This article argues that Satan’s plot in Revelation 20 draws from the Asael/Azazel myth in 1 Enoch 10.4–8 and 54–57. The former Enochic passage, like Rev. 20, tells of an angel who is commissioned to imprison a rebellious angel for the moral corruption of humanity. Both are sealed in the pit until judgment day, when they are to be thrown into a great fire. The latter Enochic passage describes Asael’s preparation for war against the holy city and subsequent judgment, which resonates with Rev. 20’s battle against the city and judgment. This article argues that these allusions to Asael were specifically made to allude to the Azazel ritual of the Day of Atonement, which is the background to Asael’s imprisonment in 1 En. 10, and the idea finds affirmation in similar literature, Jewish traditions, and festal patterns in Revelation. This article lastly and briefly considers what typological and soteriological implications this allusion to the Day of Atonement may have.

Why was the body of a man crucified by the Romans buried in a rock-hewn tomb? Whereas Jewish scruples about leaving the dead unburied would have been satisfied by burying Jesus in a shallow grave, a survey of Jewish burial practices indicates that instead he was buried in the kind of tomb normally reserved for the elite. Two of the Gospel accounts suggest that Joseph of Arimathea was a follower of Jesus, but this is historically unlikely. Piecing together the evidence from the Gospel narratives, it is proposed that, as a wealthy member of the Jewish ruling council, Joseph could well have been engaged in a programme of building tombs to honour prophets from the past. When faced with the death of a prophet in his own day, he may well have felt constrained to avert any divine retribution by giving Jesus an honourable burial. Memory theory is employed to suggest that distorted recollections of Joseph bribing Pilate to release Jesus’ body can be detected in the accounts of Jesus’ burial found in Matthew and John. This article aims to demonstrate that Jesus receiving an honourable burial in a rock-hewn tomb is historically plausible.

Jonathan Rowlands recently argued that the historical-critical and the TIS approaches to reading Scripture are both justified, by their own lights, in that each represents a ‘language game’ whose rules are grounded in nothing more than a preference for a particular reading goal. This brief response will challenge two of Rowlands’s main claims: (1) that Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ concept is applicable to the reading of texts, and (2) that the coexistence of authorial and textual (types of) meaning in a text justifies a plurality of approaches.

In this article, the author examines how Christian supremacy and anti-Jewish rhetoric appears in the discourse about ancient biblical manuscripts, especially codices or bound book forms. Through a rhetorical-ethical analysis, the writer investigates how scholarly discourse constructs the relationship between Christianity and the codex, focusing not on the physical artifacts themselves, but on the materiality of the ideologies that shape the descriptions, associations, and assumptions surrounding the Christian codex in academic literature. This inquiry looks specifically at the way in which the codex often gets defined as a symbol of Christian severance from Judaism and Jewish practice and examines how the Christian codex has been produced and interpreted within a framework that upholds the binary division between Jews and Christians. In doing so, it considers how this the discourse of the Christian codex contributes to a broader narrative of Christian superiority within the fields of New Testament studies and book history.

The challenging and inventive articles in this volume push scholarship in the Apocalypse of John further in both hopeful and liberatory ways. Social location, intersectionality, and connections with contemporary politics are in conversation with John’s ancient text, which forms the bookend to the Christian Bible. The questions these authors raise are necessary for locating the both ethical and oppressive uses of this apocalyptic text in our times.

Drawing inspiration from Sara Parks’s article on the ‘Brooten Phenomenon’, which references Bernadette J. Brooten’s groundbreaking work on women’s lives in the ancient world, this article addresses the tendency to overlook scholarship on Revelation by women and about gender. The article offers close analyses of recent commentaries and articles on Revelation and finds that women’s scholarship is cited mainly when discussing gender and often relegated to footnotes. This lack of citation belies the significant presence of women-identified scholars publishing on Revelation.

This article offers a decolonial feminist and affective reading of the book of Revelation. I examine how Revelation’s ‘marks’ can function as tools of social, political, and racial control by reinforcing insider/outsider boundaries and gendered hierarchies. This article also examines how Revelation’s language of purity and exclusion can move through bodies and emotions, shaping lived experiences and communities.

This short article considers the coloniality of Revelation, and scholarship about Revelation, through feminist and decolonial lenses, centering the sonic and epistemic reverberations of (post)apocalyptic discourse in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and María. Engaging with the work of feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial scholars, the essay expands upon decolonial feminist ethicist Melissa Pagán’s ‘hermeneutics of el grito ’ as a critical method for reading Revelation’s screams and silences. It calls for a reimagining of apocalyptic interpretation grounded in the lived realities of environmental catastrophe and persistence in the face of coloniality.

This paper scripturalizes Revelation 12 through an Africana queer lens to advance the survival and flourishing of Black and brown people of transgender experience. The woman is read as a transcestor of trans women and gender non-conforming people from William Dorsey, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Pepper LaBeija, and RuPaul to signify a community screaming for survival, freedom, and flourishing. This approach brings Black Transgender Studies into conversation with the topic of Gender and the study of Revelation.

This introduction lays out the premise for this special edition, which arose from a panel session at the 2024 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting which explored ‘The Future of Revelation and Gender Studies’. It explains how those included in the volume build on previous trends in scholarship and offer insights into avenues they would like to see further research on in relation to Revelation and gender take. Taken together, the pieces offer a rich set of diverse perspectives on the book of Revelation and its study in relation to gender.