Ancient times
Ancient Israel’s historical experience and faith in the guidance and the promises of God provide the foundation of the Western tradition of historical eschatology. The basic structure of this faith is found in the law of promise and fulfillment, and the eschatology of the Hebrew Bible is grounded in faith in God and hope in the future (Genesis 12:1–3). Jewish eschatology has its beginning in the biblical promise to Abraham that, through him, all nations would be blessed and that his descendants would receive a "good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8). In the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), the promise includes the increase of people and possessions, as well as the blessing and triumphant presence of God (Genesis 49:8–12; Numbers 23; Deuteronomy 33:13–17; Numbers 23:21). The Jews interpreted their defeats at the hands of Israel’s enemies (Assyria in the 7th century bce, Babylon in the 6th) not as the result of the might of great empires but as punishment for their own disobedience of the laws of God. The concept of the “day of the Lord” arose from this view of history, which holds that the empire will fall and the remnant of the Lord’s faithful will receive salvation and victory. This new idea and Israel’s political history—both the recent disasters and the memory of the great Davidic kingdom—led to the hope in the future messiah from the house of David (II Samuel 7).
During the political catastrophes of the 8th century bce, the great prophets took up the concept of the "day of the Lord," proclaimed it as a day of judgment (Amos 5:18), and made it the focus of eschatological hopes. Isaiah also adopted the eschatological view that salvation occurred only after the universal judgment (Isaiah 4:3; 6:13; 11:11; 37:31) and, in some passages, combined it with the presence of a messianic mediator of salvation (Isaiah 7–12). In another passage (2:1–3), Isaiah offered the most striking expression of nonmessianic millennialism in the prophetic texts, declaring, “and he shall judge between nations, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they study war anymore.” This is a vision of universal redemption and also a profoundly subversive vision of the political order in which the weapons of aristocratic dominance are transformed into the tools of manual labour.
Prophetic hopes kept the idea of Israel alive after the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel (8th century bce) and Judah (6th century bce). In some formulations, this prophetic hope sought to restore the exiled Jews to the land of Israel, and in others it sought the redemption of the righteous in all nations of the earth. It was conceived of as a new creation, a new heart, a new covenant (Jeremiah 31; Ezekiel 36; Isaiah 41; Isaiah 51).
The Book of Daniel (2 and 7) contains the first use of symbolic language and the mysteriously precise numbers that formed the core of subsequent apocalyptic speculation in both Judaism and Christianity. His apocalyptic hope anticipated the "kingdom of the Son of Man" following the consummation of evil in the fourth and final kingdom of the world. Daniel offers the first expression of hope in a messiah and in a Son of Man, an eschatology that unites the fulfillment of the history of Israel with the end of world history. Daniel’s vision of the four empires also reveals the hostility of Jewish (and early Christian) apocalyptic thought to imperial power.
Reacting to a threat to the existence of the Jewish faith and the desecration of the First Temple of Jerusalem in 167 bce, the Maccabees revolted against the occupation forces of the Seleucid monarch of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and against those of their Jewish countrymen who favoured assimilation. The anonymous author of Daniel wrote his work, which describes the forced resettlement of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century bce, in support of these rebels, particularly assuring them that God was aiding them, that the end of their struggles was in sight, and that a new golden age was dawning. In two passages he depicts visions of a series of four world kingdoms, represented in the first passage by parts of a giant statue and in the second by mythological beasts, each kingdom embodying evil to a greater extent than the last. Human kingdoms, according to Daniel, will end with the fourth kingdom, crushed by a "stone…cut out by no human hand," symbolizing that the destruction of the kingdom and the ensuing order are supernatural events. The Son of Man, however, will institute a fifth, entirely righteous, just, and eternal kingdom.
Daniel, like the previous prophets, made predictions, but, unlike other prophets’ predictions, the outcome anticipated by Daniel was to be the product not of historical development but of divine intervention that completely reverses the expected historical outcome. The reversal of worldly expectations through divine intervention is one of the most characteristic features of apocalypticism and contrasts with the older prophetic style. The apocalyptic view also shifts the focus of future expectations from predictions of punishment lest people change their ways to predictions of events that must occur, regardless of human actions. This new tradition acknowledged that evil was so dominant on earth that only God’s cataclysmic intervention could free the world from its grip. Also essential to Daniel and subsequent apocalypticism is the immediacy of the message and the promise of salvation. Descriptions of this imminent cosmic salvation included vivid representations of historical figures who depicted the progressive growth of evil and decline of goodness from the past to the present.
Along with the ideas of the imminent intervention of God in history and the reversal of the irresistible progress of evil and declension of good, Daniel’s apocalypse introduced other influential ideas. Numerology, mythological figures, and angelology were probably introduced by Daniel as a result of the influence of Iranian thought. Although likely the result of the unique problems the author faced in presenting his views as a 6th-century-bce prophet to a 2nd-century-bce audience, other characteristics of The Book of Daniel, especially its pseudonymous authorship and emphasis on esoteric truths, remain essential components of apocalyptic writings. Numerous references to the number of days before the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promises have also proved very important. Despite the passage of millennia since its composition, the book inspired apocalyptic expectations as late as 1843, in both the United States (William Miller) and Persia (the Bāb).