A History of the End of the World

given over to be burned with fire.” At last, a celestial savior—“one like unto a son of man”—is sent to earth on a cloud. “And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom,” writes Daniel, “an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away.”⁴⁹

All of these motifs—God enthroned in heaven, the angels who serve him, and the self-evidently symbolic monsters who stalk the earth—will be reworked and repurposed in the book of Revelation. The book of Daniel is perhaps the single most important of the various “models and sources” that the author of Revelation seems to have invoked in his own writings. And that’s exactly why we must try to understand the methods and meanings of the book of Daniel before we can hope to solve the even deeper mysteries of Revelation.

The key to Daniel—and all of the apocalyptic writings, including the book of Revelation—is found in the simple fact that its night visions are not to be taken literally. Indeed, Daniel himself says so.

“The vision of my mind alarmed me,” he writes. “I approached one of the attendants and asked him the true meaning of all this.”⁵⁰ And the angelic “attendant” patiently explains that the beasts are, in fact, purely symbolic. “This is what he said,” explains Daniel. “These great beasts, four in number, mean four kingdoms will arise out of the earth.”⁵¹ The fourth kingdom, symbolized in the vision by a beast with ten horns, will endure through the reign of ten powerful kings, but it will finally be destroyed. “And the kingdom and the dominion shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High”—that is, the Jewish people, or, at least, the “holy ones” among them who have remained faithful to the Covenant.⁵²

Once we are given permission to read the book of Daniel as a symbolic rather than literal account of history —and, in fact, we are instructed to do so by the author himself—new and illuminating meanings emerge from the otherwise mysterious text. Indeed, the book of Daniel speaks directly to the experience of the Jewish people who were confronting both the excesses of Antiochus the Madman and the seductions of Hellenism at the time when the book was first written and first read—the very men and women whom the author seeks to “exhort and console.” To put it bluntly, the book of Daniel, like much else in the Bible, is propaganda, not prophecy.

Thus, for example, Daniel refuses to eat the rich food and fine wine offered by the court chamberlain of the pagan emperor, and contents himself with a daily ration of beans and water—an example of right conduct for Jews who were being invited (or compelled) to break the laws of kashrut. When Nebuchadnezzar decrees that a golden idol be erected and worshipped, the readers of Daniel were meant to think of Antiochus, who defiled the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem by installing an idol of Zeus. And when Daniel’s three companions—Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego—choose death by fire rather than bow down to the idol, they are spared from suffering by a guardian angel who joins them in the furnace, a consoling thought to any Jewish man or woman facing the tortures that are described by Josephus or the author of the book of Maccabees.

“Lo, I see four men, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt,” declares the pagan monarch, who is scared out of his wits by what he beholds, “and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”⁵³

Above all, Daniel holds out the promise that the Jewish people will be relieved of all suffering because history itself, as we know it, will come to an end. “Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the end of days,” says one of the heavenly messengers who grant Daniel a series of revelations. A cunning and deceitful king “shall stand up against the prince of peace,” says one messenger, “but he shall be broken,” although the instrument of his defeat shall be “no human hand.” After a final period of tribulation—“a time of trouble such as there never was”—the archangel Michael will descend from heaven to make war on the last of the evil kings, “and at that time, thy people shall be delivered.”⁵⁴

Thus does Daniel put a new spin on the old theology of the Hebrew Bible. Daniel’s night visitors readily concede that God afflicts the Jewish people for their faithlessness, just as Moses had warned, but they also promise that one day God will “make reconciliation” and “bring in everlasting righ teous ness.”⁵⁵ As if to make amends for the fact the God does nothing to prevent various oppressors from torturing and murdering their Jewish subjects, the angels hold out the prospect of a day of resurrection when the dead will be judged, and rewarded or punished appropriately.

“Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt,” the angels promise. And, when the end of the world finally comes, it is not merely a good life on earth that awaits the worthy souls but an eternal life in heaven: “Those who are wise,” the visitors assure Daniel and his readers, “shall shine like the stars for ever and ever.⁵⁶

The newfangled ideas in the book of Daniel were meant to soothe the sufferings of Jewish men and women who lived during the Maccabean Revolt or, at least, the most pious among them. But the scenes of resurrection, judgment, and eternal life would have been as unfamiliar and off-putting to the classical biblical prophets as the notion that God and Satan are at war for the hearts and minds of the Chosen People. Nor did these ideas come to play a commanding role in Jewish tradition, which continued to focus on the intimate relationship between the God of Israel and the Chosen People in the here and now rather than the hereafter.

But when the author of Revelation unpacked the theological baggage of the book of Daniel during the first century of the Common Era, he found fresh and powerful ways to address the sufferings of a new generation of pious men and women. They were no less estranged from the high culture of classical paganism than the victims of Antiochus had been, and they felt themselves no less at risk of persecution and death. And the first readers and hearers of Revelation responded to the new way of reading the Hebrew Bible. If the apocalyptic tradition is the “child of prophecy,” the apocalyptic tradition itself is “the mother of Christianity.”⁵⁷

Nor are the ideas of resurrection and judgment the only theological innovations that we find in the book of Daniel. Other biblical authors, for example, describe angels as not much more than celestial errand boys; indeed, “messenger” is the literal meaning of the Hebrew word (malak) that came to be rendered in English as “angel.” The author of Daniel, by contrast, appears to borrow the idea of an elaborate hierarchy of angels directly from the Persian tradition of angelology: “Thousands upon thousands served Him,” says Daniel of the heavenly court of the Ancient of Days. “Myriads upon myriads attended him.”⁵⁸ And he is the first biblical author to refer to the archangels Gabriel and Michael, who will play such a prominent role in the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic writings.⁵⁹

Daniel is also the first biblical author to use the phrase “son of man” in the paradoxical sense that will be familiar to readers of the Christian scriptures; when Daniel refers to someone as “the son of man,” the prophet means to say that he is not the offspring of ordinary human beings. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, however, the phrase is given its natural meaning; the book of Job, for example, uses “son of man” in making the point that God is incomparably greater than any mere mortal: “How much less [is] man, a worm; the son of man, a maggot.”⁶⁰ For Daniel, by contrast, the “son of man” is exalted, eternal, and all- powerful: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the son of man came with the clouds, and came to the Ancient of Days, and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him, an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away.”⁶¹

The book of Daniel also offers the first example in the Bible of the kind of number crunching that came to be such an obsessive practice among readers of Revelation. Daniel begins with an apparently straightforward passage from the book of Jeremiah in which the prophet predicts that the Babylonian Exile will last exactly seventy years: “After seventy years are accomplished for Babylon,” God tells Jeremiah, “I will remember you, causing you to return to this place.”⁶² But the angel Gabriel explains to Daniel that the old prophet actually meant to say seventy weeks of years—that is, seventy times seven, or a total of 490 years. And, what’s more, Jeremiah meant to predict not merely the end of the exile in Babylon but the end of all earthly evil and the advent of a celestial paradise: “Seventy weeks of years are decreed,” reveals the archangel, “to put an end to sin, and to bring in everlasting righ teous ness.”⁶³

In fact, Daniel is told exactly when the sinful world will be destroyed, although the angel provides two different calculations of the end-times. Daniel is granted a vision in which it is revealed that the end will come either 1,290 or 1,335 days after “the abomination of desolation is set up.”⁶⁴The angel does not explain what is meant by “the abomination of desolation,” but scholars suggest that the phrase refers to the statue of Zeus that Antiochus installed in the Temple at Jerusalem. Perhaps the author of Daniel was thinking only of the period of time that passed between the erection of the idol and the rededication of the Temple after the