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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Revelation 21:2 - 21:2
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
And I John - “John” is omitted in A, B, Vulgate, Syriac, Coptic, and Andreas; also the “I” in the Greek of these authorities is not emphatic. The insertion of “I John” in the Greek would somewhat interfere with the close connection which subsists between “the new heaven and earth,” Rev 21:1, and the “new Jerusalem” in this verse.
Jerusalem ... out of heaven - (Rev 3:12; Gal 4:26, “Jerusalem which is above”; Heb 11:10; Heb 12:22; Heb 13:14). The descent of the new Jerusalem out of heaven is plainly distinct from the earthly Jerusalem in which Israel in the flesh shall dwell during the millennium, and follows on the creation of the new heaven and earth. John in his Gospel always writes [Greek] Hierosoluma of the old city; in the Apocalypse always Hierousaleem of the heavenly city (Rev 3:12). Hierousaleem is a Hebrew name, the original and holy appellation. Hierosoluma is the common Greek term, used in a political sense. Paul observes the same distinction when refuting Judaism (Gal 4:26; compare Gal 1:17, Gal 1:18; Gal 2:1; Heb 12:22), though not so in the Epistles to Romans and Corinthians [Bengel].
bride - made up of the blessed citizens of “the holy city.” There is no longer merely a Paradise as in Eden (though there is that also, Rev 2:7), no longer a mere garden, but now the city of God on earth, costlier, statelier, and more glorious, but at the same time the result of labor and pains such as had not to be expended by man in dressing the primitive garden of Eden. “The lively stones” were severally in time laboriously chiseled into shape, after the pattern of “the Chief corner-stone,” to prepare them for the place which they shall everlastingly fill in the heavenly Jerusalem.