Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation Read Free

nothing, grieving until I die.” Startled by her desperation, Ezra says, “I dismissed the thoughts with which I had been engaged, and turned to her and sought to console her.” To stop her from killing herself, he rebukes her and offers hope: “If you acknowledge God’s decree to be just, you will receive your son back in due time”—presumably, in the “age to come,” in eternity. 23
    Like John of Patmos, Ezra says that he began writing his revelation in anguish, since the horrors he had witnessed during the war with Rome had shattered his faith. Yet although
intellectually
he had refused to accept what he heard about divine justice, his narrative shows that somehow he had internalized it. The scholar Michael Stone suggests that the author here alludes to a powerful experience of conversion, having found that he could console others only
after
he had put aside some of his own grief, along withthe questions that had preoccupied him. 24 When he turned to console a heartbroken woman, he found himself speaking of God’s justice, and even God’s love, discovering within himself resources of compassion that released some of his own bitterness.
    Suddenly, Ezra says, he saw the woman’s face turn radiant and flash like lightning: “I was too frightened to approach her … then she suddenly uttered a loud and terrifying cry.” 25 Aghast, he watched her vanish and then transform into a great city. He fell unconscious, and he says that when he came to, an angel helped him to stand and revealed that the grieving woman was actually his beloved Jerusalem, who, after being ravaged by the horrors of war and having mourned for her dead children, was transformed into the new and glorious city of Zion, which John, too, claimed to have seen.
    Ezra’s account of loss becomes, then, a vision that finally encompasses the devastation—and hope for healing—of a whole nation. The following night, he receives a terrifying vision of Rome, “the fourth kingdom which appeared in a vision to your brother Daniel.” Drawing upon Daniel’s prophecy, just as John had, Ezra sees Rome as a monstrous beast rising from the sea and as an enormous eagle with three heads, showing that this empire is “headed” by three rulers, apparently alluding to the three emperors who destroyed Jerusalem—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, the latter still reigning as he writes. Thus Ezra, like John, expresses anger over Israel’s destruction and longs for God to set things right as he looks forward to the day when God’s messiah casts Israel’s oppressors into a fiery pit, raises the righteous back to life, and reigns in the new Jerusalem.
    John of Patmos had ended his revelations there—in judgment,fire, and glory—but Ezra turns from these, hoping for still more exalted inspiration. Imagining that the pagan nations had burned and destroyed Israel’s Torah and Scriptures, the prophet asks the Holy Spirit to inspire him so that he might restore revelation to the human race. Following instructions he receives in a vision, he goes back to the field, this time bringing piles of writing tablets and five expert scribes:
    And on the next day, behold, a voice called to me, saying, “Ezra, open your mouth, and drink what I give you to drink.” Then I opened my mouth, and behold a cup was offered to me, full of something like water … but its color was like fire. And I took it and drank; and when I had drunk it, my heart poured forth understanding, and wisdom increased in my breast, and my spirit retained its memory; and my mouth was opened. 26
     
    Seeing the spirit as divine intoxication, Ezra says that inspired words now poured forth from him, so that “during forty days, ninety-four books were written.” The first twenty-four, he says, turned out to be the traditional twenty-four books of the Hebrew Scriptures, which the Lord told him to publish for everyone to read. But Ezra says that he was told to keep secret the
seventy
books that followed and