Revelation 14:14-20

Revelation 14:14-20, in their present position, are a proleptic and realistic summary of the final judgment, representing as a divine catastrophe what 16 17. delineate as the outcome of semi-political movements (cf. 18. after 17). The strange picture of messiah (14 f., contrast Revelation 1:10 f., Revelation 19:11 f.), the absence of any allusion to the Beasts (Revelation 14:9-11) or to the Imperial cultus, the peculiar angelology, and the generally disparate nature of the scene as compared with the context, point to the isolated character of the episode. The abrupt mention of the city (20) suggests that the tradition belonged to the cycle underlying Revelation 11:1-13 (the city, 13), and several critics (e.g., Spitta, Erbes, Weyland, Völter, Schon, Briggs, Rauch) regard it variously as a finâle to the oracles of that chapter. But the connexion is one of tradition rather than of literary unity. The data of style and content leave it uncertain even whether the episode goes back to a source or a tradition, whether it is Jewish (so especially Sabatier, Pfleiderer, and Rauch) or Jewish Christian (Schön, Erbes, Bruston, J. Weiss, etc.), and, if Jewish Christian, whether it was written by the author of the Apocalypse (Weizsäcker) or not. The least obscure feature is the victory of the messiah over antichrist and his legions (not of an angelic judgment on Israel, J. Weiss) in the vicinity of Jerusalem (cf. Revelation 11:13; Revelation 14:1 f., and Revelation 20:9) at the end of the world, an expectation of which we have another variant apparently in Revelation 19:11 f. Probably the prophet inserts the episode here in order to repeat, in a graphic and archaic, although somewhat incongruous fashion, the final doom of which he has just been speaking and to which he is about to lead up (Revelation 14:15-20.) through a fresh series of catastrophes. “If one might venture to wish to discard as an interpolation any part of the attested text of the Apocalypse, it would be this passage. How can it be understood of anything but the final judgment? Yet it comes here as anything but final.… The earth goes on just as before” (Simcox). But here, as often elsewhere, the clue lies partly in the vivid inconsequence of dream-pictures, partly in the preacher's desire to impress his hearers, and partly in the poetic, imaginative freedom of his own mind.