Jewish Messianism and the Cultic Process

In this chapter, the author examines the patterns of messianic belief as they found expression in Jewish religious traditions and their historical development. He argues that elements of the cultic process are to be found in the vicissitudes of messianic belief no less than in other religious belief systems. Conservative tendencies played a major role in the preservation of the Jewish religious community, but a lesser role in the genesis of messianism. Traditional messianism carries within it the characteristics of the cultic process. The motifs of the persecuted and oppressed victims who overturn their oppressors and become the triumphant victors, and thus take their turn in oppressing and dominating their former tormentors, are direct expressions of the paranoid process. The apocryphal works contained little of the apocalyptic and eschatological elements that play such a prominent part in the subsequent pseudepigraphal literature.