Knocking on Heaven’s Gate - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 1997

Knocking on Heaven’s Gate

Death, insanity and heresy await the unwary who dabble in heavenly mysteries.

By Ronald S. Hendel

The TV footage was disturbing—people with identical short haircuts, long robes and brand-new Nike sneakers telling us why they were about to take their own lives. Their Web site told of a spaceship hiding behind comet Hale-Bopp that would take them to a higher plane. They lived in a millionaire’s mansion in San Diego and called themselves Heaven’s Gate. They jump-started their own personal eschaton by committing mass suicide. The idea that the end of the world is nigh is familiar to Jews and Christians. It is an idea that began in Judaism during the Second Temple period and […]

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Endnotes

1.

The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (Abot de Rabbi Nathan) Version B, ed. and trans. Anthony J. Saldarini (Leiden: Brill, 1975), p. 182.

2.

See Roland H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, ed. S.L. Greenslade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 34.

3.

See Gershom G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1960), p. 38; and David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), p. 26.

4.

Tosefta H|Dagiga 2.3–4; trans. revised from Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, p. 31. On the mystical connotations of this text, see J.M. Baumgarten, “The Qumran Sabbath Shirot and Rabbinic Merkabah Traditions,” Revue de Qumran 13 (1988), pp. 209–213.