Revelation 8:1

The opening of the seventh seal is followed by half an hour's silence in heaven: “he opened” looks back to Revelation 6:12, the absence of subject showing that 7 is a parenthesis foreign to the seal-series in its original shape. Probably this series, like each of the others, was originally a separate oracle upon the latter days. When woven by the author into his large work, they suffered a literary treatment which has interrupted but not altogether obliterated their original form and sequence. The book of destiny is now open; what follows (Revelation 8:6 f.) is the course of the future, which naturally corresponds at some points to the predictions already sketched proleptically in chap. 6. A brief interval, not of exhaustion but of expectation, of breathless suspense (a pause in the ecstasy, LXX of Daniel 4:16), ushers in a preliminary series of judicial plagues heralded by seven trumpet-blasts (Revelation 8:2 to Revelation 11:19). Half an hour (ἡμ., cf., Win. § 5, 22 a for form) may have been an ominous period; Josephus (B. J. vi. 5, § 3) describes a portent at the siege of Jerusalem which consisted of a bright light shining at twilight for half an hour, and the collocation of silence with reverence is illustrated by the LXX version (εὐλαβείσθω πᾶσα σάρξ) of Zechariah 12:13 and Zephaniah 1:7 f. The following trumpet-series has been woven into the frame of the work by the device of making it take the place of the climax which (after Revelation 6:17; Revelation 7:1-2) one would naturally expect to occur at this point. When the dénouement should take place, nothing happens; the judgment is adjourned.