Roots and geometries in Revelations

by kepler 7 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  kepler

  Several days ago while driving across town in the car, it came in conversation that the New Jerusalem was perfect cube.

  Also, according to my source, the measure of city's dimension was quite significant of itself.

  Since beltway traffic was heavy and I was in the midst of exiting to an even more congested side road, I let most of those assertions ride. But I made a mental note to look up and read the specifics of Revelations chapter 21. From previous readings and commentaries, I was already a sceptic about whether John of the Gospel was the same author of the epistles and this final book. If I looked at words and concepts in the Gospel and Revelations, I am inclined to think that John Patmos was a wholly new influence on the course of the overall Biblical book: someone accused of a less polished Greek, pre-occupied with swords, harlots, the number seven and the the number 12, wings and mouths, codes and symbols for sure.

  21:1 - "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth..."

  21: 9- "One of the 7 angels that had the 7 bowls full of the seven final plagues came to speak to me and said, 'Come here and I will show you the bride that Lamb has married... [and] in the spirit he carried me to the top of a very high mountain and showed me Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. ...Its wall was of great heigh and had 12 gates... and over the gates were written the names of the 12 tribes of Israel... and on each of the twelve foundation stones, each one of which bore the name of the 12 apostles of the Lamb.;

  21:15 ... "The plan of the the city is perfectly square, its length the same as its breath. He measured the city with his rod and it was 12,000 furlongs [ elsewhere stadii] equal in length and breath, and equal in height."

  I think we stop for now right there, lest we start studying the diamond, gold and other jeweled furnishings. Looking at my Greek NT, it appears that the original was measured as 12,000 stadii per side. One conversion I found is 1 stadia = 607 feet.

  One modern measure of the nautical mile for astronautical measures is 6076.115484 ft or about ten stadii. It's a little obscure, but consider some other relationships with nautical miles. If the circumference of a spherical ( vs. oblate) based on a radius of 3443.934 nautical miles is 21,638,875... nautical miles, nothing immediately leaps out at you. Why should we have nautical miles at all? But what if we divide that number by 360 to get the number of nautical miles per degree of circular arc? We get 60.1 nautical miles/ degree or pretty close to 60. With stadii we get about 600.

  That there is any connection between circumference and the stadia, I do not attribute this to John of Patmos, but rather to Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes. In the third century BC working in Ptolemaic Egypt, he derived a fairly accurate terrestrial circumference by measuring differences in elevation of the sun in Alexandrian and up-river wells, doing additional work in astronomy and geography.

  I don't think John of Patmos saw stadii in this context since he describes the descent of a cubical 1200-nmi wide city onto the plains east of the mediterranean sea. Lunar radius for example is 940 nautical miles. As observed from space the New Jerusalem would be nearly as large as the moon with a point of tangency on the revolving earth somewhere around 30 degrees north. This vision would make more sense with a Flat Earth on which a perfect cube could reside like Florida's Vertical Assembly Buildind, built to about 1/12000th scale.

  This is described both as the paradise ( garden earth) and the new earth in various discussions we are aware of. Moreover, there is also a connection between the new Jerusalem and an elect of 144,000. In John's account it would appear to be an exclusive of the tribes of Israel - or at least they would have most of the reservations.

  Another problem for 144,000 elect is seating or housing.

  When you consider this number for a moment with respect to squares or cubes, you discover that the formations needed to attend to housing or seating are non-trivial.

  The square root of 144,000 is 379.473 - so I would recommend even - odd seating and a tweak or two. But when you consider that the square of 1200 nmi per side, you get 1,440,000 square miles. That's an elect population density of 0.1 per square mile and 1200 nautical miles of ceiling space.

  The cube root of 144,000 is 52.4. So that would mean a need for 52.4 housing units per side.

  No, I'm not an expert on these matters, but they do make me lean away from literal interpretations of apocalyptic writings.
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  Xanthippe

  No, I'm not an expert on these matters, but they do make me lean away from literal interpretations of apocalyptic writings.

  Good plan!
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  Londo111

  Uh oh, 607 feet!

  By measuring features of New Jerusalem, we can calculate when old Jerusalem destroyed.
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  transhuman68

  THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS (Wise, Abegg & Cook)
  12. A VISION OF THE NEW JERUSALEM
  1Q32, 2Q24, 4Q554-555, 5Q15, 11Q18

  In the year 586 B.C.E., the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, destroyed the Temple of the Lord that King Solomon had built in Jerusalem. Some of the best religious thinkers in ancient Israel, such as the prophet Jeremiah, saw in this event the welcome judgment of God on a nation that had placed too much reliance on external worship and not enough on the religion of the heart. Others equally pious, such as Ezekiel, agreed, but longed for the day when the God of Israel would restore to his people all that had been lost, giving them a new temple and temple city. Ezekiel himself contributed to this longing with a vision of a new temple and a new Jerusalem (Ezek. 40-48), but he was not alone. The book of Isaiah speaks of a new Jerusalem encrusted with jewels (54:11-12), and the book of Tobit speaks of a time when "Jerusalem and the temple of God will be rebuilt in splendor, just as the prophets have said" (14:6-7).

  The new Temple built after the Israelites returned from exile in the fifth century B.C.E. was only a modest substitute for these dreams, and those who remembered the first Temple wept when they saw the foundation laid for the new one (Ezra 3:12). There were still dreams of another, greater, temple. In the first century B.C.E., Herod the Great doubtless depended on widespread fascination with such a dream to provide popular support for his building programs within Jerusalem, including a new, magnificent Temple.

  The Qumran texts testify to this continuing fascination of the idea of a new Jerusalem with two examples: text 131, The Temple Scroll, and the present text. A Vision of the New Jerusalem, reconstructed from several scrolls, is a detailed description of a Jerusalem-to-be given by an angel to an unknown recipient, quite in the manner of Ezekiel's vision, but differing in many details. No description of the temple itself survives in the fragments, but the temple is mentioned several times.

  The dimensions of the visionary city and buildings are too large to be realistic. The city, for example, measures 140 stades on the east and the west, and 100 stades on the north and south. In modern terms these dimensions would be 18.67 miles by 13.33 miles (the stade being 2/15 of a mile). This new Jerusalem would have been larger than any ancient city and could only have been built by divine intervention, like the even larger city beheld by a later visionary in the New Testament book of Revelation (21:9-27).

  LOL, nothing in the Bible was written by divine inspiration- it is just a reflection of the dreams of many religious people of those times. John of Patmos was just drawing on current ideas.
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  mP

  kepler:

  Revelation like the rest of the Bible and much of antiquity believed in numerology and astrology. Rev is especially filled with 7 and 12 because they are symbols of heavenly perfection. The heavens contain 7 what we would call planets and a year has 12 months. Anything more or less is chaos and wrong. All the measurements and countings are nonsense, John mentions a grouping or measure and must use either 7 or 12 in some form. Thousands are a way of say much, its not a literal number.
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  kepler

  Londo111,

  This must be a cautionary tale: Here I was, I started on this rant and end up inadvertently deriving the prophetic foot-year principle - very close to my mouth. Reminiscent of the pyramid inch used to track events through the ages, it could be used to determine an arrival past - 1914.

  A word of caution, however. Unlike the BC-AD calendar, this system employs a zero. So I'll leave 1914 as a student exercise.

  Hint: To the first two decimal places Pi is .14 and 9 is divisible by 3.

  ---

  Transhuman,

  I appreciate that account of the Dead Sea scrolls. That is exactly the sort of insight many people would like to get out of them. If you could suggest a good guide or two where such matters are discussed, would be much obliged. I suspect others would appreciate as well.

  mP,

  Well, I get five objects we would call planets that the ancients could identify: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Did they double book Venus as the Evening and Morning stars back then? And the moon?... Or the sun? I think we are on the same page about ancients placing much stock in numbes such as seven, twelve and forty, but if they were vague about dimensions, they would be vague about rationales as well. Sometimes they actually did have to get specific with building plans, but then all those symbolic numbers show up all over again.

  ----
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  kepler

  Transhuman68,

  Perhaps the answer to my inquiry is the book you mentioned above ( Dead Sea Scrolls by Wise, Cook & Abegg). Nonetheless, I have found it hard to tie down what the fragments of the scrolls are telling us. And quite often the forensic discussions of their existence seem rather close mouthed about conclusions that can be drawn.

  To illustrate, here was a recent train of thought and a topic on Bible studies. I had wondered about the characterization by Josephus in the Jewish War (with Rome) of the three principal so-called parties of Jewish philosophy: the Pharisees, Saduccees and Essenes and how they contrasted with current theological beliefs. The Essenes were characterized as believing in a spiritual resurrection - and Josephus accused them of being influenced by Greek thought. Discussions of the OT references to resurrection or after life led me to the deuteronomical book Wisdom of Solomon. Written in Greek probably in the last century BC, the book clearly mentions the notions that form much of New Testament theology.

  Wisdom: 2:24 - "Death came into the world only through the Devil's envy, as those who belong to him to their cost."

  I repeat. Nothing else I see in the Old Testament connects it so closely with the New - and the Wisdom book is not even included in most of the Bibles sold. Evidently the Hellenized Greeks to which Josephus refers are based in Alexandria and are not drawing from Olympian tales or the Iliad. It's the Neo-Platonic school from the start.

  Yet on the other hand, when I look for any evidence that Qumran had a book of Wisdom in its remains, I see none.
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  transhuman68

  I don't really have a specific interest in this subject- but some of the proofs that the WTS offers as to the Bible being special is that it is so well preserved & it is unique- but the scrolls from Qumran show that is not so. It's interesting that the idea of a new Jerusalem lasted for hundreds of years- from Ezekiel & Isaiah through to John, but I guess that is to be expected in the 2nd Temple period. John's revelation on the island of Patmos doesn't seem so 'inspired' when put in the context of other extra-Biblical writing- which is all I'm interested in.