A History of the End of the World (7 page)

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 Christian ity 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 Christian ity. 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 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

Perhaps the most potent (and poignant) of these apocalyptic ideals was the longing for a Messiah, the liberator who would be sent by the God of Israel to defeat the forces of evil and bring peace, security, and sovereignty to the Jewish people. Josephus may have been mindful of the passage in the book of Daniel where “one like the son of man” is granted “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom” when he describes the power of the apocalyptic idea during the Jewish resistance against Rome.
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“What more than all else incited them to the war,” writes the ancient Jewish historian, “was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would be become ruler of the world.”
⁸⁶

Josephus, writing from the perspective of a collaborator with the Romans, was contemptuous and dismissive of the ideals that motivated the Jewish partisans. “Deceivers and impostors” is how Josephus describes the self-styled prophets “who, under the pretense of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, persuaded the multitude to act like madmen.”
⁸⁷
He derisively notes that one such prophet, known only as “the Egyptian,” persuaded his followers—“about 30,000 dupes,” as Josephus puts it—that he could and would cause the walls of Jerusalem to collapse upon his command.
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But, almost inadvertently, Josephus also allows us to see exactly how powerful and provocative these ideas could be.

To rally the defenders of Jerusalem during the final battle of the Jewish War in 70
C.E.
, for example, the leaders of the Zealots and the other factions resorted to the same rhetoric that had worked so well during the Maccabean Revolt. “A number of hireling prophets had been put up in recent days by the party chiefs to deceive the people by exhorting them to await help from God,” writes Josephus, “and so reduce the number of deserters and buoy up with hope those who were above fear and anxiety.” When the Roman soldiers set fire to the colonnade of the Temple where some six thousand men, women, and children were sheltering, the most ardent among them chose to martyr themselves: “Some flung themselves out of the flames to their death, others perished in the blaze; of that vast number there escaped not one.”
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The Jewish War ended in the utter defeat of the armed resistance against Rome. Yet again, the Temple was destroyed, and yet again the Jewish people were sent into exile. Over the next century or so, new Jewish freedom fighters—and new claimants to the crown of the Messiah—struggled against the Roman occupation, but none of them were victorious. The last major war of national liberation against Rome was fought under the leadership of a heroic guerilla commander named Simon Bar Kochba, who was hailed as “King Messiah” by Rabbi Akiva, one of the most revered of the ancient rabbinical scholars. But Bar Kochba, too, was defeated by the Romans. His torture and death in 135
C.E.
was proof to his Jewish followers that he could not be the Messiah after all: “It will only be demonstrated by success,” explained one medieval rabbi, “and this is the truth.”
⁹⁰
And so the messianic idea in ancient Judaism began to turn from an urgent expectation into an attenuated and fatalistic longing.