Revelation 8:8-9

A fiery mass, huge as a mountain, is flung into the sea a description which would recall the fiery volcanic bombs familiar to inhabitants of the Egean. The catastrophe includes, as in the first Egyptian plague, the turning of water into blood and the destruction of marine animals (4 Ezra 5:7, Verg. Georg. iii. 541 f.), besides havoc among the shipping. Volcanic phenomena (cf. Introd.§ 8) in the Egean archipelago (e.g., at Thera) are in the background of this description, and of others throughout the book; features such as the disturbance of islands and the mainland, showers of stones, earthquakes, the sun obscured by a black mist of ashes, and the moon reddened by volcanic dust, were the natural consequences of eruption in some submarine volcano, and Thera adjoining Patmos was in a state of more or less severe eruption during the first century. All this suggested the hideous colours in which the final catastrophe was painted by the imagination of pious contemporaries. In the eruption of 1573, the sea round Thera was tinted for twenty miles round, and even when the submarine volcano is quiescent, “the sea in the immediate vicinity of the cone is of a brilliant orange colour, from the action of oxide of iron”. In 1707 a large rock suddenly appeared in the sea, during the eruption, and owing to noxious vapours “all fish in the harbour died”.