Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Above all, Daniel holds out the promise that the Jewish people will be relieved of all suffering because history itself, as we know it, will come to an end. “Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the end of days,” says one of the heavenly messengers who grant Daniel a series of revelations. A cunning and deceitful king “shall stand up against the prince of peace,” says one messenger, “but he shall be broken,” although the instrument of his defeat shall be “no human hand.” After a final period of tribulation—“a time of trouble such as there never was”—the archangel Michael will descend from heaven to make war on the last of the evil kings, “and at that time, thy people shall be delivered.” 54

Thus does Daniel put a new spin on the old theology of the Hebrew Bible. Daniel’s night visitors readily concede that God afflicts the Jewish people for their faithlessness, just as Moses had warned, but they also promise that one day God will “make reconciliation” and “bring in everlasting righ teous ness.” 55As if to make amends for the fact the God does nothing to prevent various oppressors from torturing and murdering their Jewish subjects, the angels hold out the prospect of a day of resurrection when the dead will be judged, and rewarded or punished appropriately.

“Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt,” the angels promise. And, when the end of the world finally comes, it is not merely a good life on earth that awaits the worthy souls but an eternal life in heaven: “Those who are wise,” the visitors assure Daniel and his readers, “shall shine like the stars for ever and ever. 56

The newfangled ideas in the book of Daniel were meant to soothe the sufferings of Jewish men and women who lived during the Maccabean Revolt or, at least, the most pious among them. But the scenes of resurrection, judgment, and eternal life would have been as unfamiliar and off-putting to the classical biblical prophets as the notion that God and Satan are at war for the hearts and minds of the Chosen People. Nor did these ideas come to play a commanding role in Jewish tradition, which continued to focus on the intimate relationship between the God of Israel and the Chosen People in the here and now rather than the hereafter.

But when the author of Revelation unpacked the theological baggage of the book of Daniel during the first century of the Common Era, he found fresh and powerful ways to address the sufferings of a new generation of pious men and women. They were no less estranged from the high culture of classical paganism than the victims of Antiochus had been, and they felt themselves no less at risk of persecution and death. And the first readers and hearers of Revelation responded to the new way of reading the Hebrew Bible. If the apocalyptic tradition is the “child of prophecy,” the apocalyptic tradition itself is “the mother of Christianity.” 57

Nor are the ideas of resurrection and judgment the only theological innovations that we find in the book of Daniel. Other biblical authors, for example, describe angels as not much more than celestial errand boys; indeed, “messenger” is the literal meaning of the Hebrew word ( malak ) that came to be rendered in English as “angel.” The author of Daniel, by contrast, appears to borrow the idea of an elaborate hierarchy of angels directly from the Persian tradition of angelology: “Thousands upon thousands served Him,” says Daniel of the heavenly court of the Ancient of Days. “Myriads upon myriads attended him.” 58And he is the first biblical author to refer to the archangels Gabriel and Michael, who will play such a prominent role in the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic writings. 59

Daniel is also the first biblical author to use the phrase “son of man” in the paradoxical sense that will be familiar to readers of the Christian scriptures; when Daniel refers to someone as “the son of man,” the prophet means to say that he is not the offspring of ordinary human beings. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, however, the phrase is given its natural meaning; the book of Job, for example, uses “son of man” in making the point that God is incomparably greater than any mere mortal: “How much less [is] man, a worm; the son of man, a maggot.” 60For Daniel, by contrast, the “son of man” is exalted, eternal, and all-powerful: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the son of man came with the clouds, and came to the Ancient of Days, and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him, an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away.” 61

The book of Daniel also offers the first example in the Bible of the kind of number crunching that came to be such an obsessive practice among readers of Revelation. Daniel begins with an apparently straightforward passage from the book of Jeremiah in which the prophet predicts that the Babylonian Exile will last exactly seventy years: “After seventy years are accomplished for Babylon,” God tells Jeremiah, “I will remember you, causing you to return to this place.” 62But the angel Gabriel explains to Daniel that the old prophet actually meant to say seventy weeks of years—that is, seventy times seven, or a total of 490 years. And, what’s more, Jeremiah meant to predict not merely the end of the exile in Babylon but the end of all earthly evil and the advent of a celestial paradise: “Seventy weeks of years are decreed,” reveals the archangel, “to put an end to sin, and to bring in everlasting righ teous ness.” 63

In fact, Daniel is told exactly when the sinful world will be destroyed, although the angel provides two different calculations of the end-times. Daniel is granted a vision in which it is revealed that the end will come either 1,290 or 1,335 days after “the abomination of desolation is set up.” 64The angel does not explain what is meant by “the abomination of desolation,” but scholars suggest that the phrase refers to the statue of Zeus that Antiochus installed in the Temple at Jerusalem. Perhaps the author of Daniel was thinking only of the period of time that passed between the erection of the idol and the rededication of the Temple after the offending image had been removed—an event that is celebrated in the Jewish festival of Chanukah. And the fact that two periods of time are specified may mean that the date predicted by the first author passed uneventfully and so a scribe who came along later felt obliged to insert a second and longer period into the text.

Of course, the second date was wrong, too, at least if it was intended to mark the end of the world. But such quibbles have never mattered much to Bible readers who are searching for secret meanings in the text, then or now. After all, if biblical prophecy is “a coded message to be deciphered by the inspired interpreter,” as John J. Collins puts it, then it is up to the discerning reader to break the code and reveal the hidden message. And, as we shall see, men and women have been inspired to invest endless energy and enterprise in doing so ever since. 65

“As a prediction of the end, it was a failure,” writes H. H. Rowley, “but as a powerful spiritual force it was a great success.” 66

For all of these reasons, the book of Daniel is the font of apocalyptic speculation, and its words and phrases have been mined for revelatory meanings over the last two thousand years. The Western apocalyptic tradition in its entirety has been characterized as “footnotes to the apocalyptic visions of Daniel.” 67And the so-called Little Apocalypse of the Gospels—the passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus describes how the world will end—has been called “a very early Christian midrash, or expansion, on the Danielic account of last events.” 68