Reading Revelation in Context: John’s Apocalypse and Second Temple Judaism ed. by Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (review)

Finally, a book that construes the “context” of Revelation to be early Judaism rather than the Greco-Roman emperor cult—and at an introductory level no less! This slim paperback consists of twenty individually authored chapters of about seven pages each. The authors are both junior and tenured scholars at a variety of seminaries and universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In lucid, engaging prose, each author introduces a section of Revelation intriguing or challenging for its symbolism or drama, then turns to a portion of an early Jewish text that offers some interpretive illumination, offering a helpful literary summary of the passage in its context rather than a complete translation. (Among the sources used, the Enochic corpus and 4 Ezra predominate, but even Joseph and Aseneth and Apocalypse of Zephaniah make appearances). Then the chapter returns to the particular passage or chapter of Revelation to show how the early Jewish text might provide context. Each chapter then offers a quite good bibliography of further relevant ancient texts as well as critical scholarship. In service of its pedagogical function, the book includes a glossary and indexes of ancient texts, subjects, and secondary authors. In structure, style, and perspective the chapters contribute to a useful whole, and so I am treating Reading Revelation in Context as a whole rather than as a collection of independently conceived studies.

Of course, with twenty different contributors (including the three editors), chapters will necessarily vary in terms of insight, imagination, and confessional interests. But what is most impressive about this book is its significant departure from the “parallelomania” of generations past, when Jewish materials would be taken out of context as primitive foils for Christian ideas. In this book scholars “read the Parables of Enoch alongside Revelation 1” (p. 43, italics added) or read “4 Ezra with the two witnesses narrative” of Revelation 11 (p. 103, italics added), or they find that “Revelation 20:1–15 moves in the stream of [Book of the Watchers’] exegetical tradition” (p. 161, italics added). To be sure, in a volume meant for seminarians, the early Jewish texts do occasionally end up positioned as ethically or theologically inferior: the Epistle of Enoch, “which makes no accommodation for repentance for rich sinners,” unlike Revelation (p. 50), and Revelation’s “radical redefinition of the ‘holy’ people of God . . . [as] no longer a matter of bloodline,” as Testament of Levi holds (p. 57, an old supersessionist canard). But these sorts of confessional asides, like the “Amen!” that oddly punctuates the conclusion of chap. 4, are few and far between, and the secular or non-Christian reader need not be on guard for such statements. (The regular use of “Old Testament,” however, will be more irritating to many contemporary readers.)

These features are excusable because the book, in its introductory format, is really quite unusual for emphasizing early Jewish literature for the context of Revelation. (Much contemporary work on Revelation focuses on a Roman imperial context and often reimagines the ancient book as a cri de coeur against colonialism and capitalism.) The use of Jewish materials for the religious context of Revelation is clearly heir to the work of Richard Bauckham, who is cited in many of the chapters. And of course an instructor could certainly supplement this book with others that emphasize Revelation’s anti-Roman attitudes: Christopher Frilingos’s Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation (Divinations; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) is especially good in this regard. But beyond simply highlighting Jewish context, Reading Revelation in Context presents the extracanonical resources—Enochic texts, 4 Ezra, Jubilees, and so on—in particularly inviting terms. Unlike in many introductions to Second Temple Jewish writings, the texts are here described and sections summarized in a way that would inspire a student to want to read...