Revelation 10:5-6

Modelling from Daniel 12:7, the writer describes the angel's oath (by the living God, as usual in O.T.; cf. Matthew 26:63), with its native gesture (cf. Trumbull's Threshold-Covenant, 78 f.) and contents. In the ancient world oaths were usually taken in the open-air (Usener, Götternamen, 181), before the all-seeing deities of the upper light. But here, as at Revelation 14:7, the eschatological and the creative acts of God (the latter an outcome of His living might, as Sir 18:1, En. Revelation 10:1; Acts 16:15, etc.) are deliberately conjoined; God's activity in creation and providence would culminate in judgment. “There shall be no further delay,” or time lost. The interval of Revelation 6:11 (Daniel 12:7) is over: all is ripe now for the end, ἡ συντέλεια καιροῦ. The parallels in Slav. En. xxxiii. 2, 65:7, upon the abolition of seasons and periods of time are merely verbal. What engages the writer here is the usual point of importance in apocalyptic literature, viz., “Is it long to the end? Is the future longer than the past” (4 Esd. 4:44 50)?