היחס אל אירועי העבר במקרא ובאפוקליפטיקה

Old Testament preoccupation with the past is a characteristic of ancient Israel's thought, unparalleled in its time and place. Contemplating its history Israel sees itself as a people established by a series of sovereign Divine Acts (the Call to Abraham, the Exodus, Lawgiving), but thereafter acting on its own in a world of geopolitical realities. The Old Testament's view of history is thus deterministic when dealing with the series of Divine Acts by which Israel was constituted, but pragmatic and insisting on Free Will when dealing with later events. Apocalyptic literature has inherited the basic biblical preoccupation with the past, and reinterpreted its results. It discerns in the sequence of events the gradual realization of a preordained Divine Plan, and retells biblical history to show this. The biblical material is either presented at some length or reduced to a brief scheme. The period between the end of biblical history and the beginning of the End is either greatly foreshortened (as in the Apocalypse of Weeks) or dealt with at length (as in the Sheep Apocalypse). These and other features are discussed in the present article by analysing in a series of comments the Assumptio Moisis, The Weeks Apocalypse and the Sheep Apocalypse in Enoch, and the Vision of the Twelve Waters in Syriac Baruch. Thus, while the main biblical characteristic of contemplating the past remains, it leads to a thoroughly different understanding of it: apocalyptic literature is largely deterministic; it also tells us about the past only to base its predictions about the future. By contrast, Old Testament narrative is not concerned about the future at all (leaving it to the prophets) but keeps its eye on the past, thus producing genuine history.