Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

Revelation 4 is the well know scene of the Lamb of God, the heavenly throne, and the 24 elders.

Less well known is the fact that this scene and its elements have a specific Old Testament context: the covenant lawsuit genre.

There is a strong scholarly consensus about the covenant lawsuit elements, and its use in divine council scenes in the Old Testament.

Once such scene is Daniel 7:9-28, where the text specifically describes multiple thrones in a heavenly council (“court”), assembled to render judgment (Dan 7:9-10).

Revelation 4 has more than a dozen parallels to Daniel 7, presented in the same order.

This episode introduces us to the covenant lawsuit genre as the backdrop to Revelation 4.

Introduction

Today we’re going to do Revelation 4. It’s only Part 1.

You know, we’re going to hit stretches like this, too, where there’s just something that’s sort of lurking behind the backdrop of a chapter or that we have to sort of cover first, and that’s going to set up some of the drill down stuff.

So today, we’re going to look at Revelation 4 and get our feet wet there.

And again, what we’re doing in this series is it’s all about the use (the repurposing) of the Old Testament in the book of Revelation.

And today we’re going to see how John repurposes an Old Testament genre, and that is called (in Old Testament scholarship) “the covenant lawsuit genre.”

Covenant Lawsuit Genre

It’s also known as “the covenant lawsuit treaty.”

So there’s a lot of scholarship behind this.

There’s a pretty solid consensus of scholarship, in fact, that Revelation 4-5 is a Divine Council scene that utilizes features of the covenant lawsuit genre from the Old Testament.

So today, we want to be talking about what that genre is, what are the elements.

And once we go through the elements, you’re going to kind of see, if you think about Revelation 4-5, that, “yeah, the chapter does kind of unfold in this particular way.”

And that’s going to inform certain items in these chapters— basically, how to read them, or “this is the Old Testament bigger picture and here’s what the passage is accomplishing.”

And then there’s this other thing over here that’s a little more nuanced, or we’ll drill down into a specific passage that John might use or repurpose in Part 2. So this episode is going to be fairly broad.

Sources

I’m going to be interacting with (using) three sources here.

They’re all dissertations and they’ve all been since revised in some way and published into expensive books.

So I’m going to be using the dissertations.

But Bandy’s dissertation is one of these.

Bandy’s dissertation was entitled The Prophetic Lawsuit in the Book of Revelation.

This is his PhD dissertation from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007.

He is going to reference an older dissertation.

He references a number of works.

But one of them is a dissertation by R. Dean Davis.

And the title of that one was The Heavenly Court Scene of Revelation 4-5.

This was a PhD dissertation done at Andrews University in 1987.

And the third source that I’ll draw on is Meira Z. Kensky.

Her dissertation was Trying Man, Trying God: The Divine Courtroom in Early Jewish and Christian Literature.

This was her University of Chicago dissertation from 2009.

And I should add that her work actually includes a chapter on rabbinic literature, too, even though the title doesn’t make that completely evident.

Because when you see “Early Jewish” you think Second Temple Judaism, not Rabbinics, but she actually has a chapter on Rabbinics as well.

So I’m going to be interacting with all three of these to sort of explain, “What is the covenant lawsuit genre and how does it show up in Revelation 4-5?”

And to be honest with you, there are people that would argue that the whole book of Revelation draws on this genre in a number of respects.

We’ll drift off into that a little bit.

But we’re going to maintain our focus here on these two chapters.

The Prophetic Lawsuit in the book of Revelation

So I want to start with Bandy’s dissertation.

He is going to, as the title indicates (The Prophetic Lawsuit in the book of Revelation)… His dissertation’s not isolated to chapters 4 and 5.

So in his dissertation he’s going to show how the prophetic lawsuit (this covenant lawsuit genre) is utilized and repurposed in various places in the book of Revelation.

So what he does in his dissertation is he begins with discussing all the literature that has gone before (the work that has been put into the prophetic lawsuit genre) and then noting specifically writers as well that dip into the book of Revelation for this here and there.

And then his work’s really going to expand on the theme and really give it concerted attention, specifically in the book of Revelation.

So he goes through in his introduction lots of different approaches to this.

So it’s very evident that there’s some kind of covenant or treaty or lawsuit background.

When you hear “lawsuit,” think a courtroom scene.

Bandy points out, scholars have noticed this for a very long time.

The only question is, “Which genre or which ancient Near Eastern genre or examples are the best ones to really understand what’s going on here?”

So he goes through all these different options in his early chapter and he notes strengths and weaknesses of a bunch of them.

For instance, when he veers into Revelation, he refers to David Chilton’s work.

Chilton is (or was—I presume he’s still living)… His book that Bandy spends a lot of time on is The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation, which was 1987, so it’s not that old.

But anyway, Chilton is sort of in the Christian theological arena.

Eschatologically, he’s a preterist (that it is all history).

In that arena (Christians who do eschatology), he’s one of the few that really spent a lot of time on this covenant framework for the book of Revelation.

So Bandy spends a lot of time talking about Chilton (strengths and weaknesses, some critiques here and there).

One of his critiques of Chilton is that he depends a lot on Meredith Kline’s articulation of covenant elements that we should be paying attention to.

And you know, Kline wrote earlier than the 1980s and so some of that work is going to suffer because it hasn’t been brought up to date.

This is just a chronological issue.

But to be more specific, on page 38, Bandy writes this:

The five points of the covenant structure [MH: according to Chilton] include (1) a preamble to identify the king;

(2) a historical prologue;

(3) ethical stipulations (i.e., the terms of the covenant);

(4) sanctions (outlining blessings and cursing) ; and

(5) succession arrangements dealing with future generations.

And so when he talks about how Chilton views the backdrop of the book of Revelation as essentially a lawsuit against Israel (against Jerusalem), that’s going to lead him in a certain direction in interpreting the book that fits really nicely in the preterist camp.

Bandy writes:

Chilton views the covenant lawsuit describing the “last days of the covenantal nation of Israel,” which was fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

And then he writes [:

Chilton’s approach, however, differs from most scholars in that he arrives at the lawsuit through his covenant framework for Revelation instead of through the occurrences of juridical language and imagery.

This results, in part, from the fact that his commentary is an exposition of the English text rather than the Greek.

Likewise, Chilton argues that Revelation does not contain a prophetic lawsuit, but that it is a lawsuit based on the five point structure of an Ancient Near Eastern Covenant [from Kline].

The problem with his thesis is that he overstates his case for the covenant framework serving as the structure for Revelation.

Then elsewhere, he says:

To say that the entire Book of Revelation intentionally follows the structure of ANE vassal treaties proves difficult to validate.

Let me just stop there.

So what Bandy’s going to do is say, “Look, there’s a better option than what Kline was doing.

Not all the book of Revelation is a covenant or belongs in a covenant structure.

But various parts of the book of Revelation do construct scenes like they’re lawsuit scenes (courtroom scenes).”

Revelation 4-5 is the most prominent of these.

So he’s going to say, “An approach like Chilton’s is a bit exaggerated.”

So I bring up Chilton because he is in the Christian orbit.

We’re should be familiar with Chilton.

And they’re going to think that covenant lawsuit backdrop to the book of Revelation is Chilton.

That’s not really the case.

What Chilton was doing is something a little bit different.

And again, Bandy’s going through a whole bunch of people, but I picked Chilton because he’s going to be familiar to a lot of people in the audience.

So plusses and minuses, just like everything else.

One of the things he likes about Chilton is that, for instance:

insight that the four series of seven judgments [in the book of Revelation are] based on Leviticus 26 warrants serious consideration.

That’s going to show up later in the book in some of the specific things we see in the book of Revelation.

So again, there are important things here that a writer like Chilton and those who follow him are going to be tracking on.

But that is not what we’re going to do today.

That is not what we mean by the covenant lawsuit genre.

It’s bigger than what Meredith Kline wrote.

It’s bigger than what Chilton wrote.