This series of columns began by pointing to Western anti-Semitism and European colonialism as unindicted co-conspirators in this conflict, and we end by naming two more — the taboo realities of a transcendent weapon and a self-hypnotizing End Time theology. Neither is explicitly on the negotiators’ agenda, but each alone is enough to wreak havoc in the Middle East; together, on the world.There seems to be a bit of slippage here between apocalypses, apocalyptic, eschatology, and decisive wars. Daniel, the books collected in 1 Enoch, and the Book of Revelation are apocalypses (revelations of heavenly secrets by divine being to a human being). Apocalypses are usually interested in eschatology: the theology of ultimate issues, especially the cosmic final judgment and the fate of individuals after death. (The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch is more interested in personal than cosmic eschatology, as are the Gnostic apocalypses.) 1-2 Maccabees deal with the persecution of Judaism by Antiochus Epiphanes and the successful Jewish guerilla war against him (the "Maccabean Revolt, a decisive war). They are historical works, not apocalypses. Presumably Mr. Carroll includes them because the Maccabean Revolt is the setting of the Book of Daniel and the Animal Apocalypse (the latter again in 1 Enoch). Both authors expected this revolt to be successful (it was) and to lead directly into the final judgment (it didn't). "Apocalyptic" is hard to define beyond generally the stuff you find in apocalypses, mainly revealed heavenly secrets, usually involving some form of cosmic or personal eschatology.
First theology. The humane mainstream of monotheistic religion, and therefore the civilizations that spring from it, has included an inhuman countercurrent that swirls around the idea that God wills violence. Indeed, God uses hyper-violent destruction as a mode of redemption. We call this apocalypse. In apocalyptic texts (I & II Maccabees, Daniel, Enoch are Hebrew examples; Revelation is the supreme Christian example), history is envisioned as climaxing in cosmic warfare between God and Satan. That the battle is imagined as centered in Jerusalem defines its tie to the present conflict: Jerusalem an eternal cockpit of violence.
But apocalyptic struggle, far from local, is for nothing less than cosmic order. In such a battle, no price is too high to pay, which means a destroyed earth is acceptable and individual martyrdom is glorious. The virtue of suffering embraced for the higher cause of good against evil becomes an absolute.
This vision did not come out of thin air. It was a way of coping with the savageries of actual wars, centered in Jerusalem. The bloody apogee was reached in the wars waged by Rome against the Jewish people at the beginning of the Common Era. The Jewish historian Josephus says that more than a million Jews were killed in the first Roman war, around the year 70. The Roman historian Tacitus says that more than 600,000 Jewish men, women, and children defended Jerusalem against the Roman siege. It felt like the end of the world. Jewish resistance embraced martyrdom, as typified by the saga of Masada, where the last Jewish fighters killed themselves rather than surrender.
Thus, exactly as the Passion narratives about the death of Jesus were being written down, tens of thousands of Rome-resisting Jews were crucified. The Book of Revelation, composed in the thick of the violence, portrays the Roman war in ferocious — if mainly symbolic — terms (Rome is Babylon, The emperor Nero is the beast). Yet the apocalyptic violence of God is most clearly dramatized in the Gospel notion that the God-willed death of Jesus is the transcendent destruction that saves the cosmos. Golgotha is the highpoint of martyrdom.
The Book of Revelation, also known, tellingly, as Apocalypse, locates End Time mayhem, yes, in Jerusalem. More than other texts, it planted the idea in the Western mind that the human race is ultimately doomed to a mass suicide-murder from which it can be rescued only after the fact and magically. Such holy destruction defines the rushing current of apocalyptic millennialism.
As the article goes on to say, there are eschatological and apocalyptic traditions in Islam as well. There's plenty to go around. And I'm sure you can work out for yourself what the "transcendent weapon" is.
Mr Carroll's larger point is that a lot of the ideas in these apocalypses which involve cosmic eschatology are lurking in the background and sometimes the foreground of the current politics of the Middle East, and that should make us more than a little uneasy. He concludes:
The apocalyptic mind is alive and well — armed and dangerous. If the Israelis and Palestinians succeed in defusing their local conflict, they will also have nudged the entire human family back from an impulse that, though long regarded as holy, is profoundly wicked. The earth was not created to end in a cataclysm of violence, and neither were Israel or Palestine. Peace, therefore. Shalom. Salam.Amen to that.
