The genre "apocalypse" first appears in Judaism in the Hellenistic period. The early apocalypses are of two types. One type, attested in Daniel, the Animal Apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Weeks, provides an overview of the course of history and may be dubbed the "historical" type. The other, typified by the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch 1–36, describes an otherworldly journey and is primarily a description of places outside the normal range of human experience.

The Earliest Apocalypses

The Book of Daniel (164 BCE) provides the only example of the genre in the Hebrew Bible. The earliest noncanonical apocalypses are found in 1 Enoch. This is a collection of five books fully preserved only in Ethiopic, but four of the five books are attested in Aramaic in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The earliest copies date to the second century BCE...