Revelation 4:4

This verse breaks the continuous description of 3 and 5; it is evidently an original touch of the writer introduced into the more or less traditional scenery of the eternal court where “all the sanctities of heaven stood thick as stars” (cf. Revelation 5:11). The conception of twenty-four πρεσβύτεροι royally (Revelation 1:6) enthroned as divine assessors, with all the insignia of state, reaches back in part to a post-exilic apocalypse (Isaiah 24:23, βασιλεύσει κύριος ἐν Σιὼν καὶ εἰς Ἱερουσαλὴμ καὶ ἐνώπιον τῶν πρεσβυτέρων δοξασθήσεται), in part to the historic gerousia. But their attire (golden crowns, white robes) and functions are royal rather than judicial or sacerdotal. They are heavenly beings, angelic figures corresponding to the θρόνοι of Colossians 1:16 (cf. Isaiah 63:9 οὐ πρεσβὺς οὐδὲ ἄγγελος). The significance of the doubled 12 has been found in the twelve patriarchs or tribes + the twelve apostles (Andr., Areth., Vict., Alford, Weiss, etc.), in Jewish and Gentile Christianity (Bleek, de Wette, Weizsäcker, Swete), or in the twenty-four classes of the post-exilic priests with their “elders” (Schürer, H. J. P. i. 216 f., so from Vitringa to Ewald, Hilg., Renan, Spitta, Wellh., Erbes, Briggs). But the notion of the church as a fusion or combination of the old and the new covenants is alien to primitive Christianity, and the “elders' are not the ideal or celestial representatives of the church at all. They pertain to the heavenly court, as in the traditional mise-en-scène of the later Judaism, which had appropriated this and other imaginative suggestions of the heavenly court (Schrader, 3 pp. 454 f.), or, judicial council from the Babylonian, astro-theology, where μετὰ τὸν ζῳδιακὸν κύκλον were ranged four-and-twenty stars, half to the north, and half to the south, of which the visible are reckoned as belonging to the living, the invisible to the dead, οὓς δικαστὰς τῶν ὅλων προσαγορεύουσιν (Diod. Sic. 2:31, quoted by Gunkel in S. C. 302 308, who rightly finds in the same soil roots of other symbols in this passage, such as the four ζῷα and the seven λαμπάδες). In Slav. En. iv. 1. immediately after “the very great sea” in the first heaven is mentioned (cf. Revelation 4:6), Enoch is shown “the elders and the rulers of the orders of the stars;” so in Judicium Petri, εἴκοσι γὰρ καὶ τέσσαρές εἰσι πρεσβύτεροι, twelve on the right hand of God and twelve on the left, as in Acta Perpet. The twenty-four star-deities of the Babylonian heaven had thus become adoring and subordinate angelic beings (cf. ἡμῶν, Revelation 4:11) in the apocalyptic world of the later Judaism, and our author retains this Oriental trait, together with the seven torches, the halo, etc., in order to body forth poetically his conception of the divine majesty (so, after Gunkel, Jeremias, and Bousset, Bruston, J. Weiss, Scott, Forbes, Porter). A partial anticipation of this feature, as well as of some others, in the Apocalypse occurs not only in the “sacred council” of Doushara, the Nabatean deity (cf. Cook's North Semit. Inscr., pp. 221 f., 443 f.), but in Egyptian mythology, as, e.g., in the following inscription from the tomb of Unas (5th dynasty, 3500 B.C.) “His place is at the side of God, in the most holy place; he himself becomes divine (neter), and an angel of God; he himself is triumphant. He sits on the great throne by the side of God [Revelation 3:21]. He is clothed with the finest raiment of those who sit on the throne of living right and truth. He hungers not, nor thirsts, nor is sad, for he eats daily the bread of Ra, and drinks what He drinks daily, and his bread also is that which is spoken of by Seb, and that which comes forth from the mouth of the gods [Revelation 7:16-17; Revelation 21:4]. Not only does he eat and drink of their food, but he wears the apparel they wear the white linen and sandals, and he is clothed in white … and these great and never-failing gods give unto him of the Tree of Life [Revelation 2:7] of which they themselves do eat, that he likewise may live.”