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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 16:3-4, the sea and the rivers turned to blood
The second and third bowls repeat Egypt's first plague, the Nile turned to blood, on all the sea and all the rivers and springs.
Revelation 16:3-4, in every translation this tool compares.
A disaster film that floods a whole city starts from one burst pipe. In Egypt, Aaron struck the Nile with his staff, its water became blood, and the fish died. John's second bowl turns the whole sea to blood like a corpse's, and every living thing in it dies. The third turns the rivers and springs to blood. What struck one river now strikes all the world's waters.
Water turned to blood, and the death of what lives in it. The Greek of Exodus 7:20-21 has the river's water changed into blood (eis haima) and the fish dying. Revelation 16:3 has the sea becoming blood and every living soul in it dying. In 16:4 the rivers and springs become blood.
Exodus strikes the Nile; John strikes the sea, then the rivers and springs. In Exodus the fish die; in 16:3 every living soul (psyche) dies, which Beale takes to include people who live by the sea. John adds blood like a dead man's. The second and third trumpets (8:8-11) used the same plague on a third; the bowls are total.
Beale reads the sea and waters as pictures of the ungodly world and its trade, as in 17:15, where the waters are peoples. So the bowls strike the people who live off Babylon's economy. An angel then explains the third bowl as a fitting punishment for shed blood (16:5-6).
Not a quotation of Exodus. John takes the plague, not its words. The Nile becomes the whole sea and then the rivers, and the dying fish become every living thing.
Beale says both the second trumpet and the second bowl are based on Exodus 7:17-21, where Moses turns the Nile to blood and its fish die. Philo (Life of Moses 1.100) widened that plague to the death of people, as Revelation does. The difference between trumpet and bowl is partial against total effect. Beale argues the sea stands for ungodly humanity: the many waters of 17:1 are peoples and nations (17:15), the beast rises from the sea of nations (13:1), and blood in Revelation always stands for the suffering either of the wicked or of Christ and his people. He ties the bowls to Babylon's sea trade in chapter 18. The third bowl, on rivers and springs, rests on the same plague (Exodus 7:17-21; Psalm 78:44). Keener, the ESV Study Bible, the CSB Study Bible and the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible all name the first plague on Egypt, and Wright notes that John again draws on the plagues of Egypt. The grade is drawn here: the plague is unmistakable, only its reach has grown.
Heiser follows Beale closely. The second and third bowls take readers back to the Nile turned to blood, and he cites Philo's widening of the plague to people. He then argues with Beale that the waters stand for the mass of nations opposed to God, read through his Deuteronomy 32 picture of nations under hostile spiritual powers. The target is the people who took the mark; the water is the picture.
The sources agree that the bowls repeat the Nile plague. They read the waters differently. Beale and Heiser take the sea as a picture of the ungodly world and its trade, so the blood falls on the people who bear the mark. MacArthur reads the second bowl as the world's oceans turned thick and dark like a dead man's blood, with the sea's creatures dying, and the third as fresh water spoiled the same way, so the beast's worshipers have nothing clean to drink.
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- G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (New International Greek Testament Commentary), comment on 16:3 and 16:4
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Revelation 16:3 and 16:4
- ESV Study Bible, note on Revelation 16:3
- CSB Study Bible, note on Revelation 16:3
- NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible, note on Revelation 16:3
- N. T. Wright, Revelation for Everyone, comment on Revelation 16:1-9
- Septuagint, Exodus 7:17 and 7:20-21, Interlinear Greek-English Septuagint
- SBL Greek New Testament (MorphGNT), Revelation 16:3-4
- Michael S. Heiser, Revelation 15-16: The Seven Angels, Seven Plagues, Seven Bowls of God's Wrath, video lecture (Naked Bible Revelation series)
- John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), note on Revelation 16:3 and 16:4
