One of the questions which, according to Raba, a man will be asked ‘when he is led in for judgment,’ i.e., after he has completed his earthly course, is: ‘Have you looked forward to salvation?’ Man, that is to say, is expected to be an optimist, to find compensation for his sufferings in the certainty of an ultimate salvation. Life is not without purpose, history not bereft of design.

Admittedly, the world experienced by man is not as ‘very good’ as, according to Genesis I :JI, it was intended to be. But the imperfections are only temporary. Potentially, the world is still ‘very good,’ and, one day, it will be so in actuality. After all, God, the Creator and Revealer, is also God, the Redeemer.

Thus was the messianic hope born. Actually, the Bible gives us two different, and apparently contradictory, versions of that hope. On the one hand, there was the expectation that, in the normal course of events, things would get better. This development was expected to take place on the plane of history. Sometimes it was characterized by the figure of the ideal king, the Messiah. At other times, the ideal age of the future, the ‘latter days,’ when nations beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, was pictured without any reference to the particular form of government under which men will live then.

But the Bible also knows of another expectation. According to the Book of Daniel, prototypical of apocalyptic literature, the ‘kingdom of the saints of the Most High’ will burst miraculously -vertically, as it were-into the normal course of history, and bring history, as we know it, to a predetermined End. Since that End is predetermined by God, there would seem to be little that man can do, one way or another, to bring it about. At best, man might attempt, on the basis of mysterious and mystifying hints, such as the Book of Daniel and similar writings provide, to figure out and calculate just when that apocalyptic End is going to burst in upon us.

The Rabbis inherited both biblical notions. Some of them may have championed the one biblical notion, while others championed the other.