I’ve been reading the Face of Old Testament Studies, which contains articles about the history and current state of scholarship in the Hebrew Bible. Today, I read John Oswalt’s article on “Recent Studies in Old Testament Apocalyptic.” I can’t say that the contents of the article are imprinted on my mind, but I do recall that it addressed such issues as the definition of apocalyptic, as well as the question of whether or not it descended from prophecy.
Both are difficult issues. Apocalyptic is often defined as the belief that God will end history and set into motion something completely new. But the problem with this definition is that even texts labelled “apocalyptic” by scholars don’t match this consistently, for they may present God intervening in history and redeeming his creation, as opposed to throwing it into the garbage. And texts labelled “prophetic,” such as Second Isaiah, contain a scenario in which God brings about something that’s dramatically new. So can we fit Israel’s literature under neat, mutually exclusive categories of “prophecy” and “apocalyptic”? Oswalt argues that apocalyptic did not replace prophecy, per se, but it complemented it, as both asserted that God would defeat evil and bring forth good.
Oswalt referred to critiques of Paul Hanson’s views regarding apocalyptic. For Hanson, apocalyptic emerged in Israel’s post-exilic period, among a group of visionaries who opposed the priesthood’s attempt to rebuild the temple. Hanson sees such a visionary view in Isaiah 66:1, which ridicules the idea that Israel can build a house for God to inhabit. But the visionaries lost, and their apocalyptic ideology had to wait until the second century B.C.E. to experience a revival, in respose to the evils of Antiochus Epiphanes. According to Oswalt, Hanson’s thesis was developed in the 1960′s, a time when anti-establishment ideologues challenged the status quo, and so there’s a chance that Hanson’s historical context shaped his thesis regarding apocalyptic.