The more oppressed a group perceives itself to be, the more it will want to calculate when liberation will dawn. But that there is a divine plan, which, though often opaque, is working its way out in history and will one day demonstrate the justice of all its workings—this is believed by the biblical writers, the wisdom literature, the Maccabaean martyrs, the writers of the Scrolls, Josephus, and almost everyone else one can think of in the period. It is not a sign that apocalyptic literature has gone out on a limb; merely, that it sometimes has a different way of expressing itself, a way
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