Apocalyptic Literature

Apocalyptic literature is a genre originating in Judaism in the centuries following the Babylonian exile of 597 to 587 BC but persisting into Christianity and Islam, in which a supernatural being reveals cosmic mysteries or the past to a human intermediary through dreams, visions or heavenly journeys, typically using symbolic imagery drawn from the Jewish Bible, surveys of history and cosmology, the division of time into periods, esoteric numerology and claims of ecstatic inspiration. Almost all apocalyptic works are written under a pseudonym claiming as author a venerated hero from earlier centuries, as with the Book of Daniel, composed in the second century BC but attributed to the legendary Daniel of the sixth century BC. The genre is closely related to but distinct from eschatology, the study of the end of the present age, and while an apocalypse often contains eschatological material, this is not required; scholars have identified examples ranging from the mid-second century BC to the second century CE across Persian, Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian literature, with the clearest case in the Jewish Bible found in chapters seven through twelve of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation standing as the only apocalypse in the New Testament.