Apocalypse

A type of Jewish prophetic writing that professed to disclose divine secrets and unveil a spectacular future. Most of it is later than canonical Jewish Scripture.
The word apocalypse means “revelation.” The best-known example is the last book of the New Testament, written by a Jewish Christian, but its ancestry is more than two centuries back. The apocalyptic genre has its chief prototype in Daniel, composed about 165 b.c. This has been described as a manifesto of the Hasidim, the “pious” or “saints”—Jews who stood firm under persecution at the hands of Antiochus IV (also called Epiphanes), a descendant of one of Alexander’s generals who ruled over Syria and Palestine. He pursued a very un-Greek policy of religious conformity, which led to violence. The Jewish high priest Onias was murdered by Menelaus, a nominee of the king, and Menelaus’s brother robbed the Temple in Jerusalem. Antiochus installed a statue of Zeus in the sacred precinct, stopped the daily sacrifice, and made it a crime to own copies of Scripture. Jews who opposed him were subjected to tortures and humiliations. A resistance group escaped into the wilderness. These were the Hasidim, and they inspired a revolt that ended the persecution.
Daniel was written during these troubles. Its central character, ostensibly the author of parts of it, is a legendary sage. The book places him, in his youth, among the Israelites deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 b.c. Several episodes show the superior wisdom of the Chosen People and the divine favor they enjoy. Daniel interprets symbolic dreams and has dreams of his own, from which the main apocalyptic themes develop. By putting the story in the sixth century b.c., the author makes Daniel “foretell” events that have already happened at the real time of composition. Some passages, however, genuinely look ahead. A repeated prophecy is that Gentile empires—Babylonian, Median, Persian, Greek—will be replaced by a “kingdom of stone” that will be everlasting. Antiochus himself is denounced and consigned to destruction. The stone kingdom is the triumphant Israelite kingdom that will arise from the debris of the rest.
In Daniel, the figure of the Messiah has not yet emerged, but the author introduces a character who foreshadows him. Daniel has a vision of the Ancient of Days—God—pronouncing doom on the Gentile powers.
And behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples,
nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
(Daniel 7:13–14)
This being, human yet more than human, probably personifies Israel. The fall of the empires and the rise of the stone kingdom to supremacy are acts in a God-directed drama leading towards the end of the present age. The author gives a new prominence to angels and, for the first time in Jewish Scripture, speaks of a resurrection of the dead (Daniel 12:2–3).
After Daniel, several Jewish writers produced books on similar lines, in which the apocalyptic element grew more fanciful. They took up hints from authentic Scripture and unfolded what were supposed to be secret meanings. Much of this literature was “pseudepigraphic”: to give their books a spurious dignity, in the same manner as with Daniel, the authors ascribed them to revered figures in the past. Apocalyptic matter occurs in books alleged to be written by Ezra, by the ancient patriarch Enoch, and even by Adam—an extreme of seniority. Such productions were not admitted to the Bible, yet the fictitious visions they contained did not part company altogether with recognized tradition.
The effects of the Antiochus ordeal lasted far beyond the ordeal itself. After it, Jews had a heightened awareness of hostile forces. The Syrian tyrant became an archetype of evil. The revolt against him had created an independent Jewish state, which survived for about 100 years but failed to realize the hoped-for glories of the “kingdom of stone” and succumbed to Roman conquest in 63 b.c. Hopes were continually being disappointed. Some apocalyptists detected the reason in a supernatural conflict that derived from Babylonian and Persian myth but had hitherto been excluded from Jewish belief. Devils were now discovered; they were made out to be fallen angels headed by Satan, previously a minor spirit and barely mentioned in Scripture, but now beginning to be presented as an adversary of God, troubling humanity and particularly the Chosen People. A dragon-monster called Beliar also made mischief. Against these powers of evil, angels were ranged, with names and relationships and political roles; Michael being the protector of Israel.
Human agency, it was implied, could not bring final peace. Apocalyptists enlarged on texts in canonical prophecy about a coming Day of the Lord. It would be terrible, but it would end in the overthrow of Israel’s enemies, human and otherwise. One of these books, the Testament of Naphtali, declares: “God shall appear on earth to save the race of Israel, and to gather the righteous from among the Gentiles.”
The victory could be expected to involve cataclysms, foreshadowed by the long-ago drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. It could also be expected to involve the activity of a special divine champion. Some authors took up Daniel’s image of the “Son of Man” and made him an individual, heading Israel rather than personifying it. In the Book of Enoch, he is the Righteous Elect One, a celestial viceroy who will sit enthroned ruling all, judging all, and enlightening the Gentiles. Other speculation developed the idea of the Messiah, a more earthly figure, a prince of the House of David who would reestablish Israel’s kingdom in unassailable glory. The Messiah was not identified with the Son of Man before Christianity. However, one Jewish school of thought harmonized the conceptions by saying that a Davidic kingdom would come first and an apocalyptic world-transformation later.
All such anticipations looked towards a world to come, a golden age not in the past where most mythologies placed it but in the future. After the upheavals and the defeat of evil, the sun would shine brighter, waste places would bloom, and living creatures would cease to harm each other. A stream of purifying water would flow from Mount Zion, and Jerusalem, rebuilt and resplendent, would be the world’s capital. At some stage in this universal healing, the Lord would pronounce judgment on humanity, and all would receive their true deserts. As Daniel had foretold, there would be a resurrection of the dead: perhaps only of a select few, perhaps of the dead in general. If the latter, the good would dwell in an eastern paradise, Gan Eden, and the wicked in a western country of sorrow, Gehinnom.
This Jewish literature does not include any major, definitive work, but it influenced the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it supplied motifs for Revelation, the great apocalypse at the end of the New Testament.