The Apocalypse: A Brief History [Hardcover]

This accessible and enlightening history provides insights into the fascinating genre of apocalyptic literature, showing how the apocalypse encompasses far more than popular views of the last judgment and violent end of the world might suggest.

• An accessible and enlightening history of the apocalypses --ancient Jewish and Christian works -- providing fresh insights into the fascinating genre of literature
• Shows how the apocalypses were concerned not only with popular views of the last judgment and violent end of the world, but with reward and punishment after death, the heavenly temple, and the revelation of astronomical phenomena and other secrets of nature
• Traces the tradition of apocalyptic writing through the Middle Ages, through to the modern era, when social movements still prophesise the worlds imminent demise

Acknowledgments

Chronology

1. Revelation in the Age of the Torah

2. The Book of the Watchers ? and Ascent to Heaven

3. The Book of Daniel and the Kingdom of the Holy Ones

4. The Heavenly Messiah

5. The Heavenly Temple, the Fate of Souls after Death, and Cosmology

6. Tours of Paradise and Hell and the Hekhalot Texts

7. Eschatology in the Byzantine Empire

8. Apocalyptic Movements in the Modern Era

Further Reading

Index

This is certainly a valuable addition.? We look forward to those which are yet to come. (Theological Book Review, 2010)

Martha Himmelfarb is the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her work has focused on Judaism of the Second Temple period and apocalyptic literature in particular. She is the author of Tours of Hell: An Apocalypl£%