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Introduction to

Apocalyptic Literature

The apocalyptic literature of the Bible has been seen as both the most important element within it, to be given singular attention as the key to a successful Christian life, or as a source of embarrassment that is better ignored. These opposing attitudes toward apocalypticism within Christianity have been a constant feature of its history. It would be possible to write a history of Christianity with the contrasting views of the value of apocalyptic literature as its organizing principle. My purpose in this book is to take a serious look at the apocalyptic texts found in the Bible in order to establish why they were written and what they were concerned with at the time of writing. I will pursue this objective by asking:1) for whom were they written? 2) What is the issue they are concerned with? And 3) within which symbolic universe does their message make sense? My task is to reconstruct as much as possible their historical context. The ancient Hebrews, the post-exilic Jews and the early Christians went through traumatic experiences of national defeat, exile, denials of national independence and significant changes in the cultural and religious milieu in which they lived. It was within these circumstances that the authors of these texts wrote. All these factors need to be taken into account before one can make any sense of these texts in the twenty-first century.

The Bible contains full blown apocalyptic books, like Daniel and Revelation, books that contain apocalyptic chapters which don’t fit comfortably within them, and books that while belonging to a different category work up themes that eventually became characteristic of the apocalyptic perspective. Since the biblical apocalyptic perspective developed as a descendant of the prophetic tradition in Israel, in this book I will first establish the nature of the prophetic tradition. Then I will explore how the apocalyptic perspective developed within the prophetic and other traditions. After that, I will analyze the mayor apocalyptic texts in the Bible. Finally, I will draw some conclusions and make some practical suggestions as to the relevance of the apocalyptic perspective in the twenty-first century. For full disclosure, I am using the labels “prophetic” and “apocalyptic” as heuristic devices that help in the analysis of these texts. No author of one of these books understood himself as an apocalyptic author. These labels are modern tools of analysis with which to contrast and compare different points of view. Characteristics of one or the other of these labels may be found in books classified in the other group.

The function of prophecy in Israel

The apocalyptic authors of the Old Testament were descendants of the prophets. Both aimed at quite similar objectives. It is a misunderstanding, however, to think that their basic objective was to forecast the future. The prophets’ primary interest was to interpret the present, call for a change of direction in the lives of the people of Israel and advise them on what needed to be done at the moment. That they are known as prophets does not say that they foretold what would happen in the future, but that they spoke on behalf of another. The word “prophet” is composed of two Greek words: pro and phemi. The preposition pro may mean either “to anticipate” or “to take the place of.” Thus, in English we have the word prophylactic (to anticipate an infection), propensity (to anticipate liking) and proscribe (to anticipate writing). We also have the word proselyte (an alien who is in), prosthesis (taking the place of a missing part), and protestant (one who testifies against, or for another). Phemi means “to say,” “to affirm.” The prophets spoke for another, for the Lord. Doing this, they were not “fore-telling,” but “telling for,” standing for, in place of the Lord. Through them the Lord was telling the Israelites how he viewed their present course of action, describing what the future held if they continued in their present course, and advising them to change course.

This definition of a prophet was still in use in early Christian times. The apostle Paul points out that different members of the church have been given different gifts and identifies “prophecy” among them (1 Cor. 12:10). He also gives a list of the roles God has established for the proper functioning of the church. He lists “prophets” after “apostles” and before “teachers” (1 Cor. 12:28). As Paul describes them, the prophets were the ones who spoke a “Word of the Lord.” We would call them “preachers.” In antiquity, the Word of the Lord was understood to be oral, even after its later compilation in books by editors. With some significant differences demanded by the circumstances, the apocalyptic writers did the same three things the prophets had been doing. It is in this discrete sense that the apocalypticists are to be thought of as descendants of the prophets. They also were analyzing the present and concerned to recommend a course of action.

In the process of analyzing what was taking place from the divine perspective, the prophets revealed a God who is not primarily attached to natural phenomena in their yearly cycles, but a God who has been actively involved in bringing the people out of a troubled past is taking notice of what they are doing in the present and has control over their future. The prophets examined the life of the people in its historical setting. According to them, Yahveh is the Lord who has been guiding the people of Israel as they have advanced toward their present unparalleled and unexpected prosperity. Human affairs are not bound to the natural cyclical return to the beginning. Human activity is significant when it does something new, something different. Human beings do not promote well-being and prosperity by faithfully celebrating feasts that keep them attuned with the turning of the seasons and promote the reception of the bounties of nature. The prophets insisted that shalom, health, well-being, prosperity, peace, was a gift of Yahveh, the Lord of time. They released time from the circle of yearly repetitions and cast it on a time-line that came from the past and reached forward to an open future. This gave the present significance not because of its correspondence with a primordial divine action or a particular natural phenomenon that demanded the performance of a specified ritual, but because it gave human beings the opportunity to collaborate with God in the formulation of the future. In Israel, feasts which had been celebrations of transitions in the course of natural events, under their new cosmology became celebrations that had to do with particular historical events.

The prophets admonished the people to remember how God had blessed them in their past history, and that they had entered into a covenant agreement with Yahveh. This made it necessary to live according to chesed, covenant loyalty. Having entered into a covenant with Yahveh, the people were now Yahveh’s bride. The understanding that their connection to their God was not in nature, but in the way in which they lived in obedience to covenant stipulations set the Israelites in a peculiar trajectory. Rather than depending on the performance of religious rituals for security and prosperity, they were to depend on Yahveh’ guidance for security and prosperity. This required a particular way of living at all times, not just at festival time. God’s demands have primarily to do with life in society. God’s retributive justice is applied in reference to one’s relationships with others and one’s commitment to God. Since God had elected Abraham and his descendants as his people, they were now Yahveh’s bride. Any deviation from their commitment to their husband was denounced by the prophets as harlotry. To their chagrin, the prophets found pervasive evidence of Israel’s deviations from its covenant commitments. Therefore, God aimed to punish Israel severely. If the people continued in their present course of action, God’s judgment would be their historical downfall. On the other hand, if they turned away from their evil ways and became loyal to the God of the covenant, God would reward them with security and prosperity.

The origins of prophecy

The prophets whose writings we possess were not the only ones giving advice to the people. In Israel there were sorcerers, diviners, augurs, soothsayers, necromancers and witches. The Old Testament contains repeated warnings against consulting them or paying attention to their pronouncements. There were also “seers” who were also called “men of the spirit,” and later came to be called “prophets” (1 Sam. 9:10). When Saul encountered a group of them he was also empowered by the spirit, which gave rise to the saying “Is Saul also among the prophets?” (1 Sam. 10:12). In time, the old schools of the prophets produced professional prophets who were attached to the temple and were servants of the king. They spoke what the king wanted to hear. By contrast, the prophets whose oracles are now found in the Bible were for the most part the ones who stood against those in power who were abusing the weak among them: the widow, the orphan, the day laborer, the poor.

In the canon of the Hebrew Bible one section is designated as the Former Prophets and another as the Latter Prophets. What according to this nomenclature is designated as the Former Prophets are books that we consider narratives (1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings). The Latter Prophets section of the Hebrew canon contains the books which have collections of the sayings of prophets, which we call now the prophetic books. The first of the “former prophets” in Israel is Samuel who was also a judge. He marks the transition from the leadership of the judges, who were endowed by the spirit to become military leaders charged to deliver the people from the oppression of neighboring chieftains, and the kings, who gave the people security with a standing army and royal prestige. This was a major shift in the history of Israel, and left scars that brought about the future division of the nation under two competing kingdoms. It was the transition from charismatic to institutional leadership. The endowment of the Spirit on the judges had been for the accomplishment of a specific task. Once the task had been accomplished, judges returned to their normal life. That is, their spiritual endowment had been temporary.

The establishment of a king, with hereditary rights of succession, institutionalized the power of the Spirit; its flow was thought to have been restricted to official channels. There are two contradictory narratives about Samuel’s participation in the establishment of the monarchy, evidence of the controversy that characterized its establishment. The institutionalization of the Spirit was strongly resisted by many. According to one account, the people asked for a king because they did not wish to have one of the sons of Samuel as their judge. Faced by this request, God advised Samuel to comply, and identified Saul as the one to be anointed king (1 Sam. 8-11). In this account, God is behind the introduction of kingship, and Samuel, the prophet, is following God’s directive when he anoints the first king. According to the other narrative, the people asked for a king because they were being threatened by Nahash, the king of the Ammonites. God was displeased by this request, and Samuel felt duty-bound to warn the people of the consequences of their request. Loyalty to a king would become a competitor to their obedience to God (1 Sam. 12). According to this account, the people did not trust God’s ability to provide protection from foreign attacks, and God took their request for a king as an offense against him. Obviously, not everyone in Israel was happy with the crowning of what proved to be despotic kings. These stories also reflect on the role of the prophet. According to one, he is a loyal servant of the king who is a servant of God. According to the other, the prophet stands in opposition to the king who has been enthroned as a reluctant concession on the part of God.

The prophets as advisers or accusers of those in power

The prophets we know for their activities in the narratives of the books of Samuel and Kings were concerned with matters having to do with kingship, dynastic stability, foreign policy and military activity. Elisha, in particular, exemplifies these roles. Nathan was a prophet attached to the royal household who gave David the message that, while Yahveh did not wish him to build the house of God in Jerusalem, Yahveh would establish his “house” (dynasty) forever (2 Sam. 7:14-29). This promise was the foundation of all future expectation of a Messiah, the One Anointed by the Lord. Nathan also determined the dynastic line and made sure that Solomon, rather than Adonijah, became the successor to King David (1 Kg. 1:5-53). It is somewhat of a surprise to read that Nathan also charged King David with the murder of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, and told David what would be God’s punishment for his crime (2 Sam. 12:1-25). This story, however, ends by telling that on account of this intervention God loved Nathan and changed his name to Jedidiah. It is somewhat difficult to see how Nathan was both a promoter of the Davidic dynasty and an accuser of King David. Maybe the Nathan who provided the divine stamp on the Davidic dynasty is not the same as the person who charged David with a crime and came to be known as Jedidiah. Elijah the Tishbite, who stood against King Ahab and his worship of Baal, acted like Jedidiah (1 Kg. 17:1; 18:1-19). So also did Huldah, the wife of Shallum. She confirmed the judgment of God against Judah. Because of King Josiah’s repentance before God, however, she declared that God would postpone the downfall of Jerusalem until another king came to power (2 Kg. 22:14-20, 2 Chr. 34:22-28).

The prophets whose oracles were preserved in books were protestants who testified for the Lord against those in power. They stood against wayward kings, hired prophets, corrupt priests and greedy nobles. Amos was the first of these prophets, or Latter Prophets according to the Hebrew canon. He stood in defiance to the authority of Amaziah, the priest of the temple at Bethel and the king he served. At the time of Jeroboam II (786-746 B.C.E.), the kingdom of Israel was enjoying its largest territorial expansion and great economic prosperity (Am. 7:10-17). Being a shepherd from Tekoa, in the southern kingdom of Judah, Amos had the temerity to prophesy against Jeroboam at the royal sanctuary at Bethel, the northern competitor to the temple in Jerusalem. His message exposed the injustices done by the prosperous and flamboyant princes who thought themselves blessed because of their generosity with the sacrifices of bulls and heifers at the temple. Amos pointed out to them that their ritual displays at the altar did not cover up their abuses of the poor, their greed and their trust in their own piety. Being descendants of Jacob, they considered themselves the elect of Yahveh who were destined to even greater prosperity. They had the idea, its origin is obscure, that on the Day of the Lord, when God would personally enter history, they would be able to celebrate with much rejoicing as they would achieve the pinnacle of national glory and untold fame. Amos announced to them, to the contrary, that on account of their way of life, their expectations were totally unfounded. He told them, “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! It is darkness, and not light; as if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house and leaned with his hand against the wall, and a serpent bit him. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?” (Am. 5:18-20). Amos’ aim was not to prognosticate the future. It was to call for a change of behavior that would cause their dark future not to be. The constant advice of the prophetic messages in the tradition of Amos was shub, turn, return, change course, repent. Amos’ message was quite negative because God’s ways were not being followed. His intention, however, was to cause them to change their unjust ways so that they could continue to live in the land in security and peace.

Hosea, who prophesied in the northern kingdom a few years later, also gave a negative appraisal of the way in which the Israelites were living. After charging the people with harlotry (Hos. 4:13-15) and other sins, Hosea announced, “The days of punishment have come, the days of recompense have come; Israel shall know it.… They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah; he will remember their iniquity, he will punish their sins” (Hos. 9:7-9). His description of God’s punishments is disturbing, “Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open” (Hos. 13:16). If life in Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, continued in its present course, Hosea predicted a future that today rings as one devised by a sadistic torturer. He, however, balanced his indictments with calls to repentance, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord, say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity’ .… They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom as the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon” (Hos. 14:1-2, 7). Hosea reports God saying“I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely” (Hos. 14:4); “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! … My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger” (Hos. 11:8-9). The contrast between the two possible futures could not be more pronounced: the sadist killer against the romantic lover. The early prophets aimed at causing the people to take seriously the present and live according to their commitments to Yahveh. For them, the future was still open. God could change his mind and not execute the dire judgments their present conduct called for. While Amos is unique in his concentration of the coming doom that will punish a sinful people, all the other prophets, starting with Hosea, balance their announcements of doom with demonstrations of God’s loving commitment to his people.

Prophetic adjustments to new circumstances

The prophets active in the southern kingdom of Judah just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and afterwards during the Exile in Babylon, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (630-570 B.C.E.), found the situation untenable and lamented the extreme corruption taking place at the palace and the temple. They could do no other but announce the downfall of the city and the temple due to the total disregard for the God of the covenant. Their idolatry had no bounds. Yahveh is a jealous God of justice, and retributive justice would take its course.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel, however, realized that the retributive justice of God needed to be adjusted to a new understanding of the self. They recognized that the traditional understanding of the self as a member of a family, or tribe, does not make sense to those who saw themselves as individual persons. The notion that the exiles were suffering on account of the sins of ancestors who had been idol-worshipers in Jerusalem was no longer reasonable. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel refer to a proverb that was used to justify suffering as punishment for sins committed by ancestors. It said, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jer. 31:29; Ez. 18:2). According to these prophets, justice does not operate this way any longer. They proclaimed instead, “the soul that sins shall die” (Ez. 18:4) or “each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge” (Jer. 31:30). The individualization of responsibility for one’s actions was a major shift in the Israelite understanding of justice.

Until then it was perfectly reasonable to punish a whole clan for the crime of one of its members. The story of the conquest of Jericho, tells that Achan “took some of the devoted things; and the anger of the Lord burned against the people of Israel” (Jos. 7:1). The story ends with the resolution of the problem created by the fateful deed. “And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the mantle and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters, and his oxen and asses and sheep and his tent, and all that he had; and they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, ‘Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord brings trouble on you today.’ And all Israel stoned him with stones; they burned them with fire, and stoned them with stones. And they raised over him a great hip of stones that remains to this day; then the Lord turned from his burning anger” (Jos. 7:24-26). At that time it apparently seemed quite reasonable for God to be angry with all the people of Israel and cause their defeat at Ai as punishment for the transgression of one man. To solve the problem that had affected all the people of Israel, the people did not execute just Achan, but Achan, his sons and his daughters. Besides, all his possessions were burned. That God’s justice works on the basis of tribal identity is in evidence throughout the history of Israel up to the Exile. What Jeremiah and Ezekiel proclaimed was that the way in which God’s justice had been working in the past was no longer to be. From now on, punishment would only affect the guilty perpetrator.

Among the features that contributed to the dawn of an apocalyptic perspective during and following the Exile, this shift in the identification of a person from one who is a member of a tribe to one who is a single individual is crucial. This is the transition from corporate to individual identity. Jeremiah and Ezekiel proclaimed this new vision of how Yahveh’s justice works to disallow the excuse being given by the exiles who blamed their fathers rather than themselves for their sufferings in Exile. The prophets told them that because they did not turn away from the evil ways of their fathers they were responsible for their own suffering. This transition, of course, reflects a new understanding of the value of an individual. It became logical to understand that God’s justice works on the basis of individual responsibility because of the influence of the Greek philosophers who established a new vision of the person. In Greece, it had brought about the rejection of autocrats and the establishment of the right of each individual citizen to vote for the election of rulers. In Israel, where history had become the arena of God’s activity, the arrival of individual identity brought about a new understanding of God’s justice.

The basic theological proposition supporting the reaffirmation of the Law in Deuteronomy is that God is the God of retributive justice. The book contains three discourses given by Moses at the gates of the Promised Land interpreting God’s words at Sinai. By the time Deuteronomy was written and “found” at the temple (2 Kg. 22:3-8) to become the basis for the reforms of King Josiah (621 B.C.E.), Moses was considered the greatest of the prophets on the basis of his having been the One who spoke for God. It was written as Moses’ “testament;” as a warning to the future which they would face after his imminent death. In the book, Moses functions in a new role. He interprets the word the Lord had given in the past, rather than proclaiming a new word for the present. “If you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God … Bless shall you be in the city, and bless shall you be in the field … The Lord will establish you as a people holy to himself … And the Lord will make you abound in prosperity … And the Lord will make you the head, and not the tail; and you shall tend upwards only, and not downward .… But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field … Cursed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground … Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and frustrations in all that you undertake to do until you are destroyed and perish quickly .… And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you .… ” (Dt. 28:1-68). This very explicit advice to obey the Lord, and the even greater detailing of the consequences of disobedience, sets up retributive justice as the Lord’s way of dealing with the people of Israel. But when personal individual experience proved that this type of justice was not working, it brought about a major theological crisis. It became necessary to justify the ways of an Almighty God, something quite unnecessary when the present sufferings were understood to be caused by the sins of ancestors.

The end of the Exile did not mean the restoration of the Kingdom of Judah. Most of the descendants of the Hebrews who had been exiled to Babylon had become established in their new home and decided to stay in Mesopotamia. In Palestine there were remnants of the people who had been defeated by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., now known as Samaritans, or people of Samaria. The Jews who decided to settle in Judah were now subjects of the Persian satrap of the region. They did not establish an independent kingdom. Under these circumstances, prophecy could not fulfill its traditional role as the Word of the Lord defending the weak against the abuses of the powerful, or as the adviser of kings in matters of diplomacy and war. Under Persian rule the priests and a new class, the scribes, came to positions of prominence, as demonstrated by Ezra and Nehemiah. Kings and princes were no longer in power over the people.

Also to be noticed is that the compilation of the Pentateuch, beginning just before and during the Exile, gave the people “the Scriptures.” At the same time, the oracles of the prophets were being compiled into books by anonymous editors. Guidance as to how to live under conditions different from the ones in which they had lived before the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple was to be gained by the study and interpretation of “the Torah” (That which has been said and taught authoritatively). The scribes who interpreted the Scriptures took the place of the prophets who spoke the Word of the Lord. The shift from an oral Word of the Lord to a written word that needs interpretation for its reapplication was another major shift in the religious life of the Israelites. The Pentateuch became the Scriptures studied and interpreted by the scribes. Traditional prophecy was now preserved in books; therefore, it came to an end. Besides, the construction of a new temple in Jerusalem (520–515 B.C.E.) gave the priests a new base of operations. A high priest, rather than a king, was the local leader of the people. The Jewish governor was a servant of the Persian satrap. Expectations for a full restoration of life under a royal figure enjoying all the blessings that God had promised them, therefore, were ever-present. These expectations, however, were not being fulfilled. Nathan’s promise that a descendant of David would be seated on a throne in Jerusalem forever (2 Sam. 7:11, 16), or Moses’ promise of a prophet “like me” (Dt. 18:15), were spelled out in different versions of the role of the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed. It became the task of scribes to formulate how the promises of the Scripture would come to pass, and to tell the people how to obey the will of God while living under circumstances quite different from the ones in which their ancestors had lived both as sojourners in the desert and as farmers or merchants dependent on the military protection of judges or kings. The written law envisioned circumstances that no longer existed.

The expansion of Greek culture after Persia took its armies into Europe and later Alexander the Great took his to Mesopotamia and India brought with it a new cosmopolitan class with broader horizons. The exile of the Jews in Babylon had put them in touch with another vibrant culture and its religious manifestations. There they had learned the views of Zoroaster. Among them, his dualistic understanding of the human predicament as life in the midst of cosmic forces of good and evil. Traditional stories of creation had told how the gods who created the present world had to conquer evil gods. In other words, a chaotic situation under the rule of evil powers had to be dismantled before cosmos could be established. In the case of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, Marduk had defeated Tiamat, the Deep Sea, and used her body to build the cosmos. The armies of the defeated god or goddess, however, may still be about enticing human beings to do evil. This means that human beings live subject to external forces which try to control their behavior.

This is something unknown to the prophets of Israel. According to them, evil impulses acting in the heart of human beings are somewhat of a puzzle. Human beings have the power to decide whether to obey God or to worship idols. Even though the Psalms, for example, admit the existence of the council of the gods, and Yahveh is exalted above all the other members of the council of the gods, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets do not know of supernatural beings who are engaged in causing human beings to disobey God, or to worship Baal, Astarte, Ammon or Tammuz. Jeremiah, the most introspective of the prophets, wonders about the fact that human beings lack chesed, covenant loyalty. Loyalty to their God should be natural in them, but it is not. He asked, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” The answer, of course, is no. If it were possible for them to do it, “then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer. 13:23). For Jeremiah, evil is a problem that resides inside human beings. It causes them to develop bad habits. Observing what is true in the case of migratory birds, Jeremiah laments that what is true with other animals in the natural world is not true with human beings. “Even the stork in the heavens knows her times; and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming; but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord” (Jer. 8:7). A mechanism that works in birds and keeps them on course does not work in men and women who constantly deviate from their commitments. Jeremiah makes this point again with another rhetorical question and a metaphor also taken from nature, “Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me” (Jer. 18:14-15). Mountain snows keep melting into streams year-round; they never run dry. This time, what is not the case in nature is the case among God’s people. That people forget their God is a puzzle, especially after each individual has sole responsibility for his/her actions. For the prophets, the Israelites’ forgetfulness, lack of loyalty, rebellion against God are a puzzle. Such behaviors do not make sense. They do not envision evil supernatural forces at work causing human beings to be disloyal to the covenant with their God.

Contrasts between prophetic and apocalyptic texts

Several factors came together to give rise to the apocalyptic perspective. Like prophecy, it was not a peculiar phenomenon to the Israelites, or the Jews. Apocalyptic literature is known from all the surrounding nations in antiquity, and most students of apocalyptic texts are concerned with the exploration of their features in different cultural situations. These studies come to different conclusions as to the distinctive features all apocalypses have in common. Among the most prominent are an emphasis on a final judgment, the revival of the language of creation stories and a predetermined understanding of history. The classification of apocalyptic and prophetic texts according to characteristics has been difficult; therefore, my use of characteristics in order to contrast apocalyptic and prophetic texts is purely heuristic.

As stated already, the apocalypticists were the descendants of the prophets, but they faced a problem which the prophets did not encounter. That Yahveh is a God of justice who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked was an observable truism for the prophets who worked within a corporate personality understanding of identity. The apocalypticists had to find a way to affirm God’s retributive justice within the new understanding of the self as an individual person. To affirm that an almighty God deals with his creatures according to retributive justice became problematic when it was disproved by personal experience. Confronted with the suffering of a righteous person, it became difficult to argue that God is both almighty and just. It was primarily to solve this theological problem that apocalypticism arose among the Jews. Biblical apocalyptic literature, the only one with which I am concerned, differs in several significant ways from the prophetic literature of Israel because due to changes in their historical existence and direct contacts with other more developed societies made it necessary to give an account for the suffering of the righteous. The prophets working within a symbolic universe with a corporate understanding of human identity could assume that God’s retributive justice is at work.

Since in our civilization we are conditioned to think that the best way to understand something is to describe its historical development, some time ago it became almost axiomatic to see apocalyptic texts as the answers to unfulfilled prophecies. That is, Hebrew eschatology evolved this way because, as noticed above, the expectations of the re-establishment of the Davidic dynasty after the exile were not fulfilled. This linear explanation of the rise of apocalyptic texts overlooks the tensions existing between different traditions running within the people of Israel. Cultic, royal/military and wisdom traditions did not come to a satisfactory synthesis either before or after the exile. Different prophets had different allegiances and described different scenarios. As said above, they actually desired that their announcements of the coming doom would not actually take place.

The apocalyptic authors were dealing with a new, different situation because God’s judgment of his people had taken place at the Exile. Their agenda was to interpret the present for people who were in Exile, or were ruled by foreigners while living in their land. They were not addressing a people who enjoyed political and military stability and prosperity by abusing the weak among them. It was not that the prophecies of the prophets were unfulfilled, but that the present conditions were totally different from the ones in which their fathers lived. Thus, while the prophets pleaded for a change of course so that the coming punishment could be avoided, and the future could be the establishment of a restructured, purified present, the authors of apocalypses foretold a future that would break into the present and destroy it. For them, the future could not be a continuation of the present, not even a purified one. The difference in their perceptions of the future was caused by their different evaluations of the nature of history. Both the prophets and the authors of apocalypses had a negative view of the present. The prophets thought that the present could be salvaged because they understood that the future was open. If the people repented, God could change his mind. If they experienced suffering, it had been caused by the sins of their fathers. The apocalypticists could not see a happy future coming out of a chaotic present; conceived as chaotic especially from the perspective of individual identity. According to them, the present had no future because their suffering made no sense.

Like the prophets, the apocalypticists understood the connection between human beings and their God to be in history, but unlike the prophets the apocalypticists understood that the future was predetermined rather than open. According to the prophets, the Israelites needed to reconsider their course of action. If they continued as they were going, the future was bleak, but if they changed course and turned to the Lord, God was more than willing, in fact he was anxious, to relent from his anger and “love them deeply.” Thus the prophets admonished the people to repent. If they did so, God knew how to forgive and forget. Their sins will be buried in the depths of the sea.

By contrast, the apocalypticists understood that history is predetermined. God had set things up “from before the foundation of the world.” History has been running along as it was meant to be and the future is just as firmly set as the past was. There is nothing that men and women can do to change what the future brings. The apocalypticists plead for patience and endurance, rather than repentance. What “the chosen” now need is perseverance in their faithfulness and obedience to God. The apocalypticists do not advise repentance because their message is for the elect ones, those who are suffering unjustly. The course of history is firmly set; therefore, their advice to them is to persevere with patient endurance until God enters history on their behalf, as he has determined already before the foundation of the world to do at the appointed time.

Another significant difference between the prophets and the apocalypticists is their views on the origin of the human predicament and its full implications. The prophets considered the Exodus the formative period in the history of Israel. God had chosen them, taken them out of Egypt and made them a people at Sinai. There he had revealed himself to them and made a covenant with them, thus reaffirming all previous demonstrations of his loving care for them. How did the people respond to God’s multiple manifestations of his love for them? They rebelled. At the Sinai desert they worshiped the golden calf. Their rebellion against Yahveh at Sinai was for the prophets the paradigmatic sin that marked the existence of Israel as a rebellious, stiff-necked people. When they asked Aaron to make them “gods who shall go before us,” they established themselves in a continuous rebellion against Yahveh (Ex. 32:1-9; see Ez. 20:13). For them, idolatry is the sin that defines the conduct of the people. The prophets know nothing about the sin of Adam and Eve. Evil in the human heart is somewhat of a puzzle, but its presence among the Israelites is evident in their rebellion against the God who made them a nation and entered into a covenant relation with them at Sinai.

The shift to the consideration of the sin of Adam and Eve as the primordial sin becomes explicit within the biblical canon, for the first time, in the letters of the apostle Paul. With the shift from Sinai to the Garden of Eden the nature and the consequences of the primordial sin also become different. It is not just a sin that marks the Israelites as a rebellious people, but one that brings about the enslavement under the power of sin not only of all humanity, but of the whole creation. Paul is the one who tells us that Satan is the ruler of this world, intent on deceiving and taking advantage of the weak in faith (2 Cor. 2:11; 4:4). Jeremiah wondered how it could be that the mechanism that keeps migratory birds healthy by following the laws for their wellbeing the mechanism that makes for obedience to God’s designs is not functioning in human beings. Paul, on the other hand, took for granted that humans lived under the power of cosmic forces of evil that kept them bound to sin and used the power of the Law to kill them. He did not wonder about the reasons for their evil ways. He knew that Adam had opened the door and Satan had entered God’s world and taken control of it (Rom. 5:12-14). The difference between Jeremiah and Paul can only be understood when one realizes the emergence of the concept of The Fall as a cosmic tragedy that brought about a world no longer under Yahveh’s direct control. Satan and his angels are thought to be free agents in this “fallen” world (2 Cor. 4:4). What was a puzzle to Jeremiah was not a puzzle for Paul.

The shift from the sin of Israel at Sinai to the sin of Adam and Eve at the Garden as the paradigmatic sin also brought about a shift from a historical to a cosmic, mythological, setting to the human drama. To elaborate on the concept of the Fall as a cosmic transition from the sovereignty of God to Satanic free range over the world, the apocalypticists borrowed from the ancient creation myths of Canaan and Mesopotamia that told of a war between the powers of Good and Evil. There is a trace of them in the story of Genesis one. It begins referring to the “formless” and the “void,” and points out that the “Wind/Spirit” of God was moving over (suppressing or incubating?) a restless “sea” that was engulfed in primordial darkness (Gen. 1:2). Are the formless and the void, and the wind and the sea, two theogonic pairs? Theogonic pairs are the standard constituents of the divine pantheon in creation stories. In all apocalyptic literature the sea (Tiamat) is the place from which evil forces come forth. Of course, Genesis one is a theological breakthrough. It is a concerted attempt to avoid stories of creation with their pantheons. There is no battle between the sea and the wind, between the creative Word and the formless and the void, or between darkness and light, as in the Enuma Elish. Elohim, the god of creation, is a transcendent god who never gets involved with the material world he is bringing into existence out of the void, the sea and the darkness. This is not a narrative. It is a structured polemic, with repeated formulas, against polytheistic creation myths that narrated cosmic battles and established a natural connection between the creation and the world of the gods. It starts with the creation of a day and ends with the sanctification of a Day. The structure is designed to give the Sabbath a cosmic footing in creation itself. This is a much stronger footing than the historical one, as a sign of freedom from slavery, given to it in the earlier version of the Ten Commandments found in Deuteronomy. In the process it confirms the process of secularization that had begun with the worship of Yahveh as the god of history, and the denial of divinity to the forces of nature. By conceiving the predicament of humanity under the cosmic power of sin to involve the whole of creation, apocalypticism reached back to stories of creation and their cosmologies. In the process it also gave to God’s activity universal, cosmic range, something that Jeremiah anticipated when he compared God’s commitment to his covenant with Israel with his commitment to the stability of the cosmic order in nature (Jer. 31:35-36).

The prophets’ concerted efforts to disassociate worship from any natural phenomena transferred the significance of the yearly festivals from seasonal events in nature to episodes in the history of Israel. It reached its goal at the Exile. Throughout the course of Israel’s dwelling in the promised land, the worship of fertility gods and goddesses was alive and well among the Israelites. The Former and the Latter Prophets never tire of condemning the fertility rites taking place at the groves and the high places throughout the land. From the Exile on, the Israelites became monotheists, and Yahveh was enthroned as the only God. All others were not gods but idols. Loyalty to Yahveh, was essential not only because of the historical relationship the Israelites had with Yahveh, but also because he is the universal only true God.

This had not been so earlier, as evidenced in the story of Ruth. When Ruth and Orpah, Naomi’s daughters-in-law, inform her that they wish to go with her on her return to Judah, Naomi tells them that they must remain with their families in Moab and worship their family’s gods. Orpah takes the advice and goes back to her family and its gods. Ruth, however, insists that she will go to Judah and worship Naomi’s god (Ru. 1:15-16). The story presupposes that it is perfectly proper for people to worship the gods of their families in their land. Once in the promised land most Israelites naturally became worshipers of the gods of their new land at the groves and the high places. Altars to them were found in the court of the Jerusalem temple.

The prophetic battle against the worship of other gods and the explicit denial of the existence of other Gods, one of the main purposes of the post-exilic chapters in Isaiah, was severely compromised by the apocalyptic introduction of Satan and his angels as cosmic forces that influence human actions. The notion of The Fall was necessary in order to account for the suffering of the just, those who were loyal to Yahveh. To admit that God is no longer the god who rules over history and dispenses rewards and punishments was unthinkable. The way out of the dilemma was to admit that at the moment God is not in total direct control of what goes on in the world, but it is not the case that women and men have free will allowing them to develop evil habits. The problem is not a historical problem that affects only human beings. The problem is that the whole of creation has fallen under the power of the forces of evil, personified by the Devil, Belzebul or Satan and his angels. The introduction of Satan as the one who controls, or at least is a free agent in, the fallen creation, and thus brought with him sin and death into the world, shifted the extent of the predicament from that of the Israelites living in their land to that of the whole of humanity living under cosmic evil forces. In fact, sin is not just a Jewish problem connected to the Law given at Sinai. It is the problem of all humanity connected with a creation fallen under Satan and his evil forces.

This cosmic problem requires a cosmic solution. For the prophets, the problem had been a historical problem that was to be solved historically. On the Day of the Lord God would intervene and set up Jerusalem as the capital of the world and all the kings of the world would come to learn the Law and wisdom from Yahveh at Jerusalem (Mic. 4:1-4; Is. 2:1-4). For the apocalypticists, the prophetic solution was no longer tenable. The problem was beyond repair within the present fallen creation. It required the termination of a fallen creation and its history. The evil in the world had become so pervasive that it could not be fixed within the present structure of things.

To have a world in which God’s intentions when he created the world could be operational, God needed to destroy the world that is now controlled by evil forces and create a new world to take its place. This is the doctrine of the Two Ages: reality consists of This Age and The Age to Come. The suffering of the just is possible now because retributive justice may not be operative in this present evil Age. This means that it is possible for righteous people to suffer in the fallen creation. God’s justice, however, will be fully operative in the Age to Come. Then, both those whose ways are evil and those whose ways are just will receive the recompense they deserve. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary at the moment, ultimately, behind the scenes, God is in control of the universe. Even if in This Age the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, in The Age to Come things will be set right. To know this is wisdom, but for most it is a mystery. This mystery, however, has been revealed to a chosen few. The prophets envisioned “the restoration of the fortunes of Israel” in the promised land within the historical continuum. The apocalypticists envisioned the functioning of God’s retributive justice in The Age to Come, after the end of history.

The divine revelation of the mystery which the apocalyptic texts convey takes place in one of two ways. According to one of them, as the author was praying and wondering about the incongruity of believing that he lives in God’s world when so many terrible things are going on all around him, an angel of God comes down from heaven and reveals to him God’s understanding of what is going on and how God will take care of things. He is assured by the angel that God’s ultimate purpose is going to be accomplished. According to the alternative way, the author was taken up to heaven and brought before the presence of God. There he is informed of what is going on by witnessing the actions of different angels. In either case, the context for the apocalyptic resolution of the human predicament of the righteous sufferer, while described in earthly, historical activities, is in reality being determined by divine activities that contribute to the accomplishment of God’s righteous purposes for Creation. By placing himself in the heavenly realm before the throne of God (Rev. 4:1), or by receiving a message by an angel sent from the throne of God (Dan. 8:15-20), the apocalyptic visionary escapes the nationalistic perspective of the prophets. He may still envision Jerusalem as the umbilical cord of the universe and the Torah as central, but the dwellers of the New Jerusalem are the chosen ones from every nation. This means that the apocalyptic perspective has no attachments to political of national identities. Its only attachment is to the God of creation. The prophets, by contrast, were attached to the God of Israel’s history.

Another major cosmological shift took place in the period following the Exile. It contributed to the way in which the apocalyptic imagination described the future bliss of the elect. It involved the conception of the human person in the world. It is natural to conceive one’s home as the place where one was born. Throughout one’s life one remains attached to one’s birthplace. Humans are normally permanently attached emotionally to their place of origin; finding themselves in any other place they feel “away from home.” In that situation, their underlying desire is to “return.” The notion of one’s home can be understood not only in personal terms, but also in terms of humanity at large. According to the traditional Hebrew understanding of human origins, God had made them from dust of the earth and the earth was their home. On the earth, God had designated the land where he directed Abraham on his journey out of Mesopotamia, and in which he became a sojourner, as the land where his descendants would dwell and become a great nation. For the Hebrews the possession of the land, and dwelling in the Promised Land had become a major element of their self-awareness as a people. As noticed earlier, they understood that their future with God after the restoration of their fortunes would continue to be in their earthly home.

With the opening of travel, commerce and political connections between the Mediterranean and the Indian cultures, the notion of the human soul as an immortal, eternal living thing that had become entrapped in a physical body became widespread in the West and it convinced women and men that the earth was not their real home. Their essential being, their immortal soul, was “at home” only in heaven, the soul’s place of origin. This shift to heaven as the true home of human beings created the pervasive desire to return home to heaven. Salvation ceased to be identified with health and prosperity on earth and became attached to the ability to escape the earth and return home to heaven. This gave rise to multiple esoteric, ascetic religious ways to achieve salvation through knowledge of the path on which the soul could make the journey back to heaven. It became the main agenda of the Mystery Cults that invaded the Roman Empire from the East, where they had been originally fertility cults. In a way, the notion that human beings were eternal souls who had become entrapped in a body of flesh was another version of the notion of The Fall. According to it, The Fall consists of the entrapment of the immortal soul in a mortal body. Unlike the prophetic visions of a blessed future on this earth, the apocalyptic conceptions of salvation envision the future in either an earthly or a heavenly new home. The choice seems to be influenced by whether the apocalyptic author is still strongly conditioned by his Jewish roots, or is somewhat more open to the Hellenistic cultural milieu.

Symbolic Apocalyptic Language

Finally, I would like to consider the most immediately evident difference between prophecy and apocalypticism: its appropriation of the language of creation myths and of ancient iconography. Many factors seem to have been involved in the development of apocalyptic discourse. To come to terms with them, it may help to start with a consideration of the risks involved in the use of words. Words are the indispensable means for communication, but words may also be the barriers to communication. In verbal communication three factors are involved: the speaker (writer), the hearer (reader) and the reality being symbolized by words. Modern philosophy has been particularly interested in the connotative and the denotative aspects of words. As a result, it has been affirmed that what is said but is “beyond proof” is meaningless. This reduction of meaningful speech to what can be demonstrated functions well in systematic scientific discourse that works through logic and appeals to reason, constricting the role of the imagination. It says that a human person may express ideas, desires, feelings, regrets, aspirations, etc., but since they cannot be confirmed with the objectivity required of scientific discourse, they are ultimately disconnected from reality. Discourse about what the imagination conceives, be it artistic, literary or religious, however, cannot be demoted to the fantasies of childhood that have no connection with reality. When what the imagination conceives is expressed by an intelligent adult it does not reveal immature flights to unreality. It has to do with what is as real as anything that can be proven in time and space. Attempts to give meaning to such discourse by transposing it to verifiable prose do not improve communication of what the discourse is about. To represent something symbolically does not imply that the speaker is in doubt about the reality or the validity of what he is saying. The use of symbols is concomitant to the use of words; it does not reflect the desire to impress aesthetically, or to lack confidence about the content of the discourse. The prophets not only used symbolic language, but also symbolic actions. By their performances they were not trying to magically bring about the future. They were trying to make as plain as they could what they understood to be the will of God. It was the most effective way for them to communicate the divine involvement with the present.

The authors of apocalypses conceived the crisis of their present as more dire than that faced by the prophets. It involved not just the unjust conduct of Israel’s princes, priests and kings. It involved the whole of creation. This crisis could not be solved by using intermediaries: locust, drought, hunger, foreign armies, etc. This crisis required the direct intervention of the Omnipotent God. The only way to depict the personal impingement of God in the material and historical order in which people lived was the radical way in which God had brought about creation, as was being said by their time, “out of nothing,” thus increasing the power of the God who does not use water or soil to create, as said in the creation stories of Genesis. The adoption of the language of creation myths, however, was not just an easy revival of traditional language. It was a very conscious use of mythological symbols to give conceptual clarification to the existential confusion of life in the present.

The symbols used by the authors of apocalypses were indeed traditional. They found them in the ancient myths of creation and in earlier books of the Old Testament, and they were easily understood by their contemporaries. Modern attempts by some interpreters to distinguish between what is to be taken literally and what is to be taken symbolically would have been inconceivable to the original readers of these books. They lived in the symbolic world of the imagination. There were no canons telling them that they were to tell about the past as it actually happened, or to prognosticate about the future as it would actually happen. Historical writing as an academic discipline committed to tell it “as it actually happened,” as von Ranke in the nineteenth century taught historians to be their duty, did not exist back then. Before von Ranke everyone who wrote about the past, including all ancient Greek and Latin “historians,” told about the past with a heuristic agenda. The prophets looked at the past to understand the present and offer moral advice. From the past they learned about the times when the Israelites had rebelled against their God and about the many demonstrations of God’s covenant loyalty to his people. Thus, they contrasted the people’s loyalty to their covenant with God by describing God’s loyalty as a “Rock,” and the people’s loyalty as “the morning dew.” It evaporates as soon as the sun heats up the atmosphere. They hoped, however, that the people would turn away, repent from their past and the future they envisioned would actually not happen.

The apocalypticists looked at the past to counterbalance the blessed future that will put an end to the past that got the people into their unacceptable present. After the exile, the Endzeit wird Urzeit pattern is standard in apocalypses. The future “end time” is to become like “primeval time.” The future is described in terms of the pastoral simplicity, agricultural abundance and creature harmony that obtained in Eden. The final judgment is described with parallels with Noah’s times. According to the first Greek thinkers, all matter is made of four basic elements: air, water, earth and fire. Two of them are characterized as being essential to the flourishing and the destruction of life: water and fire. While God destroyed the world of Noah with water, his future destruction of the fallen world will be with fire. It is not surprising that the authors of apocalypses found the appropriate language with which to depict the future that would displace the present in the language of the ancient stories that told how chaos was displaced by cosmos and the flood put an end to a world engulfed in wickedness.

The apocalypticists used a range of symbols: white bulls for the patriarchs of Israel, fallen stars for the sons of God that descended to earth to marry women, wild animals for the gentiles, blind sheep for the Jews, composite, monstrous beasts for nations, and their horns for their kings, etc. If today these symbols seem distractions it is because we may fail to perceive the agendas informing these apocalyptic accounts. It is also probable that sometimes the symbols were understood only by those belonging to a particular apocalyptic tradition. In any case, to use them now to extract “revelations” about the historical future is to abuse them.

The function of the apocalyptic texts was to give the members of a community a secure self-understanding at a time when the present brought about confusing distortions of accepted theological notions. When the present does not make sense, and does not provide significant prospects for the future, persons in an individualistic society feel insecure in a confusing existential situation, their very being finds itself anchored in a void. The present becomes oppressive. At such times, the attention of people is not directed to a phenomenological explanation of what is happening, but to a basis for ontological certitude. The function of apocalyptic texts is to provide needed ontological certitude in the present and prescribe a course of action. For this, the symbolic language that enriches the imagination is the most effective means of communication.

I conclude this introduction by summarizing that on the basis of the doctrines of The Fall and of The Two Ages, apocalypticism developed all kinds of scenarios in order to affirm God’s sovereignty and God’s justice in circumstances that required significant modifications of the prophetic tradition. These scenarios often depict how what is going on in heaven directly affects the conditions on earth as God demonstrates his ultimate control over his creation. Their intention, however, is not to foretell what will happen. They are designed to tell confused believers who cannot make sense of their present in a fallen world to persevere with patience so as to receive their just reward at the end. They affirm that while in This Age they are experiencing tribulations, in The Age to Come they will enjoy eternal life. The apocalyptic message is: patient endurance and faithfulness to Yahveh will be rewarded. In the following chapters I will elaborate on how the transitions described above appear in the late prophets and how the apocalyptic texts in the Bible express the message that while at the moment God’s justice is not quite evident it will be quite evident at the End. Those faithful to God will see their hopes fully realized. The expression of this basic message, however, does not always fit all the features singled out for contrasts between prophetic and apocalyptic. They may appear heavily nuanced at times. This is the case because the characteristics of prophecy and apocalyptic texts outlined here, as already said, basically serve heuristic purposes to facilitate understanding and further investigation.