No, there is no "end of the world" in Judaism or Christianity
Clearing up some basic misunderstandings of doomsday
Imagine, hypothetical reader, that you interpreted being forgiven by someone—truly forgiven—as the end of your relationship with them.
That would be ludicrous, right?
Why, then, do so many people seem to think the Jewish and Christian ideas of Redemption are about the world ending?
This (typically implicit) distortion of both faiths’ doctrines is confusingly present among the faithful and outsiders alike.
To start, I want to look at two words whose meanings have been distorted in English: apocalypse and doomsday.
Apocalypse
I occasionally see people use the thrilling (?) fact that “apocalypse” means “revelation” as a neat rhetorical trick to blow people’s minds. This trick confuses me, because that’s… just what the word has tended to mean throughout its history.
When you read the title of the Christian Bible’s final book—Revelation—it should be obvious that that’s what “apocalypse” means, given Revelation is a straightforward translation of the Greek word apokalupsis, whence apocalypse. Hence the book still often being called the Apocalypse of John, because Revelation and Apocalypse are the same thing.
Apocalyptic thought has almost always been normal in Judaism. The longest of the three parts of the Hebrew Bible, the Nevi’im (Prophets), is all about revelations delivered to—you guessed it!—Prophets.
Now, most of these prophetic books don’t fit the actual genre termed apocalyptic by scholars. The end of the Book of Daniel does fit the bill though, in the even cooler part after the fun court tales. I’ve discussed the prophetic part of this late-written book before, from a rhetorical perspective.
But also, see 4 Ezra, or the Similitudes of Enoch, or the million Christian and Jewish apocalypses written after the Second Temple’s destruction… check out John J. Collins’s The Apocalyptic Imagination for a standard introduction, and John C. Reeves’s Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic for a good introduction to later Jewish apocalypses and an anthology that includes some sources that one would be excused for not knowing.
But like, Daniel and Revelation? Those are literally biblical. The most canonical a book can be. Jesus even gives his own very famous apocalyptic sermon at one point, known often as the Olivet prophecy. See below for more on that.
None of these works has to do with the end times in colloquial meaning, because despite even scriptural usage of phrases like “end times,” or “end of days,” no such concept exists in either Jewish or Christian doctrine.
Apocalypses are, for the most part, concerned with redemption and the restoration of a perfect world.
Utopia is hardly the same as annihilation or dystopia. Apocalyptic scriptures about the “end of days” are about the total transformation of brokenness into perfection, not the agonising end of the universe.
Doomsday
One of the most famous books in mediaeval English literature (?) is the Domesday Book, often respelled for modern readership as the Doomsday Book.
Doomsday is indeed a reference to the Day of Judgement, Yom haDin in the usual Hebrew terminology. Wow, how world-ending!
Except the term Doomsday was fitting for the book because it’s a legal book, not because of anything to do with the much-touted “end of the world” or a comic book supervillain.
Doom just meant law. The Day of Judgement, shockingly, is just a day of judgement.
Doomsday is the day of reckoning.
I’m not saying that people are misusing the term “doomsday” in contemporary English. I’m too much of an ordinary language fan to think that the mainstream usage of a term is incorrect because of its original-ish usage centuries ago. Same goes for “apocalypse.”
My point is that our language has calcified misunderstandings of Redemption in ways that make it hard to accurately discuss Jewish and Christian ideas of the utopian future. Yes, Jews and Christians have almost always believed that there’ll be a Doomsday. We believe in apocalypses, because we have tended to believe that we can know the future through revelation.
Now that I’ve discussed two little words, onward to biblical basics.
“The world” does not “end” for the righteous
There are plenty of threatening and world-ending types of verses in the Hebrew Bible directed toward evil people. Look at Zechariah 14:13 regarding the fates of the enemies of Jewry:
As for those peoples that warred against Jerusalem, G-D will smite them with this plague: Their flesh shall rot away while they stand on their feet; their eyes shall rot away in their sockets; and their tongues shall rot away in their mouths.
We know it’s always been a mainstream Jewish idea that the souls of the unrighteous are annihilated. There is, in the common phrase, “no place for them in Olam haBa [the World to Come].” See, for instance, one of the best-known works in all of Rabbinite Judaism, the Rambam’s tractate in Mishneh Torah on Teshuva (Repentance):
The reward of the righteous is that they will merit this pleasure and take part in this good. The retribution of the wicked is that they will not merit this life. Rather, they will be cut off and die.
The Rambam is making the normal point that the righteous merit and receive eternal bliss. This is because the alleged end of the world is the end of wickedness, not the end for everyone.
The Rambam’s normative 13 principles of the faith end with two principles regarding belief in the coming of the Messiah (Mashiach) and in the resurrection of the dead. So famous are these principles that they’re a widespread part of liturgy.
I’ve written concerning other redemptive prophecies elsewhere.
That’s a basic summary of the mainstream Jewish idea of Redemption. Mashiach (whether as the sole messiah or the second) comes as foretold and even the dead rise to live in eternal bliss with the Shekhinah, the Presence of G-d.
Reform Jews reject most or all of these doctrines, but they should probably still know what they’re rejecting so they can better appreciate their own faith.
Christianity agrees, because it started as Judaism! What a shock.
Christianity has the same general idea of doomsday as Judaism. The world gets remade in perfection as a utopia for the righteous, who’ve merited eternal life.
Jesus’s apocalypse
I mentioned the Olivet prophecy above: that’s one of Jesus’s most famous speeches in the Christian gospels. It’s a synoptic thing, so it’s in each of those three gospels. Let’s look at the sermon briefly. To quote from the version in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 21, verse 28:
And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
Yes, I’m quoting the KJV. I’m not a Christian scholar, I’m a foetal literary scholar. So, yeah, the “birth pangs of the messiah” feature in the preceding verses, but then the whole point is Geulah, or Redemption. Stopping at the boo-hoo this will suck part is straight up missing the much-touted Gospel Message itself.
In fact, if the message about the future sucked, the whole conceptual framework wouldn’t be called the “Good News,” now would it? And nobody would convert to the religion, because there would be no reason to.
21:36 is also very relevant:
Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.
It is pretty remarkable that people’s idea of the Christian “end times” doesn’t tend to focus on the actual end of the story.
John’s apocalypse
Let’s also take a brief look at the Revelation/Apocalypse of John, much-discussed as a dystopian tale about punishment and so on. Revelation 22:5:
And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 22:12-14:
And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
An eternal city of bliss isn’t an annihilated void. Quite the opposite.
Inferno, Paradiso, and religious illiteracy
It’s a well-known feature of literary reception that readers have tended to find Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, more compelling than the Paradiso, the cycle’s heavenly finale. The Inferno is flashier and more sadistically appealing. Reading about eternal bliss is pretty boring for a lot of readers, likely because it’s harder to believe in perpetual happiness than perpetual pain. The same seems to have happened to the most famous and widely available books in human history (most of which are pretty short).
My call to action for the end of this screed is to read religious texts before reaching distorted (even opposite!) ideas of what they say.