REVELATION = THE END GAME STAGE OF THE BIBLE

To get the full experience, you should have gone through the whole rest of the Old Testament in order to recognize the 500+ references thrown in.

Also helps to have completed the following DLCs – New Testament, Second Temple writings & beliefs, Ancient Near East, First Century Greek culture & religion, Septuagint.

For where I demonstrate just a snippet in Revelation 1 with main inspiration from Dr Heiser’s podcasts:

BIBLICAL REFERENCES & OCCAM’S RAZOR

Occam’s Razor is (mis)used too often, but I think it has valid applications in referencing and cross-referencing Bible passages.

The reason I bring this up is directly because of Ezekiel’s vision of the cherubim – how should one interpret the strange amalgation that he describes? The route taken by someone who studies the Ancient Near Eastern context of the Old Testament is straightforward, Ezekiel was using the imagery of the surrounding Babylonian culture to convey that YHWH is the divine king who controls destiny. Ref: https://drmsh.com/ezekiels-vision-why-it-wasnt-a-flying-saucer-part-1/ and https://drmsh.com/ezekiels-vision-part-2/

Orrrrrr one could a different route I’ve seen, by running through the entirety of the rest of the Bible to find and link all the various component parts of Ezekiel’s descriptions (requiring 70+ pages of explanation). And then calling the first method eisegesis and ‘putting ANE above the Bible as authority’ because the only correct methodology is ‘Scripture interprets Scripture’.

A related example, did Paul in Romans 3:12-18 quote Psalm 14:3 as found in the Septuagint (like roughly 75% of all Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament)? Or is it more likely that he extracted portions of six different portions from the Masoretic Text?
Ref: https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/st-paul-quoting-the-septuagint/