The Road of Promise - Part I - Article V
THE PROPHET TO COME, AND THE DEAD WHO WOULD RISE
Part I, Article 5 — What Israel Was Waiting For
Two absences ran alongside the political and priestly hopes this series has already traced, quieter than either but no less real, and both concerned things a throne or an altar could not by themselves supply. The first was a voice: since the last canonical prophet fell silent, God had not spoken to Israel the way he once had, directly, through a man sent for that specific purpose, rather than through the accumulated weight of a written Law already centuries old. The second was a grave: death still had the last word over the righteous exactly as it did over the wicked, and no one had yet said, with binding authority, that this arrangement would not always hold. Both absences had scriptural roots reaching back well before the Second Temple period, and both had become sharper, more specific, and more urgently and openly discussed by the time Christ was born than they had been in any earlier era of Israel's history.
A Prophet Still Owed
The hope for a coming prophet was not a vague wish for inspiration in general. It was rooted in a specific, textually anchored promise Moses himself had made before the conquest of Canaan even began, distinguishing Israel's God-given access to true prophecy from the soothsaying and divination practiced by the surrounding nations: “The Lord thy God will raise up to thee a PROPHET of thy nation and of thy brethren like unto me: him thou shalt hear.”¹ That promise had, in one sense, been fulfilled many times over across the centuries of judges and prophets who followed Moses. But by the Second Temple period, a strand of Jewish expectation had come to read Deuteronomy's promise as pointing forward to one final, climactic prophet still to come — not merely another voice added to a long line already stretching back a thousand years, but the voice, the last and definitive one before the age to come finally arrived.
The community at Qumran treated this expected prophet as a distinct office in its own right, separate from the two Messiahs discussed earlier in this series. Their Community Rule directs the sect to live by its provisional statutes “until the coming of a prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel” — three figures, not two, named in a single breath and awaited together as three separate offices rather than facets of one anticipated deliverer.² This was not a peculiarity confined to one desert sect keeping its own private taxonomy. The Gospel of John preserves, almost in passing and with no apparent apologetic agenda of its own, direct evidence that the same three categories were live and distinct in ordinary religious conversation in Jerusalem itself. When priests and Levites were formally sent from the capital to question John the Baptist about his identity, they did not ask him a single, generic question. They asked in sequence, methodically working through the available categories one at a time: “Art thou Elias? And he said: I am not. Art thou the prophet? And he answered: No.”³ Christ, and Elias, and the prophet were three separate boxes a first-century Jew might check, not three names loosely applied to one expected figure. Later in the same Gospel, after the multiplication of the loaves, the crowd's own spontaneous reaction confirms how alive this specific category remained in ordinary popular religious imagination, quite apart from any formal delegation of priests: “This is of a truth the prophet, that is to come into the world.”⁴ The definite article matters and should not be read past quickly. Not a prophet, as though any inspired man might qualify. The prophet — the one Deuteronomy had named centuries earlier, still owed, still awaited by a title specific enough that a crowd could recognize a candidate for it on sight.
A Grave Still Unanswered
The second absence was older in its scriptural roots and, in its way, more painful in daily life, because it touched every family in the nation rather than only its political or liturgical leadership. For most of the Old Testament period, the dead were simply gone, descending to Sheol, a shadowed and largely undifferentiated place of the departed, with no clear scriptural promise of return to bodily life and no developed doctrine of individual reward or punishment beyond the grave. That began to change, sharply and specifically rather than gradually, in the book of Daniel, written to sustain a persecuted people under the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”⁵ This is not poetic language about a nation's collective fortunes being restored, the way earlier prophets had sometimes spoken of Israel's exile and return. It is a promise about individual bodies, individually judged on the merits of individual lives, rising bodily out of literal dust in the earth.
The persecution that produced Daniel's promise also produced its most vivid narrative expression, in an account meant to be read and remembered rather than merely believed abstractly. Second Machabees preserves the story of seven brothers tortured to death, one after another, in full view of their own mother, for refusing under threat of the same treatment to eat swine's flesh in violation of the Law. Each dying brother appeals explicitly and by name to the very resurrection hope Daniel had voiced a generation or two earlier. The second brother, at the point of death, tells his torturer directly: “Thou indeed, O most wicked man, destroyest us out of this present life: but the King of the world will raise us up, who die for his laws, in the resurrection of eternal life.”⁶ A third brother goes further still, offering his own hands to be cut off before the king's eyes with the calm and specific expectation that he will “receive them again” from God's own hand in the resurrection to come.⁷ This is resurrection hope functioning not as an abstract theological proposition to be debated in a school but as the specific, load-bearing belief that let seven young men walk into prolonged torture, one after the other, without recanting to save their own lives. Whatever else can be said about the theology of the Second Temple period, it cannot be said that this particular hope was merely academic to the people who actually held it under threat of death.
A Hope Not Everyone Shared
It is worth being precise here, because Second Temple Judaism was not unanimous on this question any more than it was unanimous on the shape of the Messiah. The book of Acts preserves the fault line directly: when Paul stood trial before the Jewish council, he deliberately provoked a division among his judges by declaring himself on trial “concerning the hope and resurrection of the dead,” and Luke's narrative pauses to explain why this split the room: “the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both.”⁸ The Sadducees, drawn largely from the priestly and aristocratic classes and holding closely to the written Torah alone, saw no resurrection promise there and rejected the doctrine outright. The Pharisees, whose interpretive tradition drew more freely on the fuller sweep of the prophets and the developing oral law, held to it as firmly as the Maccabean martyrs had. The very existence of this dispute, argued out loud in the Jerusalem council within living memory of Christ, confirms that resurrection was not a settled article of Jewish faith waiting passively to be affirmed. It was contested ground, defended by some at the cost of their lives and denied by others who held the highest religious offices in the nation.
Two Silences, Still Unbroken
This article closes, like the others before it, without resolution. A specific, named prophetic office remained owed and unfilled, distinct enough in the popular mind that a man could be asked about it by name and answer plainly that he was not it. A specific, contested hope for bodily resurrection had produced its own martyrs and its own skeptics, split cleanly down the middle of the nation's own religious leadership, with neither side able to settle the question for the other. Whether the same figure who would finally answer the first silence might also have something to say about the second is not a connection Deuteronomy or Daniel makes explicit, and this article will not manufacture the link. What can be said is that Israel, on the eve of Christ's public ministry, was still short a prophet and still uncertain about its own dead — two forms of absence, unresolved, still waiting to be tested against whoever might next claim to speak for God.
Endnotes
1. Deuteronomy 18:15 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.); see also Deuteronomy 18:18–19 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
2. 1QS (Community Rule) 9:11, in Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English 111 (rev. ed., Penguin Classics 2004).
3. John 1:21 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.). The Douay-Rheims here renders the name “Elias,” the form used throughout that translation for the prophet elsewhere called “Elijah.”
4. John 6:14 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.); see also John 7:40 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (“Of a truth this is the prophet.”).
5. Daniel 12:2–3 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
6. 2 Machabees 7:9 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
7. 2 Machabees 7:10–11 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
8. Acts 23:6, 8 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.); see also Matthew 22:23 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (“the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection”, questioning Christ).
