Texts in Conversation
Revelation 14:20 describes blood rising as high as a horse’s bridle, apocalyptic imagery that is similar to the language of judgment in 1 Enoch 100:3, where the horses walk through blood that is as high as their chest and high enough to completely cover the chariots.
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1 Enoch 100:3
Pseudepigrapha
1 In those days, in one place, fathers together with their sons shall be smitten, and brothers will fall in death with one another until the streams flow with their blood. 2 For a man shall not spare his hand from slaying his sons and his sons' sons, and the sinner shall not spare his hand from his honored brother: from dawn till sunset they shall slay one another. 3 And the horse shall wade up to the breast in the blood of sinners, and the chariot shall be submerged to its height. 4 In those days, the angels shall descend into the secret places and gather together all those who brought down sin, and the Most High will arise on that day of judgment to execute great judgment among sinners. 5 And over all the righteous and holy, He will appoint guardians from among the holy angels to guard them as the apple of an eye, until He makes an end of all wickedness and all sin, and though the righteous sleep a long sleep, they have nothing to fear.
Date: 200-50 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Revelation 14:20
New Testament
15 Then another angel came out of the temple, shouting in a loud voice to the one seated on the cloud, “Use your sickle and start to reap, because the time to reap has come, since the earth’s harvest is ripe!” 16 So the one seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped. 17 Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he, too, had a sharp sickle. 18 Another angel, who was in charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to the angel who had the sharp sickle, “Use your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes off the vine of the earth, because its grapes are now ripe.” 19 So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the grapes from the vineyard of the earth and tossed them into the great winepress of the wrath of God. 20 Then the winepress was stomped outside the city, and blood poured out of the winepress up to the height of horses’ bridles for a distance of almost 200 miles.
Date: 92-96 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... We begin with a collection of texts which are clearly related in some way (Revelation 14:20; 1 Enoch 100:3; 4 Ezra 15:35-36; Ginza; y. Ta'an 4:8; Lamentations Rabbah 2:24; b. Gittin 57a; Prayer of Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai 9) ... This collection of texts, ranging in date from the second or first century B.C. to the medieval period, from Jewish, Christian and (in one case) Mandean works, clearly shows that Revelation 14:20 makes use of a topos which was widely used to indicate slaughter, in war, of exceptional proportions. In most cases it occurs in the context of apocalyptic prophecy. Most appropriately it is used with reference to the last battle of history, in which sinners will destroy each other on an unprecedented scale, but in many of the later apocalypses it describes an earlier battle in the sequence of events which lead to the end of history. In some cases, the battle which, from the fictitious standpoint of the pseudepigraphal prophecy, is set in the future may be an event already in the past from the standpoint of the author and his readers ..."
Bauckham, Richard
The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation
(pp. 40-43) T&T Clark, 1993
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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