coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who would realize the long-postponed promises of Jehovah" (Wells, 1971, p. 225). Or, as another commentator explains: "In the period after the exile, when there was no longer a king in Judah, the 'messiah' came to mean an ideal figure who would restore the kingdom of Israel in the future" (Glossary, 1995, p. G433). Messianism was amplified in the mind-set of Jews in the centuries following because other empires (e.g., Persia, Athens, Alexander) successively and effectively marginalized and suppressed whatever practical Jewish military ambition might have been in play. Eventually, Great Rome's advance across the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor subsumed the other conquests and any realistic chance that Israel would reclaim its former glory. Emergent Judaism did claim converts, according to Wells. More important for the present research is that the messianic idea persisted amid the "great and changing empires of that age" (Wells, 1971, p. 227).
There was also a line of apocalyptic Jewish writing in this period indepe
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