One of the most elaborate visions of apocalyptic transformation in early medieval Jewish writings comes from Sefer Zerubbabel. The work was most likely composed in the early seventh century and reflected the apocalyptic mindset that formed in the wake of the bloody war between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. Sefer Zerubbabel creatively combines traditional apocalyptic themes, elements of rabbinic literature, and new images to create a remarkably powerful vision of apocalyptic upheaval. The book's symbolism was destined to play an important role in the formation of Jewish messianic and apocalyptic themes well into modern times.

It has long since been noted that two female characters, the mother of the Jewish Messiah and the mother of his demonic adversary, feature prominently in Sefer Zerubbabel and indeed are central to its plot. The majority of scholars have argued that both women reflect a complex reaction to the figure of the Theotokos in contemporaneous Byzantine theology. Thus David Biale used the female characters of Sefer Zerubbabel as an example of “counter-history” produced by the Jewish inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire to engage and subvert the symbolic universe of the dominant Christian culture. In the text that follows I shall take this discussion one step further by arguing that the female figures in Sefer Zerubbabel are part of a broader narrative that developed in early medieval Judaism and attempted to reinterpret Byzantine imperial and religious symbolism to discover its “true” meaning within Jewish messianic context.

This book takes its cue from the concept of “byzantine Commonwealth” originally formulated by Dimitri Obolensky and Garth Fowden to describe the Byzantine political and cultural system in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The term was first proposed by Obolensky in a relatively narrow sense to describe the unique mode of “Byzantium's relations with the peoples of Eastern Europe” during the Middle Ages. According to Obolensky, the Byzantine Commonwealth was based on a sense of cultural commonality between the empire and a number of neighboring East European countries, whose “ruling and educated classes were led to adopt many features of Byzantine civilization, with the result that they were able to share in, and eventually to contribute to, a common cultural tradition.” In Obolensky's opinion, this cultural commonality ran sufficiently deep “to justify the view that, in some respects, [these countries] formed a single international community.” Although politically independent, the members of the commonwealth shared a common cultural identity which provided them with a sense of unity above and beyond political borders.

Fowden has significantly broadened Obolensky's definition by projecting it back into the period between the late fifth and the seventh centuries, and suggesting that during that time an “empire,” a geopolitical entity that dominated earlier Near Eastern history, evolved into a “commonwealth.” The commonwealth represented a new “politico-cultural entity,” in which groups that were more or less politically independent formed a common identity on the basis of shared cultural and religious values.

Tn conclusion, a few words remain to be said about the broader historical, cultural, and religious implications of Jewish eschatological narrative. The seventh and eighth centuries a.d. witnessed the defeat of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of Muslims; its gradual disintegration and the loss of such vital territories as Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and North Africa; and finally the Iconoclast policy of Byzantine emperors. The sense of failure triggered a variety of responses. On the one hand, the notion of the Church being a distinct entity no longer associating itself with an empire but rather asserting its own universalism gained momentum not only in the Latin West but also in the now Muslim East. On the other hand, a variety of political and religious ideologies looked forward to the restoration of the Roman Empire and its phoenix-like renewal. Most Byzantine apocalyptic narratives produced in the centuries immediately following the collapse belonged to the second category. They called for the miraculous revival of the empire and the restoration of its triumphant universalism, envisioning both of them as final steps leading toward direct divine rule on earth.

Remarkably, many restorationist ideologies envisioned the impulse for the restoration of the empire coming not from Constantinople nor even, for that matter, Rome. It appears that Syriac Ps.-Methodius was composed, among other things, to argue against the widespread view that the restoration of the empire would come from Ethiopia.

In his homily commemorating the defense of constantinople against the Avars and the Persians in 626, Theodore Syncellus hails the sacred and eternal nature of the Byzantine Empire and its capital city by portraying them as the true Israel and New Jerusalem, respectively. Theodore presents an elaborate exegesis of prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament arguing that they should be read as references to the events of 626. Among other things, according to Theodore, the sack of the Old Jerusalem and the salvation of the new one took place on the same date. This providential coincidence marked the special destiny of the New Jerusalem, Constantinople, to be the religious center of the true Israel as well as the geographic center of the inhabited world, “the navel of the world,” binding the world together in religious and imperial unity. Theodore Syncellus stands in a long line of Byzantine authors who used the theme of succession from Israel to Byzantium as a way to buttress the triumphant universalism of the empire. The supersessionist narrative that portrayed Israel as a typological precursor of Christian Byzantium became a ubiquitous feature of Byzantine religio-political discourse and court ritual.

Christianity did not invent Roman universalism. The ideology of Rome's eternal rule had a long and deeply rooted pre-Christian history, going all the way back to the Golden Age of Augustus and past him to the republican period. Yet the Christian Roman Empire and its ideologists proved to be worthy recipients of this age-old doctrine.

I am profoundly grateful to people whose support over the past several years made this book possible. The project was both started and completed during my tenure years in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. I want to thank members of the department for their collegiality, which allowed me to succeed in the daunting task of completing a book project. My special thanks go to Christopher Mount, for his advice on matters relevant to my research, as well as his constant readiness to proofread sections of this work and offer valuable remarks on matters of both content and style.

Support and advice received from Robert Chazan, Jeffrey Rubenstein, Lawrence Schiffman, and other faculty members of my alma mater, the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, played a crucial role in the successful completion of this project. Without the enthusiastic support of Beatrice Rehl of Cambridge University Press and the endorsement by two anonymous readers, this book would never have been published. I am also thankful to Ken Karpinsky, Emily Spangler, and an anonymous editor from Cambridge University Press for quick and professional handling of the manuscript.

Allison Gray did a great job with the initial proofreading of the manuscript. I deeply appreciate her help and take full responsibility for any mistakes or omissions found in the text.

Unlike his predecessors, theodore syncellus was writing at a time when the validity of his triumphalist narrative was increasingly called into question by historical reality. The 626 a.d. siege of Constantinople ended in total defeat for the Avars and Persians followed by an even more spectacular victory of the Emperor Heraclius in Mesopotamia, the very heart of the Sasanian kingdom. For the moment, the triumphalist rhetoric of the true Israel appeared to be justified, as the Christian empire found itself within striking distance of dominating the inland Near East. Within a decade, however, the tables were turned when Muslim armies took control of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and later North Africa, effectively ending Byzantine dreams of a universalistic Christian empire. Soon afterward, the greatly reduced Byzantium found itself in the grip of the Iconoclast controversy, which challenged the very basics of orthodoxy. The image of Byzantium as the universalistic and triumphant true Israel was becoming increasingly out of touch with reality.

These upheavals of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries triggered a new interest in the apocalyptic genre among the Byzantines, as well as other ethnic, cultural, and religious groups constituting the Byzantine Commonwealth. In the situation in which the seemingly eternal political and religious edifice of the Byzantine Empire was starting to crumble, the dynamic eschatology of apocalyptic predictions was once again more appealing than a static vision of the empire as the eternally realized heaven on earth.

In a recent study, raʿanan boustan has provided a detailed analysis of the story of Temple vessels in what appears to be one of the earlier redactions of ʾOtot ha-Mashiah and this story's relation to a broader literary motif of Temple spoils kept in Rome. As noted by Boustan, this redaction of ʾOtot ha-Mashiah displays no knowledge of a confrontation between Christian Byzantium and Islam. Instead, the eschatological struggle takes place strictly between Jews and Rome. Already in the opening sections of the text the latter is portrayed as the ultimate persecutor of Jews and Judaism. The sixth sign that contains the story about Temple vessels constitutes the culmination of the struggle between the two. A king rules in Rome for nine months, during which time he devastates numerous lands, levies heavy taxes upon Israel, and promulgates numerous decrees against it. After nine months Nehemiah son of Hushiel, the Messiah son of Joseph, is revealed. He launches a war against the king of Edom:

In his classical study of byzantine imperial art, andré Grabar has made an argument about the impact of imperial representational techniques on Christian images from the fourth century onward. Among other examples, Grabar singles out images of the majestically enthroned Christ which share multiple artistic elements with contemporaneous images of frontally enthroned emperors. The enthroned figure of the emperor was a common motif in Late Roman and Byzantine art. It was designed to convey the ideas of motionless serenity and eternal grandeur. The enthroned emperor was an ageless, haloed figure exercising universal dominion. Artistic representations of the imperial Christ and Christlike emperors were part of a broader trend within the religio-political discourse of Late Antiquity that assimilated the imperial office to a divine prototype. As a result, it was not an individual emperor who was divinized or rendered Christlike, but rather the imperial office itself that deified by participation those persons who happened to hold it at any given moment.

In the text that follows I shall argue that at least some late antique and Byzantine Jewish texts imagine the office of the Messiah in a similar way. I have noted in the previous chapter that it was not so much the personality of the Messiah as his association with and assimilation to the Davidic archetype (or the Davidic office) that were emphasized in Jewish messianic speculations of the time. In this chapter I shall draw further parallels between the office of the Messiah and the office of the emperor.