Sleepy Hollow & the Book of Revelation

I've been watching episodes online of the tv series Sleepy Hollow ...

a "modern-day retelling" of the 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving .... In 1781, Ichabod Crane, a soldier in the Colonial Army, on a mission for General George Washington, and caught up in a battle, beheads the Hessian soldier, the Headless Horseman, as the Horseman kills him. Now, in modern day Sleepy Hollow, New York, Ichabod rises from his grave, after the Headless Horseman (revealed to be Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) is summoned back from his watery grave by an unknown party.

The show is mostly light entertainment, religious horror in genre, but one thing that's interesting is that the main characters use the Book of Revelation to help them figure out how to stop an imminent apocalypse. When I was a teen I glanced at Revelation and what I saw was too creepy for me to want to read any further, but watching Sleepy Hollow has made me interested again.


- a detail from the Ghent Altarpiece

There are now so many good resources for those who want to learn more! Duke NT scholar Mark Goodacre has a helpful page at his NT Gateway. Johannine literature scholar Felix Just SJ has a great page: The Book of Revelation, Apocalyptic Literature, and Millennial Movements. And The Text This Week has a lot of great links. Here's a basic intro from St John's College, Nottingham ....