pha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this literature re-
ceived little scholarly attention for more than half a century. (This neglect
must be seen in the context of a general shift in focus from history of reli-
gion to biblical theology in this period.) Many of the more influential
scholars who addressed it, such as Rowley and von Rad, were biblical schol-
ars who naturally enough tried to assimilate the strange noncanonical ma-
terial to biblical categories. Much of the scholarship that purported to deal
with “apocalyptic” actually dealt with postexilic prophecy or with the let-
ters of Paul. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, led to renewed
interest in Judaism between the Bible and the Mishnah. From the 1970s on-
ward there was extensive work on the Pseudepigrapha both in the United
States and in Europe, which bore fruit in the two-volume translation of Old
Testament Pseudepigrapha edited by Charlesworth (1983-1985), which in-
cluded much more material than the older edition of Charles, and the Ger-
man series of fasciclesJüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit.
Now the apocalypses came to be studied in the context of the contemporary
pseudepigraphic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This in turn led to a
change in focus from “apocalyptic” as a kind of theology, usually studied
with an eye to its relevance for the New Testament, to the literary genre
apocalypse (Koch 1972; Collins ed. 1979).
Three results of the study of the genre are noteworthy. First, apoca-
lypses are not only concerned with historical eschatology (the end of the
present age) in the way familiar from Daniel and the book of Revelation.
They are also, even primarily, revelations of heavenly mysteries (Rowland
1983). A whole subtype of the genre is concerned with otherworldly jour-
neys, and this material is important for the early history of Jewish mysti-
cism (Himmelfarb 1993). Second, since only one book in the Hebrew Bible,
Daniel, could be said to exemplify the genre, discussion of “apocalyptic” or
“protoapocalyptic” in the prophetic literature became increasingly dubi-
ous. Third, the genre is not peculiar to Judaism and Christianity, but has
important parallels in Persian tradition and throughout the Greco-Roman
world, especially in the case of the heavenly journeys (Hellholm 1983).
Another byproduct of the focus on the genre apocalypse and on the
context of the Pseudepigrapha was increased interest in the collection of
writings known as1 Enoch.Charles had already realized that some parts of
1 Enochwere older than Daniel. Interest was greatly increased by the publica-
tion of the Aramaic fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (Milik
1976). The Italian scholar Paolo Sacchi argued that the root of apocalyp-
ticism should be found in theBook of the Watchers(1 Enoch1–36), one of the13Early Judaism in Modern ScholarshipEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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