Literally or symbolic

The book of Revelation is full of images that seem to belong to another world entirely. Do we need to stretch our imaginations to picture them literally, or are they simply symbols? The answer is both.

Not an easy answer

There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all answer to whether something in the Bible is symbolic, literal, or both at once.

Something can be symbolic and still occur in reality — the Nile turning to blood, for instance, refers to the symbolic killing of the Nile god, while the water actually did turn red like blood. A literal fact can also become symbolic in its own right: the 12 actual sons of Jacob, who formed the twelve tribes chosen by God, went on to become a lasting symbol of being chosen at all. With that flexibility in mind, this article looks at how to read and interpret the book of Revelation.

The scope of the book

To do that, we need to recognize that Revelation blends several types of literature at once: apocalyptic, prophetic, and letter. Each of these contributes a different angle on the book’s scope.

• Historical context, from the letter. We should expect some clear historical references that made sense to the first readers, which is why several of the plagues carry a specific historical referent for that original audience.
• Spiritual context, from the apocalyptic. The book wants to provoke its readers into making a decision, so it reaches for harsh images to produce a reaction, and it may use symbolic language to describe a spiritual reality we otherwise couldn’t see directly.
• Goal-oriented context, from the prophetic. The book aims to encourage and motivate people to stand against evil, inviting them to look back at the fulfillment from anywhere across the roughly 2,000 years since. Because the events described are unlikely to map onto every generation’s literal history in the same way, it’s likely that historical prototypes are being molded into symbolic patterns meant to recur.

With that framework in place, let’s look more closely at the text itself.

The Daniel frame

Some key passages in Revelation are strongly connected to the prophecy in Daniel chapter 2, and that connection helps us understand the book better. This passage parallels Daniel chapter 7, which itself has many echoes throughout Revelation.

The Daniel 2 passage is the only one among the prophetic books that uses the word “mystery” — a word that occurs four times in Revelation as well: the mystery of the seven stars and lampstands, the mystery of God, and the mystery of Babel and of the beast that carries her.

The prophecy’s opening line, “he showed … what thing must take place in the latter days,” is echoed at the very beginning of Revelation and again just before the letters to the churches.

Revelation’s own opening, “to show … what things must take place quickly,” signals that the time Daniel prophesied has now arrived — notice the shift from “in the latter days” to “quickly” — while the phrase just before the letters to the churches, “what will take place after these things,” takes up another wording of the same passage in Daniel.¹

The introduction that follows the letters uses the same formula again: “I will show you what must take place after this.”

All of these mirror the opening of Daniel’s vision — “has shown the king what will take place in the future” — while the closing of Revelation’s vision comes just as close to the ending of Daniel’s: “to show his servants the things that must soon take place.”

In English translation the parallels can look a little thin, but they become much clearer once you compare the Greek of Daniel’s Septuagint translation directly against the Greek text of Revelation.

So what should we conclude? Revelation deliberately borrows the language that frames Daniel’s vision — a vision that pictures empires symbolically, as a statue destroyed by a stone that then fills the whole earth, itself another symbol.

That points toward the book being primarily symbolic. But there’s another angle worth considering.

deiknumi and semaino

The heading names the two Greek verbs that reveal the book’s own stated purpose: “The Revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show (deiknumi) his servants what must soon take place. He made it known (semaino) by sending his angel to his servant John.” Looking closely at these two verbs gives us real insight into how God intended to show and make known the contents of this book.

semaino

This is the same word used in the Greek of Daniel for the interpretation of a symbolic vision, and outside Revelation it appears only 5 times in the New Testament.

• Once in a generic sense, meaning simply to specify.
• Once of Agabus' prophecy of a famine, the same Agabus who later acts out his message with Paul's belt.
• Three more times in John, pointing ahead to the kind of death someone would die: Jesus’s death on the cross in chapters 12 and 18, and Peter’s death in chapter 21.

The related noun is often used for Jesus’s miracles as signs pointing to his character or mission. For example:

• It marks his power to give spiritual life, as well as spiritual resurrection.
• The feeding of the 5000 shows Jesus’s power to give spiritual food.

The word semaino can also simply mean “to make known” or “announce,” but if John had wanted to emphasize that sense here, he had a more natural word available — gnorizo — and chose not to use it.

deiknumi

This word appears in the very first clause — “to show his servants what must soon take place” — and, as Beale points out, it does not simply mean “make known”: in Revelation it means a revelation through symbolic visions, communicated by an angel, which is itself another echo of Daniel (Beale, p. 52). Elsewhere in the book, John uses the same word to describe a vision he saw, typically paired with both seeing and interpreting the symbol in question:

• The angel shows him the heavenly throne room and everything that happens there, like the Lamb opening a scroll.
• The introduction to the vision of the harlot in the wilderness, surrounded by many waters.
• The Bride is shown as the city of New Jerusalem.
• The river of the water of life is shown.
• The closing summary, itself another reference back to Daniel.
• The summary of everything John saw and heard, which included different images describing the same underlying reality symbolically.

Conclusion

The book says of itself how it speaks: God made it known by signs. So in Revelation the picture is the normal case, and the plain statement is the exception. That turns the usual rule round: a reader needs a reason to take something literally, not a reason to take it as a picture.²

Three kinds of sentences give such a reason:

• Where John speaks about himself and his readers. He is on Patmos, and he writes to seven real churches in seven real cities.
• Where the book explains its own picture. The picture is a sign; the explanation is plain speech. “The seven lampstands are the seven churches”. “The fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints”.
• Where the picture points to an event. A sign is a sign of something. The Lamb is a picture, and Jesus really died. The sword from his mouth is a picture, and he really will judge. The picture is not a photograph of the event, but the event is real.³

Everything else is read first as a picture, and the Old Testament usually tells us what the picture means.

And indeed, the book is full of things that are obviously symbolic: the lamb, the dragon, the beast with its heads and horns, the book with seven seals, the sword coming out of the mouth of Jesus, and more.

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