Episode 168: The Study Series 14—Apocalyptic Literature vs Prophecy vs Historical Narratives

We’re going to look at Daniel, Revelation, and Enoch within the context of post-exilic Israel to find out what an apocalypse is, what it isn’t, and how the original audience would have read it. We’ll also cover what the Prophets are and are not, as well as historical narratives and how getting these confused with Apocalyptic writings make the popular books on Revelation not even worth the paper they are printed on.

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Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I usually teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. But not right now, right now I am doing a series about how to not waste your time with bad study practices, bad resources, and just the general confusion that I faced when I started studying the Bible and was trying to figure out what to do and whose books I should read. Bottom line, I read a lot of nonsense and spent a ton of money on it. I am going to give you some basics on how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls, save money, maximize your time and effort, and get the most out of what you are doing.

Master book list can be found here and I will add to it as needed. I will also be adding my own Master book list on Revelation Studies, which can be found at the end of this blog.

I am about to save you a world of grief because this week we’re going to talk about the difference between apocalyptic literature (like we find in Daniel, Enoch, and Revelation), historical narratives like I and II Samuel, and prophecy and what it is and isn’t (this one might shock you). The overwhelming majority of people who casually teach the Bible and some serious teachers have no understanding of these types of genre and will end up teaching the different parts of the Bible as though there are no differences and as if the audiences would have perceived them as the same kinds of literature. And this can be nothing short of disastrous. Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia in the same way that you would read Winston Churchill’s autobiography. Or how about reading the poetry of Robert Frost as an Agatha Christie murder mystery or vice versa? Even worse, reading a Chicken Soup for the Soul book the way you would a science textbook. We just wouldn’t do it because we understand the different categories of literature and we know that not all books are meant to be read in the same way. The Bible is like that as well with so many different sorts of literature between the front and back covers—parables, allegories, polemic, prophecy, personal letters, encomium, biographies, songs, poetry, wisdom sayings, apocalypses, lamentations, narratives, etc. If we misread any one of those, we are not going to really understand it. And people generally know not to read a poetic Psalm like a wisdom saying, or the Song of Solomon like the narrative of Moses receiving the ten commandments. But not everyone knows what to and not to do with parables and polemic texts. The first eleven chapters of Genesis and the twenty-two chapters of Revelation are especially challenging. But I want to spend the next four weeks or so briefly going over the major genre categories in the Bible and how the original audience would have read them.

I want to first start out by talking about prophecy and what it does and doesn’t mean—because we generally don’t use it correctly. Prophecy in Scripture is overwhelmingly devoted to encouragement and rebuke. The prophets are speaking the words of God to the people and although there is often a “if you don’t clean up your act then there will be trouble and I will allow foreign powers to do what they want to you instead of protecting you like I normally do,” there is very little of a predictive sort of thing going on. Yes, every once in a while you get the sort of “you will be in Babylon for seventy years” or “there will be a King named Josiah,” or “the Name of the Branch will be Yehoshua/Joshua,” or “I will send a deliverer named Cyrus” sort of proclamation, most of what we find coming out of the mouths of prophets are dire warnings to get their act together, stop worshiping idols, stop oppressing their neighbors, and generally stop making Yahweh look bad or like the gods of the nations. On the flip side of that is the encouragement and promise that if they do, all will be forgiven. Prophecy was composed of a lot of “if-then” statements that were in no way written in stone. And when we get to the actual predictive sort of prophetic utterance, the meaning is a lot easier to understand in retrospect than it was in advance. This is why we have so many different opinions expressed within the Dead Sea Scrolls and later Talmudic writings about what form the Messiah would take—a warlike Davidic messiah, a priestly Aaronic messiah, or a suffering Joseph sort of messiah. They could see a messiah clearly in the Scripture, but what kind was anything but clear and indeed, the different predictive utterances seemed to point to a number of messiahs and not just one. Of course, we read those and say, “Oh duh, that’s totally Yeshua/Jesus,” but none of the Bible experts could see it at the time. We need to remember this with humility and graciousness when we are trying to figure out prophecy and to remember that the last four thousand years has been little but a comedy of errors in trying to second-guess God—beginning with how Abraham and Sarah decided to help Yahweh make an heir happen to current predictions of the second coming and who the ten horns and antichrist are this time (since last year’s batch didn’t pan out).

Prophets were there to give God’s people their report cards and God rarely had anything to say when they were doing a good job of being His people. God isn’t a micromanager, and He isn’t sending prophets out to say, “You guys are awesome.” Instead it is, “You are that man!” to kings who have slipped into sins like murder and sexual assault. Really, there isn’t much need of telling the people the future when they are screwing up today. We want to know the future because then we don’t really have to just trust God and do our jobs, as Yeshua commanded His disciples in Mark 13—when He told them to ignore all the wars and rumors of wars and to just be about the work of the Kingdom until the end. You see, we don’t need to know the future to know that God wins, that there will be terrible times of persecution, that the world needs to know Him, and that Yeshua will be returning as King of the world. The parables repeatedly tell us that the wise person will be about their master’s business and not standing out in the road watching the horizon.

Let’s talk really quick about narratives and historical narratives. A narrative, in general, is a story and it can be true or false. If we read something that begins with “Once upon a time,” then we know we are reading a narrative and we will hear the story of someone or something. Usually, those four words signal to us that a fairy tale is incoming, right? What about these words from Genesis 11:27-31:

Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren; she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.

This sounds very different from “Once upon a time” or even the vague “In the beginning…” That’s because the storytelling mode changes at the end of Genesis 11 from a polemic narrative, where for eleven chapters God is being compared and contrasted with the Babylonian gods (and they don’t come out looking so great), to a historical narrative which will begin to intersect more and more with other recorded histories as we move deeper and deeper into the story. Abraham’s story is very different from the accounts of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah and Nimrod. The way he interacts with God and with others and with his environment and the culture of the ancient Near East is not what we have seen with other stories up to this point. Abraham feels real in a way that no one before him has, because the narrative has shifted from stories told to explain why certain realities of life were the way they were to the story of the creation of Israel and the Jewish people. This is another “genesis” story, another beginning, because the whole world is about to experience a reverse of the curses of Adam. Adam was exiled and Abraham is given a homeland. Adam’s experience with the land was cursed whereas Abraham is promised a land flowing with milk and honey. Adam’s sin brought misery and Abraham’s obedience brought blessings to all the families of the earth. Adam’s seed was a murderer, shedding innocent blood, and Abraham’s seed is the Messiah, shedding His own blood for the guilty.

And we don’t read Gen 12 through the chronicles of the kings in the same way that we read the prophets—even though the prophets do often include short narrative stories as in Isaiah or longer ones as in Jeremiah. When we read the narrative stories, we are reading ancient Near Eastern history which is entirely different from modern history. Ancient history is about how God or the gods interacted with humanity. There was no separation between religious life and history. History was about God first and foremost and about people second. And their histories were more geared toward speaking truths than about being accurate. Numbers were about communicating concepts and not about accuracy. Forty didn’t always mean forty and thousand didn’t always mean thousand. Believe me, it made perfect sense to them even when it frustrates the heck out of us. The historical narratives gave their perception of how the gods interacting with them in the big events of their lives. They saw nothing apart from that interaction. If they won a battle then it was God’s favor, and if they lost it was because God was angry. Planning and strategy, if they worked, were considered to be inspired.

I will say, before moving on to the apocalyptic genre, that in the narratives you will see other things like the songs of Moses and Miriam, covenant codes, parables and allegories and that sort of thing. There is a lot of crossover depending on what is being communicated and why. We just have to be on the lookout for when the type of writing changes so that we handle everything properly. Or else we will make doctrines of Heaven and Hell out of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man—which a lot of people do. But parables weren’t meant to be used that way—and we will talk about that some other week.

Alright, on the subject of apocalyptic literature such as we find in Daniel, Enoch and Revelation, it is very important that we divide it rightly and not treat it like a narrative or predictive utterance—although we do find a lot of prophecy in there in terms of encouragement and rebuke. If we mistakenly treat Revelation, for example, as a narrative, we will come up with timelines of the future that we are expecting to come to pass. But that wasn’t how this type of literature was supposed to work or how it was read by the original Jewish audiences. And allow me to say right off that I do not consider Enoch Scripture any more than I consider the Left Behind series of books to be Scripture and in a way, they are very similar because they contain various takes on what people were expecting in the eschaton, which is a fancy way of talking about the events surrounding the “end of the world” as well as what was going on behind the “veil” that separates our world from the heavenly realms. Enoch is a collection of fictional accounts written by various authors over the course of a few hundred years. I mean, they weren’t any different than us—they wondered and wrote their thoughts down and they were so wildly popular that they became part of the cultural lingo. And as Paul quoted well known pagan philosophers, these popular apocalypses were also quoted—and for the exact same reason. It’s not much different than when I got put in Facebook jail last week for using the old joke, “If I told you I would have to kill you,” when I couldn’t answer a question someone asked me. Of course, that made it even funnier. That phrase is part of our cultural waters, a commonly held joke that needs no explanation—unless you work for Facebook!

Daniel and Revelation, of course, are not the same as Enoch as they are rightly part of the Biblical canon. And I want to take a few minutes to explain exactly what an apocalypse is, why it was written the way it was, what purpose it served, and what to look for as far as identifying apocalyptic literature as opposed to narratives or more typical prophetic writings. My longer teaching on apocalypses is here.

An apocalypse was written in order to rip back the veil that separates the heavenly realm from our own, for the purpose of showing people living under an oppressive regime what the battle of good vs evil looks like from the point view of Yahweh and His hosts. This is why we don’t see this sort of literature pop up historically or in the canon until the time of the Babylonian exile. Unlike other kinds of Biblical literature, an apocalypse is written in the first person which is something we don’t see earlier in history. In an apocalypse, which is a revelation of the realities of cosmic warfare, the author is given some sort of guided tour of the heavenly realms and shown things meant to encourage and warn God’s people of where they are doing what is right in resisting Empire/the Beast Kingdoms or doing wrong in collaborating with them. With Daniel, the empires in question during the apocalyptic portions are Babylon, the Medes and Persians, the Greeks and presumably the Romans. Those enduring exile both inside and outside of the Holy Land (which was merely a province of the larger Empire) were faced with pagan gods, oppression, bloodshed, and military strength. Those living in places like Babylon and Susa were also firsthand witnesses and recipients of the wealth and comforts of living in an established and prosperous empire. We see a similar situation in Revelation, only the Empire this time is Rome in league with the Second Temple hierarchy. But the oppression of those within the Holy Land and the wealth and comforts of those in places like Laodicea and Rome are very much the same.

Throughout Daniel and the first few chapters of Revelation, severe warnings are given to those who are collaborating with Empire and those who resist are praised and encouraged. Daniel approaches this a bit differently by way of telling stories of those who are rewarded for faithfulness and those who are punished for treachery. In Revelation, there are letters to the seven churches describing the good and the bad in a series of situations. But both of these serve the same function of telling the people who are either oppressed by or compromised by Empire that in the end, God will win and people will be rewarded according to their works and specifically with respect to whom they allied themselves with—the beast kingdoms or the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole point of the peek behind the cosmic veil is to show them that no matter how things look on this side, the reality on the other side is that Empire is doomed, overwhelmed, and fighting a hopeless battle.

Enemy combatants are shown to simply be pawns of Satan and his angels. Their kingdoms are shown as nothing more than vicious beasts tearing one another apart. One rises up only to be devoured by the next, and it repeats throughout history. Only one Kingdom stands firm and undiminished while every other terrifying world empire falls into shame and even obscurity with some forgotten altogether. And the symbolism, far from being obscure or unknown to the author, is very well understood not only to the author but to the audience. I believe it was David DeSilva (first video on this list) who remarked that even a moderately intelligent Roman bureaucrat could have read Revelation and known exactly what they were really saying, and about whom. An apocalypse was subversive literature at its finest—sticking it to the man in such a way that even if the enemy understood that they wouldn’t dare admit it for fear of looking like fools. Sort of like the parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard, the chief priests knew darned well it was about them and condemning them in the worst possible terms, but if they objected then everyone would know it and they would end up looking like fools. Actually, I have had similar things happen to me before and when I am smart, I just ignore it. Calling attention to it would just be owning it as credible.

In an apocalypse, we are treated to a series of heavenly scenes full of angels and demons and powers and principalities. Although terrifying, it is actually meant to inspire both awe and confidence in the plans of Yahweh to defeat the forces of evil that plague mankind. Everything is seen for what it truly is. Kingdoms are beasts. Kings are pawns. Judgment is inevitable and often simply waiting for something like the “iniquity of the Amorites to be complete” (Gen 15:16). Yahweh warns, calls to repentance, and chastens even the worst of humanity before collapsing kingdoms and allowing them to fall prey to the next in line. In this, His mercy is shown to the world. Those who fall are not shown to have wasted their lives but as pillars of the here and not yet Kingdom. There are mysteries too great for us to see or read, but in the end, Yahweh wins through the meekness of a little lamb who has all the empires of the word running scared. Not sure if you have ever noticed that, but despite the Lion of Judah being called for, a small, wounded lamb shows up and strikes terror into the hearts of all his enemies. It’s really hilarious when you read it in that light.

And apocalypses, despite being purposefully terrifying to those who live in comfort and ease as oppressors, are very funny when read by the persecuted. Everything we see in the earthly realm gets turned upside down, and what we see as reality gets exposed an as illusion. And more than anything is the hope for the end of all things evil, when New Jerusalem descends and what was once a garden paradise becomes a city garden paradise where all that was once good is restored and the curses are no more. When Jew and Gentile of every tongue, color, nationality, ethnic group, gender, and whatever worship shoulder to shoulder in true unity and equality. Where every tear is wiped away and we see Yeshua as He is—King of kings and Lord of lords.

But if we read it as a prophetic roadmap of the future, as a narrative instead of an apocalypse, we miss it and what was meant to inspire hope and confidence becomes an obsession and a terror. But we aren’t supposed to fear the contents of an apocalypse as long as we are found to be among the faithful who do not ally themselves with nationalism, empire, and oppression. If we are scared reading it then we are reading it as transgressors. An apocalypse is a reality check for those who are suffering and a chastening rod for those who are causing suffering through robbery, violence, deceit, slavery, murder, and all sorts of immorality. An apocalypse reminds us that there will someday be justice and that we all make the decision in the here and now whether to ally ourselves with Yahweh and His Messiah and the upside down ways of His Kingdom, or with the Beast by taking his mark through allying ourselves with the oppressors. An apocalypse demands that we all answer the question of who we have allied ourselves with. And we have to look very deep and stop guarding our egos. Christian slave masters undoubtedly believed they were allied with the Kingdom but they were violent oppressors living in ease while others paid the price. We have to make sure we aren’t following suit but in different and more palatable ways.

Okay, that’s enough on those three types of Biblical literature. I think that next time I will talk about wisdom literature, poetry, parables, and allegories and how they are beneficial for us when used correctly and damaging when we don’t.