07.05 - WHITE ROBES AND PALMS.

5. WHITE ROBES AND PALMS.

“After these things I saw, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in their hands; and they cry with a great voice, saying, Salvation unto our God which sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb.” So does the early Christian seer depict those who have been made perfect, who have come out of the great tribulation, and now serve God day and night in His temple. Few Bible passages have taken such hold of the everyday Christian consciousness, few have been inscribed so hopefully on the impassive tombstone, as these chaste verses from the mysterious final pages of the Holy Book. So deeply have they entered into the sphere of religious ideas, that, generally speaking, we are not struck by the thought, how eloquent of ancient days is the colouring of the artist who created the picture. The inner beauty of the thought keeps in abeyance any impression which its form might suggest; the captivated spirit even of the modern man readily and unconstrainedly accepts the unaccustomed scenery, which yet has its proper place only under the eternal blue of the eastern sky, or in the serene halls of an ancient temple. The pious Christian of the times of decadence did not depict things to come in the forms of the pitiful present; he saw them rather in the crystal mirror of the authoritative past. The exegetes of Revelation 7:9 ff. have striven, in widely divergent ways, to explain the peculiar colouring of this celestial scenery. How does it come about that the adornment of the blessed choir of the saints before the throne of God should be portrayed exactly as it is? The explanation of the individual elements provides no difficulty.¹²⁵³ The white robes, of course, according to the bold symbolism of the text itself, are connected with the cleansing power of the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 7:14); and, even without this special reference, they have already a distinct and well-known sense (see Revelation 6:11). Again, the expression palms in their hands is familiar to the reader of the Bible as a sign of festive joy. Attempts have been made to supply a more definite background for this latter feature, now from Jewish, now from Hellenic, ideas. On the one hand, the palms have been looked upon as suggesting a comparison of the heavenly glory with the Feast of Tabernacles; on the other, they have been taken as an allusion to the palm-twigs bestowed upon the victor in the Greek games. We would not deny that such explanations, so far as concerns the details of a picture which is not after all so difficult to grasp, are quite adequate. But they do not elucidate the scene in its entirety. How did the writer come to bring together precisely these two features? And how comes it that both are assigned to the choir of the blessed, which, in alternate song with the angels, raises a hallelujah to the Most High? If we knew of no historical circumstance which might suggest an answer to these questions, we might naturally enough infer that the writer of the Apocalypse had himself composed his picture from diverse elements. But we are of opinion that there are good grounds for the supposition that the portrayer of the πανήγυριςἐπουράνοις had availed himself of the scenery of a religious ceremony with which he was familiar. In the Inscription of Stratonicea in Caria (already mentioned several times), belonging to the beginning of the imperial period,¹²⁵⁴ the inhabitants of the city, out of gratitude to Zeus Panhemerios and Hekate, resolve that, in honour of these deities, thirty boys of noble parentage, under the leadership of the παιδονόμος and the παιδοφύλακες, shall daily sing a prescribed hymnus in the bouleuterion—clothed in white and crowned with a twig, likewise holding a twig in their hands. This custom would hardly be inaugurated by the piety of the people of Stratonicea; such choirs of sacred singers, similarly accoutred, were, without doubt, also to be seen elsewhere in the Greek districts of Asia Minor.Here, then, in all probability, we have the model by which the writer of the Apocalypse was consciously or unconsciously guided; and those belonging to Asia Minor who read his book—a book full of the local colour of that region —would grasp his imagery with special facility. What they beheld in heaven was something that had, by association with their native soil, become familiar and dear to them—a choir of pious singers in festive attire; and if they had an ear to hear what the Spirit said to the churches, they could also, of course, surmise that in this instance what came from holy lips was a new song. THE END.