"When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour."
(Revelation 8:1)
The OT associates silence with divine judgement. In Hab. 2:20-3:15 and Zech. 2:13-3:2, God is pictured (as in Rev. 8:1) as being in His temple and about to bring judgement on earth.
That the temple is in heaven is to be assumed from texts such as Ezekiel 1. At the moment this judgment is to be delivered, God commands the earth to be silent. In Zeph. 1:7-18, silence is likewise commanded in connection with the "great day" of the Lord and of His judgment. These announcements of judgement from the Minor Prophets express cosmic end-time expectations, which is explicitly expressed in a universal sense in Rev. 8:1. The thought is that the final judgement of God is so awful that the whole world falls utterly silent in its presence. Thus the seventh seal is a continuation of the sixth. Whereas the first five seals deal with the entire period of the church age, the last two deal with the final judgment.
The duration of this silence is about half an hour. "Hour" in Revelation often refers to the suddenness of the time of judgement of the wicked, whereas "half" is associated with "times" of crisis and judgement in Daniel 7:25; 9:27; and 12:7. "About half an hour" might not refer so much to the precise temporal duration of the silence (about) but figuratively emphasize the suddenness and unexpectedness of a decreed judgement.
(G.K. Beale)
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