We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that some Jews believed that the physical world would come to an end, just as we cannot rule out the possibility that some Jews thought there were five gods, or that the Egyptians were the one chosen people of the creator god. But such views are marginal not only to the literature of all sorts that we possess from the period, but to the worldview of the great majority of (non-writing) first-century Jews, which we can reconstruct from their symbols, their stories and above all their praxis. Jews simply did not believe that the space-time order was
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