Ezequiel 38-39: Protoapocalíptica no exílio?

Abstract

The prophecy of Ezekiel about the war against Gog, in chapters 38-39, reveals an apocalyptic scenario of a world war, with much death and destruction. This narrative filled with supposedly apocalyptic elements stands out from the rest of the book of the prophet. This thesis seeks to carry out an exploratory bibliographic research with the goal of analyzing if there are traces of apocalyptic literature in chapters 38 and 39 of Ezekiel, with the aim of understanding if these chapters constitute proto-apocalyptic texts formulated by the community that sustained the prophet. To demonstrate this we organized the work into three chapters. In the first chapter, we present the concept and the characteristics of apocalyptic. We then proceed to seek to differentiate that from prophecy, presenting its origins and the possibility of the existence of a proto-apocalyptic. In the second chapter we describe a little of the prophecy of Ezekiel, its relation to the exile, the origin and the content of the book, besides its process of formation and structuring. We explain how the textual layers were added so as to promote a literary unity to the book. At the end we explore the themes of the book and their relation to the apocalyptic. In the third and last chapter we analyze the main theories about the traces of apocalyptics in Ezekiel based on the chapters 38 and 39 of the book. For this we briefly present the main commentaries about these chapters and we argue that according to these we judge that this text has apocalyptic characteristics. Our goal is to prove that the existence of this text is the proof of the birth of apocalyptic literature.