It is not that there is a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New, rather there are different streams of thought competing against each other in the Hebrew Bible, and the resolution to these competing views is found in Christ. An understanding of God that is opposed to Christ, opposed to the incarnation, opposed to the humanity of God, opposed to nonviolence, or opposed to a personal and humane understanding of God must be completed and corrected by the understanding of God in Christ. Comparing Ezra and Nehemiah with Ruth, shows that while the first two violently opposed intermarriage with gentiles and pictured God as retributive, Ruth is a gentile (of the “worst kind”) and yet bears the very character of God and serves as a model Jew (see here). In the stories of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, the prodigal son, and the book of Job, there is a fusion of the forgiving human victim with the face of God (see here). There is no paradoxical fusing of human means and God’s means, violence or nonviolence, or retribution and regeneration. By ignoring the contrasting images presented in the Hebrew Bible there is the danger of missing that Christ completes, resolves, corrects, and brings meaning that would otherwise be obscured. This transformational liberation reaches it culmination in the two views under contention in the books of Maccabees and Daniel.
Whether or not the Maccabean thesis of Daniel (that Daniel was composed primarily in the 2nd century and not the 6th century B.C.) is correct, the thesis brings out the contrast between the Maccabean violent solution and the nonviolent resistance in the book of Daniel to the challenge of empire. Daniel and the Jewish resistance to the empire’s demand for worship presumes a form of nonviolent martyrdom, though this possibility was also chosen by a large segment of the Jewish population resisting the Seleucid Greek empire. A thousand persons chose to escape into the wilderness, but when challenged by the Seleucid army they offered no resistance: “But they did not answer them or hurl a stone at them or block up their hiding places, for they said, ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.’ So they attacked them on the sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand persons” (1 Mac 2:36–38). From the perspective of Mattathias and his friends this was total defeat: “’If we all do as our kindred have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth.’ So they made this decision that day: ‘Let us fight against anyone who comes to attack us on the sabbath day; let us not all die as our kindred died in their hiding places’” (1 Mac 2:39–41). Having witnessed the slaughter, the Maccabees reject keeping the sabbath through nonviolence and choose extreme violence.
The contention between the two positions revolves around the sabbath, as it is not simply work but the violence of war forbidden on the sabbath, that may mean being slaughtered. These people were willing to die, along with their children, in what the text describes as their “innocence” or “singlemindedness” (ἁπλότης) and it is precisely this singleness of purpose embraced as the Christian ideal (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22; according to Jesus one’s eye should be single – Matt 6:22). These sabbath keepers are not legalists, but are shaped by the sabbath in a different relationship with God and a different way of being in the world. According to Anthony Bartlett, “The internal and symbolic content of sabbath is an earth of peace and blessing, where a fulness of life overtakes and displaces the need to work.”[1] Life comes from God, and this is not gained through human effort, whether work or war. This break-through stands out all the more, in that the tenor of Maccabees is a counter-argument to this brief episode.
The followers of Mattathias in choosing to fight on the sabbath do not want to be killed like their fellow Jews, and this is their prime inspiration. They set aside sabbath law, and begin an armed resistance. As William Farmer puts it, “once it is seen that as long as the heathen could attack the Jews on sabbath with impunity, just so long was the possibility of national independence out of the question.”[2] By attempting to save the temple and the law they miss the heart and character of the law. In violently defending Israel, they forsake the vision of a peaceful sabbath kingdom.
Where Maccabees poses the enemy and its defeat in literal terms, Daniel, through a figurative frame, poses a different sort of enemy. The four winds of heaven stir up four beasts from out of the sea, and these beasts have iron teeth, claws, tusks the wings of eagles, and the head of humans (Dan 7:2–8). They are killing machines given human pride and cunning, representing Babylonian, Mede, Persian, and Greek empires. The only resistance possible is heavenly, not simply through a new imagination but a new reality arising from within the human situation. God exercises sovereignty through “One like a Son of Man” and in his visions, Daniel describes this alternative structuring power.
Daniel’s apocalyptic vision focuses on divine intervention, not from without but erupting from within, fusing the divine with the human:
And behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming, And He came up to the Ancient of Days And was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, Glory and a kingdom, That all the peoples, nations and men of every language Might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion Which will not pass away; And His kingdom is one Which will not be destroyed (Dan 7:13–14).
Destruction and war are absent in this unified kingdom of healing, teaching, and peace. This Son of Man from the Ancient of Days transcends human limitations in fusing divine and human. He has a human nature and yet comes with the clouds on the order of YHWH’s presence in various theophanies (Exodus 13:21, 19:9; 1 Kings 8:10-11). He is given universal dominion over all peoples, unifying them under a singular head, where the bestial kingdoms are multiple and violent, with one succeeding the other (Dan 7:24-25) while the Son of Man will establish an everlasting and singular kingdom.
This enlarged frame comes with the pronouncement of resurrection:
But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12:1–3).
These “holy ones” (as Daniel describes them elsewhere) shine like the stars forever, having been made holy in a new way of being human. They have the characteristics of the Son of Man and are participants in his kingdom: “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever” (Dan 7:18). Daniel pictures these holy ones as being “worn out” in martyrdom (Dan 7:25) through relinquishing one sort of life (struggling in and through death) through a death accepting resurrection life (inclusive of martyrdom). As Bartlett emphasizes, resurrection has to be tied to a successful vision and practice of nonviolence as this is not passage beyond mortality, but its acceptance as part of eternal life, or part of a new sort of humanity sharing in divine wisdom.
Jesus taking up the title “Son of Man” from Daniel is the culminating resolution of the issue of sabbath keeping and violence: “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt 12:8). He is Lord of the sabbath in providing peace and life and final healing from sin and death. “’But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home’” (Mk 2:10–11). Jesus combines the image of the suffering servant of Isaiah with Daniel’s Son of Man, reshaping the messianic hope of Israel in himself with His impending nonviolent suffering and death (Mk 8:31, 9:31), and future return in glory (Mk 13:26, 14:62).
In this apocalyptic frame the immediate circumstance (persecution by empire) pales in comparison to an eternal perspective, and it is Daniels apocalyptic vision taken up by Jesus, referencing a Maccabean sort of desolating sacrilege, which account for his instruction: “So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains,” says Jesus (Matt 24:15–16). Jesus links the action of the nonviolent Maccabean martyrs (fleeing) with the wisdom and insight of Daniel.[3] The hope of the resurrection is the means of nonviolent resistance which recognizes the Son of Man reorders the world within a larger frame of meaning and wisdom.
This reordered reality is pictured in John’s apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man as alpha and omega and ruler of the cosmos: “In His right hand He held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength. When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last’” (Rev 1:16–17). The word of his mouth is sharper than any sword, and his life-giving human/divine radiance is the true light illuminating the fulness of a peaceable reality. Jesus fulfills the vision of Daniel as Son of Man, establishing everlasting sabbath rest.
[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 106.
[2] William R. Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: An Inquiry into Jewish Nationalism in the Greco-Roman Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956),76. Cited in Sigve K. Tonstad, “To Fight or not to Fight: The Sabbath and the Maccabean Revolt,” (Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 135–146. Copyright © 2016 Andrews University Seminary Studies), 145.
[3] Sigve, 144-145.