A History of the End of the World

only in the apocalyptic writings, where it also comes to be fused with the divine redeemer who is known, rather paradoxically, as “Son of Man.” For Daniel, the “one like a son of man” and the “one anointed” are apparently two different figures; the first is a celestial figure who is granted an eternal kingdom by God, but the second is a mortal prince who shall “be cut off, and be no more.”⁷⁹ By contrast, The Apocalypse of Weeks, one of the writings in the first book of Enoch, describes the Son of Man as precisely the kind of judge, redeemer, and savior who came to be identified in both Jewish and Christian tradition as the Messiah:

“And [the people of God] had great joy because the name of that Son of Man had been revealed to them,” goes a passage in the first book of Enoch. “And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the whole judgment was given to the Son of Man, and he will cause the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from the face of the earth. And from then on there will be nothing corruptible.”⁸⁰

Even after “Messiah” took on its meaning as a God-sent savior, the varieties of Judaism as practiced in the ancient world did not agree on who the Messiah would be or exactly what he would do. Some apocalyptic sources envision two Messiahs, one from the tribe of Judah and another from the tribe of Levi, one a king and the other a priest. Nor could they agree on how long the earthly reign of the Messiah would last. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, envisions the messianic era as nothing more than a forty-year war against the Roman occupiers of Judea, and an apocalyptic text called 4 Ezra puts the reign of the Messiah at four hundred years, after which the whole world would come to an end.

Satan, too, as we have seen, is relegated to the role of divine prosecutor in the Hebrew Bible, and he is elevated to the rank of Prince of Darkness only in the apocalyptic writings. Indeed, Satan is imagined to be the demonic counterpart to God, a powerful and willful figure whom the Messiah would fight and defeat in the end- times. The satanic arch-villain is known by many names in the apocalyptic texts—Asmodeus, Azazel, Mastema, Belial (or sometimes Beliar), and many more besides—but all of them came to be understood as one and the same as the malefactor whom the author of Revelation later calls “that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan.”

So the colorful cast of characters that will later show up in the pages of Revelation is neither wholly invented by its author nor wholly faithful to the biblical texts that he knew so well. Rather, they were all stock figures in the apocalyptic subculture of ancient Judaism. And they were not meant merely to amuse or thrill or frighten the readers and hearers of the oldest apocalyptic texts. Rather, as we have seen, the characters in the apocalyptic drama were meant to inspire ordinary men and women to serve as good soldiers, both in the culture war against classical paganism and in the war of national liberation that was fought against the pagan invaders of the ancient Jewish homeland. For pious Jews and patriotic Jews alike, then, the apocalyptic writings of antiquity were the literature of resistance—but it was resistance of a very different kind than the first readers of Revelation were encouraged to offer to their Roman persecutors.

Josephus shows us that the Jewish people adopted a variety of tactics in responding to the temptations of Hellenism and the threats of Roman imperialism. Some Jews, like Josephus himself, made a profitable peace with Rome. Other Jews, like the Zealots, took up arms against Rome in the name of God and country. And a few Jews, whom Josephus calls the “Essenes,” retreated into the wilderness to await the end of the world, when the armies of God would go to war against the armies of Satan.

Some scholars identify the Essenes with the “apocalyptic community” at Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Their urgent expectations are set down in the so-called War Scroll, which envisions a final battle between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness,” captained on one side by the archangel Michael and on the other side by the demonic figure known as Belial.⁸¹ Here is yet another example of how the raw material of the Bible was mined by the apocalyptic authors for new and revolutionary meanings—“Belial” appears nowhere in the Bible itself except as an abstract noun “whose meaning is probably ‘worthlessness,’” but he is conjured up in the apocalyptic tradition as “the supreme adversary of God.”⁸²

Still, we simply do not know whether the authors of Daniel, the first book of Enoch, and the Dead Sea Scrolls were members of the same movement in early Judaism—or whether they were worthy of being called a “movement” at all. Scholars can only speculate whether the “Pious Ones” (hasidim) who are mentioned in the Book of Maccabees, the “Wise” (maskilim) who are mentioned in Daniel, and the Essenes who are mentioned by Josephus are different names for the same people. Thus, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls were once confidently ascribed to the Essenes, but more careful scholars refer only to “the Qumran sect” and wonder out loud if and how they were linked to the other apocalyptic communities of ancient Judaism.⁸³

What they have in common, however, is clear. All of these men and women felt estranged from—and, in a real sense, betrayed by—the world in which they found themselves. Even when they were not prevented from practicing the pure and rigorous strain of Judaism that they embraced, they felt insulted and injured when their fellow Jews failed to do the same. And so, when they contemplated a Jewish king who took the name of a pagan conqueror, or a Jewish high priest who schooled youngsters in how to compete naked in Greek athletic games, or any number of Jewish parents who neglected to circumcise their sons, their true belief instructed them that they were beholding yet another manifestation of what the Bible condemns as “the abomination of desolation.”

For such men and women, then, the apocalyptic idea was both a balm and a liquor. Today you are oppressed and persecuted, they are told by the apocalyptic texts, but tomorrow your oppression and persecution will end because the whole world will end. And, what’s more, they are encouraged to look forward not only to relief from suffering—a messianic hero and his army of holy warriors who will defeat the demonic arch-villain and his army of evildoers—but also revenge against those who made them suffer in the first place. Thus, the end of the world is the occasion for a resurrection of the dead, the Day of Judgment, and the meting out of punishments and rewards.

Above all, the apocalyptic tradition was addressed to an audience of men and women who regarded themselves as outsiders and victims even if they were not actually suffering oppression or persecution at any given time and place. Apocalyptic writings reflect “the experience of alienation [in] times of crisis,” according to a certain conventional wisdom in scholarship, but John J. Collins reminds us that “alienation, and crises, may be of many kinds,” including “culture shock,” “social powerlessness,” and “national trauma.”⁸⁴ By the first century of the Common Era, all three kinds of crisis were afflicting the Jewish world where the apocalypses were being written and read, including those Jewish men and women who would soon begin to call themselves Christians.

The culture war that began during the Maccabean Revolt never really abated. The last Jewish king to carry the blood of the Maccabees in his veins, Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 B.C.E.), was an enthusiastic Hellenist who became the target of rioting by the religious fundamentalists in Judea, and he turned his army on the most pious of his own Jewish subjects in a campaign that lasted six years and cost fifty thousand lives. On his death, the various rivals for kingship courted the favor of the Roman Empire, the latest superpower of the pagan world. But Rome resolved to bring law and order to Judea once and for all, and a Roman legion marched into Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E. Thus did the stars come into alignment for the unlikely chain of events that would result in nothing less revolutionary than the reinvention of Judaism and the invention of Christianity.

At first, Rome was content to administer the Jewish homeland through a series of puppet rulers, the most famous of whom was Herod, a man of Arab blood whose family had been forcibly converted to Judaism under the Maccabees. Herod was a good Hellenist who remodeled the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem in the classical style of Greco-Roman architecture and decorated the towns and cities of Judea with stadiums and gymnasia. But when Herod died—and Judea once again fell into chaos—a Roman general marched into Jerusalem, and Judea came under the direct rule of imperial Rome as a newly established province.

As during the Maccabean Revolt, the Jews who resented the invasion of a foreign army and the Jews who resented the invasion of a foreign way of life tended to overlap. The Jewish resistance was dismissed by the Roman authorities as “bandits” and “brigands,” but they called themselves “Zealots,” thus invoking the heroic example of the biblical heroes who were “zealous for the Law and the Covenant.” Again like the Maccabees, they took up arms against both the army of the occupation and the assimilated Jews who collaborated with the Romans. The Sicarii (“dagger-men”), for example, were urban terrorists who targeted Jewish collaborators for assassination in public places. And the apocalyptic ideas and images that were first written down during the Maccabean Revolt found a new readership in the latest generation of Jewish freedom fighters.