Revelation 20:1-3

The dragon is flung by an angel, not by God or messiah, into the pit of the abyss which formed his original haunt (cf. on Revelation 9:1), and there locked up, like an Arabian jin, so as to leave the earth undisturbed for the millenium. The prophet thus welds together two traditions which were originally independent. The former echoes Egyptian (E. B. D. 4, “thine enemy the serpent hath been given over to the fire, the serpent-fiend hath fallen down headlong; his arms have been bound in chains … the children of impotent revolt shall never more rise up”) and especially Parsee eschatology (Hübschmann, 227 f.) which held that one sign of the latter days was the release of the dragon Dahâka once bound fast at mount Demavend to corrupt the earth and eventually to be destroyed prior to the advent of the messiah and the resurrection of the dead. The Iranian view was that Fredun could not kill the serpent, whose slaughter was reserved for for Sâme (Bund. xxix. 9). But John abstains from giving any reason for the devil's reappearance. He simply accepts the tradition and falls back (Revelation 20:3) piously upon the δεῖ of a mysterious providence. Some enigmatic hints in a late post-exilic apocalypse (Isaiah 24:21-22, the hosts on high and the kings on earth to be shut up in the prison of the pit but after many days to be visited, i.e., released), upon which John has already drawn, had been developed by subsequent speculation (cf. the fettering of Azazel, En. 10:4 f., 54:5 f.) into the do gma of a divine restraint placed for a time upon the evil spirit(s); see S. C. 91 f., Charles' Eschatology, 200 f. ἔθνη. Strictly speaking, the previous tradition (Revelation 19:18; Revelation 19:21) left no inhabitants on earth at all. Such discrepancies were inevitable in the dovetailing of disparate conceptions, but the solution of the incongruity here probably lies in the interpretation of ἔθνη as outlying nations on the fringe of the empire (8) who had not shared in the campaign of Nero-antichrist and consequently had survived the doom of the latter and his allies (cf. Revelation 18:9).