Revelation 15:3

As in Exodus 14-15. Moses leads Israel in a song of praise to God over the dead Egyptians, so, after Rome's downfall (Revelation 14:8 f., Revelation 15:2) the faithful are led by their captain (Revelation 12:11; Revelation 14:1; Revelation 14:4, cf. Hebrews 2:12), in a chant of triumph and gratitude. (Note the lack of any reference to their own sufferings. Their interest is in the great work of God.) For messiah as a second Moses in Jewish tradition, cf. Gfrörer, ii. 328 f. The song on the Red Sea had already been adapted to the worship of the Therapeutae (Philo, de uit. contempl. § xi.) τὴν ᾠδὴν τ. ἀ. There is a continuity in redemption, which unites the first deliverance to the final. True to his cardinal idea of the identity of God's people (Christians being the real Israel, cf. on Revelation 1:6), the prophet hails Jesus as the Christian Moses who, at the cost of his life, is commissioned by God to deliver the new Israel from their bondage to an earthly monarchy. The lyric with its Hebrew parallelisms is a Vorspiel of the succeeding judgments; it resembles (cf. E.Bi. 4954) the benediction after the Shema of Judaism (“a new song did they sing to Thy name, they that were delivered, by the seashore; together did all praise and own Thee as King, saying, ‘Yahveh shall reign world without end' ”), and is almost entirely composed of O.T. phrases. Adoration is its theme, stirred by the sense of God's justice. Similarly the famous hymn to Shamash, the Assyrian god of justice, which represents one of the highest reaches in ancient religious literature (Jastrow, pp. 300, 301): “Eternally just in the heavens are thou, / Of faithful judgment towards all the world art thou.” Most editors take the phrase καὶ τὴν ᾠδ. τ. ἀ. as a gloss; but if the song has nothing to do with the Lamb, it is as silent on Moses. Since the whole section comes from the pen of the general author, and since the collocation of the two ᾠδαί (equivalent of course to a single hymn) is awkward mainly in appearance, while the omission of the Lamb's Song would leave the section incomplete, it seems better to regard it as original rather than as a scribe's addition like Revelation 14:10, etc. As in Revelation 14:1; Revelation 14:3, the Lamb is among his followers, yet not of them.