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Echoes of Revelation
Revelation never quotes the Old Testament outright, yet no New Testament book refers to it more. See both texts side by side, why they don’t match, and what John does with them.
Revelation 1:12, turned to see the voice
John turns to see a voice, an odd phrase that may carry on the Sinai echo, where the people saw the voice.
Revelation 1:12, in every translation this tool compares.
When a writer uses an odd turn of phrase, readers who know the old book catch where it came from. John says he turned to see the voice. You cannot see a voice. But at Mount Sinai, in the Greek Old Testament, the people saw the voice and the trumpet's sound. John may be keeping up the Sinai picture from verse 10.
The verb see with the noun voice. John has blepein ten phonen; the Greek of Exodus 20:18 has heora ten phonen, the people perceived the voice.
At Sinai the whole people see the voice and are afraid. John alone turns to see it. English Bibles of Exodus 20:18 read thunderings, since the Hebrew word can mean sounds or voices. The Greek translation chose voice, and John's phrase matches the Greek.
If the echo is meant, John's vision opens like Sinai, the place where God spoke his word to his people. Beale reads it as part of John's claim to speak with a prophet's authority.
Not a certain link. It may simply be a way of saying John turned toward the speaker. Beale himself calls that reading possible.
Beale offers two readings. The phrase may be a metonymy, the voice for the speaker. He also notes the Greek of Daniel 7:11 has the prophet attending to a voice, though there it is the boasting of God's enemy. He finds Exodus 20:18 more relevant: in the Greek, the people at Sinai see the voice and the trumpet's sound; after the allusion to Exodus 19 in 1:10, he reads the seeing of a voice as a continuation of it. Philo, Decalogue 46-47, stresses that the voice at Sinai was visible. Ezekiel 3:12-13 in Greek also has the prophet behold the voice of the creatures' wings. The CSB Study Bible's cross-reference at 1:12 points to Exodus 20:18. The grade is possible: the wording is close, but the phrase is short and could arise on its own.
Beale lists Daniel 7:11 in Greek as a possible unconscious borrowing, and Exodus 20:18 as the more relevant source. Thomas, as Beale reports, takes it as a simple figure of speech for the speaker.
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- G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (New International Greek Testament Commentary), comment on 1:12 and 1:13-15, and introduction, Contextual and Noncontextual Use
- CSB Study Bible, cross-references at Revelation 1:12
- Septuagint, Exodus 20:18, Interlinear Greek-English Septuagint
- SBL Greek New Testament (MorphGNT), Revelation 1:12
