Beschreibung:
This chapter examines Jewish apocalypses from the third and second centuries BCE. Drawing on the book of Daniel and the Book of the Watchers, it looks at the relationship between “other world” and “this world” and how this relationship is conceptualized through various strategies. It shows that apocalypses construe their unique world by referring to different myths from the ancient Near East, considers a mixture of religio-historical allusions in Daniel 7–8, and discusses modern descriptions of apocalypticism and of “apocalypse” as genre that point to different aspects of an “imagined apocalyptic world.” It also analyzes the motif of chaos and creation in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, along with the prominent position of heaven and heavens within the cosmologies of ancient Jewish apocalypses.