ptic.

I. APOCALYPTIC--ITS ORIGIN AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

i. _Sources of Apocalyptic._--The origin of Apocalyptic is to be sought
in (a) unfulfilled prophecy and in (b) traditional elements drawn from
various sources.

(a) The origin of Apocalyptic is to be sought in _unfulfilled prophecy_.
That certain prophecies relating to the coming kingdom of God had
clearly not been fulfilled was a matter of religious difficulty to the
returned exiles from Babylon. The judgments predicted by the pre-exilic
prophets had indeed been executed to the letter, but where were the
promised glories of the renewed kingdom and Israel's unquestioned
sovereignty over the nations of the earth? One such unfulfilled prophecy
Ezekiel takes up and reinterprets in such a way as to show that its
fulfilment is still to come. The prophets Jeremiah (iv.-vi.) and
Zephaniah had foretold the invasion of Judah by a mighty people from the
north. But as this northern foe had failed to appear Ezekiel re-edited
this prophecy in a new form as a final assault of Gog and his hosts on
Jerusalem, and thus established a permanent dogma in Jewish apocalyptic,
which in due course passed over into Christian.

But the non-fulfilment of prophecies relating to this or that individual
event or people served to popularize the methods of apocalyptic in a
very slight degree in comparison with the non-fulfilment of the greatest
of all prophecies--the advent of the Messianic kingdom. Thus, though
Jeremiah had promised that after seventy years (xxv. 11., xxix. 10)
Israel should be restored to their own land (xxiv. 5, 6), and then enjoy
the blessings of the Messianic kingdom under the Messianic king (xxiii.
5, 6), this period passed by and things remained as of old. Haggai and
Zechariah explained the delay by the failure of Judah to rebuild the
temple, and so generation after generation the hope of the kingdom
persisted, sustained most probably by ever-fresh reinterpretations of
ancient prophecy, till in the first half of the 2nd century the delay is
explained in the Books of Daniel and Enoch as due not to man's
shortcomings but to the counsels of God. The 70 years of Jeremiah are
interpreted by the angel in Daniel (ix. 25-27) as 70 weeks of years, of
which 69-1/2 have already expired, while the writer of Enoch (lxxxv.-xc.)
interprets the 70 years of Jeremiah as the 70 successive reigns of the
70 angelic patrons of the nations, which are to come to a close in his
own ge