Revelation 9:15

This quartette of angels (= complete ruin, Zechariah 1:18 f.) has been kept in readiness, or reserved for this occasion, though they are not to be connected (as by Spitta) with the four moments of time hour, day, month, and year. Like the use of δεῖ, μέλλει, and ἐδόθη, this touch of predestined action brings out the strong providential belief running through the Apocalypse. On the rôle of destructive angels in Jewish eschatology cf. Charles on Slav. En. x. 3 and for the astrological basis (En. lxxvi. 10 f.) of this tradition see Fries in Jahrb f. d. klass. Alterth. (1902) 705 f. Probably the author means that the angels set in motion the hordes of cavalry (two hundred million) described in the semi-mythical, semi-historical pageant of the next passage. But he does not directly connect the two, and it is evident that here as at Revelation 7:1 f., we have “dream-like inconsequences” (Simcox), or else two fragments of apocalyptic tradition, originally heterogeneous, which are pieced together (at Revelation 9:16). The four angels here do not correspond in function or locality to the four unfettered angels of Revelation 7:1; they rather represent some variation of that archaic tradition in which four angels (perhaps angel-princes of the pagan hordes) were represented as bound (like winds?) at the Euphrates a geographical touch due to the history of contemporary warfare, in which the Parthians played a rôle similar to that of the Huns, the Vikings, or the Moors in later ages. Since the first century B.C. a Parthian invasion of some kind had formed part of the apocalyptic apparatus so that there is no particular need to allegorise the Euphrates into the Tiber or to find the four angels in Psalms 78:49 (LXX). The bloody and disastrous Parthian campaign of 58 62 (cf. on Revelation 6:2) may account for the heightened colour of the scene, whether the fragment was composed at that period, or (as is most probable) written with it in retrospect. But the entire vision is one powerful imaginative development of a tradition preserved in a Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra (published by Baethgen) which may be based on old Jewish materials: “and a voice was heard, Let those four kings be loosed, who are bound at the great river Euphrates, who are to destroy a third part of men. And they were loosed, and there was a mighty uproar.” Could this be reckoned as proof of an independent tradition it would help to illumine the application of the idea in John's Apocalypse, especially if one could accept with Köhler the attractive conjecture of Iselin that ἀγγέλους represents a confusion (or variety of reading, cf. 2 Samuel 11:1; 1 Chronicles 20:1) between מלאכים (= ἄγγ.) and מלכים in a Hebrew original of Revelation 9:15 (Zeits. aus der Schweis, 1887, 64). The conjecture (Spitta, de Faye, J. Weiss) ἀγέλαι (= hosts, as in Malachi 3:18; Malachi 3:18, etc.) is less likely, and in ἐπὶ cannot be taken with λῦσον (Bruston). Cavalry formed a standing feature of the final terror for the Jewish imagination ever since the Parthians loomed on the political horizon (Ass. Mos. iii. 1). The whole passage was one of those denounced by the Alogi as fantastic and ridiculous (cf. Epiph, Haer. li. 34). Gaius also criticised it as inconsistent with Matthew 24:7.