Create/Destroy

The history of the Book of Revelation begins with a longing for a different world.  The Israelites are believed to have composed their stories of end times – the Books of Daniel, Enoch, the Animal Apocalypse and other, less sanctified texts – during the exile from their Holy Land to Mesopotamia in what is known to us as the Babylonian Captivity.  The stories are of divine vengeance upon their pagan oppressors, yes, but at the same time they assert the primacy of God the Father, Elohim, through his punishment of his ‘chosen people’ who have broken the holy covenant.  This was also the time, scholars generally agree, that the myth of Creation as told in Genesis was crystallized, once again asserting God’s transcendence of nature, and Man’s creation by God, superceding the animist myths (such as the Assyrian Enuma Elish) of their captors.  Ideas of the beginning and the end, it seems, come together.
But as history has marched on and the “end” as envisioned by John and countless others has not arrived, it becomes more and more clear that the Apocalyptic thinking which has played such an important role in our political, social, and spiritual history is not the product of divine revelation but rather of a peculiar sort of psychological dissonance, as Kirsch illustrates with numerous examples from both contemporary and ancient history.  Each of us – humans, societies, and even planets and suns – one day must die.  We reflexively claim awareness of this, but the codified Western ways of living with and understanding this great and unique knowledge (it seems, at least at a glance, that mankind is Earth’s only species possessed of it) has led to a culture of mass irrationality, and spawned brutal and sad chapters of our history.  If the Earth is about to end, why not exploit it for all that its worth?  Perhaps, as we today can clearly see the consequences of our forbearers’ malfeasance and fear of the Doomsday, we can at long last come to recognize and be grateful that it will never arrive they way it has been prophesized.  The end of the story is also its beginning; it is our task to write the next.