Full of biblical references
One key to understanding the book of Revelation is to interpret it through the Bible itself, since the book is saturated with references to the rest of Scripture. But is that really true, and would the original readers even have picked up on it?
Compressed references
As we’ll see throughout this study, a great deal of biblical material lies behind Revelation’s text, and it’s rarely simply quoted. More often it’s combined, reversed, or set into an entirely new context.
That raises a fair question: could the early readers actually comprehend information packed that densely?
The early readers
The early readers were, in fact, well equipped to grasp it, for several reasons.
- The churches of Asia Minor, where Revelation’s first readers lived, were made up of both Jewish believers and Gentiles who had close, ongoing contact with the synagogues — a pattern we can see throughout the book of Acts.
- The churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia, in particular, were in close contact with synagogues that assumed a deep knowledge of the Old Testament. The same assumption shows up in the promise to Philadelphia that opponents from the synagogue will one day acknowledge that Jesus has loved this church. If, as some commentators think, this means they would come to faith, the church’s preaching must have rested heavily on showing from the Old Testament that Jesus fulfils it (Beale, p. 82).
- The reference to false prophets under the Old Testament label Jezebel shows that these churches were already fluent enough in Old and New Testament material to have it twisted by false teachers in the first place.
- It would be strange indeed if John had filled his letters to these churches with Old Testament references — manna, Jezebel, temple, New Jerusalem, Balaam — that the recipients simply wouldn’t have understood.
- John saw himself as a prophet, a role the church evidently accepted, which means he likely also functioned as a teacher who had already instructed them in the Old Testament — itself a further explanation for why false, familiar teachings could be so easily exposed in these churches.
- We also know from Acts and elsewhere in the New Testament that Jews and Gentiles alike were taught from the Old Testament, the Bible of the early church: in Berea, in Ephesus, with Timothy as a teacher, and in Paul's emphasis on the importance of the whole of Scripture.
How Revelation uses the Old Testament
Revelation contains more Old Testament references than any other book of the New Testament, yet it never quotes formally — there is no “as it is written”. Everything is allusion: words, images and whole scenes taken up and woven into John’s visions. Counts range from about 200 to over 600, depending on how strictly an echo is counted, and more than half come from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the Psalms (Beale, pp. 77–78).
Three examples from this study:
- The trumpets replay the plagues of Egypt — hail, water turned to blood, darkness, locusts — so the readers would hear that God is unmasking a new Pharaoh. → The trumpets
- The 144,000 are counted tribe by tribe, like the census of Israel’s fighting men in the wilderness (Num 1). → The 144,000
- The harlot carries the charge the prophets brought against unfaithful cities: Ezekiel 16 calls Jerusalem a prostitute, Isaiah 23 and Nahum 3 say it of Tyre and Nineveh. → Who is the harlot Babel? (2)
A reader who knows the source hears far more than one who does not — which is why the explanations on this site keep going back to the Old Testament.