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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 21:16, its length, width and height are equal
The city is a perfect cube, like the inner sanctuary of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 6:20, and square like Ezekiel's holy area.
Revelation 21:16, in every translation this tool compares.
When a family makes the whole house the room where the guests of honor sit, everyone gets the best seat. Solomon's temple had one inner room that was a perfect cube, the most holy place, where God's presence was. Only the high priest could enter, once a year. Ezekiel's temple area was square. John's city is square too, but it is also a cube. The whole city has the shape of the most holy place.
A square (tetragonos) measured by length and breadth, from Ezekiel 45:2 and 48:20 in Greek. Length, breadth and height all equal, as in the inner sanctuary of 1 Kings 6:20.
Ezekiel's sanctuary is square on the ground, and he never measures a height. John adds height and makes the city a cube. Solomon's inner room was twenty cubits each way; John's city is twelve thousand stadia, about fifteen hundred miles. No Old Testament text makes a whole city the shape of the inner sanctuary; that step is John's.
The cube says the city is the most holy place. Keener reads it as God's presence with his people at full strength, always. Beale adds that the high priest alone once stood there; now all God's people do. That is why, in 21:22, John sees no temple: the whole city already is one.
Not Ezekiel's square alone. Ezekiel's holy area is square. John's city is a cube, equal in length, width and height, like the inner room of Solomon's temple.
Beale traces the square to Ezekiel 45:2-3, where the holy area is tetragonos and measured by length and width, and to Ezekiel 41:21, 43:16 and 48:20 in Greek, where the same word is used of the temple, the altar and the holy allotment. Ezekiel 40:5 measures breadth and height equal, a source for 21:17. Revelation reads he polis tetragonos keitai … to mekos kai to platos kai to hypsos autes isa estin. Beale says the equal length, breadth and height echo the inner sanctuary of 1 Kings 6:20, and that the high priest's breastpiece was also tetragonos, measured by length and breadth (Exodus 28:16). Some Jewish traditions, Keener and Beale note, expected the new Jerusalem to grow huge, reading Isaiah 54:2 and Ezekiel 41:7; Baba Bathra 75b makes it twelve miles high. Keener, the ESV Study Bible and the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible all cite 1 Kings 6:20. The grade is drawn here: the equal three dimensions point to one room, but no wording is shared.
Heiser, reading Keener, says the city is not merely square but a cube, recalling the most holy place. The whole city is like a temple and like its holiest room. A city fifteen hundred miles high defies literalism, he says. With Beale and McDonough he reads God's glory, once kept in the back room of the temple, as now filling the whole new creation.
Beale also weighs a minority view that the city is a pyramid, like a Babylonian ziggurat, which would set it against Babylon; he does not adopt it. Keener, the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible and Heiser read the dimensions as symbolic, and Keener notes that no one could breathe at that height. The ESV Study Bible allows that they may be literal. MacArthur takes them as real: about two million square miles of ground, room for all the saints, in the shape of the most holy place.
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- G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (New International Greek Testament Commentary), comment on 21:16-17 and 21:18-20
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Revelation 21:16
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on Revelation 21:16
- ESV Study Bible, note on Revelation 21:15-17
- NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible, note on Revelation 21:16
- Septuagint, Ezekiel 45:2, Interlinear Greek-English Septuagint
- SBL Greek New Testament (MorphGNT), Revelation 21:16
- Michael S. Heiser, Revelation 21-22: The New Heaven and the New Earth, video lecture (Naked Bible Revelation series)
- John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), note on Revelation 21:16
