We should note first that the Axial interval only shows us the incidents of the chronicle of Israel/Judah, and does not show directly, what came later, the birth, for example, of Christianity. In fact, the same can be said of Judaism, and, indeed, Islam. 

As we zoom out to look at this correlation of religious emergence in the Axial period we are confronted with a problem, not of divine revelation, but of the operation of a mysterious system operating on two levels. We have the larger system or higher level which shows the 'seed period' of the Axial Age, whose boundaries are fixed, roughly, at the beginning and the end, and the intermediate or successor periods that express the realization of that seed period. Keeping these two things in mind is essential to prevent confusion. In fact the early Christians and Jews sensed this distinction, however inchoately, in their attempts to consider the Axial period as an 'age of revelation', i.e. a special period in history, one that stood out from the background of world history as a whole. But this concept of an 'age of revelation' simply won't work since we can now see that the whole phenomenon of the emergence of monotheism is part of a larger process of cultural transformation, one that takes many forms, among them the emergence of Buddhism in India, not even a theistic religion. 

Further evidence thus of a 'system' at work (we leave the term descriptively neutral) lies in the abstract character of the elusive Axial interval, whose many manifestations in parallel are dwarfed by the larger dynamic of a process that is somehow beyond theism or non-theism and able to be a triggering process not only for religious but many complex cultural innovations. 

As we develop the idea of an 'eonic model' we will see that this two-level aspect to the needed interpretation of the Axial interval will correspond to the distinction of 'macro' and 'micro' in discussions of evolution. 

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