The modern Arabic novel developed during a century of regional political disasters that impelled Arab authors to write novels with apocalyptic themes. My paper examines the apocalyptic elements that the Saudi writer ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif (1933-2004) and the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Kuni (b. 1948) employ in their novels Mudun al-Milh: al-Tih (Cities of Salt, 1984) and Nazif al-Hajar (The Bleeding of the Stone, 1990). These novels depict the cataclysmic changes that the oil boom brought to traditional Arab societies; the fall of old social and natural orders and the rise of new ones; and messianic figures sacrificed as the new orders arise. Arab novelists such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Najib Mahfuz used Christlike figures to convey self-sacrifice in an urban revolutionary context. I argue that Munif and Kuni repurposed the Tammuzis’ death-and-rebirth figure for the desert to accord with the oil boom’s transformation of traditional societies. Munif’s Cities of Salt tells of the catastrophic effect that the discovery of oil has on the people of Wadi al-‘Uyun, a village in an unnamed Arab country on the Persian Gulf. Four of the novel’s many characters announce the imminent end of the world. The character Mufaddi al-Jaddan, whose name means “redeemer,” is a local folk healer murdered by the new authorities who reappears to his followers in dreams and leads them in a final battle against the Americans. Kuni’s The Bleeding of the Stone tells of Asuf, a Bedouin boy whose family lives in the southern Libyan desert and has a sacred pact with the waddan, an endangered mountain sheep native to North Africa. Due to overhunting, the gazelle of the plains inhabits the waddans’ mountains, and locals interpret this reversal of the natural order as a sign of the apocalypse. The one waddan remaining is revealed to be the anthropomorphic Asuf, crucified and then ritually beheaded at the end of the novel. Mufaddi and Asuf must be understood in light of Arab writers’ use of Christian conceptions of Jesus. While Islamic eschatology understands Jesus as a conqueror whose return signifies the closeness of the Hour, Munif and Kuni employ a distinctly Christian Jesus: a savior and redeemer who “buys back” the community held captive by corrupt, foreign hands with his sacrifice. Mufaddi and Asuf must die so that their communities can be reborn. Munif and Kuni have thus repurposed the Tammuzis’ redeemer figure for the desert.