A History of the End of the World

Jewish and Christian scriptures. Still, the “models and sources” that inspired the book of Revelation are much closer at hand: they are to be found in the biblical writings of ancient Judaism that the author of Revelation knew, loved, and copied.

Some of the most familiar figures and scenes in the book of Revelation, in fact, can be traced back to specific passages of the Hebrew Bible—Satan, the demonic armies of Gog and Magog, the Day of Judgment, the end of the world, and much else besides. When we read what is plainly written in the source texts, however, it is clear that the author of Revelation did not feel obliged to remain faithful to what he regarded as Holy Writ. Rather, he felt at liberty to embroider upon or wholly reinvent what he found in the pages of the Bible, and he borrowed ideas and images from far stranger sources, or, perhaps even more likely, he did both at once.

Satan, for example, is given only a cameo role in the Hebrew Bible, and he is never depicted as the arch- demon that the author of Revelation imagines him to be. When he is mentioned at all, Satan is merely an “accuser” or “adversary”—the literal meaning of the Hebrew word—and not the diabolical counterpart of God. Indeed, when the word is first used in the Hebrew Bible, it is applied to King David by a Philistine king to mark David as an enemy on the battlefield.¹⁴ Even when used to identify a celestial figure, Satan is “not a proper name, but merely a title defining the function of a member of God’s heavenly court,” explains H. H. Rowley, an influential Baptist scholar and theologian of the early twentieth century. “He was a sort of Public Prosecutor at the bar of divine justice.”¹⁵

The most prominent mention of Satan in the Hebrew Bible is found in the book of Job, where he is shown to be a divine counselor who slyly suggests that Job may be less truly pious than God believes him to be. Once his curiosity is piqued by Satan’s remark, God empowers Satan to test Job’s faith by afflicting him with various woes, starting with those famous boils and ending with the death of Job’s beloved wife and children: “Behold, he is in your hands,” says God to Satan, “only spare his life.”¹⁶ So the only power that Satan enjoys in the Hebrew Bible is the power that God grants him to test Job’s faith, and the whole affair is a kind of laboratory experiment in the limits of human endurance under torture.

Similarly, Gog and Magog are described in Revelation as nations who put their armies under Satan’s command in the final battle at the end of the world. But when they are first mentioned by the prophet Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, Gog is a monarch, Magog is the country over which he reigns, and Satan is not mentioned at all. To be sure, Ezekiel predicts a battle between Israel and “Gog of the land of Magog,” but it is not a cataclysmic clash of arms that brings the world to doomsday.¹⁷ Rather, God himself invites King Gog to invade the land of Israel so that the God of Israel can “manifest My greatness and My holiness” by granting the Israelites a glorious victory.¹⁸ And, in fact, when the army of Gog is destroyed and the battlefield is cleansed of corpses, the Israelites will once again “dwell in their land secure and untroubled.”¹⁹ Like the incident with Job, the whole bloody affair has been contrived by God himself to make a point: “They will know that I the Lord am their God when, having exiled them among the nations, I gather them back into their land.”²⁰

Even when one of the Hebrew prophets seems to predict the end of the world, using words and phrases that will be familiar to readers of Revelation, he is actually describing something very different from what we find in Christian scripture. “The hour of doom has come,” vows God in the book of Amos. “I will make the sun set at noon, I will darken the earth on a sunny day.”²¹ But the prophet Amos, quite unlike the author of Revelation, does not predict that God will destroy the earth and replace it with a celestial paradise in the clouds. Rather, as Amos sees it, God will spare the Israelites who have remained faithful to the divine law, and he will grant them nothing more exalted than a good life in the here and now.

They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them;
They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine;
They shall till gardens and eat their fruit.
And I will plant them upon their soil,
Nevermore to be uprooted
From the soil I have given them.²²

To be sure, some of the Hebrew prophets were capable of weird and wild-eyed visions of the kind that we find in Revelation and other apocalyptic writings. Ezekiel, like the author of Revelation, claims to have beheld grotesque monsters and bizarre phenomena that exist nowhere in the natural world. Among the sights that Ezekiel sees, for example, are four creatures with the torso of a human being, a single calf’s hoof, four wings with a human hand beneath the feathers, and a head with four faces—a human face in front, an eagle’s face in the back, and the faces of a lion and an ox on the sides.²³ And he describes how these creatures move on fiery “wheels,” a contrivance that convinced some of Ezekiel’s later readers that what he had actually seen were UFOs: “And when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth,” writes Ezekiel, “the wheels were lifted up.”²⁴

So there is a kind of genetic linkage between the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the authors of the apocalyptic writings: “Apocalyptic,” as H. H. Rowley puts it, “is the child of prophecy.”²⁵ But the biblical prophecies differ in significant ways from the ones we find in the apocalyptic writings. Unlike the writers of the apocalyptic tradition, who delight in “guided tours” of the seven heavens, the biblical prophets always remain right here on earth. “No Hebrew prophet, not even Isaiah and Ezekiel, had gone up to heaven,” explains historian Bernard McGinn, a prominent figure in the study of Christian mysticism and apocalypticism in the Middle Ages.[2] “God had always condescended to come down to earth.”²⁶ And, significantly, when the Jewish prophets look into the future to determine the fate of humankind, they imagine not a heavenly paradise but an earthly one.

The Jewish notion of an earthly kingdom under a God-sent king, as we shall see, shows up in the book of Revelation in the vision of the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ that will follow the battle of Armageddon. Indeed, that’s one clue to the Jewish origins of its author and first readers, and that’s one of the reasons why Revelation was such a hard sell when the early Christians were deciding which writings belonged in the Bible. But that’s hardly the only or even the most crucial difference between the classical prophets of the Bible and the apocalyptic authors. The single greatest theological innovation in the apocalyptic tradition was a new and revolutionary answer to an old and enduring question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

The author of Revelation, of course, sets up “that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan,” as the source of all evil in the world.²⁷ By contrast, as we have seen, the Hebrew prophets do not seem to know or care much about Satan, and they embrace the simple if also harsh idea that everything, good or bad, begins and ends with God. If the armies of Gog invade the land of Israel, for example, it is because God sent them to do so—and if the Israelites defeat the invader, it is because God grants them victory in battle. And if the Chosen People forfeit the favor of God, they have only themselves to blame.

The moral equation is plainly written in the Bible. God, we are told in the Torah, offers the children of Israel a “covenant”—that is, a contract, and a simple one at that. If the Israelites obey the laws that God is shown to reveal to Moses on Sinai, God will bestow blessings upon them, and if they disobey those laws, God will afflict them with curses. Thus, according to the core theology of the Bible, God is the sole author of history and the sole arbiter of what happens to humankind. And so, if God is sufficiently provoked by the stubbornness and sinfulness of the Chosen People to make them suffer famine or pestilence, conquest or exile, it means only that they are getting what they bargained for and what they deserve.

Some of the most heart-shaking and stomach-turning passages of the Bible, in fact, are the ones in which Moses provides a catalog of the curses that God will bring down on the children of Israel “if you are not careful to do all the words of this law which are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awful name, the Lord your God.” So ghastly is the parade of horribles, warns Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, that “you will be driven mad by the sights you see.”²⁸

God will afflict the Chosen People with “extraordinary plagues, strange and lasting,” starting with