And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever. (Dan 12:3)
In this text, speaking of the righteous at the resurrection, we learn that the righteous will be likened to the stars. This could be implicit evidence of deification in light of a similar theme in various ancient Jewish and Christian texts. As Martha Himmelfarb noted:
The sectarians [at Qumran], for whom the very fact of membership in the community was an indication of righteousness, claimed to live in the presence of the angels: “Thou hast cleansed a perverse spirit of great sin that it may stand with the host of Holy Ones, and that it may enter into community with the congregation of the Sons of Heaven” (Thanksgiving Hymns [1QH] col. iii, lines 21-22). The extreme purity demanded in everyday life in the community is related to the belief that angels were present in the camp with the sect. The recitation of the Sabbath Songs with their description of the liturgy in the heavenly temple was intended to create a feeling of participation in the service on high.
A number of apocalypses reserve for the afterlife what the community at Qumran claims for the present. According to these texts, the reward of the righteous after death is membership in the heavenly host. The apocalypses in question, most of which do not contain ascents, date from the middle of the second century B.C.E. on, when the persecution of Antiochus made the fate of martyrs a subject of great concern. Nickelsburg has shown that this understanding of the fate of the righteous is a development of the throne of the exaltation of the wise courtier found in ancient Near Eastern court tales. In the basic plot of these tales, the wise courtier is unjustly accused of a crime against his king and is deposed. Ultimately, however, he is vindicated and raised to the highest rank in the kingdom. The story of Ahiqar is a good example of this plot; the adventures of Joseph in Egypt represent a still recognizable variation. In the apocalypses the courtier has become the righteous collectively, and the exaltation to authority in the earthly court has become exaltation in heaven after death.
Probably the most famous passage describing this form of exaltation appears at the end of Daniel: “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever” (12:3). Notice here that the righteous become not angels but stars. The Hebrew Bible sometimes equates the heavenly hose with the stars, as in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:20), where stars appear as the heavenly army of the divine warrior, or in Job (38:7), where the morning stars stand parallel to the sons of God, and are said to sing. The widespread use of star terminology and associated language for describing transformation in these apocalypses may be due to the prominence of the idea of astral immortality in the contemporary Greco-Roman world.
The equivalence of angels and stars in this stream of thought is made clear in a passage from one of the exhortations in the Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 91-105), where the righteous are promised first that they will shine like stars and then that they will be companions of the heavenly host:
Be of good courage, for aforetime you were worn down by evils and afflictions, but now you shall shine and appear as the lights of heaven, and the portals of heaven shall be opened unto you . . . Be of good courage, and do not abandon your hope; for you shall have great joy as the angels of heaven . . . But now fear not, you righteous, when you see the sinners growing strong and prospering: be not companions with them, but keep afar from all their evil-doings; for you shall become companions of the angels of heaven. (104:2-6)
The Similitudes of Enoch also makes this association when it describes the righteous dead enjoying the company of the angels and shining brightly: “And there I saw another vision of the dwellings of the righteous and the resting-places of the holy. /There my eyes saw their dwellings with the angels/And their resting-places with the holy ones . . . /And all the righteous and elect were radiant like the brightness of fire before him . . . “ (1 Enoch 39:4-7)
At the end of the first or beginning of the second century C.E. 2 Baruch also equates fellowship with the angels with becoming a star: “For in the heights of that world shall they dwell,/ And they shall be made like the angels,/And be made equal to the stars . . . “ (51:10). (Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven: In Jewish & Christian Apocalypses [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 49-51)
