6 - The Apocalypse of the Birds and the First Jewish Revolt

Summary

At this point, I have established that the Apocalypse of the Birds should be separated from the Vision of the Beasts and needs a new compositional home. I have provided evidence that the earliest readers of the Apocalypse of the Birds understood it to be a prophecy of the events of the first century ce and were reading it by the early second century ce. I will now endeavor to bring these two lines of inquiry together and read the Apocalypse of the Birds as a narrative of the events of the first century ce.

Specifically, I will establish a terminus post quem, or earliest possible date, for the Apocalypse of the Birds in 66 ce, arguing the text encapsulates some of the significant events of the early Jewish Revolt. I will be a bit more circumspect about the placement of a terminus ante quem, as well as when, and whether, the compositional window for this work closed. The major contribution of this chapter is the identification and detailing of ways that the text of the Apocalypse of the Birds is entangled with the early Jewish Revolt, though I will stop short of suggesting the entire work was necessarily composed during these tumultuous years.

A note on dating historical apocalyptic, and the problem with a terminus ante quem

To make this argument, I will now correlate the text of the Apocalypse of the Birds with historical events. This effort is built on a key assumption: that the text can be dated by following the trail left by the post facto prophecy narrated in 1 En 89.59–90.19. But what appears to be a commonsense theory requires substantial explanation. In this section, I want to demonstrate why I feel quite confident about the identification of a terminus post quem but less confident about the identification of a terminus ante quem with respect to the Apocalypse of the Birds.

The Apocalypse of the Birds is a historical apocalypse particularly indebted to the literary device of prophecy after the fact, or vaticinium ex eventu. But, it might be objected, historical apocalypses are prone to a little updating. We have ample evidence of the proclivity of later scribes to rescue valued prophecies from irrelevance by changing the received text, in ways both major and minor.