Hebrews 13:14

13:14 For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.

Psalms 48:2

48:2 It is lofty and pleasing to look at, ¹ 

a source of joy to the whole earth. ² 

Mount Zion resembles the peaks of Zaphon; ³ 

it is the city of the great king.

Psalms 87:3

87:3 People say wonderful things about you, ⁴ 

O city of God. (Selah)

Matthew 5:35

5:35 not by earth, because it is his footstool, and not by Jerusalem, ⁵  because it is the city of the great King.

Philippians 3:20

3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven – and we also await a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,

Revelation 3:12

3:12 The one who conquers ⁶  I will make ⁷  a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will never depart from it. I ⁸  will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God (the new Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven from my God), ⁹  and my new name as well.

Revelation 21:2

21:2 And I saw the holy city – the new Jerusalem – descending out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband.

Revelation 21:10

21:10 So ¹⁰  he took me away in the Spirit ¹¹  to a huge, majestic mountain ¹²  and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.

Revelation 22:19

22:19 And if anyone takes away from the words of this book of prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life ¹³  and in the holy city that are described in this book.

[48:2]  ¹ tn Heb “beautiful of height.” The Hebrew term נוֹף (nof, “height”) is a genitive of specification after the qualitative noun “beautiful.” The idea seems to be that Mount Zion, because of its lofty appearance, is pleasing to the sight.

[48:2]  ² sn A source of joy to the whole earth. The language is hyperbolic. Zion, as the dwelling place of the universal king, is pictured as the world’s capital. The prophets anticipated this idealized picture becoming a reality in the eschaton (see Isa 2:1-4).

[48:2]  ³ tn Heb “Mount Zion, the peaks of Zaphon.” Like all the preceding phrases in v. 2, both phrases are appositional to “city of our God, his holy hill” in v. 1, suggesting an identification in the poet’s mind between Mount Zion and Zaphon. “Zaphon” usually refers to the “north” in a general sense (see Pss 89:12; 107:3), but here, where it is collocated with “peaks,” it refers specifically to Mount Zaphon, located in the vicinity of ancient Ugarit and viewed as the mountain where the gods assembled (see Isa 14:13). By alluding to West Semitic mythology in this way, the psalm affirms that Mount Zion is the real divine mountain, for it is here that the Lord God of Israel lives and rules over the nations. See P. Craigie, Psalms 1-50 (WBC), 353, and T. N. D. Mettinger, In Search of God, 103.

[87:3]  ⁴ tn Heb “glorious things are spoken about you.” The translation assumes this is a general reference to compliments paid to Zion by those who live within her walls and by those who live in the surrounding areas and lands. Another option is that this refers to a prophetic oracle about the city’s glorious future. In this case one could translate, “wonderful things are announced concerning you.”

[5:35]  ⁵ map For location see Map5 B1; Map6 F3; Map7 E2; Map8 F2; Map10 B3; JP1 F4; JP2 F4; JP3 F4; JP4 F4.

[3:12]  ⁶ tn Or “who is victorious”; traditionally, “who overcomes.”

[3:12]  ⁷ tn Grk “I will make him,” but the pronoun (αὐτόν, auton, “him”) is redundant in contemporary English and has not been translated here.

[3:12]  ⁸ tn Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.

[3:12]  ⁹ sn This description of the city of my God is parenthetical, explaining further the previous phrase and interrupting the list of “new names” given here.

[21:10]  ¹⁰ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “so” to indicate the implied result of the angel’s invitation.

[21:10]  ¹¹ tn Or “in the spirit.” “Spirit” could refer either to the Holy Spirit or the human spirit, but in either case John was in “a state of spiritual exaltation best described as a trance” (R. H. Mounce, Revelation [NICNT], 75).

[21:10]  ¹² tn Grk “to a mountain great and high.”

[22:19]  ¹³ tc The Textus Receptus, on which the KJV rests, reads “the book” of life (ἀπὸ βίβλου, apo biblou) instead of “the tree” of life. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the NT he had access to no Greek mss for the last six verses of Revelation. So he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek at this point. As a result he created seventeen textual variants which were not in any Greek mss. The most notorious of these is this reading. It is thus decidedly inauthentic, while “the tree” of life, found in the best and virtually all Greek mss, is clearly authentic. The confusion was most likely due to an intra-Latin switch: The form of the word for “tree” in Latin in this passage is ligno; the word for “book” is libro. The two-letter difference accounts for an accidental alteration in some Latin mss; that “book of life” as well as “tree of life” is a common expression in the Apocalypse probably accounts for why this was not noticed by Erasmus or the KJV translators. (This textual problem is not discussed in NA²⁷.)