ABSTRACT
For most of the seventh century, Byzantine subjects found themselves in difficult times. Both Jews and Christians found themselves under the control of their adversaries in such a way that challenged their ideological standing as God’s chosen people. This chapter argues that to cope with these circumstances, Jewish and Christian authors, exemplified here by George of Pisidia, the Jewish Sefer Zerubbabel, and the Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, used apocalyptic discourse to create the hope of a future utopian deliverance by rhetorically rebuilding the landscape destroyed by their adversaries in and around Jerusalem through a cycle of dystopia, deliverance, and restoration. In doing so, they appealed to and transformed the memory of the biblical and classical past to place themselves into a larger narrative of divine deliverance.
