Reading the book of Revelation, I feel as though it, like so many of its characters, embodies a strange duality, managing to be at once both simplistic and baffling. As to be expected from such an enduring work, there’s quite a lot from it that piques my interest, but nothing more so than the book’s language and rhythm, both of which, in my view, imbue the book with a distinct orality. Throughout many sections of Revelation, I got the sense that its phrasing was intended for—as is said in the book itself and as Kirsch notes in his introductory chapters—hearers rather than readers.

That alone isn’t an earth-shattering assertion, but I believe one can find further evidence of its orality in the way some passages are structured. Take, for instance, verse 19:18, “That ye may eat the flesh of kings, ad the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.” Gruesome subject matter aside, the repetition here strikes me not only as a poetic device, but also as mnemonic aid, designed to help the text’s speaker (who probably needed to have large bits of it, if not all of it, memorized, if only for performance’s sake)  navigate it more easily. This is hardly the only example of such repetition; the passages that deal with the seven seals, seven vials, four beasts and twelve gates all have a similar repetitive, sequential structure that makes the most sense in an oral context. This reminds me—and ironically so, considering the probable author of Revelation’s disdain for all things Greek—of the Greek epic poems The Odyssey and The Iliad, both of which employ similar repetition-based mnemonic techniques, especially in terms of characterization (e.g. “the grey-eyed Athena,” which appears no less than 19 times in The Odyssey’s first book alone).

In short, not only is the book of Revelation best read aloud thanks to its odd, at-times gripping poeticisms, but it’s a text whose very structure lends itself to internalization and the spoken word.