Revelation 4:3

The sources of the general conception lie far back in passages like Isaiah 6:1 f., Ezekiel 1:26 f., Daniel 7:9 f., Enoch xxxix., xl., xlvi., mediated by rabbinical interpretations. But it should be noted that in the palace-temple of Hatra, the Parthian capital, one well-known frieze contained a row of figures including the griffin, the eagle, the human face, the head of an ox, and an emblem on the cornice apparently representing the sun. With a sublime restraint, the author leaves the royal presence undefined, though he is more definite and explicit on the whole than (say) Ezekiel. The latter's advance in this respect upon his predecessors was explained by the rabbis (cf. Streane's Chagiga, p. 73) as a needful counteractive to the Jewish belief that visions were impossible outside Canaan, and as a help to men of the captivity who needed “special details to support them in their trials” (cf. above, Revelation 1:9 f.). The σάρδιον, a flesh-coloures, semi-transparent, often golden or ruddy gem, answers to our red jasper or cornelian, so-called perhaps from Sardis, whence the stone was originally exported, ὅμοιος, adj. only here with two terminations. “The striking simile ὅμ. ὁρ. λ. ἰ. κ. σ. recalls the portrait statues of Roman emperors and others, in which the raiment is worked out in hard-coloures stones a fashion introduced in the last years of the republic from Ptolemaic Egypt” (Myres, E. Bi., 4812). ἶρις. The nimbus or halo round the throne is green, σμ. (cf. Deissm. 267) being malachite or more probably an emerald (Revelation 21:19), to which the ancients attributed a talismanic power of warding off evil spirits. “Thou hast made heaven and earth bright with thy rays of pure emerald light” (hymn to Ra, E. B. D. 8). The. rabbis (Chagiga, 16 a) discouraged any study of the rainbow, as it symbolised the glory of God. As the symbol of God's covenant, it may be here a foil to the forbidding awe of Revelation 4:5 a (which develops 3 a, as 5 b develops 3 b 4); “Deus in judiciis semper meminit foederis sui” (Grotius.) But, like the parabolic details of Jesus, these traits are mainly descriptive. The association of jasper, sardius, and emerald is a genuinely Hellenic touch: cf. Phaedo, 110, where Plato describes the real earth under the heavens of paradise as a place where in perfection lie such things as exist here but in fragmentary beauty for example, the pebbles esteemed here, σάρδιά τε καὶ ἰάσπιδας καὶ σμαράγδους. Flinders Petrie, taking σμ. as rock-crystal, argues that the rainbow here is of the prismatic colour which a hexagonal prism of that colourless stone would throw (Hastings, D. B. iv. 620).