in the manner that he desires. We see this in the words of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist:
“…as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus, he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:70-75).
Israel’s freedom served as the precondition for Israel to properly worship God. In other words, Jewish hopes of redemption were always political and spiritual. Those who seek to make them one or the other simply do not understand the role that political freedom served within the expectations of redemption.
This idea emerged because of the success of the Hasmonean Revolt led by Judas Maccabaeus. Prior to the revolt, the Jewish people lived as subjects of the Persian and Hellenistic kingdoms. They had not sought to reestablish the kingdom of Judah or the Davidic kingship after their return from the Babylonian Exile. The trauma caused by the events that led to the Hasmonean Revolt threatened Judaism’s ability to live under foreign rule and live according to the Torah. With the success of the Hasmonean Revolt in defeating the Seleucids and establishing an independent Jewish state, the idea emerged that Israel’s freedom enabled the Jews to worship God as He desired. And everyone agreed on this.
The failure of modern readers to apprehend Jesus’ meaning of the kingdom reflects our distance from his world and faith, as well as a lack of understanding of the nuances of Jewish hopes of redemption.
The arrival of Rome in the land of Israel in the 1st century BC (63 BC) fundamentally challenged these three convictions. Rome reduced the independent Hasmonean, Jewish state to the status of a client kingdom. They exploited the human and natural resources, as well as Israel’s wealth, for their own purposes. They eventually removed the Hasmoneans and established Herod (the Great) as the client king of Judaea. After Herod’s death, Rome oversaw the division of Herod’s kingdom among his sons, and then, at the request of the Jews, saw fit to remove his son Archelaus from power and annex his lands placing them under the direct rule of Roman governors, prefects, like Pontius Pilate.
How could the one true, all-powerful God, Ruler of the universe, allow his chosen people to live under the wicked rule of the idolatrous Romans?
The question, then, within Judaism became how redemption would be achieved. Many make the mistaken assumption that Judaism focused on the agent of redemption, commonly referred to as the Messiah, the anointed one. This was not the case. Redemption was the focus and how it would be achieved. An anointed figure served as God’s agent, like Moses in leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, but God’s redemption is what mattered. In response to the question of how redemption would happen, three streams of thought emerged within Judaism.
The first stream of thought embraced a Militant Activism. It believed Israel had no sovereign but God. Consenting to submit to foreign rule, for example paying taxes (a sign of submission), was a sin. When confronted with such a situation, this ideology believed Jews should take up the sword and shed blood, even Jewish blood, to achieve the removal of Rome from the land God promised to Israel. This ideology was represented by the various Jewish rebel movements, like the Fourth Philosophy, that emerged in the first century and eventually led the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (AD 66-73). While “freedom” originally was the means to Israel’s ability to worship God, it became a slogan, an end unto itself, during the First Jewish Revolt, which led these groups to brutally pervert justice and enact atrocities against their fellow Jews to achieve their ends.
The second stream of thought developed an Apocalyptic Passivism. Judaism’s encounter with Persian religion in the 6th-4th centuries BC introduced the concept of time and the “end” to Judaism. This led to the periodization of history as Jews sought to impose coherence and order upon time from creation to the end. The end (eschaton) became a period where the righteous will receive their reward and the wicked will be punished. The division of time into determined periods offered comfort for those who felt themselves oppressed by the wicked. It provided coherence to their suffering and promised deliverance at God’s preordained time. In this way, it encouraged them to maintain their righteous obedience. Many who viewed the world in this manner believed that the natural course of events in the present age would not provide an end to their suffering nor the prospering of the wicked; therefore, they looked to a time beyond the present age, the world to come, when the righteous would receive their reward and the wicked would be punished. This apocalyptic determinism led those who embraced it to view the end and redemption in a rather passive manner. Human action had no bearing on the timetable or outcome of redemption; redemption would come at God’s predetermined time. One waited for God to act. This also could lead to an isolation among those who viewed themselves as righteous, over and against the rest of humanity, whom they saw as wicked. The Qumran Essenes adopted such an ideology.
The third stream of thought expressed a Redemptive Activism. This stream viewed Roman rule as due to Israel’s sin. Roman rule was illegitimate, but it came about because of Israel’s sin. The theology of the book of Deuteronomy shaped this outlook. Deuteronomy taught if Israel obeyed God’s commands, the Torah, it would possess the land, rule over it, and experience the blessings of the covenant, yet if Israel disobeyed God’s commandments, it would be subjected to foreign rule and suffer the punishments of the covenant. Deuteronomy also provided that when Israel transgressed the covenant, if the people repented, God would forgive and redeem them: repentance brought redemption. Repentance, then, offered the path to redemption. God would respond to the repentance of the people by bringing about their redemption. This included the removal of the Roman yoke. For this ideology, acts of piety, repentance, fasting, even charity, served as outward manifestations of the repentance and obedience of the people, which, in turn, led to redemption. They were not merely pietistic acts; they served a redemptive function. Therefore, we refer to it as redemptive activism; repentance and obedience to the Torah were active actions to hasten God’s redemption. Those who embraced this thinking coined the phrase, “kingdom of Heaven.” It served as an anti-slogan against the militant activists, who sought to bring redemption by the sword, and the apocalyptic passivists, who looked for God’s reign only in the eschatological future.
How could the one true, all-powerful God, Ruler of the universe, allow his chosen people to live under the wicked rule of the idolatrous Romans?
The language of freedom, liberty, and redemption evolved from the period of the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament to the first century. The idea of emancipation from political oppression exists within the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament, particularly within the story of the Exodus. The noun “freedom,” however, is not attested within the Hebrew Bible. The terms “liberty” (in Hebrew דרור) and “redemption” (in Hebrew גאולה) feature prominently in the in passages pertaining to the Jubilee and sabbatical years (Leviticus 25; Isaiah 61:1-3; Jeremiah 34:8-17; Ezekiel 46:17). But they did not refer to the notion of political liberty. By the first century, however, the language of freedom, liberty, and redemption embodied Jewish hopes of political emancipation.
During the First Jewish Revolt, the Jewish rebels minted coins that bore the slogans “freedom of Zion” and “for the redemption of Zion.” In years two and three of the revolt, when it looked like the rebels might, in their own power, defeat the Roman forces, the slogan on their coins read the “freedom of Zion.” The Jewish historian Josephus attests that freedom was the primary goal of the Jewish rebels (War 2:264; see also War 2:346, 348, 443). By year four, however, their fortunes had shifted. The rebels only held Jerusalem and some fortresses in the south of the country; therefore, the legend on the coins changed to “for the redemption of Zion.” Now, the rebels recognized that their hopes of redemption lay in God’s miraculous assistance.
What caused this language development between the Hebrew Bible-Old Testament and first century? The notion of political liberty entered Judaism during the Hasmonean period. As early as the days of Judas Maccabaeus (2nd century BC), we find the expressed hope of political independence. As we mentioned above, the idea of Jewish independence serving as the precondition for Israel to properly worship God emerged in this period. What caused this shift? It ironically seems to have come from the influence of Greek ideas upon Judaism.
Within the ancient world, the idea of political freedom emerged in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. The expansion in the Aegean of the Lydian and especially the Persian kingdoms brought the Greek cities (polei) under foreign rule, often in the form of a tyrant. Citizens of the polis understood themselves as free due to their relationship with the polis. The use of the abstract Greek noun eleutheria (“freedom”) and its attachment to the concept of political freedom dates to the Persian Wars (480/479 BC). Eventually, however, during the Peloponnesian War, the idea of “freedom” became a thing unto itself and the pursuit of it led the Athenians and Spartans to commit atrocities in order to achieve their freedom ideal.
The loss of political freedom within the Greek world led to the evolution of the idea of freedom, particularly among the philosophers, to something more internal and abstract. Philosophy, then, became the path to true freedom and happiness. Both the Epicureans and Stoics agreed that freedom was the principal goal of life. Epictetus stated, “For on these matters we should not trust the multitude, who say, ‘Only the free can be educated,’ but rather the philosophers, who say, ‘Only the educated are free’…no one who is in error is free…no man who is in fear, or sorrow, or turmoil, is free, but whoever is rid of sorrows and fears and turmoils, this man is by the self-same course rid also of slavery” (Discourses 2.1.21-24). Epicurus claimed that “One must be a slave to philosophy to achieve true liberty” (Seneca, Epistle 8.7).
Repentance, then, offered the path to redemption.
Jewish ideas of liberty, as found within later rabbinic sources, follow a parallel development as we see in the Greek world—a movement from political freedom to something more inward and abstract. Moreover, both the Greek and Jewish ideas of freedom assume that while freedom relieves one from slavery it requires a form of enslavement to something else. Thus, the Greek notion of political freedom apparently combined with the Jewish ideas of liberty, as found in the Exodus story, within the Hellenistic era.
These three streams of thought—militant activism, apocalyptic passivism, and redemptive activism—reflect, in a nutshell, the primary expressions of Jewish redemptive hopes. And, as we will see, the kingdom of Heaven belonged to the stream of redemptive activism; however, many scholars have sought to identify and understand it within the Gospels as belonging to the hopes of the militant activist or the apocalyptic passivists. Such claims fail to recognize that the language of the kingdom of Heaven does not appear among these groups. It belongs rather to those who saw acts of piety as having a redemptive consequence.
With this background, we now turn our attention to the idea of the kingdom of Heaven in Judaism and Jesus, which we will address in Parts 2 and 3.