Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (9)

The word “Armageddon” has become the generic way of referring to almost any end of the world scenario. In scripture, the word only occurs once, in Revelation 16:16, which we are going to look at today.

The book of Revelation describes the biblical end of the world as revealed to the apostle John by the glorified Christ. In this prophecy, Armageddon is the place where all the major Gentile nations assemble to do battle at the climax of the great tribulation period, in which God will bring about Israel’s repentance and recognition of its Messiah while simultaneously judging the nations of the world for their various evils and mistreatment of his people.

In this last book of the Bible, John received much new revelation about the time of the end directly from the Lord, but we should not be surprised to find every word of it consistent with what the Lord said through the Old Testament prophets centuries earlier, including Zephaniah. How much John thought about the language of Zephaniah or other Old Testament prophets when writing his descriptions of what he saw is an open question. Certainly he would have been very familiar with what they foretold.

Zephaniah in the New Testament

1/ Revelation 16:14-16 is consistent with Zephaniah 3:8

In Revelation 16, John describes the seven bowl judgments of the wrath of God poured out upon the world. This is the final series of judgments, following the seven seals and seven trumpets. Verses 14-16 are concerned with bowl number six:

“The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east. And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs. For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty. (‘Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!’) And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

The setting is manifestly future; nothing remotely on this scale has ever occurred in this world’s history. John does not draw his language precisely from Zephaniah’s prophecy (he uses a different Greek word for “assemble” than the Septuagint text of Zephaniah), but it is abundantly clear both passages speak of the same time and place. Zephaniah wrote: “ ‘Therefore wait for me,’ declares the Lord, ‘for the day when I rise up to seize the prey. For my decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out upon them my indignation, all my burning anger; for in the fire of my jealousy all the earth shall be consumed.’ ”

Linear or Repeating?

When I was younger, I assumed the three sets of judgments in Revelation were linear, following one after another in time. Further study has me considering the possibility that the seals, trumpets and bowls are different views of the same events, though I’m far from convinced at this point. Comparing the sixth bowl with the sixth seal and sixth trumpet is interesting, if not conclusive:

The Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12-17): “When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’ ”

The Sixth Trumpet (Revelation 9:13-19): “Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, ‘Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.’ So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind. The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number. And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths. By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents with heads, and by means of them they wound.”

The sixth bowl and sixth trumpet certainly have more in common with one another than either has with the sixth seal, not least the gathering of armies for battle in Israel and the connection with the great river Euphrates. Beyond that, I’m open to further enlightenment on the subject. All the interpretations I’ve come across of these passages in Revelation have their difficulties, some more than others.

Armageddon

The word “Armageddon” is actually a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Har Məgīddō, which scholars most frequently associate with the “Megiddon” referenced in Zechariah.

I have always had difficulty with the location traditionally assigned to this terminal conflict, especially the notion of limiting it to the Megiddo area, which is actually 55 miles northwest of Jerusalem as the crow flies, and a full 66 miles on existing roads. Joel speaks twice about the Lord gathering the nations for judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, adjacent to Jerusalem, and Zechariah refers to a “siege of Jerusalem” itself. How do we reconcile the traditional view of a climactic battle taking place more than an hour’s drive from Jerusalem with these very specific scriptures, given the logistics of moving massive numbers of troops from multiple nations in a hostile country? As a younger man, I didn’t have an answer.

To eliminate the apparent difficulties, J. Dwight Pentecost proposed that we view Armageddon as a lengthy campaign rather than a single battle, perhaps as long as three and a half years. That gets rid of the geographic conflicts, but it makes Armageddon less of a climactic tilt than any of the prophets appear to describe. Further, I don’t think it’s a necessary concession.

Megiddo or Jerusalem?

Michael Heiser solves the problem by rethinking the meaning of Armageddon:

“The correct (Hebrew) term John uses to describe the climactic end-times battle is harmagedon. This spelling becomes significant when we try to discern what this Hebrew term means. The first part of the term (har) is easy. In Hebrew har means “mountain.” Our term is therefore divisible into har-magedon, ‘Mount (of) magedon.’ The question is, what is magedon?

Two options have historically been offered for answering this question. The first is the traditional ‘Megiddo,’ which I mentioned at the start. The meaning of the phrase would be ‘Mount Megiddo.’ Many well-meaning Bible teachers accept this phrase after looking at pictures of Megiddo. The problem is that this is an archaeological tell — an artificial mound created by successive layers of building and occupation over millennia. It is not a natural formation. It is not a mountain, and there are no mountains in the entire region.”

Heiser’s right. Pictures of Megiddo today show nothing remotely resembling a mountain. Megiddo is barely a hillock. Heiser resolves the apparent contradiction this way:

“It is crystal clear that the final conflict occurs at Jerusalem, not Megiddo. Megiddo is referenced only to compare the awful mourning that will result. Not only does Zechariah 12 place the final battle where the nations see the risen, pierced Christ at Jerusalem, but verse 11 tells us explicitly that Megiddo is a plain, not a mountain! So where does this leave us? Does magedon point to Jerusalem? It would seem that it has to, in light of (1) the term har-magedon, which describes this final battle, and (2) Zechariah 12:9-11, which plainly sites the conflict at Jerusalem.”

Heiser then goes through a series of steps in the Hebrew to demonstrate that rather than referencing Mount Megiddo, the Hebrew consonants transliterated in Revelation actually do point to the city of Jerusalem. He finishes this way:

“Armageddon is a battle for all the supernatural and earthly marbles at Jerusalem. Megiddo doesn’t fit the profile in any way.”

Mountains and Molehills

Reconciling all the apparent difficulties in the prophetic scriptures concerning the final judgment of the nations when the Lord gathers them to battle is already complex enough without introducing squabbles about the etymology of a word that only appears once in the entire Bible. I am always grateful for scholarship that points us back to the explicit statements of scripture, as Heiser does here, rather than technical arguments that require the English reader to literally make a mountain out of a molehill.

In any case, this gathering of the nations would seem to be the only obvious allusion to Zephaniah’s prophecy in the entire New Testament.

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Photo of Megiddo courtesy Anagoria, CC BY 3.0