What Does Revelation 14:20 Mean?
And the winepress is trodden outside the city, and blood comes out of the winepress, up to the bridles of the horses, for a stretch of one thousand six hundred stadia.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.THE KEY
The winepress image makes judgment’s violence impossible to keep abstract: its outflow is measured in blood, depth, and distance.
THE MEANING
This image sets the press outside the city and measures its outflow up to horse bridles and across sixteen hundred furlongs. The reader encounters judgment as violence that cannot be hidden inside an abstract word: its visible expression is blood, given depth and distance. The scale is staggering, not clean or bloodless.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that judgment can be rendered as an orderly, bloodless abstraction; the vision presents it as slaughter with reach and measure.
THE ROOT
ἐπατήθη
epatēthē
GROWS FROM
πατ- (pat-), the verbal stem of πατέω (patéō)
To tread or step upon.
The passive form describes the press being trodden; related Greek words can intensify the same action into trampling. The image holds violence at the level of applied pressure rather than leaving it as a remote verdict.
ALSO GROWS
patéō: To tread upon; for example, Luke 10:19.
πατέω
This is the verb behind “was trodden,” keeping the press’s violence connected to the act of stepping or pressing upon.
katapatéō: To trample underfoot; for example, Matthew 7:6.
καταπατέω
The compound carries the same treading root into the stronger image of trampling, clarifying the force present in the press.
αἷμα
haima
GROWS FROM
αἱματ- (haimat-), the stem of αἷμα (haima)
Blood.
Greek keeps blood visible in words for both shedding and flow. The press’s yield is named as blood, and the verse measures its reach without euphemism.
ALSO GROWS
haimatekchysia: Shedding of blood; for example, Hebrews 9:22.
αἱματεκχυσία
The same blood-family word makes explicit the shedding that this verse pictures as the press’s outflow.
haimorrhoeō: To suffer a flow of blood; used of the woman in Matthew 9:20.
αἱμορροέω
This compound joins blood to flowing, echoing the verse’s image of blood pouring out and reaching far beyond the press.
THE PATTERN
The winepress image turns judgment into harvest violence whose measure spills beyond the press.
Stretch out the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Come, tread, for the winepress is full. The vats overflow, for their evil is great.I have trodden the winepress alone, and none of the people was with me. For I will tread them in the burning of my anger, and trample them in my heat. Their blood will be spattered on my garments, and I will soil all my clothing.And from his mouth goes out a sharp sword, so that with it he strikes the nations, and he shepherds them with a rod of iron, and he treads the winepress of the seething and swelling anger of God the all-ruling.THE THREAD
And from his mouth goes out a sharp sword, so that with it he strikes the nations, and he shepherds them with a rod of iron, and he treads the winepress of the seething and swelling anger of God the all-ruling.This verse uses the same Greek verb family for treading and names the winepress directly, making explicit the action compressed into Revelation 14:20. Revelation 14:20 then gives the consequence in its full scale: blood at the bridles and across the stated distance.
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