Breaking the Code

These seven angels are identified as “the seven angels who stand before God” (8:2), the seven who, according to Jewish tradition, formed an elite order of archangels. In Tobit, a Jewish text written during the intertestamental period, an angel reveals himself thus: “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of

Ephesus had become an epicenter of imperial cult in Asia Minor, with a local temple to “the Goddess Roma and the Divine Augustus” and a provincial temple to the emperor Domitian.

the explicit number, 144,000, symbolizes completeness—not one of the redeemed is missing.

The Euphrates is significant as the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, beyond which lay the Parthian menace. These demon-horsemen with their mounts, hitherto held in leash, are now let loose like avenging furies upon the Roman provinces at “the hour, the day,

the city as “Satan’s throne” in a more general way, in view of such a multiplicity of forms of paganism.

The imagery that John uses to describe his visions may have been in part suggested by storms, earthquakes, and eclipses of the first century. If, as is likely, Revelation was written after AD 79, when the sudden eruption of Vesuvius completely engulfed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum with molten lava and destroyed ships in the Gulf of Naples,

Also favoring the close of the first century as the time of the composition of Revelation is the fact that, according to 2:8-11, the church in Smyrna had been persevering under trials for a long time, whereas according to Polycarp,2 the bishop of Smyrna in the first half of the second century, the church there did not yet exist until after the time

It is clear that John had studied the Old Testament very thoroughly. Of the 404 verses that comprise the twenty-two chapters of the Book of Revelation, 278 verses contain one or more allusions to an Old Testament passage.

John may subscribe to the idea that the desert tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple were models of the cosmos (see Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews 3.6.4 §§122-23; 3.7.7 §§180-81; Philo, The Special Laws 1.66). We have already encountered the accoutrements of the holy places and inner courts in John’s heaven (Revelation 6:9; 8:3-5) and will aga