REVELATION 22:6-21 -- PART 1 (PROPER DIVISIONS)

 

Revelation 22:6-21—Part I (Proper Divisions)

There are a number of good strategies to use when approaching any portion of Scripture. I thought I would use the last chapter of the Bible as a test case to demonstrate my own personal method. This is generally my first step; the others will be discussed in subsequent posts. Feel free to take anything out of this methodology that seems to be useful to you and ignore the rest.

The Bible is quite unlike any other book you will ever read in that it stands together as a unity while at the same time being composed of numerous separate books written in different languages by a number of human writers over an extended time period. And for the novice, it is hard to make sense out of the way it is organized.

The most obvious division one first encounters is that between the Old and New Testament. While the OT contains the history and religious writings of the Jews written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the NT covers a much later period of history with movement of the people of God outside the Holy Land into the wider Roman Empire, and it was written in the Greek language. To confuse the picture even more, Catholic and ecumenical Bibles also include books called the Apocrypha which were generally written in the time between the OT and NT when Judea was under the control of the Greeks. And these books may be found located either at the end of the Bible or sandwiched between the OT and NT.

The second sort of division one sees in the Bible is into separate groupings according to literary genre, beginning with the historical books in the OT, moving on to the poetic books and the OT prophecies. The NT is similarly divided into the Gospel accounts, church history in Acts, and the letters of church leaders such as Peter, Paul and John. The problem in understanding all this comes in when a reader expects to see a strictly chronological account and fails to realize that some of the poetry and prophetic books were actually written somewhere in the middle of the history related in the history books.

To add to the confusion even more, some of the historical books themselves can't be taken in a strictly chronological order. Thus, I-II Chronicles, which follows Samuel-Kings in the Bible, actually covers most of the same territory as that other account; the four Gospels all parallel one another chronologically; and most of the NT epistles were written during the same period of time covered in Acts.

For one who wishes to get a better feel as to how all of these specific parallels fit together, there are two basic ways to do it conveniently. One is to replace or supplement your Bible with a Chronological Bible. There are a few such different books which are available on the market. In these, one gets a sort of Reader's Digest summary of the Bible neatly arranged so that you can read the whole story in chronological order. And when there is more than one account of the same event in the Bible, the editor will take bits and pieces of each individual account and mash them together to present a unified story with any potential conflicts and contradictions removed. I would recommend this approach only for those who wish to say that they have read the whole Bible, even if they haven't really done so.

A much more sound approach is to purchase what are called “harmonies” that list parallel passages of Scripture side-by-side in parallel columns so that you can easily compare them with one another. Thus, there is a Harmony of the Gospels, of Acts and Letters of Paul, and of Samuel-Kings / I-II Chronicles.

The third layer of divisions in the Bible consists of the separate books themselves. However, one must keep in mind that I and II Kings / I and II Samuel really was written as one coherent book, divided into smaller segments for convenience sake. And the same really applies to Ezra-Nehemiah and possibly I-II Thessalonians.

With that long introduction in mind, we can now begin to approach John's Revelation, which is, of course, divided into separate chapters. Some people naively treat these chapter divisions as being as sacred as the text itself whereas they only came into being during the Middle Ages, well over 1,000 years after the completion of the Bible. Also, they were basically the product of a single scholar, not produced by any sort of official church committee.

For the most part, these chapter divisions do an excellent job of indicating where the natural breaks in the text should be located, but that is not always the case. Two examples happen to be found in the first and last chapter divisions in the whole Bible. Thus, all Bible commentators are in agreement that Genesis 2:1-3 more properly belongs as the conclusion to the creation story of Genesis 1. It is interesting that the same error in division has been committed in starting Revelation 22 where it now is. This is because again the opening verses, 1-5 more properly belong to the preceding chapter instead. That is why I have limited this series of posts to verses 6-21 instead of including the whole chapter as a discrete unit. There are several reasons for making that judgment call:

1. Revelation 22:5 concludes with the words “they will reign for ever and ever,” which certainly sounds like the conclusion to a major literary unit.

2. These first five verses continue the theme of Revelation 21 regarding a description of the holy city and its inhabitants.

3. Revelation 21:1-22:5 consists of things that John “saw” or “was shown” by an angel whereas Revelation 22:6-21 consists of things that he “heard.”

4. With the exclusion of those first five verses, there is formed a perfect verbal bracketing device between verses 6-7 and the ending of the chapter, as shown below.

Figure 1: Inclusio for Revelation 22:6-21

    true (6a)

        Lord God (6b)

            I am coming quickly (7a)

                blessed is the one keeping (7b)

                    the words of the prophecy of this scroll (7c)

-------

                    the words of the prophecy of this scroll (18a)

                cursed is the one changing it (18b-19)

            I am coming quickly (20a)

    Amen (20b)

        Lord Jesus (20b)

Perfectly matched bookends like these are so common throughout the OT and NT that scholars have even given a technical name to this sort of literary device – an inclusio. Notice the way this technique subtly equates Lord Jesus with Lord God, while at the same time highlighting for the final time in the Bible contrasting curses and blessings.

The only set of parallels in Figure 1 which is not transparently obvious is that between “true” and “amen.” The Greek word used here for “true” is alethinoi. But the word “amen” reads the same in Hebrew, Greek, and English. In other words, it is not a translation of the Hebrew original, but simply a transliteration into both Greek and English. Most people know this word as an appropriate response to a prayer and feel that it means something like “Let it be so” or “Great prayer!” But actually, it is attesting to the truth of what has been prayed. Jesus even used it to attest in advance to words that he was about to utter. Thus, the familiar, “Verily, verily, I say to you” translates “Amen, amen, I say to you.”

The close association between “truth” and “amen” can be seen both in older translations (verity with verily) or modern ones (truth with truly).

I hope you can see from the above what kind of additional insights into Scripture can come out of the simple exercise of determining the proper boundaries of a given portion of the Bible. The next post in this series will continue with methods of subdividing a given section of Scripture.