The End of the Scroll. Herold Weiss

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СКАЧАТЬ world. It is natural to conceive one’s home as the place where one was born. Throughout one’s life one remains attached to one’s birthplace. Humans are normally permanently attached emotionally to their place of origin; finding themselves in any other place they feel “away from home.” In that situation, their underlying desire is to “return.” The notion of one’s home can be understood not only in personal terms, but also in terms of humanity at large. According to the traditional Hebrew understanding of human origins, God had made them from dust of the earth and the earth was their home. On the earth, God had designated the land where he directed Abraham on his journey out of Mesopotamia, and in which he became a sojourner, as the land where his descendants would dwell and become a great nation. For the Hebrews the possession of the land, and dwelling in the Promised Land had become a major element of their self-awareness as a people. As noticed earlier, they understood that their future with God after the restoration of their fortunes would continue to be in their earthly home.

      With the opening of travel, commerce and political connections between the Mediterranean and the Indian cultures, the notion of the human soul as an immortal, eternal living thing that had become entrapped in a physical body became widespread in the West and it convinced women and men that the earth was not their real home. Their essential being, their immortal soul, was “at home” only in heaven, the soul’s place of origin. This shift to heaven as the true home of human beings created the pervasive desire to return home to heaven. Salvation ceased to be identified with health and prosperity on earth and became attached to the ability to escape the earth and return home to heaven. This gave rise to multiple esoteric, ascetic religious ways to achieve salvation through knowledge of the path on which the soul could make the journey back to heaven. It became the main agenda of the Mystery Cults that invaded the Roman Empire from the East, where they had been originally fertility cults. In a way, the notion that human beings were eternal souls who had become entrapped in a body of flesh was another version of the notion of The Fall. According to it, The Fall consists of the entrapment of the immortal soul in a mortal body. Unlike the prophetic visions of a blessed future on this earth, the apocalyptic conceptions of salvation envision the future in either an earthly or a heavenly new home. The choice seems to be influenced by whether the apocalyptic author is still strongly conditioned by his Jewish roots, or is somewhat more open to the Hellenistic cultural milieu.

      Symbolic Apocalyptic Language

      Finally, I would like to consider the most immediately evident difference between prophecy and apocalypticism: its appropriation of the language of creation myths and of ancient iconography. Many factors seem to have been involved in the development of apocalyptic discourse. To come to terms with them, it may help to start with a consideration of the risks involved in the use of words. Words are the indispensable means for communication, but words may also be the barriers to communication. In verbal communication three factors are involved: the speaker (writer), the hearer (reader) and the reality being symbolized by words. Modern philosophy has been particularly interested in the connotative and the denotative aspects of words. As a result, it has been affirmed that what is said but is “beyond proof” is meaningless. This reduction of meaningful speech to what can be demonstrated functions well in systematic scientific discourse that works through logic and appeals to reason, constricting the role of the imagination. It says that a human person may express ideas, desires, feelings, regrets, aspirations, etc., but since they cannot be confirmed with the objectivity required of scientific discourse, they are ultimately disconnected from reality. Discourse about what the imagination conceives, be it artistic, literary or religious, however, cannot be demoted to the fantasies of childhood that have no connection with reality. When what the imagination conceives is expressed by an intelligent adult it does not reveal immature flights to unreality. It has to do with what is as real as anything that can be proven in time and space. Attempts to give meaning to such discourse by transposing it to verifiable prose do not improve communication of what the discourse is about. To represent something symbolically does not imply that the speaker is in doubt about the reality or the validity of what he is saying. The use of symbols is concomitant to the use of words; it does not reflect the desire to impress aesthetically, or to lack confidence about the content of the discourse. The prophets not only used symbolic language, but also symbolic actions. By their performances they were not trying to magically bring about the future. They were trying to make as plain as they could what they understood to be the will of God. It was the most effective way for them to communicate the divine involvement with the present.

      The authors of apocalypses conceived the crisis of their present as more dire than that faced by the prophets. It involved not just the unjust conduct of Israel’s princes, priests and kings. It involved the whole of creation. This crisis could not be solved by using intermediaries: locust, drought, hunger, foreign armies, etc. This crisis required the direct intervention of the Omnipotent God. The only way to depict the personal impingement of God in the material and historical order in which people lived was the radical way in which God had brought about creation, as was being said by their time, “out of nothing,” thus increasing the power of the God who does not use water or soil to create, as said in the creation stories of Genesis. The adoption of the language of creation myths, however, was not just an easy revival of traditional language. It was a very conscious use of mythological symbols to give conceptual clarification to the existential confusion of life in the present.

      The symbols used by the authors of apocalypses were indeed traditional. They found them in the ancient myths of creation and in earlier books of the Old Testament, and they were easily understood by their contemporaries. Modern attempts by some interpreters to distinguish between what is to be taken literally and what is to be taken symbolically would have been inconceivable to the original readers of these books. They lived in the symbolic world of the imagination. There were no canons telling them that they were to tell about the past as it actually happened, or to prognosticate about the future as it would actually happen. Historical writing as an academic discipline committed to tell it “as it actually happened,” as von Ranke in the nineteenth century taught historians to be their duty, did not exist back then. Before von Ranke everyone who wrote about the past, including all ancient Greek and Latin “historians,” told about the past with a heuristic agenda. The prophets looked at the past to understand the present and offer moral advice. From the past they learned about the times when the Israelites had rebelled against their God and about the many demonstrations of God’s covenant loyalty to his people. Thus, they contrasted the people’s loyalty to their covenant with God by describing God’s loyalty as a “Rock,” and the people’s loyalty as “the morning dew.” It evaporates as soon as the sun heats up the atmosphere. They hoped, however, that the people would turn away, repent from their past and the future they envisioned would actually not happen.

      The apocalypticists looked at the past to counterbalance the blessed future that will put an end to the past that got the people into their unacceptable present. After the exile, the Endzeit wird Urzeit pattern is standard in apocalypses. The future “end time” is to become like “primeval time.” The future is described in terms of the pastoral simplicity, agricultural abundance and creature harmony that obtained in Eden. The final judgment is described with parallels with Noah’s times. According to the first Greek thinkers, all matter is made of four basic elements: air, water, earth and fire. Two of them are characterized as being essential to the flourishing and the destruction of life: water and fire. While God destroyed the world of Noah with water, his future destruction of the fallen world will be with fire. It is not surprising that the authors of apocalypses found the appropriate language with which to depict the future that would displace the present in the language of the ancient stories that told how chaos was displaced by cosmos and the flood put an end to a world engulfed in wickedness.

      The apocalypticists used a range of symbols: white bulls for the patriarchs of Israel, fallen stars for the sons of God that descended to earth to marry women, wild animals for the gentiles, blind sheep for the Jews, composite, monstrous beasts for nations, and their horns for their kings, etc. If today these symbols seem distractions it is because we may fail to perceive the agendas informing these apocalyptic accounts. It is also probable that sometimes the symbols were understood only by those belonging to a particular СКАЧАТЬ