The Bow Set in the Cloud and the Rainbow Round the Throne
Old Testament: Genesis 9:13-16
I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds: And I will remember my covenant with you, and with every living soul that beareth flesh: and there shall no more be waters of a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the clouds, and I shall see it, and shall remember the everlasting covenant, that was made between God and every living soul of all flesh which is upon the earth.
Old Testament, also: Ezechiel 1:28
As the appearance of the rainbow when it is in a cloud on a rainy day: this was the appearance of the brightness round about.
New Testament: Apocalypse 4:3
And he that sat, was to the sight like the jasper and the sardine stone; and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
The connection
The bow is the first thing in Scripture God gives as a sign of His covenant, and He gives it to men: "This is the sign of the covenant which I give between me and you" (Genesis 9:12). When God says He will see it and remember, Scripture speaks in man's way, for God does not forget; the bow is hung where every eye can find it so that those who do forget will remember the promise, and, as Victorinus reads it, no longer fear the water. It is also a weapon laid aside, a war-bow hung in the sky pointing away from the earth, and the covenant it seals is the first offered to every living soul that beareth flesh rather than to one household or one nation. Ezechiel then takes that ordinary sky and puts it around the throne itself, describing the brightness enclosing the One seated there as the appearance of the rainbow when it is in a cloud on a rainy day, so that what had appeared over a drowned world after the water drained away is now the light surrounding God's own seat. The Apocalypse completes it: John sees the throne, and there is a rainbow round about it, no longer a simile reached for to describe a brightness but simply there, permanent, encircling. What Noe was given to see occasionally, after storms, John sees fixed around the throne as its ordinary condition, mercy no longer promised against a future flood but built into the place judgment is issued from.
Moral sense
God set the sign in the sky not because He forgets but because we do; what steadies a soul in the middle of judgment is not anything it has earned but a promise that does not change, and the bow is given so that the soul will look up and recall it.
Anagogical sense
The bow hung over a ruined world becomes the light around the throne, so that the last vision of God shows mercy encircling Him before any seal is opened, and every judgment that follows in the book proceeds from inside that circle.
The Fathers
Victorinus of Pettau, Commentary on the Apocalypse of the Blessed John, on ch. 4: "And there was a rainbow about the throne. Moreover, the rainbow round about the throne has the same colors", which he ties directly to the bow of Genesis, spoken to men and not to God: "The rainbow is called a bow from what the Lord spake to Noah and to his sons, that they should not fear any further deluge in the generation of God, but fire. For thus He says: I will place my bow in the clouds, that ye may now no longer fear water, but fire." He reads the same sign again at Apocalypse 10:1, "Upon his head was a rainbow. He points to the judgment which is executed by Him, or shall be."
Warrant
Apocalypse 4:3 does not itself cite Genesis 9:13-16, and neither text names the other. The connection is not merely inferred, however: Victorinus of Pettau, writing the earliest surviving full commentary on the Apocalypse, reads the rainbow round the throne as the same bow God set in the cloud for Noe, and draws from it the shift from a judgment by water to a judgment by fire. Ezechiel 1:28 stands between the two texts as the passage that first moves the rainbow from the sky to the throne. Checked in the Greek, and the debt is to Ezechiel rather than to Genesis: horasis and kyklothen both stand at Ezechiel 1:28 in the Septuagint and again at Apocalypse 4:3, so the appearance and the encircling are the same two words. Genesis 9:13-16 shares no distinctive vocabulary with the Apocalypse, which fits the entry, since what Genesis supplies is the bow itself and what Ezechiel supplies is the bow around a throne.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 71.
The verses
Genesis 9:13 · Genesis 9:14 · Genesis 9:15 · Genesis 9:16 · Ezechiel 1:28 · Apocalypse 4:3
