A History of the End of the World

offending image had been removed—an event that is celebrated in the Jewish festival of Chanukah. And the fact that two periods of time are specified may mean that the date predicted by the first author passed uneventfully and so a scribe who came along later felt obliged to insert a second and longer period into the text.

Of course, the second date was wrong, too, at least if it was intended to mark the end of the world. But such quibbles have never mattered much to Bible readers who are searching for secret meanings in the text, then or now. After all, if biblical prophecy is “a coded message to be deciphered by the inspired interpreter,” as John J. Collins puts it, then it is up to the discerning reader to break the code and reveal the hidden message. And, as we shall see, men and women have been inspired to invest endless energy and enterprise in doing so ever since.⁶⁵

“As a prediction of the end, it was a failure,” writes H. H. Rowley, “but as a powerful spiritual force it was a great success.”⁶⁶

For all of these reasons, the book of Daniel is the font of apocalyptic speculation, and its words and phrases have been mined for revelatory meanings over the last two thousand years. The Western apocalyptic tradition in its entirety has been characterized as “footnotes to the apocalyptic visions of Daniel.”⁶⁷ And the so- called Little Apocalypse of the Gospels—the passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus describes how the world will end—has been called “a very early Christian midrash, or expansion, on the Danielic account of last events.”⁶⁸

The best measure of Daniel’s stature and influence in the apocalyptic tradition is found in the book of Revelation, whose author draws from the book of Daniel more often than from any other scriptural text, Jewish or Christian. But the book of Daniel is hardly the only or even the oldest apocalypse of the ancient Jewish world. In fact, the author of Daniel may have been inspired by still older texts, and not only by the prophetic writings that are readily found in the Bible. Once we follow the author of Revelation down the rabbit hole of the apocalyptic tradition, we find ourselves in a place where the sights are curiouser and curiouser.

The starting point of the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism may well be found in a strange and unsettling collection of ancient texts called the First Book of Enoch, the oldest of which predate the book of Daniel by a half century or so.⁶⁹ All of the writings are attributed to the biblical figure of Enoch, but they were composed by various flesh-and-blood authors over a period of several centuries. Here we find “the kernel in which the essence of apocalypticism is contained,” according to Italian scholar Paolo Sacchi, a specialist in apocalyptic studies, “and from which the whole tradition grows.”⁷⁰

Enoch, the father of Methuselah, figures prominently in both the apocalyptic and mystical traditions because of the mysterious circumstances of his passing as reported in a single line of text in Genesis: “And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”⁷¹ By an ancient and enduring tradition, the passage is understood to mean that Enoch is spared an ordinary death and is, instead, elevated to heaven while still alive. And so he came to be used as a stock character by various apocalyptic authors who imagined what “secret things” are revealed to him in the celestial realm.

The First Book of Enoch, for example, picks up and elaborates upon a lively tale about a band of randy and rebellious angels that is only briefly mentioned in the book of Genesis. The biblical account describes how the so- called sons of God (b’nai elohim ) descend to earth in pursuit of “daughters of men” whom they have spied from heaven and thus sire a race of giants.⁷²The Book of Watchers goes on to reveal that the fallen angels are, in fact, the minions of the Devil and “the cause of all the evil upon the earth.”⁷³

Significantly, the author of The Book of Watchers uses the term “watcher” to identify the celestial figures who are elsewhere called angels, a turn of phrase that also appears in the book of Daniel: “I saw in visions of my head upon my bed,” writes Daniel, “and, behold, a watcher and a holy one came down from heaven.”⁷⁴ Here is yet another point of linkage between Daniel and the other writings in the apocalyptic tradition: nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible is an angel called a “watcher.” And here, too, the author chooses language that is eerie and even scary: the watchers are spies and provocateurs rather than guardians.

The watchers are guilty of more than crimes of passion, or so Enoch discovers. They also reveal “heavenly secrets” to the human race, including “charms and spells” for working feats of magic, “the art of making up the eyes and of beautifying the eyelids” for purposes of seduction, and the craft of fashioning “swords and daggers and shields and breastplates” for use in making war. God sends the archangel Raphael to bind the chief of the defiant angels, a demonic figure here called Azazel, and cast him into a pit in the desert until “the great day of judgment” when “he may be hurled into the fire.”⁷⁵ But the damage is already done.

“The world was changed,” goes one passage in The Book of Watchers that must have resonated with the life experience of its first readers, the “Pious Ones” who were fighting a culture war against Hellenism. “And there was great impiety, and much fornication, and they went astray, and all their ways became corrupt.”⁷⁶

Another tale in the first book of Enoch, The Animal Apocalypse, surely resonated in a very different but equally powerful way with the same readership. All of the figures in the tale are depicted as animals: Adam, for example, appears in the guise of a white bull, and the rebellious angels sire not human offspring but elephants, camels, and asses. At the climax of The Animal Apocalypse, the evildoers on earth are vanquished by an army of “small lambs” who grow horns—the leader of the flock is the lamb with the biggest horn—and they go into battle with a sword bestowed upon them by “the Lord of the sheep.”⁷⁷ The elaborate and highly fanciful allegory would have been clear to readers in Judea in the second century before the Common Era: “The lamb with the big horn is clearly Judas Maccabee,” explains John J. Collins, “and the context is the Maccabean revolt.”⁷⁸

The Book of the Watchers and The Animal Apocalypse are only two of the texts that have been gathered together in the first book of Enoch. Other apocalyptic writings in the same collection include The Astronomical Book, The Book of Dreams, and The Apocalypse of Weeks, all equally exotic to any reader whose experience of Judaism is based on the Torah and the Talmud. Two additional collections, known as second and third books of Enoch, also contain apocalyptic writings, and so do many of the other works that are characterized as Pseudepigrapha—the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Testament of the Patriarchs, the Book of Jubilees, and the Third Sibylline Oracles, among many others.

All of these apocalyptic texts, as we have already noted, were wholly excluded from the Hebrew Bible itself. In fact, they represent the imaginings and yearnings of men and women who placed themselves at the outer fringes of the Jewish community and sometimes, as in the case of the community at Qumran, far beyond it. And yet these texts are the place where some of the most familiar figures in both Judaism and Christianity were first fleshed out, including the divine redeemer known as the Messiah and the divine adversary known as Satan. Indeed, the apocalyptic texts were the alchemist’s crucible in which the raw materials extracted from the Bible were refined and recoined into something shiny and new.

The biblical version of the Messiah, for example, is hardly the exalted figure that he would become in the apocalyptic traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. His title is derived from the Hebrew word mashiach, which literally means “anointed one”—that is, someone over whose head oil has been poured in a ritual of sanctification that was used to initiate a man into the priesthood or to crown a king. For the authors of the Hebrew Bible, a “messiah” is nothing more than a human being who holds some high office or who has been charged with some special duty.

Thus, for example, Aaron, the first high priest of Israel, is anointed, and so are the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David. But, according to the Bible, a man need not be a king or a high priest, or even a worshipper of the God of Israel, to merit the lofty title of “anointed one.” As we have seen, the Bible also refers to the pagan emperor of Persia as an “anointed one”—a messiah—simply because he succeeded in defeating the rival pagan empire of Babylon and thus restored the exiled Jewish people to their homeland. For that reason, if the author of Revelation had confined himself to the Hebrew Bible, he would never have given us the exalted figure of the Messiah who is celebrated so magnificently in Handel’s oratorio.

Indeed, the more familiar notion of the Messiah as a celestial savior is given its first and fullest expression