Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
The seven thunders in Revelation 10:4 are a hidden code waiting to be cracked
John was told point-blank not to write down what the seven thunders said: there's nothing encoded in the text to decode, because the words were never recorded.
Revelation 10:4, in every translation this tool compares.
In Revelation 10, a mighty angel comes down, plants one foot on the sea and one on the land, and calls out, and when he does, "the seven thunders sounded" (Revelation 10:3). John says he was about to write down what they said, meaning the thunders spoke something intelligible, not random noise. Then a voice from heaven stops him: "Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down" (Revelation 10:4). That single line has generated a long history of people trying to guess or reconstruct what got said. Heiser treats that whole hunt as a category error.
Thunder elsewhere functions as the voice of God: Psalm 29 repeats "the voice of the LORD" seven times over the waters, and the Sinai theophany in Exodus pairs God's voice with thunder. So the seven thunders are best read as a complete, sevenfold divine utterance, real content, not gibberish. What makes the moment striking is that it inverts how Revelation normally works. Later in the book John is told the opposite, "do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book" (Revelation 22:10), which itself reverses Daniel, who was told to seal his visions "until the time of the end" (Daniel 12:4, 9). Revelation generally presents itself as the unsealed apocalypse, the one book where the end-time secrets are finally out in the open. The seven thunders are the one deliberate exception to that pattern.
The point isn't that the content is hidden somewhere for a sharp enough reader to dig out. John was told not to write it, full stop, which means, as far as the text is concerned, there is nothing left to recover. The instinct to speculate about what the thunders said misses what the moment is doing: reminding the reader that God hasn't revealed everything, that some of his counsel stays his own, and that a book largely built around unveiling mysteries still draws a line it won't cross. Trying to crack the code doesn't just waste time, it runs directly against what the passage is telling the reader to do.
