Conversations About The End Of Time:
Jews, Christians and Muslims at the Beginning of Islam[1]
Professor Gordon D. Newby
The Goodrich C. White Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
Emory University
The Max and Pearl Herman Lecture Series, University of Regina
My talk tonight is about how Jews, Christians and Muslims participated in a common discourse about the divine plan for the end of the world. We will see that each tradition had its own perspective, but all shared a common anxiety about the Eschaton, and all shared stories about popular figures involved with the End.
Let me start my talk today by looking at eleventh chapter of the Qur’an (Q 11:31) in which we read that Noah says to his people, “I do not say to you ‘I have the treasures of Allah,’ and I do not know the unseen, and I do not say, ‘Indeed, I am an angel…’” In the Quranic telling, the audience seems to be surprised that Noah is merely “flesh” like the generation of the Flood.[2] These individuals, to whom Islamic tradition refers as the People of Noah, seem to have been expecting a heavenly messenger, one who had God’s treasures and secrets, to bring them an “Apocalypse” and assure them that they could escape God’s wrath. Why would they have thought that the person we know as the very human Noah would by in any way angelic? The answer lies in the Qur’an’s embrace of the vast literature about Heaven, Hell, the creation and the end of the world, the Eschaton, found among Jews and Christians in the Late Antique world before Islam. Early Muslim thinkers commenting on the Qur’an were the latest among Middle Eastern monotheists to join the conversation about the nature of God and the End of the World.
Just before the birth of Muhammad there seems to have been heightened expectation that the world would change and begin to come to an end. Why this expectation? To be sure, the Eastern Mediterranean world was in a mess. Protracted wars between Romans (Byzantines) and Persians (Sassa nians) had devastated the economies of the region, but there were also some signs that things might be getting better. Periodic peace treaties were concluded throughout the middle of the sixth century and some groups, notably the Arabs of northern Arabia, had grown rich selling goods and services to both sides of the war. From our historical perspective, things were not greatly worse than at other times in the region and they were, in fact, a bit better than a century earlier. [3] Thus, there is no obvious situational need for an End-Time scenario that would promise deliverance after extreme hardship at this particular point in time as opposed to any time in the two centuries before.
One explanation for the rise of Apocalyptic speculation and anxiety about the Eschaton in association with Islam’s inception has to do with Islam’s connections with the various Judaisms and Christianities that shaped the religious sensibilities of the Near East in the Late Antique. Since I am an historian, following the practice of many of my fellow historians, the beginning of my story today will itself have yet another beginning. Thus today’s talk about Apocalypticism in the Near East at the time of the rise of Islam will not begin in 570 C.E., the birth of Muhammad, or in 610 C.E., the beginnings of Islam, but rather in the time around 70 C.E. with the destruction of the Jewish Second Temple and the Jewish-Roman wars.
As a note, the term Apocalypse as I am using it refers to an uncovering or revelation of something hidden, from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, and, more specifically, those revelations of the secrets of heaven. Of course the term has and had become associated almost exclusively with the End-Time, but to understand these early responses to eschatological and apocalyptic thought, we have to see that “Apocalypse” is more encompassing.
One of the results of the Temple’s destruction was the creation of the Talmud, which was generally adopted by Jews only in the early Islamic centuries. In it, we are told that the world will exist for six thousand years and be devastated for a thousand.[4] In another interpretation, the world will last for six thousand years, two thousand in chaos, two thousand with the Torah, and two thousand as the days of the Messiah. Toward the end of the sixth millennium, the Messiah, or a series of messiahs, will come to usher in the final stages of time’s linear progression. According to the calendar commonly accepted by Rabbinic Jews, we humans are almost 5,775 years from Creation, coming to the close of almost six millennia of the existence of the world. Secular scientists, who often pose a counter theology, speculate that creation was ten to twenty billion years ago, and so, for most modern Jews, the fact that we are running out of time in this sixth millennium in the Jewish calendar is unnoticed and unremarkable.
This is not the case for everyone, however, and has certainly not been the case in the past. Speculations about the Eschaton and its most prominent feature, the coming of a Messiah,[5] have long been a characteristic of Rabbinic Judaism, sometimes coming more to the fore than at others, but always present. The date from creation that I mentioned above appears not to be the date imagined by the early Rabbis mentioned in the Talmud. Nor was it the case for the famous first century C.E. Pharisaic Jewish historian, Josephus, who, in his Contra Apionem, says of his Antiquities of the Jews, “Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are taken out of our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue.”[6]
For some, the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. marked the beginning of the messianic age, for it was the anticipation of that cataclysmic event that brought about the Messiah’s birth.[7] Christians held that Jesus had come in the sixth millennium. Some, like St. Augustine, held that Jesus was born in the year 5,000 after creation,[8] while others say he was born around 5500.[9] This raises the question of what happened to the calendar. How can we be at year 5775 if Jesus was born around 5,000?[10] One answer is that around 250 C.E., Mar Samuel, the Babylonian Amora of Nehardea, recalculated the calendar based on his calculations of the time of Creation, which resulted in a difference of a thousand years between his new date and the Creation-era calculations of the earlier rabbis. Some scholars assume that one impetus for this re-calculation of the calendar was the pressure from Christian claims that Jewish dating proved that Jesus was the Messiah, a charge borne out by the Muslim historian al-Biruni who reports, “The Christians reproach the Jews with having diminished the number of years with the view of making the appearance of Jesus fall into the fourth millennium in the middle of the seven millennia, which are, according to their view, the time of the duration of the world, so as not to coincide with that time at which, as the prophets after Moses had prophesied, the birth of Jesus from a pure virgin at the end of time, was to take place.[11] The failure of the Messiah to appear within a short period after the destruction of the Temple led many either to put off the date of the projected appearance or to reject the whole notion of speculation. As a Rabbi Hillel said, “There will not be a messiah for Israel, because they already consumed him in the days of Hezekiah.”[12] Mar Samuel’s re-dating follows, of course, one of the most famous of Judaism’s messianic failures, the short-lived revolt of Shim’on Bar Kochba against the Romans, which ended with his death in 135 C.E.
But messianic speculation did not die with messianic failure; it only intensified. Again from the Talmud, we see that a fourth century Rabbi Joseph reports hearing of the discovery of a hidden scroll written in Aramaic and Hebrew that predicted the end of the world order in 4291, ca. 530 C.E., after which would come the wars of the great monsters of the deep, the taninîm and Gog and Magog, – the Ya’jûj and Ma’jûj of Sûrat al-Kahf – presaging the days of the Messiah.[13] We know of no generally identified messianic figure from the sixth century C.E., but the legendary treatment of the abortive Jewish uprising in southern Arabia which ended with the death of the last Jewish Himyarite king, Yûsuf Dhû Nuwâs in 527 C.E. gives some indication that he was thought to be either a messianic figure or a precursor,[14] one legend having it that Dhû Nuwâs was not killed, but rode off into the sea and was swallowed up, never to be seen again.[15]
One possible explanation for a failed messiah is to say that the messiah has not died but is merely hidden from the world to return at a later time. It is more likely that Dhû Nuwâs should not be understood as the Messiah son of David but as the Messiah son of Joseph, hence his regnal name as Yûsuf, or Joseph. The figure of the Messiah ben Joseph[16] is supposed to come before the Davidic Messiah, wage war, and then be defeated. Only then will the Davidic Messiah appear to preside over the last days. At any rate, one of the claims made by Muslims is that the Jews were expecting a Messiah/Prophet at the time of Muhammad’s birth in 570 C.E. While this notion becomes a major feature in Muslim apologetics, there is some evidence that certain Jews accepted Muhammad’s mission on this basis while retaining some or all of their Judaism. This was the case with Abû ‘Îsâ al-Isfahânî, who led an unsuccessful pro-Shi’ite, anti-Umayyad, Jewish revolt at the end of the first Islamic century.[17] For many speculators, the coming of Islam was at a time of great anxiety and much speculation about the end of the world.
One difficulty with understanding the end-time thinking at the time of the rise of Islam is that apocalypticism takes on extremely local characteristics, depending on the place, the time and the particular religious group, while, at the same time, appearing to be nearly universal. Wayne Meeks, a scholar of apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, gives a useful list of characteristics of apocalypticism that can help us compare usages Judaism, Christianity and Islam:[18]
- Usually it is the revelations received by one or more individual prophets that provide the ordering complex of beliefs for the movement, such as Jesus for Christianity or Muhammad for Islam.
- Characteristically, the eschatological beliefs introduce innovations in a traditional society, making use of the known and accepted traditions in new combinations in the innovative system of beliefs, like the use of history in the Book of Daniel to predict the end of time.
- Participants in millenarian movements are frequently persons and groups who have experienced frustration of their access to social power and to the media through which social power is exercised.
- The medium for change in the millenarian movement itself is primarily cognitive. “Social change is preeminently symbol or symbolic change.” This implies that apocalyptic beliefs do not merely constitute a compensation in fantasy for real want of power, goods and status, but first of all provide a way of making sense of a world that seems to have gone mad.
- Success in creating a new “plausibility structure” or “mazeway” can enable a group to discover or obtain social power. The apocalyptic myths, as radical as they may be in “nihilating” the existing world – that is, the “symbolic universe” of the dominant society – may therefore serve a “conservative” and constructive function for the believing group. That is, they may pave the way for new forms of institutionalization. In such a case the “routinization of charisma” may not entail so radical a change as Max Weber believed.
To this list we must add an additional characteristic that sets apocalyptic thinking apart from other forms of revolutionary change based on ideology. As my colleague, Vernon Robbins, has observed, “Apocalyptic discourse is a ritual that changes all regions of space in the body and in the world into ‘hyper-intensified’ moral places.”[19] One of the strongest driving forces within apocalypticism is its drive to bring moral choice to bear on every moment and every act. There are no neutral, non-moral places, spaces, or times when apocalyptic thinking takes hold fully. This characteristic becomes apparent when we look at several chapters of the Quran from the linked perspectives of moral choice and time.
The tenth chapter of the Quran, Sûrat Yûnus (Jonah), is the first example in which we can see the collapse of time that transforms the universe into Robbins’ hyperintensified moral space. Called Jonah because of the mention in verse ninety-eight of the community to whom Jonah prophesied, this Sûrah weaves through several themes. After an allusion to Muhammad as a warner of God’s impending punishment, the next few verses briefly describe Creation. But, this presentation of Creation is not history in the Genesis model. Instead, we learn that “In the difference between night and day and that which God created in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who protect themselves [from evil]” Q 10:6. In verse 23, we get a possible allusion to Jonah’s storm-tossed trip, but abstracted, in the usual Quranic fashion, to a timeless, featureless, de-historicized plane, leaving the reader with a sense that the words could apply to the present moment as easily as to a specific distant past. Starting in verse seventy-five, we get a narrative of Moses and Aaron, following a short mention of Noah and other, unnamed messengers sent “to their people.” While the Moses narrative is relatively complete, in Quranic terms, occupying about sixteen percent of the chapter, it, too, has fewer of the details that would make it seem richly historicized to those comparing it with the biblical version. Such a comparison with the Bible misses the point of the Quranic narrative. It is not meant to historicize, but to de-historicize, all the while assuming that the reader knows the historical details or knows that historical details should be there.[20] The point here is that listeners to and readers of the Quran have, right from the beginning, known something of the stories of the prominent biblical figures. The rhetorical differences between the way the stories were known and the way they are found in the Quran is part of the Quran’s dissonance that is, itself, a rhetorical feature of the Quran. The unsettling tension between a historical account and the Quran’s de-historicized telling focuses the reader’s attention on the Quranic message: the past is a guide for choosing a moral path in the present to get the promised future.[21]
As I have shown elsewhere, the temporal substructure of this chapter demonstrates a juxtaposition of the two ends of time: Creation and the Day of Judgment. Verse three recalls Creation, “Your Lord is God, who created the heavens and the earth in six days, and then established Himself on the Throne, directing [all] things.” Verse four then takes us to the Eschaton: “To Him is your return, all of you, a promise of God in truth.” Verses five and six return us to Creation, while verses seven through ten hurl us back to the end of time. Verse eleven places us in an indeterminate present, telling us that “We leave alone those who have no hope in meeting us to wander about in their excesses.” In verse thirteen, we are back in the past when we are told that “We have already destroyed the generations before you when they did wrong, their messengers having come to them with clear proofs, and they were not believing. Thus We reward the evildoers.” In fourteen, we are back to the present, with a move toward the future: “We appointed you vice-regents on the earth after them, so that We could see how you would do.” Indeed, all of the verses in the chapter continue to juxtapose past and future to intensify the decisions we are to make in the present between good and evil. And finally, the whole of the chapter is set in a progressive temporal frame with verse 3 starting at Creation, and the last verse, 110, ending with God’s judgment at the Eschaton, a judgment we have earned by our actions as vice-regents.
When we turn to Surah 18, the chapter titled “The Cave,” we see that a similar architectonic pattern emerges in the use of underlying temporal terms and implied warnings. In this chapter, however, as clearly as in any chapter of the Quran, the content, as well as the underlying structures, leads us to see the text as an interwoven set of layers of stories and sermons that knit Jews, Christians and Muslims together. The story of Moses’ encounter with the Servant of God, who had been taught wisdom in God’s presence, points to the deeper meanings of God’s creation that lie beyond the limits of revelation. Moses, the recipient of the Law, who stood on Mt. Sinai, demanding to see God face-to-face, is portrayed as needing education in “right conduct.” But, “Why?” one might well ask, since Moses knew from God the totality of God’s legislation for humankind, at least at his time. Both Rabbinic and Islamic legend understand the limits of Moses’ knowledge. The Babylonian Talmud avers that Moses, sent by God to be seated with the least talented students in the back row of a class given by Rabbi Akiba, cannot follow the arguments, and has to be content merely to hear his name mentioned as a reference.[22] And why does he need to be educated by Rabbi Akiba? Not only is R. Akiba Rosh la-Chachamim, the head of the Sages, but he is also the one who recognized Bar Kochba as the Messiah who was advancing the final days. There is more to knowledge from God than just what appears on the surface, and even the most knowledgeable are not the All-Wise.[23]
Sûrat al-Kahf is replete with the notions that all is not what it seems. Even the identity of Moses stands in doubt. Post Quranic speculators about this chapter question the identity of Moses, disputing whether he was the Moses of biblical prophecy or another Moses. As many commentators have observed, this ambiguity is characteristic of Quranic discourse; it seems to invite midrashic speculation, all the while cautioning against it. Quranic narratives, more than the sacred narratives in either Jewish or Christian scripture, seem to float free. They do not have to be grounded in actual historical events and times. This greater level of abstractness and universality proved frustrating to post-Quranic scholars, and the attempts of the classical mufassirûn to pin each Quranic reference to historical events changed the basic way the Quran was read and understood in Islamic society. I contend that the scholasticism of the early Islamic scholars had the effect of “routinizing charisma,” to use a Weberian term, by tying Qur’anic references in the Qur’an to specific Jewish, Christian or pre-Islamic Arab literary works. While this worked to the advantage of making the Qur’an familiar to the recent converts from those groups in the early Islamic centuries, it obscured the apocalyptic force of the Qur’an. The narratives in Sûrat al-Kahf are prime examples of the re-valorizing of antecedent understandings of even such basics as God’s revelations as they are recast into a new temporal and rhetorical order: apocalypticism making the “old” “new.”
In the Surah’s eponymous story, the Sleepers in the Cave, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Christian legend, appear in an ambiguous state between life and death. Time is compressed, distorted and, ultimately it would appear, irrelevant. Everything that is placed on the earth “is an ornament to test which of them is best in conduct.” (Q 18:7) The sleeping youths were raised up after a “number of years” to see who could calculate how long they slept. Even the youths themselves were unaware of how long they slept, one of them modeling the proper attitude toward absolute statements about reality by saying, “Your Lord knows best how long you have tarried.” (Q 18:19) The hearer of the story is admonished to avoid becoming embroiled in the detailed speculation, “They will say three, their dog the fourth, and they will say five, and their dog the sixth, trying to stone the invisible, and they will say seven, their dog the eighth. Say, My Lord knows best their number. No one knows but a few, so do not dispute them except in an open dispute and do not seek a formal opinion from them about them” (Q 18:22). [24]
Two more stories in Sûrat al-Kahf serve to remind us of our impending fate, the parable of the two gardens and the story of Dhû-l-Qarnayn’s encounter with the quintessential apocalyptic figures, Gog and Magog. In the parable of the gardens, the wealthier of two landowners asserts that his garden will last forever, that the Hour will never come, and, that if it does, he will be given better than what he has. In a classic hubris-before-havoc narration, his garden is destroyed, leaving him nothing but repentance, and us with the cautionary tale that even, or maybe especially, great wealth is no protection against the coming Hour. (Q 18:32-44)
Dhû-l-Qarnayn is another matter. In the few verses starting with Q. 18:83, we are introduced to a two-horned individual, whom commentators have gone to great pains to identify as Alexander the Great.[25] Through this last identification, a number of commentators see in Dhû-l-Qarnayn the legendary Alexander, as opposed to the historical one, and add stories to the tradition of commentary from the Alexander Romance cycle, one of the most popular bodies of material in the late ancient world. The legendary Alexander is the one who travels the earth in search of knowledge, who meets with strange creatures, vanquishes India, travels to China and Tibet, and goes from the rising of the Sun to its setting. Early Muslim commentators on the Quran claim that this Dhû-l-Qarnayn/Alexander met al-Khidr in his travels, linking that story to the Mûsâ of Surah 18 and his encounter with al-Khidr. Modern scholars can link this story back to the fabled epic of Gilgamesh and thereby include pre-Biblical versions of Noah and the Flood, but ancient readers of the Alexander Romance, as it is called, saw the figure of Alexander as transcending the boundaries of the sacred and the secular and the hidden and the manifest.
With Alexander’s narrative past in mind, it is easy to understand why the thrust of the Quranic discourse is not clarity but creative, provocative ambiguity. Who is Dhû-l-Qarnayn and how is he related to Moses? The stories are juxtaposed, leaving a narrative fissure between them, an invitation for the creative midrashic imagination to speculate about the relationship, focusing the mind on the text and its underlying moral meaning. Just as with the issues of time, we are not given full, linear, historical information. As we contemplate the associations, we are drawn deeper into the text; pulling one thread leads to another. “Say, I will recite a remembrance of him to you,” we are told in the Quran (Q 18:83), and then we are given vignettes, that tantalize, that give us verisimilitude but then dissolve on closer scrutiny, only to lead to more threads to follow. When we get to verse 94, where Dhû-l-Qarnayn is told that “Gog and Magog are spoiling the land,” we are confronted with post-Biblical apocalyptic references that demonstrate that the Quranic reading of the Biblical text is as nuanced and layered as any of the commentaries are of the Quranic text itself. It is as though a chasm opens before us into which we can peer at the myriad layers of texts that support our understanding and keep us from getting to the bottom of the Qur’an’s bottomless text.
The interpretive chasm also extends outward, into other chapters of the Quran. We know that Gog and Magog are eschatological figures from Q 21:95-97:
There is a ban on any community which We have destroyed: that they shall not return until Gog and Magog are let loose, and they hasten out of every mound. And the True Promise draws nigh; then behold them, staring wide (in terror), the eyes of those who disbelieve! (They say): Alas for us! We (lived) in forgetfulness of this. Ah, but we were wrongdoers.
Each narrative passage reinforces the other, so, even though Gog and Magog are mentioned only in two verses of the Quran, those two verses carry with them the interpretive textures of two separate chapters. Another Quranic strategy scatters portions of stories throughout the whole of the Quran, binding it together in one context.
The seeming contradictions of narrative disjuncture promoting midrashic analysis that then binds disparate portions of the Quran together (itself inviting dissolution, reconfiguration and recombination) is part of what Robbins would term the “inner texture,” the texture of the medium of interior communication. We have been looking at the Quranic verses from the vantage of the Quran’s own mode of language and its own narrative conventions. Linked to this is another set of relationships that Robbins would term “intertexture,” the “interactive world of a text. This is the text’s representation of, reference to, and use of phenomena in the “world” outside of the text being interpreted.” For Sûrat al-Kahf, the reference to Gog and Magog “reconfigures” the verse in Sûrat al’Anbîya’ (or vice versa), each adding a new element to our understanding of the other. Taking the Quran as a whole, however, would not allow us to see this as “intertexture” unless we understood the story to be somehow related to an external text, like Pseudocallisthenes. Thus another text is drawn in to the discussion. Is it the right one? The Quranic logic of textual entrapment does not eschew a text that fits, but does not limit itself to only one text at a time. Robbins’ image of the text as tapestry keeps all the threads of a text in harmonious tension, even those that are at cross-purposes with one another. The threads of apocalyptic discourse we are observing connect us to the larger world of East Mediterranean apocalyptic, not as a direct quotation, but under the surface of the uppermost discourse, almost so that we feel the pull to other textual environments without fully realizing it.
Let us return to the angelic figure of Noah and turn to another text that is drawn into this apocalyptic tapestry, the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, an apocalyptic work of nearly as wide an influence among Jews and Christians as the Alexander Romance, and a favorite among the Jews of Arabia in Muhammad’s time. Here we find an interesting story of Noah’s birth reported in the voice of Enoch:[26]
And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness. And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. And he said unto him: ‘ I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels, and I fear that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth. And now, my father, I am here to petition thee and implore thee that thou mayest go to Enoch, our father, and learn from him the truth, for his dwelling-place is amongst the angels.’
And when Methuselah heard the words of his son, he came to me to the ends of the earth; for he had heard that I was there, and he cried aloud, and I heard his voice and I came to him. And said unto him: ‘ Behold, here am I, my son, wherefore hast thou come to me? ‘ And he answered and said: ‘ Because of a great cause of anxiety have I come to thee, and because of a disturbing vision have I approached. And now, my father, hear me: unto Lamech my son there hath been born a son, the like of whom there is none, and his nature is not like man’s nature… Behold, I have come to thee that thou mayest make known to me the truth.’
And I, Enoch, answered and said unto him: ‘The Lord will do a new thing on the earth, and this I have already seen in a vision… and there shall be a great punishment on the earth, and the earth shall be cleansed from all impurity. Yea, there shall come a great destruction over the whole earth, and there shall be a deluge and a great destruction for one year. And this son who has been born unto you shall be left on the earth, and his three children shall be saved with him: when all mankind that are on the earth shall die [he and his sons shall be saved]. And now make known to thy son Lamech that he who has been born is in truth his son, and call his name Noah; for he shall be left to you, and he and his sons shall be saved from the destruction… for I know the mysteries of the holy ones; for He, the Lord, has showed me and informed me, and I have read (them) in the heavenly tablets.[27]
This strange narrative of Noah’s nature and heritage enjoyed wide popularity within the apocalyptic traditions around Enoch. Versions of the material have been found in Aramaic, Ethiopic, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls to name a few.[28] From the point of view of the tradition represented by this text, it would appear easy for others to confuse Noah’s nature with that of an angel. Even his own father is uncertain of his nature and origin. The person that fulfills the three special natures that Noah denies in the Quranic passage is not Noah himself but Noah’s great-grandfather, Enoch. But this is not merely the Enoch of Genesis.[29] By the end of the sixth century, the brief biblical passages had been elaborated into a complex apocalyptic cosmology. The Christian writer, Paul, in his Letter to the Hebrews, asserts that Enoch was taken because of his faith and did not see death (Hebrews 11:5). In the popular books of Enoch, he was taken to heaven so that one pious man would not be destroyed when God abandoned earth. Once translated into heaven, he was stripped of his humanity and transformed into the powerful angel, Metatron, was given all of God’s secrets, and was given the duty of guarding God’s treasures. [30]
But, Enoch was not supposed to remain in heaven forever, for he was appointed “to reveal secrets and to teach judgment and justice.”[31] In the apocalyptic mood before the Flood, the people are represented as expecting divine intervention in the form of at least the chief of all God’s heavenly creatures.[32] As much as Noah’s hearers wanted an angel from Heaven, so did Muhammad’s hearers, and he joins Noah in saying at the end of Sûrat al-Kahf, “I am only a mortal like you.”
Jonathan Z. Smith, in a study of the relationship between Wisdom and Apocalypticism, says that Jewish and Christian apocalypticism cannot be understood from themselves or from the Old Testament alone, but must be seen as peculiar expressions within the entire development of Hellenistic syncretism. I would argue that these statements should include Islamic wisdom and apocalypticism as well. Islamic culture stands as both the inheritor and the interpreter of Hellenistic ideas and modes of social thought. We can expect to be able to trace chains of ideas, represented in textual and social traditions interacting with new social conditions in a manner that resists radical reinterpretation of social conditions in favor of a preference for continuity of understanding. In this regard, the social upheavals of the centuries immediately prior to and during the rise of Islam were interpreted as part of an archaic paradigm that preserved for the actors as much connection with the past as possible.
From this vantage, we can understand J. Z. Smith’s statement that “Apocalypticism is a learned rather than a popular religious phenomenon. It is widely distributed throughout the Mediterranean world and is best understood as part of the inner history of the tradition within which it occurs rather than as a syncretism with foreign influences.” Here I would modify J.Z. Smith’s statement. For this study, we should expect that each culture’s use of literary topoi, such as those found in the Alexander Romance or the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, will be driven by an internal cultural complex and set of habits of social functioning while still sharing elements that are part of the larger sphere of common ideas in which the several cultures operate. Together in the Qur’an, both Dhû-l-Qarnayn and Enoch, having brought stories from the ends of the earth and beyond, now bear witness to the impending End of the earth and the End of time.
It is clear that the conversations about the end of time reach deeper into Mediterranean cultures than only at the learned, scribal level. In the absence of clearly evidenced cross-cultural scribal conventions, the consonance of apocalyptic ideas has to be based on phenomena that are clearly shared and that show evidence of affecting the learned scribal traditions. One well-studied area can serve as an example of popular discourse changing formal and scribal tradition, the area we call magic.
From the beginning of the first millennium C.E. well into the rise of Islam, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims tried to regulate their lives and the universe of harmful forces through the use of magical incantations. Usually these incantations were inscribed on clay bowls that were buried at the doors and corners of houses in order to ward of demons, exorcise evil forces, bring about fertility, and generally improve the lives of those living in the house. The magicians were generally Jewish but below the learned ranks of rabbis and often included women. In this well-studied phenomenon, the names of the client-beneficiaries of this magic indicate that it was an ecumenical practice crossing all the confessional communities. The texts were written in a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew, and in the case of exorcism, the wording resembles Jewish writs of divorce. The incantations call on the name of God, angels, powerful demons, and sometimes Jesus’ name is invoked when the clients are Christian. The world of demons, lilliths, disease and trouble was a cross-confessional topic of conversation, just as were the stories of Enoch, Alexander, and when the world might end. Indeed, Enoch and the angels mentioned in the Enochid texts show up in these magical incantations. The rabbis of the academies and the Talmud tried to minimize the importance of magic either by ignoring it or by saying that it was women’s work, and they said that the end of time were far off, unknowable, and off limits except for the educated elite. But they had to succumb and let in some magic, if only to tame it. The overturning of vows and curses in the Aramaic magical world found a place in the Yom Kippur liturgy as kōl nidrē, “all vows” that are annulled by the congregation’s recitation of those powerful words. In by popular demand, it remains a witness to the force and duration of popular will.
We started our story with the end of the world in the time of Noah and looked briefly at some texts that preserve the anxiety that another end will come. When we come to our end, we see that the Qur’an acknowledges its worry about time’s end. In that anxiety, it evokes the whole of previous Jewish and Christian scripture and the Hellenized body of commentaries on it as an Apocalyptic whole. The anxiety of all those arguments about who is right and when the end will come is dismissed by the Qur’an’s notion that the Day of Judgment will come faster than the blink of an eye.[33] Until the end comes, however, conversations among us all remain one of the most popular varieties of literary expression.
[1] This paper is part of a book-length project that explores the interactions of Jewish, Christian and Muslim apocalyptic writings mainly around the time of the rise of Islam. No part of this paper may be quoted, copied, or reproduced without the express written permission of the author.
[2] Q. 11:27.
[3] Sidney Smith, “Events in Arabia in the 6th Century A.D.,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 3 (1954), pp. 425-468.
[4] Sanhedrin 97a.
[5] It should be noted that Rabbinic Jews at the time of the rise of Islam expected a series of messianic figures rather than just one Messiah.
[6]Book I.1.
[7] See references to this idea in L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 5729/1968, vol. vi, p. 406.
[8] See City of God xxii. 30.5.
[9] See Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Bk. 1, chap 21; and Hippolytus’ Commentary on Daniel.
[10] Jews have used a wide array of calendric calculations for different purposes. During the Seleucid period, for example, calculations were made from the Battle of Gaza (312 B.C.E.), but primarily for contracts and civil events. After the Maccabean revolt, some dated from “the year of the salvation of Israel,” (164 B.C.E.), while still others dated from the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.
[11] .”[11]Eduard Sachau, al-Athar al-Bagiya or the Chronicle of Ancient Nations of al-Biruni, London, 1879, p. 18.
[12] Sanhedrin 99a.
[13] Sanhedrin 97b.
[14] See G. Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 38-48.
[15] A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, Karachi: Oxford U. Press, 1955, p. 18.
[16] According to a number of speculations, there is some connection between the Alexander Romance and the Messiah b. Joseph tradition, for, in the Midrash, on the strength of Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17, a pair of horns, with which he will “strike in all directions,” is the emblem of Messiah b. Joseph (comp. Pirḳe R. El. xix.; Gen. R. lxxv.; Num. R. xiv.; et al.), just as in the apocalyptic identification of Dhû-l-Qarnayn with Alexander in Islamic commentaries on the Qur’an.
[17] He was the eponymous founder of the Jewish group, the Issawiyyah, who held that Abû Îsâ would return from across the river Sambation with his army at the beginning of the messianic age. This group is associated with the well-known Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, an apocalyptic, anti-Umayyad, pro-Shi’ite narrative midrash.
[18] Meeks, W. (1979), “Social Functions of Apocalyptic Language in Pauline Christianity”, Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, D. Hellholm. Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck, p. 688.
[19] Vernon K. Robbins, “Rhetorical Ritual: Apocalyptic Discourse in Mark 13,” in Vision and Persuasion: Rhetorical Dimensions of Apocalyptic Discourse. Edited by Gregory Carey and L. Gregory Bloomquist. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1999: 95-121.
[20] How much the community knew of the details of the biblical stories has been the subject of countless studies, most of which have aimed at proving that Muhammad and the Muslims “borrowed” the material from Jews and/or Christians.
[21] One of the commonplace statements about the Quran is that its chapters are not very coherent compilations of the pieces of revelation that came to Muhammad over his lifetime and were stitched together after his death by a committee headed by his personal secretary, Zaid b. Thâbit. Both Muslims and western scholars, in slightly differing perspectives hold this view. Within the Islamic tradition, the Quranic verses are usually disengaged from one another and recombined with verses from other chapters for most all purposes except liturgical recitation, where the custom is to recite the whole of the Quran in order. In Jonah, the stories of Noah and Moses are thus often understood in combination with the portions of those stories and allusions to them elsewhere in the Quran rather than firmly fixing them within the narrative context of the chapter. Such “synoptic” reading is, of course, also common in other traditions, and is the way in which most Christians understand the life of Jesus. Because the verses in the Quranic chapters can be divided and recombined does not mean that they are inherently disjointed. On the contrary, a close reading of Sûrah Jonah shows remarkable thematic unity.
[22] Menachoth 29b: Rab Judah said in the name of Rab, When Moses ascended on high he found the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in affixing coronets to the letters. Said Moses, ‘Lord of the Universe, Who stays Thy hand?’ He answered, ‘There will arise a man, at the end of many generations, Akiba b. Joseph by name, who will expound upon each tittle heaps and heaps of laws’. ‘Lord of the Universe’, said Moses; ‘permit me to see him’. He replied, ‘Turn thee round’. Moses went and sat down behind eight rows [and listened to the discourses upon the law]. Not being able to follow their arguments he was ill at ease, but when they came to a certain subject and the disciples said to the master ‘Whence do you know it?’ and the latter replied ‘It is a law given unto Moses at Sinai’ he was comforted. Thereupon he returned to the Holy One, blessed be He, and said, ‘Lord of the Universe, Thou hast such a man and Thou givest the Torah by me!’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree’. Then said Moses, ‘Lord of the Universe, Thou hast shown me his Torah, show me his reward’. ‘Turn thee round’, said He; and Moses turned round and saw them weighing out his flesh at the market-stalls. ‘Lord of the Universe’, cried Moses, ‘such Torah, and such a reward!’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree’.
[23] The great Islamic historian and collector of Islamic lore, Muhammad b. Jarîr at-Tabarî, tells the story that Al-Khadir, seeing a bird drinking from the ocean, tells Moses that his wisdom is as insignificant compared to God’s wisdom as the amount of water the bird drinks is to the water of the ocean. At-Tabarî, ed. De Goeje, I 418.
[24] Norman O. Brown, following the lead of Louis Massignon, has called Surah 18 the “Apocalypse of Islam.” “Surah 18,” he says, “ is the apocalypse of Islam: the heart of its message, not displayed on the surface, is the distinction between surface and substance, between Zahir and Bâtin.” In line with the sentiments of Islamic tradition, he cites the anecdote about Ibn Abbas, about whom it was said, “One day while standing on Mt. Arafat he made an allusion to the verse ‘Allah it is who hath created seven heavens, and of the earth the like thereof’ (65:12) and turned to the people saying ‘O men! If I were to comment before you on this verse as I heard it commented on by the Prophet himself you would stone me.’” The filter through which Norman Brown is viewing this chapter of the Quran is the distinction made by the classical commentators between tafsîr, the explanation of the grammatical, lexical and surface meanings of the verses, and ta’wîl, the symbolic and sub-surface inner meaning of the text. In this chapter, as elsewhere in the Quran, many commentators have perceived a set of symbolic meanings that lie behind and support the surface and more literal interpretations of the text. Using the technique of following the structural threads of the chapter we used for Sûrat Yûnus, we see that there is the same underlying compression of Creation-time and Judgment-time bearing on the undefined present. The immediate pressure of this temporal collapse focuses our attention on time’s end. Norman Oliver Brown, “The Apocalypse of Islam,” Social Text 8 (1983-1984), p. 155.
[25] He is variously a god of thunder, al-Mundhir al-Akbar b. Mâ’ as-Samâ’, the grandfather of an-Nu’mân b. al-Mundhir, ‘Alî b. Abû Tâlib, and, most commonly, Al-Iskandar, or Alexander the Great.
[26] Charles, R. H. (1913). The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, with introductions and critical and explanatory notes to the several books. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.
[27] In the full version of this text, the description of the wondrous child is repeated verbatim each time the story is told. From a narrative structural perspective, this kind of repetition is indicative of an oral transmission of this account later redacted into the written version we have cited. It is clear that the story of Enoch existed among popular story tellers as well as in learned texts.
[28] For the development of the Enochid tradition, see Vanderkam, J. C. (1984). Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. Washington, D. C., The Catholic Biblical Association of America.
[29] Genesis 5:21-24: “When Enoch had lived for sixty-five years, he became the father of Methusalah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methusalah three hundred years and had other sons and daughters. All the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God. Then he was no more because God took him.”
[30]We read in 3 Enoch:
- Aleph I made him [Enoch] strong, I took him, I appointed him: (namely) Metatron, my servant, who is one (unique) among all the children of heaven. I made him strong in the generation of the first Adam. But when I beheld the men of the generation of the flood, that they were corrupt, then I went and removed my Shekhina from among them. And I lifted it up on high with the sound of a trumpet and with a shout, as it is written (Ps. 47:6): “God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.”
- “And I took him”: (that is) Enoch, the son of Jared from among them. And I lifted him up with the sound of a trumpet and with a teru’a (shout) to the high heavens, to be my witness together with the Chayyoth by the Merkaba in the world to come.
- I appointed him over all the treasuries and stores that I have in every heaven. And I committed into his hand the keys of every several one.
I made (of) him the prince over all the princes and a minister of the Throne of Glory (and) the Halls of ‘Araboth: to open their doors to me, and of the Throne of Glory, to exalt and arrange it; (and I appointed him over) the Holy Chayyoth to wreathe crowns upon their heads; the majestic Ophanim, to crown them with strength and glory; the honored Kerubim, to clothe them in majesty; over the radiant sparks to make them shine with splendor and brilliance; over the flaming Seraphim, to cover them with highness; the ˙ashmallim of light, to make them radiant with light and to prepare the seat for me every morning as I sit upon the Throne of Glory. And to extol and magnify my glory in the height of my power; (and I have committed unto him) the secrets of above and the secrets of below (heavenly secrets and earthly secrets). Odeberg, H. (1973). 3 Enoch; or, The Hebrew Book of Enoch. New York, Ktav Pub. House. , pp. 164-168.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Can we read in this the apocalyptic expectation at the time of Muhammad that he would be something more than a man and would bring portents from heaven? See Q 29:50 et passim.
[33] Q. 16:77.