The Book of Revelation: Plagues as Part of the Eschatological Human Condition

Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte

doi:10.1177/0142064x211025496

Abstract

Although plagues and disease do not feature prominently in the book of Revelation, specific images from the book, including the four horsemen (Rev. 6) and bowls of wrath (Rev. 15–16), have been used in certain traditions in which epidemics and pandemics have been, and still are, being interpreted as part of the eschatological human condition: they are seen as inflicted on humanity, ultimately by an angry God, whose wrath will lead to a final judgment.

Highlights

See Lietaert Peerbolte 1996138-41 for a discussion of the pagan backgrounds of Rev. 12. the Devil and his being cast out of heaven
In his Epidemics and Society of 2019, Frank Snowden indicates that there are two popular models for accounting for diseases and their origin
Humanity is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: one either gets beaten by the Devil or by God’s angels, and there seems to be no way to survive, unless one belongs to the select group of 144,000 members of Israel and the many who join them from the Gentiles, chosen as God’s elect.2Accordingly this contribution aims at analysing the ways in which the book of Revelation, and a number of early receptions of Revelation, dealt with human suffering

Summary

See Lietaert Peerbolte 1996

138-41 for a discussion of the pagan backgrounds of Rev. 12. the Devil and his being cast out of heaven. In the three septets that symbolically depict the course of history in the book of Revelation, the seals (6.1–8.5), the trumpets (8.6–11.19) and the bowls (15.125), the main protagonists are angels who act on behalf of God. The first four seals bring about the four riders on horses, who cause perdition and slaughter, the fourth of whom is even equated with Death itself. The determinism with which the book of Revelation describes the course of human history includes the fate of humanity as suffering from plagues inflicted by angels on behalf of God. in Rev. 9, a third of humankind is said to perish at the sixth trumpet: the ‘four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates’ (9.14) are unleashed, and they bring disaster upon humankind, killing a third of all human beings. If the three series of seven phenomena are repetitive, the seven bowls described in Rev. 15–16 characterize the septets in general terms as plagues

See Beale 1999

Aune 1998b

Conclusion