“evildoers against the Covenant.”39 The bitter struggle between the assimilationists and the fundamentalists of ancient Judea has been called “a ‘Kulturkampf’ between Judaism and Hellenism.”40
“Kulturkampf,” of course, is a term commonly used nowadays in its rough English translation—“culture war”—to refer to any struggle between two warring value systems and ways of life.41 Just as the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” movements confront each other across the front lines of the culture war in the modern world, the pious Jews of antiquity who insisted on circumcision as a sacred rite confronted the assimilated Jews who chose to forgo the old ways. And so, as we shall come to see, “culture war” is equally useful in describing what was really at stake in the apocalyptic tradition and, especially, the book of Revelation.
But the tensions in the Jewish world of the second century B.C.E. were not merely the result of a clash between assimilationists and fundamentalists. The pagan king who ruled over Judea, as the ancient chroniclers described him, was a monster whose excesses eventually sparked a war of national liberation under the leadership of a man called Judah Maccabee, “Judah the Hammer.” Here, for the first time in recorded history, we are able to glimpse the remarkable power of the apocalyptic idea to move otherwise ordinary men and women to offer their lives, sometimes as soldiers and sometimes as martyrs, in the name of God.
On the death of Alexander the Great, his vast empire was divided up among his generals. The land of Judea, a small but strategically significant province that served as a land bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa, passed under the control of the Syrian dynasty founded by one of Alexander’s generals, a man called Seleucus. Starting in 175 B.C.E., the reigning king of the Seleucid dynasty was a particularly vile and hateful man called Antiochus IV. By an accident of history, as we shall shortly see, he will figure crucially in the book of Daniel, the only apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible and a text that served as one of the “models and sources” for the book of Revelation.
One of the glories of Hellenism was its open-mindedness toward religious beliefs and practices, a core value that characterized the world of classical paganism. But Antiochus IV was an aberration among the monarchs of the Greco-Roman world, an arbitrary and impulsive autocrat who sought to suppress the unruly Jewish fundamentalists in Judea by force of arms. He called himself Antiochus Epiphanes (“Antiochus the Manifestation of God”), but his excesses against the Jewish people were so much at odds with the tolerance that Hellenism displayed toward the religions of conquered people that he earned himself the moniker Antiochus Epimanes—Antiochus the Madman.
Antiochus was troubled by the unsettled state of affairs in Judea for mostly geopolitical reasons. The culture war among Jewish factions was approaching a state of civil war, and the Jewish fundamentalists were seeking to ally themselves with a rival pagan monarch, the pharaoh of Egypt, the descendant of yet another general who had served Alexander. When Antiochus finally marched into Judea on his way to Egypt in 168 B.C.E., his strategic objective was to secure his southern flank in Judea before making war on the meddlesome pharaoh. But he resolved to restore law and order in Judea by rooting out the practice of Judaism through a series of hateful and humiliating decrees.
Under Antiochus, the fundamental rites of Judaism—circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath, and the dietary laws of kashrut—were criminalized. The worship of the God of Israel was forbidden, and an image of Zeus, the high god of the Greek pantheon, was installed in the inner sanctum of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem. Thus, we are told, a pig was offered as a sacrifice on the altar of Yahweh, the high priest was ordered to eat its flesh, and its offal was poured over the scrolls of the Torah. All over the land of Judea, anyone who refused to turn over the Torah for public burning was subject to arrest, torture, and execution by the death squads of the Syrian king.
“They were whipped with rods and their bodies were torn to pieces,” reports Josephus, the Jewish general- turned-historian who eventually put himself in ser vice to the Roman Empire in the first century of the Common Era, “and they were crucified while they were still alive and breathed.”42
Such atrocities sparked the Maccabean Revolt, an uprising against Syrian occupation and oppression led by the celebrated Judah Maccabee. Under Judah’s command, the Jewish resistance fought on two fronts, one a war of national liberation against the Syrian army, and the other a struggle against the assimilated Jews whom they regarded as both apostates and collaborators. Among the exploits of the Maccabees, for example, was the forcible circumcision of Jewish males, infant or adult, who had neglected the ancient rite that symbolized the covenant with the God of Israel. The armies of Antiochus were finally defeated in 164 B.C.E., and the Maccabees established the first independent Jewish state since the last Jewish king had been sent into captivity in Babylon.
Along with acts of martyrdom and feats of arms, the Jewish people of the second century B.C.E. offered another kind of resistance to the foreign army of occupation and their native collaborators. A few charismatic and visionary authors began to tell tales that were intended to strengthen the resolve of the “Pious Ones” who refused to compromise their true belief. They draped the stories in veils of mystery, and they conjured up strange visions, some terrible and some tantalizing. And they spiced the stories they told with a longing for—and a sure promise of—a day of bloody revenge against their enemies.
The texts that were composed during the days of the Maccabean Revolt “are born out of a sense that the world is out of joint,” according to historian John J. Collins, one of the leading scholars in the modern study of apocalypticism, and they were “written to exhort and console.”43Indeed, the tales of revenge and redemption in the end-times can be seen as a tool of propaganda in both a shooting war and a culture war. And, as we shall see, they were the earliest stirrings of the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism and Christianity that would one day result in the writing of Revelation.
One repository of the early apocalyptic tradition is the book of Daniel. The texts that are collected and preserved in Daniel are set in Babylon in the early sixth century B.C.E., some four centuries before the Maccabean Revolt. The monarch who is depicted in Daniel is Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian emperor who conquered Judah, destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem, and carried the Jewish royals, priests, and gentry into exile. But scholars agree that the various stories in the book of Daniel were actually composed and compiled in the second century B.C.E., and Nebuchadnezzar would have been recognized by the original readers of the book of Daniel as a stand-in for Antiochus the Madman.
“If the author wished to hearten the faithful in the time of affliction and persecution, what better medium could he have chosen?” writes H. H. Rowley.44“They were entertainment, as well as charged with a message, and so they could easily be remembered and passed from mouth to mouth.”45
Indeed, a certain fairytale quality suffuses the book of Daniel. Among the exiles in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, we are told, are young Jewish men of noble blood, “fair to look on, and skillful in all wisdom,” and Daniel is the fairest and wisest of them all.46 When the pagan king threatens to put Daniel to death unless he reveals the meaning of a dream so mysterious that it has baffled all the royal astrologers, enchanters, and magicians, Daniel prays to the God of Israel for a revelation. God grants Daniel’s prayer and discloses the meaning of the dream.
“Blessed be the name of God, for wisdom and might are his,” says a thankful Daniel. “He revealeth the deep and secret things, he knoweth what is in the darkness.”47
The “secret things” that God reveals to Daniel are quite at odds with what the other biblical authors say about the fate of the Chosen People. Elsewhere in the Bible, as we have seen, God himself is identified as the one who sends Nebuchadnezzar and other foreign invaders to afflict the children of Israel, and all because of their own apostasy and harlotry. Here and now a new idea enters the Bible: the Jewish people are afflicted not by God on high but by evildoers on earth, and God will one day rescue them from their oppressors by sending a savior to defeat the enemy and establish an eternal kingdom of divine peace and perfection for the pious Jews who remain faithful to the Torah.
“Then the holy ones of the Most High will receive the kingdom,” Daniel is told by a heavenly emissary, “and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”48
The idea is memorably expressed the “night visions” that Daniel describes. Four nightmarish beasts, “dreadful and terrible,” crawl out of the sea and range over the earth, devouring all in their path. God, depicted here as the “Ancient of Days,” a white-haired king on his celestial throne, attended by angelic minions numbering a “thousand thousands,” bestirs himself to defeat the last and most dreadful of the beasts, a monster with ten horns, iron teeth, and brass claws: “And as I looked,” affirms Daniel, “the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and
