RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 77the problem of evil was not generated (though it may admittedly have been
intensified) by an event.^71 Jews were unhappy long before Antiochus IV or
Pompey marched into Jerusalem.
This is not to suggest that the emergence and spread of apocalyptic mythol-
ogy have no explanation—that they were generated entirely by the internal
dynamics of Israelite and Jewish religious ideology and float free of material
causation—or even that political developments had no influence on them.
But we must be clear about what it is we are trying to explain. We can trace
the emergence and spread of the myth at first in literature. What we need to
account for, then, is the emergence of the ideology among the literate, espe-
cially in the very same scribal/wisdom circles that were responsible for trans-
mitting andpromulgating the covenantalideology. Indeed, it seemslikely that
thehistoricalprocessmainlyresponsibleforgeneratingapocalypticmythology
and causing its spread was the rise of the covenantal ideology, to which it
seemsbothareactionandacomplement.Wemustalsoconsiderthecharacter
of the relationship between the quasi-official, literary version of apocalyptic
mythology and the presumably more popular characteristics of ancient Juda-
ism as the recognition of the power of demons, astrology, millenarianism, and
so on—a relationship perhaps comparable to that between the Pentateuch
and local legal praxis.
Content of the MythAlthough the various accounts of the myth differ significantly in detail, it is
not especially difficult to detect the common narrative structure underlying
them. As in the Genesis narrative, God created the universe. But in the myth,
God was not alone but was surrounded by ranks of subsidiary deities that at
some point gained full or partial control of creation. The earliest account, in
1 Enoch 1–36 (parts of which may have been composed as early as 300
B.C.E.—not long after the common dating of the Pentateuchal priestly docu-
ment, which includes most of Genesis 1–11) connects this demonic revolu-
(^71) I have been influenced on this point (indirectly) by Paolo Sacchi (Jewish Apocalyptic and
Its History[Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990], esp. pp. 32–87; Davies, “Social World,”
268, also emphasizes the importance of the problem of evil in generating this myth; on the
problem of God’s distance, see M. Himmelfarb, “Revelation and Rapture: The Transformation
of the Visionary in the Ascent Apocalypses,” inMysteries and Revelations, 79–90, especially 89–
90, relying on Scholem), who also had the good idea of contrasting Enoch with two roughly
contemporary works, Ecclesiastes and the slightly later Wisdom of Ben Sira. But Sacchi seems
to take the problem of evil as directly generative of certain key apocalyptic texts, which seems to
me unhelpfully reductionist; it also seems to constitute an attempt to define a literary genre by
positing a shared theological concern, also a bad idea. I am merely arguing that the central
myth of apocalypticism—variously transformed, chopped up, and even skipped altogether in the
literary apocalypses—is concerned with the problem of evil and, more importantly, that it implies
an ethos fundamentally at odds with that of the covenant.