אחרית ימים הווה ומשיח שבא ומת

My paper starts with a summary of three uprisings against the Hellenistic movement and the Seleucid regime initiated by conservative priests in Jerusalem before the so-called Antiochian Decrees. It then detects the voice of this conservative group in two pre-sectarian writings found in the Qumran caves, the Apocryphon of Jeramiah and an independent literary unit embedded in the Damascus Document (B 19:5-13). The paper proceeds with an analysis of the Enochic Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 89-90), and the claim that the earlier, hidden layer of this treatise echoes the conservative group, while the treatise’s overt layer is a sectarian one. The charismatic leader described there is no other than Doresh-aTorah, known to us from the Damascus Document (A 7:9-21). A further claim is that both writings assign a messianic role to this figure; in other words, they assume ‘present eschatology,’ and both express the belief in the imminent coming of the Davidic Messiah. The last part of the paper shows that following the death of Doresh-HaTorah, the Qumran Community was forced to admit that “eschatology” belongs to an unknown future, and demonstrates that, as a result, messianic hope has an insignificant role or no role at all in sectarian writings such as Pseudo-Moses and Jubilees, composed at the end of the second century BCE. These writings, instead, focus on John Hyrcanus’ evil deeds and envision his close disappearance.