As a genre, the historical apocalypses that emerged in Seleucid Judea, Babylonia and Iran staged a battle between king and God over the control of time and the architecture of history, exposing the claims of empire as illusory, and relocating the fate of nations to heaven.
For the Seleucid empire, as we have seen, time was transcendent and disinterested. The future was monotonised and disenchanted. Temporal texture was depersonalised. There was no possibility of restart. Worst of all, there was an endlessness that, by implication, would overwhelm eternity. Seleucid time was a mere passing, and so a loss. Tick, tick, tick, tick…
The historical apocalypses, by contrast, presented an image of time in which everything, including the future, was already determined. Where all that happened to you, happened for you. History was shaped, directed and reaching toward a conclusion. All events, however dislocated, were part of a single story, a total history. Above all, these historical apocalypses called forth the end of days – in this example, the stone that destroys Earthly empire. Not only did this fantasise the destruction of the Seleucid empire; it also brought the new experience of time to a close.
The end-times achieved a kind of temporal integration, like the backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything. They converted the experience of one-thing-after-another into a narrative plot. No longer was time passing away, empty and irredeemable, tick-tick-tick; it now had meaning and an ending, tick-tock.
