Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Apocalypse Then
By Harold Bloom
The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Vol. I: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments
edited by James H. Charlesworth
Doubleday, 995 pp., $35.00
The Jews returned from Babylon in the year 539 before the Common Era, or rather they began to do so then, since many remained in Babylon, and those who came back to Jerusalem and Judea did not arrive all at once. But they flourished, their numbers grew, and they were not much disturbed at first by the Hellenistic kingdoms that were established all around them after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Their upper classes were Hellenized, yet for more than a century most of them held fast to their traditions. From 200 BCE on, they were ruled by a Hellenized Syria, which sought total control over them. In 175 BCE, Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, declaring that he was the manifestation of Zeus, set up an altar to Zeus in the Temple at Jerusalem. Confronted by this 'abomination that desolates' (as it is called in the Book of Daniel), the Jews inevitably rebelled.
Review, 6214 words
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