The Bowls Bring the Conflict to Its Appointed Gathering

Since 15:8 has closed the temple to everyone, the great voice from inside it can only be God’s own. “Go your ways” is simply hypagete, “go”. The bowls will strike in the same order as the trumpets: earth, sea, rivers, sun, darkness, Euphrates, and the last.

“Noisome and grievous” is kakon kai poneron, “bad and evil”; in 1611 “noisome” meant harmful, not smelly. “Sore” is helkos, the word for the boils of the sixth plague of Egypt (Exodus 9:9–11) and for “the botch of Egypt” threatened in Deuteronomy 28:27.

“Living soul” is the phrase of Genesis 1:20–21 for the creatures the waters were told to bring forth. The sea that teemed with living souls on the fifth day of creation is now emptied of them. Blood “of a dead man” is thick and clotted, not flowing.

Moses was told to stretch his rod “upon their streams, upon their rivers, and upon their ponds, and upon all their pools of water, that they may become blood” (Exodus 7:19). No fraction limits it this time: the fresh water, all of it, becomes blood.

The best Greek text reads “which art, and wast, the Holy One”, with no future clause, as in 11:17. The King James’s “and shalt be” comes from a conjecture by Theodore Beza, printed without manuscript support. The words themselves echo Psalm 119:137, “Righteous art thou, O LORD, and upright are thy judgments”.

Isaiah 49:26 promised the oppressors of Zion, “they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine”. The principle is older, Genesis 9:6, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”. Saints and prophets are named together as those whose blood cries out.

The Greek says literally “I heard the altar say”: the altar itself speaks, the altar under which the souls cried “How long?” in 6:10. Its answer is nai, “Yes”, and its words are the same as the martyrs’ address, “true”, now applied to the judgments they asked for.

The fourth trumpet darkened a third of the sun; the fourth bowl makes the sun fiercer. “Power was given unto him” may refer to the sun itself, treated as an agent. The redeemed of 7:16 were promised that the sun would not strike them; here it strikes those outside that promise.

“Great heat” is kauma mega, the scorching heat the redeemed were promised shelter from in 7:16. After the earthquake of 11:13 the survivors “gave glory to the God of heaven”, and the angel of 14:7 called for exactly that; here the same words appear with a “not” before them.

“Seat” is thronos, the throne the dragon gave the beast in 13:2. The darkness recalls the ninth plague, “darkness which may be felt” (Exodus 10:21). “Gnawed” is masaomai, found only here in the New Testament: people chewing their tongues in agony.

“The God of heaven” is the title under which the frightened remnant gave glory in 11:13; here the same title is cursed. The sores of the first bowl are still on them. The phrase “repented not of their deeds” closes the fifth bowl as “repented not of the works of their hands” closed the sixth trumpet (9:20).

Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC by diverting the Euphrates and marching his army along the riverbed into the city (Herodotus 1.191). Isaiah 44:27–28 had joined the two: “That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers: That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd”. “The east” is literally “the rising of the sun”.

Frogs were the second plague of Egypt, swarming into houses and beds (Exodus 8:3), and creatures of the waters without fins and scales were unclean (Leviticus 11:10). This is the first time the second beast is called “the false prophet”, a title he keeps from here on (19:20; 20:10).

“Miracles” is semeia, signs, the word used of the false prophet’s deceptions in 13:13. “The battle” has the article, “the war”, a war already expected, and the same phrase gathers Gog and Magog in 20:8. “That great day” recalls Joel 2:11, “the day of the LORD is great and very terrible”.

The Mishnah describes the temple guard at night: if the captain found a Levite asleep at his post, he could beat him or set fire to his clothes (Middot 1:2), sending him away shamed. This is the book’s third beatitude, and it breaks into the gathering of the kings without warning, in the first person.

The best Greek text reads “they gathered them”, the spirits being the ones who gather. Megiddo commands the valley of Jezreel, where Deborah and Barak defeated Sisera “by the waters of Megiddo” (Judges 5:19) and where King Josiah fell to Pharaoh Necho (2 Kings 23:29). Zechariah 12:11 remembers the great mourning “in the valley of Megiddon”.

The air is the domain of “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), and the last bowl is poured into it. “It is done” is a single Greek word, gegonen, a perfect tense. The same word is spoken again from the throne in 21:6, when all things have been made new.

“Such as was not since men were upon the earth” echoes Daniel 12:1, “a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation”, and the plague of hail in Exodus 9:24, “such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation”.

The cup is described by stacking two words for anger: literally “the cup of the wine of the fury of his wrath”. In 14:8 Babylon made the nations drink the wine of her passion; now the cup comes back to her. The three parts of the city are not explained.

“Fled” anticipates the great white throne, when “the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them” (20:11). At the sixth seal islands were moved out of their places (6:14); now they cannot be found at all.

A talent was a weight of roughly a hundred pounds. Hail fell on Egypt in the seventh plague (Exodus 9:24), and the great stones from heaven killed more Amorites than Israel’s swords did (Joshua 10:11). Josephus says Roman catapults at the siege of Jerusalem hurled stones of a talent’s weight (Jewish War 5.270).