THE MILLENNIAL BINDING OF SATAN: A LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO REVELATION 19:11—20:6

Abstract

This study proposes that Revelation 19:11-21 and 20:1-6 are cohesively linked with each other. The major implication for this is that the millennial binding of Satan (20:1-3) and the millennial vindication of the saints (20:4-6) are consequent effects of Christ’s victory at the eschatological battle (19:11-21). Christ’s Parousia then is the occasion for the punishment of the millennial binding of Satan and the reward of the coterminous millennial reign of the saints. Scholars who disconnect 20:1-6 from 19:11— 21 recapitulate the millennial binding of Satan and the vindication of the saints as the interadvent period. Consequently, this non-sequential interpretation breaks John's unified, cohesive message by creating a new semantic environment at 20:1. The millennial contextual setting, however, does not begin at the chapter break, where many interpreters inevitably place it. Rather than disrupting the cohesion by building a semantic wall between 19:11-21 and 20:1-6, John chooses linguistic resources that signal a semantic thread of continuity. This study models Halliday and Hasan's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory of cohesion, a robust linguistic theoretical framework for discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on two types of textual meanings within SFL. The first type, adapted in this study for Hellenistic Greek, is Ruqaiya Hasan’s Cohesive Harmony Analysis (CHA), a tool that identifies semantic relations such as cohesive devices as ties, cohesive chains, and chain interactions. This model quantifiably measures the degree of a reader’s perception of coherence in Rev 19:11— 20:6. The second type oftextual meaning devoted to the latter half ofthe study is the discourse analytical tool ofInformation Flow (IF). It is an exegetical tool that analyzes a further dimension of cohesion concerned with thematization and prominence, locating lexicogrammatical resources in the ranks of clause, sentence, paragraph, section, and the broader co-text of the discourse, in this case, the book of Revelation.