God's Timetable [Hardcover]

Sets of seven. 666. The Whore of Babylon and the Seven-headed Beast. How would first-century readers have heard these things? One can get at an answer by asking, How does the Book of Revelation compare with contemporaneous Jewish apocalypses? God's Timetable unlocks the hitherto unseen Jewish background to the Apocalypse based on the seven weeks leading up to Pentecost, the Harvest Feast. The meaning of Revelation suddenly becomes clearer. Stramara situates the Book of Revelation in its original context as a prophetic work regarding the end of the world, the final harvest, and Jesus as the fulfillment of expectations. --Daniel Stramara whirls his way through Revelation, imaginatively unfolding a complex web of intriguing possibilities to argue that Revelation draws from liturgical lections associated with the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). Read along--it's certainly a fun ride. --Warren Carter Professor of New Testament Brite Divinity School --Daniel F. Stramara, in his engaging new work, God's Timetable, sheds light on many of the exegetical enigmas in the book of Revelation. Stramara reads Revelation within the liturgical context of the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost (Shavu'ot), a festival whose apocalyptic significance is attested by other important Jewish writings of John's time. Ultimately, Stramara's work reveals a community very much at home in the world of first century Judaism.-- --Paul B. Duff Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies The George Washington University --As strange as it may seem, some two millennia after the writing of the Book of Revelation we now have a work that provides an original and convincing account of the meaning of the last book of the Bible. In this blockbuster, Daniel Stramara deciphers some of the most mysterious and puzzling images in Revelation. Carefully grounded in Jewish and Christian scholarship, God's Timetable will be a standard against which future works on Revelation will be measured.-- --Wilburn T. Stancil Professor of Theol'