Revelation 19:11-21

Revelation 19:11-21 : a second vision of doom, on the Beast and his allies (in fulfilment of Revelation 12:5). Their fate (Revelation 19:17-21) follows a procession of the angelic troops (Revelation 19:11-16, contrast Revelation 9:16 f.). The connexion of this and the foregoing volume (Revelation 19:7-9) is mediated by the idea that the marriage of the warrior-messiah (cf. En. lx. 2; 4 Esd. 12:32, 13:38; Apoc. Bar. xxxix., xl., lxx.) cannot take place till he returns from victory (so in the messianic Psalms 45.). Now that the preliminary movements of the enemy (Revelation 17:16-17) are over, the holy war of Revelation 17:14 begins, which is to end in a ghastly Armageddon. This passage and the subsequent oracle of Revelation 20:1-10 reproduce in part a messianic programme according to which the dolores Messiae (cf. Klausner: mess. Vorstellungen d. jüd. Volkes im Zeitalter der Tannaiten, 1904, 47 f, and Charles on Apoc. Bar. 27:1) are followed by messiah's royal advent on earth (here sketched in part from Sap. 18:4-24) t o found a kingdom of the just (i.e., Israel) who are raised for this purpose. Israel supplants Rome as the world-power (Bar. 39.). Her period of superiority opens with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple, and closes with a crushing defeat of Gog and Magog, who are led by an incarnate villain (“dux ultimus,” xl.), but are finally vanquished by the aid of the ten tribes who return to take part in this campaign. Death and Satan then are annihilated, and eternal bliss ensues. Like Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:20 f., John modifies this scheme of tradition freely for his own Christian ends. He introduces a realistic expansion of the messianic age into three periods: (a) a victory of messiah (mounted, like Vishnu, on a white horse for the last battle) and his ἅγιοι (cf. Revelation 14:20) over the beast, the false prophet, and the kings of the world, who as already noted turn their attention to the saints after crushing Rome (Revelation 19:11-21); (b) an undisturbed reign of Christ and his martyrs (Revelation 20:1-6), evidently in Palestine; (c) the final defeat of Gog and Magog, with Satan their instigator (Revelation 20:7-10). There is little or nothing specifically Christian in all this section (except Revelation 20:4-6, cf. Revelation 19:13), but the general style betrays the author's own hand, and there is no reason to suppose that a Jewish source in whole or part (so e.g., Vischer, Sabatier, de Faye, Weyland, Spitta, von Soden) underlies it. The sequence of the passage with Revelation 16:13-16; Revelation 16:18-20 is due to a common cycle of tradition, rather than to any literary source (Schön). It is a homogeneous finalê written by the prophet, in terms of current eschatology, to round off the predictions at which he has already hinted. Moralising traits emerge amidst the realism, but it is impossible to be sure how far the whole passage (i.e., 11 21) was intended to be figurative.