Armageddon is Coming!

Many believe that Armageddon’s etymological origin begins in Megiddo, which lies in Israel’s Jezreel Valley. The ancient city, the site of several major battles, stood guard over a narrow pass along a strategic trade route connecting Egypt and Assyria.

One story has it that the word Armageddon found its way into an early Greek translation of the New Testament: The translator dropped the aspirant “H” of Har Megiddo (Mount Megiddo), giving rise to a term whose usage has taken on layers of new meaning throughout history. Looming large in modern popular culture, it’s used to describe everything from asteroids destroying the earth to the 9/11 attacks and the ongoing financial crisis.

How did Megiddo, now a highway junction with a bus terminal near an archeological site and a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors, become so immortalized? We have the last book of the New Testament to thank: Revelation 16:16 identifies Armageddon as the location of the final battle between the forces of good (the messiah) and evil (the anti-messiah) at the end of time.

Early Christians were deeply influenced by Jewish thinking on the subject. References to a final battle between good and evil appear in the Books of Daniel and Ezekiel, which were written during the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon, following the Siege of Jerusalem in 597 B.C.E. This battle may have crept into Judaism through Zoroastrianism, the Persian religion that spoke of dualism—the balance of good and evil. “One of the great challenges Judaism faced,” says Ian Werrett, an assistant professor of religious studies at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, WA, “was how to reconcile evil [in monotheism]. If you had an evil god and a good god, it’s easier.”

During the first century B.C.E., the battle reappeared, this time in one of the early Dead Sea Scrolls. The War Scroll depicts a final, 40-year struggle between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness.” This fundamental dilemma consumed Jewish thinkers at this time for good reason. “The Jews had no political autonomy and large numbers of people were being crucified for resisting the Roman authorities,” says Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, the founder of the Multi-Faith Alliance of Tucson, AZ, who has studied the apocalypse. “Justice had to be reasserted somehow.”

Early Christians were drawn to an end-time battle for the same reason. “Most of the apocalyptic texts [in both Judaism and early Christianity] were written by minorities who saw eventual reckoning from temporal powers who oppressed them,” explains Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, who earned a master’s at Harvard Divinity School.

As Christianity spread, Armageddon took root as a central belief. But while final battle fervor has existed at different points in Jewish history, it didn’t become a major part of Jewish thinking. One possible explanation for this, says Steven P. Weitzman, a professor of Jewish history and culture at Stanford University, is the bitter legacy of the second century Bar Kochba revolt. The followers of Bar Kochba—who was seen as a messianic figure who could restore Israel—were tortured and executed by the Romans. “Christianity went on to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and was in a position to act on some of its apocalyptic impulses,” Weitzman says. “Jews suffered the catastrophe of the Bar Kochba revolt and their situation of powerlessness led many apocalyptic traditions to go underground or to be reinterpreted in mystical ways.”

Islam proved to be more fertile ground for the concept of Armageddon. While Islam is theologically more similar to Judaism, “with regard to end-times it’s much closer to Christianity,” says Reza Aslan, religious scholar and author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. Indeed, one of Islam’s six articles of faith calls for belief in judgment day and resurrection.

Armageddon has a sister word, apocalypse, which is often mistakenly used as a synonym. Armageddon refers to the battle that takes place at the end of time, while apocalypse refers to the moment of revelation that is said to occur at the end-time. Just as there are commonalities about end-time beliefs among the Abrahamic faiths, there are shared ideas about what will come next. In spite of disagreements on the identity of the messiah, there is a common belief that he will win the battle and call forth the afterlife.

Today many religious people continue to believe in Armageddon, although ideas about the end-time vary widely, even within faiths and denominations. Protestant beliefs range from a metaphorical understanding to predictions about events including “the tribulation” and “the rapture,” after which eternity begins. While these beliefs may bring comfort to some, Aslan warns that they can also be used to minimize personal, social and political responsibility. There are those, says Aslan, who would see themselves as “actors in a script that was written by God before time began” in which “human morality plays no role.”

Others, of course, mine the notion of Armageddon for humor. As the late Charles Schulz, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip, wrote: “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”—Barbara Altman