Apocalyptics. There are myths among many peoples
of the collapse of the world, sometimes also of a time
of redemption to be expected upon the ending of the
world; and in these, of course, Christian influences are
often present. The eschatological beliefs of Western
as well as of Islamic cultural history are rooted in late
Jewish apocalyptics in which the historical perspec-
tives of the Old Testament are fused with aspects of
Iranian eschatology.
Generally speaking, the idea was widespread in
antiquity that time proceeds cyclically, just as nature
does: history returns, after the expiration of a cosmic
year—or aeon—to its beginning; events repeat them-
selves in perpetual reiteration. In Iran, on the other
hand, the notion of a circular pattern was abandoned
quite early. History was viewed as a straight line. The
content of world events is the battle for men between
the good god and the evil spirit. At the end of the
world the dead are awakened and judged, the evil spirit
is destroyed by the hosts of the good god, and there
begins an eternally blessed existence on an earth freed
from all evil. This blissful period heralds the finale, the
eschaton of history; nothing is said of a repetition of
the battle between light and darkness, even if the
thought is borrowed from the cyclical view that the
eschaton corresponds to the felicitous beginnings of the
world.
This Iranian belief concerning the end of time en-
countered Old Testament piety and was thereby intro-
duced into Jewish thought. This was all the more read-
ily possible because the cyclical view of history had
been alien to the Old Testament from time immemo-
rial. God, the Creator of the world, guides the history
of His chosen people along a straight line of historical
development toward specific goals: He furnishes the
Promised Land; He leads them through the catastrophe
of exile into a new period of redemption; He promises
the people a powerful Prince of Peace out of the House
of David, etc. But these ideas were not eschatological
to the extent that they were not connected with
the idea of the final end of all history.
Under the influence of Iranian eschatology this Old
Testament view of history was developed in time into
an apocalyptic eschatology, the oldest documents of
which still made their way into the Old Testament
canon (Daniel; Isaiah 24-26). This apocalyptic view
now includes not only the history of the children of
Israel, but the whole of world history with all its peo-
ple. Simultaneously, in place of the fluctuating this-
worldly ideas of the goals of Israelite history, it substi-
tutes the expectation of a cosmic catastrophe that leads
to the end of the old aeon and of its master, the Devil,
and passing through an eschatological period of re-
demption yields to a new world of absolute and perfect
salvation. The depiction of the old aeon can in conse-
quence borrow its coloration from the cyclical view
of history, and the history of the expiring world can
be seen as a process of decline from a Golden Age.
But the apocalyptic conflagration of the world at the
end of the old epoch does not introduce any repetition
of events but, in accordance with dualistic thought,
leads into an ahistorical new aeon. The subjects of
history are no longer primarily peoples, but individual
persons who, if they have already died, are conse-
quently to be raised to judgment at the end of the old
aeon. The time and manner of the eschatological turn-
ing point are decided by God alone as the master of
history, but to some scattered prophetic figures the
course of history to its end, as well as the eschatological
outcome, has been revealed by God himself in advance
(hence apocalypse, from the Greek
apokalyptein, “to
reveal”). Thus the process of history unfolds inalterably
in accordance with a plan laid down by God.
Not infrequently a balance is struck between the
historically immanent Old Testament hope and the
transcendental apocalyptic expectation such that the
apocalyptic end of history is preceded by a final mes-
sianic reign within history; hence an interregnum be-
tween the old and the new aeons in which the elect
rule together with the Messiah. Texts such as Revela-
tion 20 have perceptibly influenced the history of the
West in expecting a thousand-year interregnum
(chiliasm); for although the eschatological interregnum
is conceived as historically immanent, revolutionary
movements have often been fired in anticipation of it.
