Sorry, Wil. I wouldn't pin it on the "Abrahamic" (you mean Jewish, right?) religious traditions. As noted in this interview, some ideas about a future cathartic event appear to have come from Zoroastrianism.

I think Jewish ideas about Armageddon can be traced to the death of King Josiah of Jerusalem in a battle with Pharaoh Necho II in 609 BC on a plain near the ancient tell of Har Megiddo. Josiah, who came to power as a young child under the influence of powerful priiests, the heir to a long legacy of corrupt forebears, was killed as a young ruler at the peak of his power (sort of like an ancient Jewish JFK). Josiah had been celebrated as a powerful and influential leader--despite his age (sort of like Obama)--who rectified past wrongs, overseeing the extirpation of idolatry and other non-Jewish practices, supervising public readings of an ancient "scroll of law" (thought to be the Book of Deuteronomy) that had been "discovered" during a restoration of the Temple, and initiating the first nation-wide celebration of Passover. When he was cut down at the height of his popularity, his death sent a huge shock wave through the entire nation of Israel.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megiddo_(place)

Josiah's death signaled the beginning of the end for Jerusalem under the First Temple. Within a generation after his death (in 586 BC), the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple (which must have been, for the Israelites, a metaphysical "end of the world"), and deported the nobility, priests, upper classes, and intelligensia to Babylon.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_exile

The destruction of the Temple and the massive deportation to Babylon resulted in a period of intense soul-searching and introspection, especially since this collapse of Jewish civilization occurred so soon after its peak (a situation not so different from that of the Maya, although for the Jews the collapse was even more rapid and dramatic). Prophets like Isaiah (actually a conflation of several individuals) sought to explain the destruction of the Temple not just as a conquest by the more powerful and expansionistic Babylonians, but as a metaphysical crisis precipitated by the moral failings of the people of Israel. A historical defeat became a metaphysical punishment.

It seems likely that--as with JFK and Elvis--there were rumors that the popular King Josiah had not really died but was actually alive and would return to save the Jews. When time passed and this didn't happen, his story morphed into one of a metaphysical return of the ancient king and a post-Babylon restoration of the royal lineage of David, complete with references to Armageddon (i.e. "Har Megiddo," the place of his defeat). It may also have been in Babylon that Jewish authors picked up bits of the Epic of Gilgamesh--the story of a catastrophic flood--to weave into an official story (in Genesis) of God's first punishment of the world for bad behavior.

It's probably not an accident that the Hebrew name "Jesus" is similar (with a few sound changes) to the name of "Josiah." There may even have been a backward projection of an invented sacred mythology of the conquest of Canaan led by Joshua (note the similarity--especially in Hebrew writing--to "Josiah," and "Jesus") after the Exodus as a national legend that reconstructed events of the past (which almost certainly had not unfolded as described) to inspire hopes for the future.

Anyway, the destruction of the First Temple *was* a kind of cathartic event, after which Judaism was radically transformed into a royalty-free, priest-led religion of the Second Temple. It was transformed yet again after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, a historical event that once again "ended the world" and propelled yet another mythology--the one that resulted in Christianity and the metaphysical deification of the "King of Kings" in the story of Jesus.

Anyway, these are some of my own theological musings. I think a reasoned perspective on Jewish and Christian mythologies, as on the myths about the Maya calendar and 2012, can help us to understand a bit of what's really going on in the construction of "truth" and "reality."