The Apocalypse of Weeks: All of History in Ten Weeks

In shortThe Apocalypse of Weeks is a short vision in the Epistle of Enoch, in chapters 93 and 91 of 1 Enoch. In it Enoch divides all of history into ten “weeks,” that is, ten periods, from his own day to the last judgment and the new heaven.

People will put up with almost any wait, as long as they are told how much time is left. An hour in line with a sign announcing the waiting time is easier to bear than ten minutes of uncertainty. The author of the Apocalypse of Weeks, who lived more than twenty-two hundred years ago, understood this principle well, and applied it to the whole of history.

The vision is very short, fewer than twenty verses, and it is found in the Epistle of Enoch, the last part of 1 Enoch. Enoch reads to his sons “from the books,” and gives them the history of the world, from his own day to the end of time, divided into ten units that he calls weeks.

Six weeks that have already passed

And Enoch began to recount from the books, and he said: I was born the seventh from Adam, in the first week, while judgment and righteousness still endured. After me, in the second week, great wickedness will arise and deceit will spring up. In it the first end will come. After it has passed, violence will grow, and in it one man will be saved, and he will make a law for the sinners.

1 Enoch 93:3–4

Anyone who knows the Bible can decode the hints without difficulty. The first week is the time of Enoch himself, “the seventh from Adam.” In the second week comes “the first end,” the flood, and one man is saved in it, Noah. At the end of the third week a man is chosen as “the plant of righteous judgment”: Abraham. At the end of the fourth, holy visions are seen and “a covenant for all generations” is given: the revelation at Mount Sinai. At the end of the fifth, “a house for glory and for the kingdom” is built: the Temple of Solomon. And in the sixth week everyone's eyes grow dark, one man ascends to heaven, who is Elijah, and at its end the house is burned and the people are scattered.

A week, in this vision, is not seven days. Each week is a whole era, and the eras are not equal in length. Scholars have tried to calculate the length of a week by generations or by years, and have not reached an agreed result. The author seems to have been more interested in order than in arithmetic. The Book of Jubilees, copies of which were found at Qumran, also divides time into units of seven. For these circles, the number seven was the key to the order of the world.

The seventh week: this is where we stand

After that, in the seventh week, a perverse generation will arise. Its deeds will be many, and all its deeds will be perverse. At its end the chosen and the righteous will be chosen from the eternal plant of righteousness, and they will be given sevenfold teaching about all creation.

1 Enoch 93:9–10

This is the week of the author and his first readers, and it contains a deafening silence. The return from exile is not mentioned, and neither is the Second Temple. In the author's eyes, everything that has happened since the destruction is one long “perverse generation.” Only at the end of the week does something good happen: a group of righteous people is chosen from within the nation, and it receives “sevenfold teaching about all creation.” It is hard not to guess that the author saw himself and his friends in that group.

One image runs through the whole vision. Abraham is chosen as a “plant,” from him grows “the plant of righteousness,” and the righteous of the seventh week are chosen “from the eternal plant of righteousness.” History, in this image, is like a garden: most of what grows in it is weeds, and the gardener knows very well which seedling he is tending.

This is also where the date comes from. The vision contains no hint of the persecution under Antiochus or of the Maccabean revolt, and so most scholars conclude that it was written shortly before them, early in the second century BCE. If so, it is one of the earliest works in which all of history is divided into periods and leads to an end known in advance, slightly earlier even than the visions of the Book of Daniel.

Three weeks that have not yet come

From the eighth week on, the vision speaks of the future, and it does so in the same matter-of-fact tone. In the eighth week a sword is given to the righteous, and they carry out judgment on the wicked. At its end “a house for the great King” is built. In the ninth week judgment is revealed to the whole world, and all humankind “will stream toward the way of uprightness.” And then:

After that, in the tenth week, in its seventh part, there will be an everlasting judgment on the great Watchers, who came out from among the angels, and on the heavens, for ever. Then the upper heavens will pass and vanish, new heavens will appear, and all the host of heaven will shine seven times brighter, for ever. After that will come many weeks beyond number, for ever, in goodness and righteousness, and from then on sin will no longer be remembered, for ever.

1 Enoch 91:15–17

The order is worth noticing. First the affairs of one people are set right, then those of all humanity, and finally those of heaven itself. Even the Watchers, whose sin opened the book, receive their final judgment here. And the earth is not destroyed. This is an end with no catastrophe in it: a list of repairs, one after another.

Weeks out of order

Anyone who looks for the vision in the book will run into a glitch. The first seven weeks are in chapter 93, while the last three appear before them, in chapter 91. That is how the text came down in the Ge'ez manuscripts.

Scholars had long suspected that the pages got shuffled at some stage of copying, and the suspicion was confirmed in Cave 4 at Qumran. In an Aramaic fragment of the Epistle of Enoch found there, the eighth week comes right after the seventh, in order. The scroll, more than fifteen hundred years older than the Ethiopian manuscripts, preserved what the copyists had lost.

Why divide history into weeks

The vision uses a simple and effective device. The speaker is Enoch, who lived in the first week, so everything he tells is supposedly prophecy. The reader, who lives in the seventh week, checks the first six weeks and finds that everything came true exactly. Why should he not believe the last three as well?

But the real power of the vision lies in the timetable itself. We still divide the past into periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern age. And almost always, whoever draws the division places himself close to the turning point. Very few people have ever bothered to write a work explaining that we are right in the middle, and that nothing special is about to happen.

The author of the Apocalypse of Weeks told his readers that seven parts out of ten were already behind them, and that the worst was ending right now. With news like that, a great deal can be endured.

And after the tenth week he does something lovely. The man who counted every era so carefully stops counting: “After that will come many weeks beyond number.” A timetable is for those who are waiting. Those who have arrived have no need to look at the clock.