Free A History of the End of the World by Jonathan Kirsch

eyelids” for purposes of seduction, and the craft of fashioning “swords and daggers and shields and breastplates” for use in making war. God sends the archangel Raphael to bind the chief of the defiant angels, a demonic figure here called Azazel, and cast him into a pit in the desert until “the great day of judgment” when “he may be hurled into the fire.” 75 But the damage is already done.
    “The world was changed,” goes one passage in The Book of Watchers that must have resonated with the life experience of its first readers, the “Pious Ones” who were fighting a culture war against Hellenism. “And there was great impiety, and much fornication, and they went astray, and all their ways became corrupt.” 76
    Another tale in the first book of Enoch, The Animal Apocalypse, surely resonated in a very different but equally powerful way with the same readership. All of the figures in the tale are depicted as animals: Adam, for example, appears in the guise of a white bull, and the rebellious angels sire not human offspring but elephants, camels, and asses. At the climax of The Animal Apocalypse, the evildoers on earth are vanquished by an army of “small lambs” who grow horns—the leader of the flock is the lamb with the biggest horn—and they go into battle with a sword bestowed upon them by “the Lord of the sheep.” 77 The elaborate and highly fanciful allegory would have been clear to readers in Judea in the second century before the Common Era: “The lamb with the big horn is clearly Judas Maccabee,” explains John J. Collins, “and the context is the Maccabean revolt.” 78
    The Book of the Watchers and The Animal Apocalypse are only two of the texts that have been gathered together in the first book of Enoch. Other apocalyptic writings in the same collection include The Astronomical Book, The Book of Dreams, and The Apocalypse of Weeks, all equally exotic to any reader whose experience of Judaism is based on the Torah and the Talmud. Two additional collections, known as second and third books of Enoch, also contain apocalyptic writings, and so do many of the other works that are characterized as Pseudepigrapha—the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Testament of the Patriarchs, the Book of Jubilees, and the Third Sibylline Oracles, among many others.
    All of these apocalyptic texts, as we have already noted, were wholly excluded from the Hebrew Bible itself. In fact, they represent the imaginings and yearnings of men and women who placed themselves at the outer fringes of the Jewish community and sometimes, as in the case of the community at Qumran, far beyond it. And yet these texts are the place where some of the most familiar figures in both Judaism and 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