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Bible Dictionaries
Euphrates
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or The Euphrates was a famous river of Mesopotamia. Its chief interest for us in the Apostolic Age is its adoption as a term in the allegorical apparatus of Christian polemic and apologetic. In Revelation 9:14 the sixth angel is ordered to release the four angels who were bound at the river Euphrates, and in Revelation 16:12 the sixth angel dries up the Euphrates for the coming of the kings of the East. We have here an allusion to the Nero-legend which told that Nero had fled to the East, to the Medes and Persians, beyond the river Euphrates, and would again cross the river accompanied by myriads of soldiers and make war on Rome (Sib. Or. iv. 119-122, 137-139). In accordance with this legend, a second pseudo-Nero appeared on the Euphrates under Titus in a.d. 80 (cf. R. H. Charles, The Ascension, of Isaiah, 1900, pp. lviii-lxi). In both the Apocalyptic verses, however, we have more than an allusion to a Parthian incursion. In the allegorical language of the period, as Egypt was the type of bodily life, so was Mesopotamia of spiritual (cf. Hippol. Ref. v. 3: ‘Mesopotamia is the current of the great ocean flowing from the midst of the Perfect Man’). On the other hand, by another symbol the Euphrates stood for the power of the earthly kingdom and the waves of persecutors (e.g. in Bede, Explan. Apoc. ii. 9 [Migne, Patr. Lat. xciii. 159]), or for the human as opposing the Divine.
Thus, interpreting the wind of the apostolic period by its legacy to subsequent ages, Rupertus understands the waters of Euphrates in the Apocalypse as the foolish reasonings of men dried up by the judgment of God in order that the saints of Him who is the ‘East’ may destroy ‘the deceits of the magi, the vain inventions of philosophers and the fictions of the poets’ (Com. in. Apoc. ix. 16 [Milne, Patr. Lat. clxix. 1123]). Also, as the Euphrates was the boundary of Paradise and of the realm of Solomon, it came to signify the reason of man as the boundary to be passed by the spiritual man before he could see the light of the eternal day. In this way the evil condition of Euphrates passed easily into the conception of it as the water of baptism. Philo has yet another interpretation (de Somn. ii. 255). Referring to Genesis 15:18 he says that the river of Egypt represents the body and the river Euphrates the soul, and that the spiritual man’s jurisdiction extends from the world of change and destruction to the world of interruption, the two terms ‘river of Egypt’ and ‘river Euphrates’ being thus opposed as blame and praise are opposed, so that man may choose the one and eschew the other.
W. F. Cobb.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Euphrates'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/e/euphrates.html. 1906-1918.
