A History of the End of the World

“hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch,” escalating to “madness, blindness, and dismay,” and ending with the emblematic curse of the Jewish people—conquest and dispersion, exile and enslavement. “The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar,” vows Moses, “a nation whose language you do not understand, a ruthless nation that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy.”²⁹

Remarkably, the innocent will suffer along with the guilty—men, women, children, and babies alike—and all because God himself wills it. “You shall betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her,” rants Moses. “Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people and it shall not be in the power of your hand to stop it.”³⁰ And, besieged in their cities by the conquering armies, the children of Israel will be reduced to cannibalism. Perhaps the most horrific scene in all of the Bible is the one in which a “dainty and tender” young mother hides the afterbirth of her newborn infant—and the baby itself—from her husband and other children: “She shall eat them secretly,” says Moses, “because of utter want, in the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you.”³¹

So the Hebrew prophets find fault only with the Israelites. They do not mention Satan at all, and they do not blame the unhappy fate of the Israelites on the various pagan kings who are shown in the Bible to invade and conquer the land of Israel. Indeed, according to the logic of the biblical prophets, as we have seen, the foreign oppressors are sent by God, and the Israelites suffer precisely the fate that God promises them in Deuteronomy. The point is plainly made by the prophet Jeremiah by way of explanation of the Babylonian conquest and exile in 586 B.C.E.:[3] “And when your people say, ‘Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?,’ you shall say to them: ‘As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve strangers in a land that is not yours.’”³²

God, too, decides when to remove the curses that he has called down on his own people, according to the biblical prophets. When the Babylonians were later defeated by the rival empire of the Persians, the exiled Jews were allowed to return to their homeland in Judea and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. That is why the emperor of Persia, Cyrus, is hailed in the Bible as a savior of the Jewish people, and that’s why God is given all the credit for sending him to their rescue: “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed one, whose right hand He has grasped,” writes the prophet Isaiah in one poignant passage. “‘For the sake of Israel, I call you by name, though you have not known Me.’”³³

The phrase “anointed one,” of course, is a literal translation of the original Hebrew word that comes down to us in English as “messiah.” And so the biblical author makes it clear that even a pagan may serve as a messiah if the God of Israel wills it. The name of Cyrus, the pagan messiah from ancient Persia, is rendered in biblical Hebrew as “Koresh,” and it is a name that we will encounter again in the long and exceedingly strange history of Revelation. Indeed, the fact that the name “Koresh” first appears in the Bible and then figures in the headlines of the late twentieth century shows the remarkable staying power of the messianic idea.

But the simple idea that God alone is the source of both good and evil began to lose its appeal at a moment when the biblical texts were still being composed and the Bible as we know it did not yet exist. On precisely this point, as we shall see, the earliest apocalyptic writers in Jewish tradition came up with one of their most startling and enduring innovations—the notion that Satan, and not God, is to be blamed for the bad things that happen. Some pious and prideful Jewish men and women simply refused to believe that God would afflict them merely because some of their fellow Jews were less than pious, and they began to look for someone else to blame—a supernatural arch-villain who was God’s adversary and enemy.

The idea that God is forced to struggle against an Anti-God would have struck the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible as alien, baffling, and even heretical. But the idea captured the hearts and minds of Jewish men and women who suffered conquest and exile, occupation and oppression, estrangement and disempowerment, all at the hands of pagan kings and armies whom the God of Israel seemed unwilling or unable to defeat. So a few daring innovators set out to work a theological revolution by raising the biblical Satan from divine counselor and public prosecutor to the new and elevated role of master conspirator and maker of war on God himself. Here begins the apocalyptic tradition that will figure so prominently in Christian theology, and nowhere more prominently than in the pages of Revelation.

By an old tradition in rabbinical Judaism, the end of the Babylonian Exile in 538 B.C.E. also marks the end of prophecy. God was willing to speak in dreams and visions to a few exceptional men and women who lived in the distant past, the rabbis conceded, but they found it harder to believe that human beings in the here and now had been granted the same divine gift. While the ancient rabbis were willing to imagine the coming of a savior who would bring an era of peace and security to the Jewish people, they were less credulous about men and women who offered their own prophecies and revelations about the end of the world. And, for that reason, most of the apocalyptic writings of the late biblical era were not only excluded from the Hebrew Bible itself, they were wholly written out of Jewish tradition.

“The day the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from prophets,” says the Talmud, “and given to fools and children.”³⁴

But, tragically, the Jewish experience of conquest did not come to an end. After a few centuries of relative peace and security as a provincial backwater of the Persian empire, Judea was invaded yet again by the armies of a conqueror from a far-off country whose language the Jewish people did not speak. His name was Alexander, and among his celebrated accomplishments was the spread of the classical pagan civilization that we call Hellenism. For the Jewish fundamentalists in ancient Judea, the arrival of Greek art, letters, manners, philosophy, and religion was as threatening as the arrival of any pagan army.

Notably, the very first apocalypses were written in direct response to the danger posed by Hellenism, a danger that manifested itself sometimes in occupation and oppression by a foreign army, but far more often as a kind of seduction by a foreign culture that was rich, worldly, sophisticated, and pleasure seeking. And so, by a strange irony, Alexander the Great, too, can be regarded as one of the fathers of the apocalyptic tradition that will ultimately produce, several centuries later, the book of Revelation.

Alexander himself was dead by 323 B.C.E., only thirty-three years old and already weeping for want of new worlds to conquer, but he left behind an empire that now included the land of the Jews. And in Judea, as elsewhere throughout the ancient world, the local gentry were eager to embrace the alluring new ways of their latest overlords. So it was that the Jewish aristocracy and intelligentsia began to speak and write in Greek. The earliest translation of the Bible into a language other than Hebrew, for example, is the Greek version called the Septuagint. But, significantly, the aping of Greek ways by Jewish men and women went far beyond the otherwise pious study of scripture in translation.

“They frequented the theatres and sports meetings, held drinking bouts, and generally adopted the Greek manner of gay living,” writes Simon Dubnow, the twentieth-century scholar who revolutionized the study of Jewish history before his death during the Holocaust.³⁵ They sent their sons to gymnasia, a form of schooling borrowed from the Greeks. They consorted with female dancers and singers, “the attractive vice which the Judaeans learned from the Greeks,” according to Heinrich Graetz, the pioneering Jewish historian of the nineteenth century.³⁶ They even participated in the athletic competitions that were the centerpiece of Greek culture. And, because the athletes in the Greek games competed in the nude, some assimilated Jews sought to conceal the fact that they had been circumcised by a primitive version of plastic surgery, “submit[ting] to painful operations in order to remove the sign of the covenant,” as Graetz puts it, “and thus avoid the ridicule of the Greeks on the occasion of the Olympic Games.”³⁷

So powerful was the allure of Hellenism that it worked its seductive magic even on the priests who served in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem. At one point, for example, the two rivals for the high priesthood were Jewish men known as Jason and Menelaus; their names can be found nowhere in the Torah, of course, but they feature prominently in its pagan equivalent, the sacred myths of ancient Greece and Rome. And when Jason was elevated to the post of high priest, he found it appropriate to establish a palaestra—a public facility for the training of young men in the art of wrestling and other Greek sports—in the very heart of Jerusalem, the holiest place in all of Jewish tradition. To the horror and outrage of pious Jews, even the priests charged with the sacred duty of conducting daily sacrifices to Yahweh “neglected their duties to join the games.”³⁸

All of these practices were deeply offensive to the strict fundamentalists of Judaism, a faction that has come to be known as the Hasidim (“Pious Ones”). They detested the hedonistic ways of Hellenism, including the promiscuous display of the naked human body and the idle distractions of the theater and the stadium. They condemned their fellow Jews who embraced the Greek way of life as “violators of the Law” and vilified them as