The Earliest Apocalypses: In the Beginning Was the End
First, the Babylonians gave the ancient Jews the experience of an apocalypse, and then, after their liberation, the Persians gave them the language with which to understand that apocalypse. For almost two generations during the seventh century BCE, following the Babylonian invasion of the kingdom of Judea and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, thousands of the faithful suffered exile in Mesopotamia, true to the plaintive mourning of Psalm 137 with its evocation that “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Only fifty years separate the destruction of the First Temple in 588 BCE and the return of exilic Jews to Judea in 538 BCE after their deliverance by the Persians, but the trauma of the Babylonian captivity had an indelible effect on Judaism, and a vocabulary for comprehending how a world can end. After the Persian king Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians, the ruler allowed the Jewish remnant to return to Jerusalem. During this period it was the Zoroastrian faith of the Persians which was the most formative influence on Judaism in the development of the apocalyptic. What the Zoroastrians possessed was a comprehensive eschatology, that is, a complete understanding of what the apocalypse entailed.
Whether out of gratitude to Cyrus’s decree or as a result of the horrors of their treatment by the Babylonians, apocalyptic thinking became an important current of Jewish thought. Culture is anathema to a vacuum; all beliefs, values, sentiments, thoughts, philosophies, ideologies, and religions are born first from experience, so that though apocalypse provides a language that billions of people have applied to their own faith, the concept itself came from this history before the Common Era. During the generations when the Israelites ruled over their own kingdom in the Levant, which due to political turmoil later split into two separate states—Judea with its capital Jerusalem in the south and Israel with a capital of Samaria in the north—the religious conception of the end of days was largely undefined and inchoate. Eschatology is a way of thinking that doesn’t make sense if there isn’t yet a conception that reality itself can come to an end.
Among the rulers of Jerusalem, including kings like Solomon and David, as well as the priestly caste who performed rites within the massive limestone temple upon the Holy City’s tallest mount, this was a land overflowing with milk and honey that was promised to the Hebrews if they upheld their covenant with the Lord. A conception of all of that coming to an end arguably relies on a tangible tragic experience, an intimation of apocalypse before there is the ability to speak of such a thing for the entire universe. The northern successor state of the once unified kingdom of Israel was the first to collapse, when 720 years before the Common Era the Neo-Assyrian ruler Sargon II invaded and deported thousands of women and men. Refugees streamed south to Judea to live among their coreligionists. In accounts of murder and pillaging, rape and destruction, the Israelites and their cousins had both experienced narratives of unfettered horror.
The unified book called the Bible is a historical fiction, the Hebrew Scriptures composed of some twenty-four individual books, written across a multitude of genres from epic to legal code, erotic poetry to philosophical dialogue, in the hands of thousands of different scribes, redacted together over the course of centuries into a quasi-cohesive whole. There has been disagreement since the nineteenth century—when contemporary secular biblical scholarship was first established—on the exact contours and chronology by which this happened, but that scripture is a multi-threaded tapestry woven by many hands is beyond disagreement. Part of this process of composition began after the Neo-Assyrian destruction of Israel, as those survivors in Judea became involved in a project whereby their nations’ respective foundational epics would be synthesized together into a revised work that would express the aspirations and beliefs of this newly combined people.
Whoever was the actual Israelite author of certain portions from Genesis and Exodus, he (or she) has been designated by philologists and biblical scholars as the “Elohist” for their preferred name of God—“Elohim”—a plural word that roughly translates to “God” (or more accurately “gods”). Their Judean colleague, author of the oldest portions of Genesis and Exodus, is often known as the Yahwist, for her (or his) preferred name for the Lord being the unutterable tetragrammaton of Yahweh. Though some scholars would disagree with the description, the resultant books bear similarity to the poetic genre of epic, with David Alter in The Art of Biblical Poetry describing those features as including “an interplay of narration and dialogue, [where] the formal burden of the poetry is the telling of a traditional tale; and the narrative tempo is leisurely enough to allow for detailed descriptions of feasts, of hand-to-hand combat, even to some degree of the physical appearance of the actors, human and (for the most part) divine.” These two separate strains would be edited together into the version read today; contradictions (such as the two separate accounts of creation) were less important than the project of making a cohesive epic to reflect a cohesive state.
To Genesis and Exodus would be added three more books—Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers—along with two more potential writers and a “redactor” who is sometimes identified with the biblical prophet Ezra, at least according to proponents of the “Documentary Hypothesis” formulated by nineteenth-century secular scholars. These five books, a complex interweaving of various narratives, traditions, and texts, constitute the central scripture of Judaism which is known as the Torah. Alongside the Torah are the texts known as Nevi’im, or those books of the prophets, and Ketuvim or “writings,” which includes works like Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Job. This is the corpus of texts which Jews call the Tanach (the name is an acronym from those three constitutive divisions). The exact ordering of these books wasn’t decided upon by rabbinical authorities until the first or possibly the second century after the Common Era, when the introduction of the codex—the bibliographical term for what we think of as a “book”—led to the replacement of papyrus scrolls as the primary literary technology. Suddenly a strict order for this canon became an intellectual possibility, one which had important religious implications. The early Christians, for example, placed the prophets last, which suggested a direct line between those men and Christ in the New Testament (also why, despite having a similar listing of contents, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament are not identical).
In the context of the Hebrew Scriptures, the preponderance of apocalyptic thinking comes from the writings of the prophets. James L. Kugel explains in The Bible as It Was that “For centuries before the Babylonian exile, prophets had acted as divine spokesmen. . . . They were seen, quite literally, as messengers of God, and the messages they brought—words of rebuke and announcements of divine judgment and punishment, as well as messages of hope and divine encouragement or simply divine directives and commandments—compelled the attention of kings and commoners alike.” Apocalyptic thinking most often occurs in the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then Daniel, who is included by Jews in Ketuvim but by Christians among the prophets. Both Isaiah and Jeremiah wrote before the Babylonian captivity, though large portions of the book of Isaiah were composed by somebody else after the historical events of the exile (however, there is scholarly disagreement on the exact chronology). Speaking of the captivity, Isaiah (or somebody writing under that persona) declared in Isaiah 5:12 that “hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure,” an invocation of how the dragon of apocalypse disorders the regular harmony of our material world, of how it pulls perdition up into our reality.
Among the prophets who engaged in apocalyptic thinking before the destruction of Jerusalem, the woeful narrative of the Israelites being conquered by the Neo-Assyrians provided a potent example and warning for potential destruction wrought as an act of divine punishment. Jeremiah in particular, descended from Israelites himself, warned that inequity and a turning away from the laws of the Covenant would doom Judea to God’s wrath, for he foretold the destruction of the land by the Babylonians, which he lived to see, finally dying in exile while living in Egypt. “And I will prepare destroyers against thee, everyone with his weapons,” it reads in Jeremiah 22:7–9, “and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire. And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbor, wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great city? Then they shall answer, because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God, and worshiped other gods, and served them.”
Prophets are popularly understood as a type of soothsayer, a figure who tells the future. This is a woefully incomplete understanding of what a prophet actually is, for their primary vocation is to speak a moral truth to those in power. Jeremiah was able to see into the future, but his reasons for doing so were to warn the people and their rulers what the punishments for transgression would be. The prophet has lent his name to a genre of sermonizing known as the “Jeremiad,” in which a speaker reminds his audience of the nation’s or faith’s highest values, while demanding that they live up to those principles lest disaster befall them. In the context of the book of Jeremiah, the prophet had spoken out against the pagan backsliding of the Judeans who increasingly embraced any number of practices from unbiblical ritual sacrifice to the worship of foreign deities, all in conflict with the strict belief in the single God. Because reforms were not made and because Judea was not purged of these sins, the Babylonians and their mad king Nebuchadnezzar were used as a tool of the Lord to punish his chosen people.
Thus, another theme of apocalyptic thinking, where a decadent and degenerated society suffers as a result of its own sin—as indeed had happened in the Genesis story of Noah, or with the incineration of those wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Quoting the Lord, Ezekiel 38:14 says that “On that day when my people Israel are dwelling in security, will you not know it? You will come from your place, from the remotest parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great assembly, a vast army. Like clouds covering the land, you will come against my people Israel.” The dragon is thus used as a beast of unforgiving justice. Ezekiel lived in exile by the Chebar River in Mesopotamia, and though the Judeans had yet to return to Jerusalem, the prophet foretold not only their restoration but also future persecution against them during the last days of the world’s existence. Ezekiel is an incantatory, hallucinatory, almost psychedelic book; the prophet has visions of angels that look like wheels rotating within wheels covered in eyes and of deserts of dead bones resurrecting themselves.
A hallmark of apocalyptic writing is often this fevered, disturbing, and surreal assortment of strange images which appear as if they should be symbolic, but for which each interpretation is often illusive. “Within . . . were what looked like four living creatures,” writes Ezekiel, and the “appearance of each one was like that of a human. Each one had four faces and four wings. Their feet were straight, and the soles of their feet like those of a calf, and they were shining like the glow of burnished copper.” In this regard, Ezekiel’s language anticipates future prophets like Daniel or John of Patmos. As Kugel notes, prophets like Ezekiel “were an intermediary in communications between God and humanity.” As the Lord is so totally alien, foreign, and other from our own experience, the sacred a vast gulf of distance away from the profane, there is a certain cracked sense that such visions would be so bizarre. Both the horror and trauma of the Neo-Assyrian destruction of Israel and the Babylonian conquering of Judea and the subsequent exile inculcated a certain experiential wisdom about destruction which was invaluable to the development of apocalyptic thinking, but it was from the Zoroastrianism of the liberating Persians that much of the subsequent cosmology would be adapted, perhaps as a mark of gratitude.
Like almost all ancient peoples, the Jews believed in malevolent and demonic spirits who could affect and hurt people. The idea came from the Zoroastrians that there was a singular absolute evil responsible for all misfortune in the world, and that some future battle would have to be waged against that force. Derived from the teachings of an enigmatic Persian prophet named Zarathustra, who most likely lived no later than a millennium before the Common Era, the ancient religion is arguably the origin of the most important tropes in the apocalyptic narrative, with scholar Mary Boyce arguing in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices that these doctrines have “probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith.” The Zoroastrians were cosmological dualists—they believed in two equally powerful gods—which clearly contradicted the strict monotheism of Judaism. In an important sense those who returned to Jerusalem were far more monotheistic than they had been before the exile, taking heed of Jeremiah’s warning about backsliding. Reconciling evil with a monotheistic God has always been a difficult proposition, not just in Judaism, but for Christians and Muslims as well. Though the Jews didn’t adopt the dualism of Zoroastrianism, some of the literary sense of that eternal conflict between good and evil found its way into Judaism, even if it was difficult to ever fully make consistent with belief in a singular omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent deity. Yet from Zarathustra—the most important historical figure of which the vast majority of people living today are unaware—came the basic script of good and evil confronting each other in a future world-ending battle.
The first time that Satan is referred to with the singular grammatical article is in the biblical book of Job, a sophisticated meditation on the subject of why evil things happen to good people, most likely composed after the end of the Babylonian captivity. Recounting a divine bet made between God and the devil as to whether the latter can tempt the righteous Job to curse the former if enough misfortune should befall him, the author refers to that wicked supernatural entity as ha-Shaitan—“the Adversary.” Satan, however, is not yet the almost-deified being he’d appear as in works such as Revelation (indeed many references that were written earlier than Job, such as the serpent in Genesis, were retroactively interpreted as concerning him). By contrast, the Zoroastrians had long believed in a purely evil being that existed in tension with an entirely benevolent god. In temples where Zoroastrians practiced their rites, a holy fire would be tended which represented the benevolence of Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord” who creates and maintains existence.
Since the beginning of the universe, Ahura Mazda exists in conflict with Angra Mainyu, a destructive and evil force that’s nearly the equal in power of the righteous god. “In the beginning there were two primal spirits,” reads the Zoroastrian sacred text Ahunavaiti Gatha, “Twins spontaneously active, / These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.” Such a dualism was anathema to the strictly monotheistic Jews adhering to the Shema, the credo that the “Lord is our God, the Lord is one,” yet as belief in Satan evolved, especially within Christianity, it clearly owed something to the totalism of Angra Mainyu. Even while apocalyptic thinking was already in evidence in scriptures written before the exile, the Persian religion offered a fully detailed model of an epic future confrontation between the powers of good and evil, where, regardless of the suffering of the innocent and wicked alike, the final victory of righteousness was still assured. Known as Frashokereti by Zoroastrians, this purging at the end of the world signals a return to the purified state of nature before creation; it is a resetting of the proper equilibrium of existence—of the descent of the dove after the dragon has finished its task. The period of Frashokereti sees a battle between two respective representatives of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu; the latter’s son Azi Dahaka, associated with serpents and dragons, will be defeated by a figure known as the Saoshyant, “the one who brings benefit.”
Boyce describes Zoroastrianism’s innovations as such—that there is a belief in a “supreme God who is the Creator; that an evil power exists which is opposed to him . . . that in its present state [the world] will have an end; that this end will be heralded by a cosmic Savior, who will help to bring it about . . . that at the end of time there will be a resurrection of the dead and a Last judgment . . . and that thereafter the kingdom of God will come upon earth.” Stripped of detail in this manner, the similarities to Judaism are remarkable; meanwhile, the congruencies with Christianity are almost exact. Significant in the Jewish incorporation of Zoroastrian beliefs is Cyrus the Great, a figure that is spoken of as a redemptive liberator, a great advocate for the Jewish people despite his not being of the faith. Within the Hebrew Scriptures, a certain title is used to honor him which translates to the “anointed one.” That designation is applied to several biblical figures, including Solomon and David, but Cyrus is the only instance in which it is used to describe a gentile. Upon the end of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews would begin to develop a systemized understanding of the implications of this title, as would the Christians later on. As a concept, it would be intertwined with belief in the apocalypse. Before any of that, however, the anointed one who was Cyrus was simply called a “messiah” by the Jews.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Reprinted with permission from The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse by Ed Simon copyright © 2025 Fortress Press.