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277 the Dead Sea Scrolls fame), who secluded themselves at Qumran. In the efforts to decipher the prophecies, a rising new power—Rome—had to be figured in. Having won repeated wars with the Phoenicians and with the Greeks, the Romans controlled the Mediterranean and began to get involved in the affairs of Ptolemian Egypt and the Seleucid Levant (Judea included). Armies followed imperial delegates; by 60 B.C.E., the Romans, under Pompey, occupied Jerusalem. On the way there, like Alexander before him, he detoured to Heliopolis (alias Baalbek) and offered sacrifices to Jupiter; it was followed by the building there, atop the earlier colossal stone blocks, of the Roman empire’s greatest temple to Jupi- ter (Fig. 123). A commemorative inscription found at the site indicates that the emperor Nero visited the place in a.p. 60, suggesting that the Roman temple was already built by then. The national and religious turmoil of those days found expression in a proliferation of historic-prophetic writings, such as the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, the Testa- ments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Assumption of Mo- ses (and several others, all collectively known as the Apocrypha and Pseuda-Epigrapha). The common theme in them was a belief that history is cyclical, that all has been foretold, that the End of Days—a time of turmoil and up- heaval—will mark not just an end of a historic cycle but also the beginning of a new one, and that the “flipover time” (to use a modern expression) will be manifest by the coming of the “Anointed One’—Mashi’ach in Hebrew (translated Chrystos in Greek, and thus Messiah or Christ in English). The act of anointing a newly invested king with priestly oil was known in the Ancient World, at least from the time of Sargon. It was recognized in the Bible as an act of consecra- tion to God from the earliest times, but its most memorable instance was when the priest Samuel, custodian of the Ark of the Covenant, summoned David, the son of Jesse, and, pro- claiming him king by the grace of God, Jerusalem: A Chalice, Vanished