The human being, Günther Anders proposes, is a creature distinguished by its lack of a fixed place or definite purpose in the order of creation. Before being “in the world,” the human finds itself added on to it: superfluous, obsolete, excluded.
In the Hebrew Bible, the destruction of Jerusalem and other cities is sometimes projected onto the cosmos. The destruction is taken more literally in apocalyptic literature of the Roman era. Destruction is not the end, but a prelude to a new creation (with one notable exception).