Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

7:4-8
they were listening to the Apocalypse of St. John,
and not to the lucubrations of the present writer.
They were men of his own generation, they
constantly heard the Old Testament in their
assemblies, and were trained by the preacher (who
might be St. John himself) to interpret it by certain
conventions. And so, without intellectual analysis,
they would receive the symbols simply for what
they were. They would understand what they
would understand, and that would be as much as
they had time to digest.”] 10
Scholars have long puzzled over the order of the tribes
in St. John’s list. Obviously, Judah is named first
because that is the tribe of Jesus Christ; other than that,
many have supposed that the list is either haphazard
(given the Biblical writers’ – especially St. John’s –
extreme attention to detail, this is highly unlikely), or
else permanently locked in mystery (this is just sheer
arrogance; we should always remember that, if we can’t
answer a question, someone probably will come along
in the next hundred years or so who will). As usual,
however, Austin Farrer’s explanation has the most to
offer. Pointing out that the names of the twelve tribes
are written on the gates of the four-cornered New
Jerusalem (21:12), he proposes that the order of the
tribes corresponds to the order in which the gates are
listed: east, north, south, west. As we can see in the first
diagram (which, like the maps of the ancient world, is
oriented toward the east), 11 St. John begins at the
eastern corner with Judah (because the sealing angel
comes from the east, v. 2), goes through Reuben and
Gad to Asher at the north corner, then down the
northwest side with Naphtali and Manasseh; starting
over again (we’ll see why in a moment), he lists Simeon
and Levi on the southeast side to Issachar at the south,
then turns round the corner and goes through Zebulun
and Joseph, ending with Benjamin at the western
corner.
Why did St. John arrange the list of tribes in this
manner? The most likely answer (Farrer’s) is found in
Genesis and Ezekiel. The twelve tribes descended from
the twelve sons of Jacob, whom he sired through his
wives Leah and Rachel, and their respective
handmaids, Zilpah and Bilhah (legally, the handmaids’
children belonged to Leah and Rachel; see Gen. 29:31-
30:24 and 35:16-18). The list of Jacob’s sons is as
follows:
10. Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse
(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1949] 1970), pp. 20f.
11. Orient means east; thus, if you are truly “oriented ,“ you are “easted”
already, placed so that you are facing the right direction (which is usually,
but not always, east).
92