Revelation 19:13

“Dipped in blood” (i.e., the blood of his foes): from the “crimsoned garments” of Yahveh in Isaiah 63.; cf. also Revelation 19:15 with “I have trodden the wine-press.… Yea, I trod them in mine anger (κατεπάτησα αὐτοὺς ἐν θυμῷ μου), and trampled them in my fury,” etc. Add Targ. Palest, on Genesis 49:11, “How beauteous is the King Messiah! Binding his loins and going forth to war against them that hate him, he will slay kings with princes, and make the rivers red with the blood of their slain, and his hills white with the fat of their mighty ones, his garments will be dipped in blood, and he himself like the juice of the wine-press.” The secret name denotes his superiority to all appeals; it indicates that the awful and punitive vigour of his enterprise made him impervious to the invocations of men. This is no Logos who dwells among men to give light and life; it is a stern, militant, figure of vengeance attacking the rebellious. Hence his name is mysterious; for “the identity, or at least the close connection between a thing and its name, not only makes the utterance of a holy name an invocation which insures the actual presence of the deity invoked, it also makes the holy name too sacred for common use or even for use at all” (Jevons' Introd. Hist. Relig. 361). The passage reflects certain phases of later messianic belief in Judaism, which had been tinged by the Babylonian myth of Marduk, Ea's victorious son, to whom divine authority was entrusted. Marduk's triumph was explained by Babylonian theologians as caused by the transference to him of the divine Name (so Michael, En. 69:14). 13 b may be a Johannine gloss upon the unknown name of Revelation 19:12 (cf. Philippians 2:9-10), under the influence of passages like Hebrews 4:15, Sap. 18. (“Thine all-powerful Logos leapt from heaven out of the royal throne, as a stern warrior into the midst of the doomed land, bearing the sharp sword of Thine unfeigned commandment”), and Enoch xc. 38 (cp. however Beer, ad loc). κέκληται, perf. of existing state, “the past action of which it is the result being left out of thought” (Burton, 75). If the above explanation of the mysterious name be correct, the author's idea was evidently forgotten or ignored by some later editor or copyist of the Johannine school, who inserted this gloss in order to clear up the obscure reference, and at the same time to bring forward the transcendent name widely appropriated by that school for Christ in a pacific and religious sense (so nearly all critical editors). In any case the two conceptions of the Apocalypse and the Fourth gospel have little or nothing in common except the word. But the introduction of this apparently illogical sequence between 12 and 13 might be justified in part by E. B. D. 94, “I am he that cometh forth, advancing, whose name is unknown; I am Yesterday, and Seer of millions of years is my name”. The application of such titles to Jesus certainly gives the impression that these high, honourable predicates are “not yet joined to his person with any intrinsic and essential unity” (Baur); they are rather due to the feeling that “Christ must have a position adequate to the great expectations concerning the last things, of which he is the chief subject”. But their introduction is due to the semi-Christianised messianic conceptions and the divine categories by which the writer is attempting to interpret his experience of Jesus. Backwards and forwards, as pre-existent and future, the redeemer is magnified for the prophet's consciousness.