If apocalypticism is taken seriously as what it professes to be,11 namely the God-given intuition of things inaccessible by means of sensual perception and human intelligence, though nonetheless real, it would be markedly contrary to its self-understanding if it only presented human reality in a merely encrypted fashion. In the light of its own claims, apocalyptic literature wants to show something which goes beyond. It is the literary expression of a certain historical perspective, namely the reaction