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

“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.” 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