Revelation 6:11

The white robe assigned each (Blass, § 32, 4) of these martyr-spirits as a pledge of future and final glory (Revelation 7:9) and a consoling proof that no judgment awaited them (Revelation 20:4-6), is a favourite gift in the Jewish heaven (cf. Enoch lxii. 15 f., and Asc. Isa. ix. 24 f.). The intermediate state was a much debated question in apocalyptic literature, and early Christian thought fluctuates between the idea of a provisional degree of bliss (as here and, e.g., Clem. Rom. i. 3, “those who by God's grace have been perfected in love possess the place of the pious, and they shall be manifested at the visitation of God's kingdom”) and a direct, full entrance into heavenly privileges especially, though neither uniformly nor exclusively, reserved for martyrs (Clem. Rom. v, Polyk. ad Phil. ix. 2, Hebrews 12:23, etc.); cf. Titius, 44 46. A cognate idea is reproduced in Asc. Isaiah 9:6 f., where in the seventh heaven Abel, Enoch and the Jewish saints appear all clothed “in the garments of the upper world” (i.e., in their resurrection-bodies) but not yet in full possession of their privileges, not yet seated on their thrones or wearing their crowns of glory. These are not theirs, till Christ descends to earth and ascends to heaven again. “And they were told to rest (or wait quietly) for a little while yet,” as they had been doing till the successive shocks of providence stirred them to an outburst of eager and reproachful anticipation. To rest implies to cease crying for vengeance (cf. Revelation 4:8). Gfrörer (2:50) cites a rabbinic tradition that the messiah would not come until all souls in גוּף (an intermediate resting-place of the departed?) were clothed with bodies. ἕως κ. τ. λ., this is closely and curiously reproduced, not so much from ideas preserved in the contemporary Apoc. Bar. xxiii. 4, 5 (where the end of the world comes when the predestined number of human beings is completed) as from the religious tradition also used in Clem. Rom. ii, lix, Justin (Apol. 1:45), and the contemporary 4th Esdras (4:36 f., quoniam in statera ponderauit 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 Hebrews 11:40). The atmosphere of this belief goes back to the first century B.C., as in Enoch (xlvii, cf. 9:22.) “and the hearts of the holy were filled with joy that the number of righteousness had drawn nigh, and the prayer of the righteous was heard, and the blood of the righteous required, before the Lord of Spirits” (cf. below, ch. Revelation 11:15 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 4:35 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 contemporary 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. lxiii. 28) told how, as Nero fled to his last retreat, during a thunderpeal the souls of his victims burst from the earth and flung themselves upon him. As the safety of the physical universe rested on the safety of the righteous, according to the Jewish notion, so any massacres of the latter at once affected the stability of the world. Hence the sequence of Revelation 6:11-12 f. There is no hint that these physical aberrations were temporary. Yet the following catastrophes (7 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 literature), or to recapitulation, or to the presence of different sources.