The work that follows is not intended to be a commentary on the Apocalypse. There have been many such commentaries, reaching back into the earliest times of the Christian era. Some, especially during the Middle Ages, have been quite spectacular in their ingeniousness. Our modern era has seen a series of fine commentaries, applying all the criteria of a historical-philological analysis to this difficult book. What I have attempted to do here is to provide a continuous reading of the text, trying to show, especially through the links which can be made with the Old Testament tradition, the coherent and unified argument of the whole work. The reader will find that, despite my admiration for and debt to the older commentaries, I have introduced something quite new to the interpretation of the Apocalypse.