RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 75of the so-called apocalyptic books, especially 1 Enoch, and in related litera-
ture, like Jubilees, the Serekh HaYahad, and the War Scroll. This issue is
complicated, controversial, and poorly understood.
I am not primarily interested in the apocalypse as a literary genre. I will not
have anything to say about the still controverted definition of apocalyptic, nor,
indeed, am I particularly concerned with some of the common features of
the literary apocalypses (e.g., heavenly ascents or lists of revealed things),
though such features may provide important hints about the milieus in which
the books were composed.^64 What I am mainly interested in is the central
myth of apocalypticism as an ideological system and its ethos as a worldview.
(I will from now on refer to this as “the myth” or “mythology,” using the
term “apocalypticism” only to designate the rather confused but still common
scholarly construct.) Evidence of this ideological system is, to repeat, not lim-
ited to apocalypses; indeed, one important type of apocalypse, the historical
(e.g., Daniel 7–12), often features only traces of the main apocalyptic myth,
while substantial accounts may appear in books like Jubilees and the Serekh
HaYahad, which are not by any formal criteria apocalyptic.
I am also not interested in speculating about the origins of the narrative
structure of the apocalyptic mythology, its relations to biblical prophecy, its
debts to Persia, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, or the royal propaganda of the
long-departed kings of Canaan and Israel.^65 The genetic problem seems insol-
uble, but the very intensity of the search for origins tells us something about
the strangeness of the phenomenon and implies that apocalypticism cannot
be explained as a straightforward evolutionary development (from, e.g., classi-
(^64) The main collection of material is J. H. Charlesworth, ed.,Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,
2 vols. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983–1985). Caution is in order, since the texts included in
no sense constitute a canon. Many of the texts are Christian and medieval and have no more
than a hypothetical connection to ancient Jewish apocalypticism; and all the texts were transmit-
ted and revised, in ways that usually cannot be determined, by Christian copyists, so that it is
often impossible to tell whether a particular text is “Jewish” or “Christian.” Exceptions are those
like Jubilees and parts of 1 Enoch, substantial fragments of which were found at Qumran. For a
brief discussion of the character of the apocalyptic genre, see J. J. Collins, “Genre, Ideology, and
Social Movements in Jewish Apocalypticism,” in J. J. Collins and J. Charlesworth, eds.,Mysteries
and Revelations; Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium(Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press,
1991),pp. 13–23;and inmuch greaterdetail,in thesame collection,D. Hellholm,“Methodolog-
ical Reflections on the Problem of the Definition of Generic Texts,” pp. 135–63. The lists are
well discussed by M. Stone, “Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature,”Selected
Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha(Leiden: Brill, 1991), 379–418. They are especially
important because they suggest that the books were written in a scribal-wisdom milieu. Heavenly
ascents: M. Himmelfarb,Ascent to Heaven.
(^65) The last is the subject of a series of books by Margaret Barker, starting withThe Older
Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early
Christianity(London: SPCK, 1987). Despite its addiction to certainide ́es fixes, the book is worth
reading for its account of the discontinuity of the Enochic myth with Deuteronomic ideology.