Prophecy and Apocalyptic

Ask most congregations what a prophet does and they will say: foretells the future. The prophetic books do contain prediction, and Christian faith rests partly on some of it. But if you measure the material, prediction of the distant future is a minority activity, and treating it as the main one distorts every book in the collection.

Some rough figures are worth having. Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, estimate that less than two percent of Old Testament prophecy is messianic, less than five percent concerns the new covenant age, and less than one percent concerns events still future to us. Be careful how you use those numbers. Fee and Stuart give them flatly, without showing their method or classifying a single passage in print, and no independent published count exists either to confirm or to refute them. Take them as the impression of one careful pair of readers, useful for the shape of the thing, and rest nothing on the decimal point. What fills the other nine tenths is address to the prophet's own generation: an indictment of specific conduct, a summons to turn, and an announcement of consequence usually falling within living memory.

The reason is structural. The prophets arrive after the covenant, and their office is to enforce it. Deuteronomy 28 sets out blessings for covenant loyalty and curses for its abandonment, and a prophet's oracles of judgment are largely that chapter read back to Israel with the names filled in. This is why the prophets sound like lawyers so often. Micah 6:1-2 stages it explicitly: 'Hear now what the LORD says: "Arise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, O mountains, the LORD's indictment, you enduring foundations of the earth. For the LORD has a case against His people, and He will argue it against Israel."' Creation is called as witness because it was present when the covenant was made. The Hebrew behind the BSB's indictment, case and argue it is the vocabulary of a lawsuit, riv.

What they prosecute is worth naming, because it is consistently two things together: idolatry and injustice, and the second is mentioned at least as often as the first. Amos 5:21-24 is the classic statement, and notice how it works. 'I hate, I despise your feasts! I cannot stand the stench of your solemn assemblies.' A few lines later: 'Take away from Me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.' The worship being rejected is not pagan worship. It is Israel's own festivals, done correctly, by people whose courts were crooked. Read the prophets as predictors and you will mine them for timelines. Read them as prosecutors and you will find they are talking about you.

Prophetic speech is formal. It uses recognisable shapes, and learning them is like learning to recognise a legal brief or a sonnet: once you see the form, you know where you are in the argument.

The messenger formula comes first: koh amar YHWH, 'This is what the LORD says'. It is the language of a herald delivering another party's words, and it frames the prophet as a courier rather than an author. Frequently an oracle closes with a matching formula, 'declares the LORD'. Everything inside the frame is presented as speech from the sender.

Claus Westermann, in Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech (1960, English 1967), analysed the commonest unit, the judgment speech, and his account is still the standard starting point: a summons to hear, an accusation stating what has been done, often introduced by a word like 'because' or 'therefore', and then the announcement of the judgment that follows from it. The therefore is the joint of the whole thing. When you find one in a prophet, everything before it is the charge and everything after it is the sentence, and a reader who quotes only what follows the therefore has lifted a sentence away from its charge.

Other forms recur. The woe oracle opens with hoy, an interjection borrowed from funeral lament, so that the prophet announces disaster over the living as though at their graveside; Isaiah 5 strings six of them together. The oracle against the nations turns the indictment outwards, as in Amos 1 and 2, where the pattern lulls Israel into approving judgments on seven neighbours before it arrives at Israel itself, which is the whole rhetorical point. There are oracles of salvation, promising restoration. There are call narratives, such as Isaiah 6 and Jeremiah 1, which do for a prophet's authority what a commission does for an officer. And there are sign-acts, where the prophet performs the message: Jeremiah smashing a jar, Ezekiel lying on his side for months, Hosea's marriage, Isaiah walking barefoot. A sign-act is a genre in its own right, and reading it as biography rather than as proclamation misses what it is for.

Two more features to expect. Prophetic books are frequently not in chronological order, so a paragraph's neighbours may be no guide to its date; Jeremiah is the standout case, and its Greek and Hebrew textual traditions differ in arrangement. And the great bulk of prophetic oracle is poetry, which means everything in the previous lesson about parallelism, imagery and hyperbole applies here in full force. When Isaiah says the stars will be darkened and the heavens shaken, a reader has to decide whether the genre is describing cosmic physics or using the ordinary imagery of political collapse, which is how comparable language works in other ancient Near Eastern accounts of the fall of cities.

Here is the single most useful principle in the study of prophecy, and scripture states it for us rather than leaving us to infer it. Jeremiah 18:7-10, the anchor of this lesson, lays out both directions: an announced destruction can be withdrawn if the nation turns, and an announced blessing can be withdrawn if it does evil. The declared future is answerable to the response of those it is declared to. This is not a loophole invented by commentators. It is the stated policy of the God who sends the prophets, given in the same book as the prophecies.

Jonah is the worked case, and it is worth doing slowly. Jonah's sermon in 3:4 is five words in Hebrew and carries no condition at all: 'Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!' There is no 'unless'. There is no 'if you repent'. Then 3:10: 'When God saw their actions - that they had turned from their evil ways - He relented from the disaster He had threatened to bring upon them.' The city is not overturned. So on the face of it an announced prophecy failed, and Deuteronomy 18:22 makes precisely that the test of a prophet who has spoken presumptuously.

Three things resolve it, and all three are in the text. First, Jonah 4:2 tells you that Jonah himself knew the announcement was conditional, which is why he ran in the first place: 'I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion - One who relents from sending disaster.' The prophet understood his own oracle better than his wording suggests. Second, the verb in 3:10 and the verb in Jeremiah 18:8 are the same, nacham, to relent or change a declared course, which ties the case to the principle. Third, and most usefully, scripture raises this exact problem elsewhere and answers it in public. Micah 3:12 announced that Jerusalem would become a heap of rubble. A century later, in Jeremiah 26:18-19, the elders of Judah quote that oracle in open court to defend Jeremiah's life. Their argument is all in verse 19: 'Did Hezekiah king of Judah or anyone else in Judah put him to death? Did Hezekiah not fear the LORD and seek His favor, and did not the LORD relent of the disaster He had pronounced against them? But we are about to bring great harm on ourselves!' Judah's own leaders treat an unfulfilled judgment oracle as a success, because the point of the oracle was to produce exactly what it produced, and the closing line shows them applying the principle to themselves in real time.

So a judgment oracle is generally best read as what one might call a real warning rather than a fixed forecast: it announces the outcome the present course is heading for, and it is spoken in order to change the course. Notice that this makes the prophets more urgent rather than less. A weather forecast is information. A warning is an act.

The second thing to say about prophetic futures concerns perspective. The prophets frequently see near and far events in a single line of sight, without the gap between them being visible, in something like the way a distant mountain range appears flat to a viewer on the plain even though the ridges are fifty miles apart. Isaiah's Immanuel oracle in 7:14 is addressed to a king facing an invasion in the eighth century, and Matthew 1:23 reads it as fulfilled in Jesus. (The BSB prints 'the virgin' for the Hebrew almah, a word that other translations, the NRSV among them, render as a young woman; that dispute belongs to the later module and does not change the point about near and far.) Joel's promise of the Spirit poured out on all flesh, framed within a locust plague and a day of the LORD, is claimed by Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2. Malachi's promise of Elijah is applied to John the Baptist and also held open. How exactly to describe this is contested: some speak of double fulfilment, some of typology, some of a single referent progressively disclosed, some of the New Testament writers reading christologically in a way that goes beyond the prophet's own horizon. That argument belongs to a later module on the New Testament's use of the Old, and it is a serious one. What belongs here is the observation itself, that prophetic horizons telescope, and the caution that follows from it: the absence of a visible gap in the text is not evidence that there is no gap in history.

Apocalyptic grows out of prophecy and is not the same thing. It has its own conventions, and by the second century BC it is a recognisable body of literature with recurring features: a vision or heavenly journey rather than an oracle; an angelic interpreter who explains what the seer has seen; an extravagant symbolic vocabulary of beasts, horns, thrones, stars and cosmic upheaval; a sweep of history divided into periods; a sharp division between this age and the age to come; and pseudonymity in the extrabiblical examples, where a work is written in the name of an ancient figure such as Enoch, Baruch or Ezra.

The standard definition came out of a Society of Biblical Literature project led by John J. Collins and published in Semeia 14 in 1979. I will summarise it rather than quote it, since the wording circulates in more than one form and you should check it in the journal itself before repeating it as a formula. The definition has four moving parts. An apocalypse is revelatory literature with a narrative framework. The revelation is mediated to a human recipient by an otherworldly being. What is disclosed is a transcendent reality. And that reality is both temporal, in that it looks toward an end-time salvation, and spatial, in that it involves another, supernatural world. Those four parts are what you use to test whether a text belongs to the genre, and they will keep you out of a great deal of trouble. Christopher Rowland's The Open Heaven (1982) argued that the heart of the genre is revelation of heavenly mysteries rather than prediction of the end, which is a corrective worth holding alongside Collins.

In the Bible, the clearest apocalyptic material is Daniel 7 to 12 and Revelation, with the vision cycle of Zechariah 1 to 6, Ezekiel 38 to 39, Ezekiel's opening chariot vision, and Isaiah 24 to 27 sharing many of the features. Outside the canon, the conventions are established by a substantial literature that you should know exists, because it is where the vocabulary was formed: 1 Enoch, whose Book of the Watchers is older than Daniel and which Jude quotes; 4 Ezra, preserved as 2 Esdras chapters 3 to 14; 2 Baruch; the Apocalypse of Abraham; and from Qumran, texts such as the War Scroll. Reading fifty pages of 1 Enoch does more for your reading of Revelation than most commentaries, and it costs nothing, since R. H. Charles's translation is out of copyright and is freely available online. It shows you a beast, a throne and a period of years being used by someone who had no interest whatever in the twentieth century.

Two conventions matter most for interpretation. The first is that the symbols are usually explained, either in the text or by the shared vocabulary. Daniel does not leave you guessing: 'These four great beasts are four kings who will arise from the earth' (7:17). Revelation does the same repeatedly, telling you that the seven lampstands are seven churches and that the seven heads are seven mountains and also seven kings. Where a symbol is not explained, the first move is to look for its use in the Old Testament, not to look for a modern equivalent.

The second is numbers, and this is where most popular reading goes wrong. In this literature numbers are a vocabulary, not a code. Seven signifies completeness, and Revelation uses it for churches, spirits, lampstands, seals, trumpets, bowls, the Lamb's horns and eyes, and the beast's heads. Twelve signifies the people of God, which is why the sealed are twelve thousand from each of twelve tribes and the city has twelve gates and twelve foundations. Four signifies the whole earth, hence four corners, four winds, four living creatures. Three and a half, and its equivalents forty-two months and 1,260 days and 'a time, and times, and half a time', is a broken seven, taken over from Daniel, and signifies a period of trouble that is cut short. How far that symbolic reading extends, and in particular whether a figure such as the 144,000 is a symbol or a quantity, is one of the questions that divides the approaches set out in the next section, so it is held over to there.

The most famous number deserves an honest paragraph. Revelation 13:18 says, 'Here is a call for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and that number is 666.' Two things are worth knowing. First, the manuscripts are not unanimous: some important witnesses, including Papyrus 115 and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, read 616. Second, the most widely held proposal is that the number is gematria, the ancient practice of adding the numerical values of letters, on the Hebrew spelling of Nero Caesar, which yields 666 with one spelling and 616 with a shorter one. The fact that a single proposal accounts for both textual readings is its main strength. It is not a certainty, and other proposals exist, including that 666 is a triangular number or simply a triple falling short of seven. What the verse itself asks for is wisdom, which is the text's own way of telling you that the answer is available to a reader inside its own symbolic world rather than to a reader with a newspaper.

Revelation is not only an apocalypse. It calls itself a prophecy in 1:3, and it is framed as a letter, with an epistolary greeting in 1:4 and seven named congregations addressed in chapters 2 and 3. Richard Bauckham's The Theology of the Book of Revelation (1993) makes the point that all three genres are operating at once, and a reading which forgets the letter to Laodicea is reading a different book from the one John sent. With that in place, here are the four standard approaches, each stated as its own advocates state it.

One question cuts across all four and is better named than assumed: how far the numbers are symbolic. Idealists and most preterists take the 144,000 of chapter 7 as twelve times twelve times a thousand, a figure for the complete people of God, and point out that Revelation elsewhere supplies symbolic explanations of its own numbers. Many futurists read it as a count of people, and some as a literal twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes named in the text, pointing out that the chapter goes to the trouble of naming them and that the book distinguishes this group from the innumerable multitude that follows it. Each side can appeal to the text's own practice, and the disagreement is a real one rather than a failure of nerve on either side.

The preterist approach holds that the visions refer principally to events in the author's own era: the persecution of the churches under Rome, the imperial cult, and in some versions the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Its advocates argue that this is what the book itself asks for, since 1:1 says these things 'must soon come to pass' and 1:3 says 'the time is near', that seven real congregations with real problems are addressed, and that reading Babylon as Rome is what every first-century hearer would have done automatically. Kenneth Gentry is a leading contemporary defender of a partial preterist reading, and the approach has a long pedigree, including Moses Stuart's nineteenth-century commentary. Its critics ask what the closing chapters describe if everything has already happened, and here preterists themselves divide, most holding that the final consummation remains future while a minority, usually called full preterists, do not.

The historicist approach holds that the visions map the course of church history from John's day to the end, unrolling in sequence. Its advocates argue that this takes seriously the book's sweep, that Daniel's visions plainly cover successive empires and Revelation stands in that tradition, and that the book was given to sustain the church across the whole span of its trials rather than for one generation. This was the dominant Protestant reading for centuries; Joseph Mede's Clavis Apocalyptica (1627) is the great systematic attempt, and the approach was held by many of the Reformers and by later expositors such as E. B. Elliott. Its critics note that historicist identifications have repeatedly had to be revised as history continued, and that the schemes of different historicists do not agree with one another. Historicists answer that revision of the details is what any reading of a partially fulfilled prophecy must expect, that disagreement among interpreters is not an argument against the method any more than it is for the other three, and that the alternative approaches leave the church's actual history strangely absent from a book written to sustain it.

The futurist approach holds that from chapter 4 onwards the book describes events still to come at the end of the age. Its advocates argue that the text's own outline invites this, pointing to 1:19, 'Therefore write down the things you have seen, the things that are, and the things that will happen after this', and that the scale of what is described, the destruction of the present order and the descent of a new Jerusalem, has manifestly not occurred. They argue further that the earliest readers of Revelation included futurists, citing Irenaeus on the beast. The best known modern expositors are dispensational, among them John Walvoord and Robert Thomas, though futurism does not require dispensationalism. Its critics ask how a book about the distant future served the congregations at Smyrna and Pergamum, who were being asked to endure something now. Futurists answer that a promise of final vindication is exactly what sustains a church under present pressure, that Paul comforts the Thessalonians the same way, and that the seven letters of chapters 2 and 3 address the immediate situation directly, which is precisely why the visions from chapter 4 onwards need not.

The idealist approach, sometimes called the symbolic or timeless approach, holds that the visions portray the abiding conflict between God and evil, and the pattern of the church's suffering and vindication, rather than a sequence of datable events. Its advocates argue that this is how the symbolic vocabulary actually behaves, that the same conflict is presented repeatedly from different angles rather than in a single chronological chain, and that this explains why the book has spoken with equal force to Christians under Rome, under Soviet rule, and under any tyranny since. William Hendriksen's More Than Conquerors (1939) is the accessible classic statement. Its critics ask whether a purely symbolic reading can still expect a real end to history, and idealists answer, in the main, that it can and does.

You should also know that much serious current scholarship is deliberately eclectic. G. K. Beale's commentary and Grant Osborne's both argue that the approaches capture complementary truths: the book addresses a first-century situation, portrays the permanent shape of the conflict, and moves toward a real consummation. Whether that is a synthesis or an evasion is itself disputed. What is settled across all four views, and worth saying to any congregation, is the book's actual claim: that the Lamb who was slain is on the throne, that the empire is not, and that the church's business under pressure is faithful endurance. Every one of the four approaches teaches that, and a reading of Revelation that leaves a congregation anxious rather than steady has failed by a standard all four accept.