καὶ ὁ οὐρανὸς ἀπεχωρίσθη ὡς
395
~ A καὶ ol σύνδουλοι badT@y καὶ oLb Note
repet. of poss. gen. 1X. 21.
12.
ethnic use (= fellows of same religious commun- ity) cf. 6. Β.Ε.α. 96 f.
d On Aeolic
€ Vili. 5, xi. 13, Xvi. 18, Matt. xxiv. 7, 4 Esd. vi. 14, Ap. Bar. Ixx. 8, Joel ii. 3, 10, 30-31. Matt. xxiv. 29, Ass. Mos. x. 4 f. h Isa, xxxiv. 4, Ezek. xxxil. 7-8, cf. Sib. Or. iii. 82, viii. 238, 413 (190).
1 For πληρωσονται (Areth.) read πληρωθωσιν (AC, 29, vg., S., Cypr., Bg., Diist.. Lach., WH, Ws., Bj., Sw., Bs.) [πληρωσωσιν SPQ, etc., And., Ti., Al. Tr.,
Holtzm.).
saecula et mensura mensurauit tempora et non commouit nec excitauit, usquedum impleatur praedicta mensura... quando impletus fuerit numerus similium uobis) which thinks not of mankind but of the righteous (cf. Apoc. Bar. xxx. 2, and Heb. xi. 40). The atmosphere of this belief goes back to the first century B.c., as in Enoch (xlvii., cf. ix. xxii.) “and the hearts of the holy were filled with joy that the number of righteousness had drawn nigh, and the prayer of the right- eous was heard, and the blood of the tighteous required, before the Lord of Spirits” (cf. below, ch. xi. 15 f.). The thought is repeated in Ep. Lugd. from this passage (‘‘day by day those who were worthy were seized, filling up their number, so that all the zealous people and those through whom our affairs here had been especially established, were collected out of both churches’). It had been already developed otherwise in 4th Esdras ‘iv. 35 f., where the seer’s impatience for the end is rebuked and God’s greater eagerness asserted. ‘‘ Did not the souls of the righteous question thus in their chambers, saying, ‘ How long are we still to stay here ? et quando ueniet fructus ‘areae mercedis nostrae? ’ And the archangel Jeremiel answered them and said, ‘When the number of your fellows is complete’.” Substituting martyrs for the righteous, the author of our Apocalypse has exploited the idea thus familiar to him as a devout Jew; his first four visions come mainly through Zechariah ; for the next he adapts this later post-exilic notion. The Neronic victims and their fellows occupied in his mind the place filled by the early Jewish saints in the reverent regard of contem- porary Jews. As Renan notices (317 f.),
this thirst for vengeance was in the air after Nero’s death, shared even by Romans; one legend (Suet. Nero, xlviii., Dio, Cass. lxili. 28) told how, as Nero fled to his last retreat, during a thunder- peal the souls of his victims burst from the earth and flung themselves upon him.—As the safety of the physical uni- verse rested on the safety of the right- eous, according to the Jewish notion, so any massacres of the latter at once affected the stability of the world. Hence the sequence of vv. rr and 12 {. There is no hint that these physical aberrations were temporary. Yet the following catastro- phes (vii. f.) plainly presuppose a universe in its original and normal condition. It depends upon the theory adopted of the book whether this points merely to such discrepancies as are not unfamiliar in literature (especially imaginative litera- ture), or to recapitulation, or to the pre- sence of different sources.
Vv. 12-17. The sixth seal opened (cf. Crashaw’s Το the Name of F¥esus, 220- 234).
1 12-14. The earthquake (reff.), dar- kening of sun by atmospheric disturb- ances, (Verg. Georg. i. 463 f., Lucan i. 75 f.,522f. Compare Ass. Mos. x. 4 f.: et tremebit terra. Usque ad fines suas concutietur . . . sol non dabit lumen et in tenebras conuertet se, etc.; for Baby- lonian background cf. Schrader,® 392 f.), reddening of the full moon as in a total eclipse (cf. reff.), the dropping of stars, the removal of the sky, and the displacement of mountain and island (En. i. 6, see below on xiv. 20) are all more or less stereotyped features of the physical situation in apocalyptic eschat- ology, where naturally (cf. Jos. Bell. iv. 4, 5) agonies and distortions of the uni-