Free Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill Page B

(taken from the Jerusalem Bible,
not
its successor, the NJB) may be criticized as being heavily colored by subsequent Christian interpretation. The Hebrew original would be more conservatively (and properly) translated simply to bring out Job’s belief that his case is a just one, which he hopes can be established while he is still alive, and that it is actually God who is Job’s adversary. But the translation I used was chosen not to make inferences unjustified by the original but to see this passage from Job as it was already being interpreted by Jews of the intertestamental period. Christians, to begin with, did not so much invent these adumbrations as borrow them from strains of then-current Jewish interpretation. In other words, though the body/soul dualism of the Greeks is completely absent from the text of Job, its author had—in his own time—no notion of aresurrection of the dead. But this notion was read into the text by subsequent commentators well before Christians appeared on the scene and, therefore, helped form the context of expectation into which Jesus was born. (By the fifth or sixth century A.D. , rabbinical commentators, like their Christian counterparts, would come to assume as almost obvious that the soul is eternal, thus going a long way toward adopting the Greek view, but this is hardly the problematic of physical resurrection that we find the author of First Maccabees struggling with.)
    Similarly, the last three lines of the first set of passages from Isaiah (these three lines taken not from the KJV but from a translation of the Vulgate, which is in its turn more dependent on the Greek Septuagint than on the best Hebrew texts) is invoked not to make Christian points but to point up the atmosphere of expectation in which the prophecies of Isaiah had come to be read—especially, perhaps, by diaspora Jews who read versions of the Septuagint rather than versions of the Hebrew—by the time of Jesus. The actual Hebrew, however, gives us an expectation that is abstractrather than personal: “Justice” rather than “the Just One”; “Salvation” rather than “the Savior.”
    If in dealing with theBook of Isaiah I fail to mention that there is a third voice—a Trito-Isaiah—to be found in chapters 56–66, this is because this particular deconstruction has no bearing on the point I am making. I should also mention that there is a raging scholarly controversy as to whether theDead Sea Scrolls (DSS) were a library of theEssenes or of some other Jewish group, and another controversy as to what the relationship ofJohn the Baptizer and/or Jesus may (or may not) have been to the Essene community. It seems plain to me that John was more extreme in his apocalyptic than Jesus, and what he has to say certainly sounds an awful lot like much of the material original to the DSS. If the DSS were not an Essene library, they were certainly the library of an apocalyptic sect of John/Jesus’s period. Though most indications surely point in the direction of the assumptions I have made in the main text, nothing of my essential argument there would be disturbed by new findings about the provenance of John or of the DSS.
    Finally, I am happy to admit that a case can be made against my claim that the Jews had “abandoned their ancestral language” by the time of Jesus’s birth. I am aware that many educated Jews were trilingual, able to read and (to some extent) speak Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic (as witness the Bar Kochba letters and the DSS themselves). But I very much doubt that such an accomplishment can be posited of the population as a whole, especially of the majority of the Galilean women and men who were Jesus’s main audience.

II: T HE L AST OF THE P ROPHETS
    In this chapter and throughout the remainder of the book, all translations from the Greek of the New Testament (except as otherwise indicated) are mine—but with an eye to other translations, especially two at opposite ends of the translation