According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests? Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers , the Book of Jubilees , legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel—a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.

Sefer Zerubbabel, the Book of Zerubbabel, is a Hebrew apocalyptic work composed during the wars between the Byzantine and Persian empires in the early decades of the seventh century of this era, shortly before the Muslim conquest of the Middle East. Himmelfarb places Sefer Zerubbael's narrative in the context of Christian tradition and contemporary Byzantine culture on the one hand and earlier Jewish eschatological traditions on the other. The impact of the Christian messianic narrative can be seen in Sefer Zerubbabel's depiction of the messiah son of David in terms of Isaiah's suffering servant and in the death and resurrection of the messiah son of Joseph, while contemporary Byzantine ideas about the Virgin as the patron and protector of Constantinople help to make sense of Sefer Zerubbabel's otherwise startling depiction of the mother of the messiah as a warrior defending Jerusalem. Sefer Zerubbabel also shows many points of contact with traditions about the messiah in rabbinic literature, but, the author argues, it is not dependent on the rabbinic formulation of those traditions. Rather, both the rabbis and Sefer Zerubbabel drew on popular traditions, which they reshaped for their own purposes. The rabbis tend to play down messianic hopes while Sefer Zerubbabel embraces them more enthusiastically. Thus reading Sefer Zerubbabel and rabbinic literature side by side allows us to recover some elements of the popular Jewish messianism of the early centuries of the Christian era. The book concludes by considering Sefer Zerubbabel's impact on a corpus of Jewish eschatological texts from the centuries after the rise of Islam.--