Hymns from scripture

Hymns based on Revelation 22

Revelation 22 has given hymn writers words for 7 hymns in this library, by writers including Isaac Watts, John Newton and Thomas Moore; Thomas Hastings. Each is listed below with the lines that echo the chapter and the verses they draw on, quoted from the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation.

The verse these hymns return to most is Revelation 22:1: “He showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb,”

Hymn writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew their Bibles almost by heart, and they wove its phrases into their lines — sometimes as a close paraphrase, as in the metrical psalms, and sometimes as a single image carried into a new setting. Reading the verse beside the line shows what the writer had in mind, and often why a hymn was chosen to be sung alongside a particular reading.

Read Revelation 22 in the Bible reader →
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