Revelation 11:11

And after three days and a half the breath of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them that beheld them.

After three days and a half ... This period equals the half of the perfect seven so frequently mentioned in this prophecy. It means that the triumph of evil is never complete, never a true and final victory. Hitler may burn the Bibles, but the fire did not go out until it had consumed into ashes all of the great cities of his blasphemous domain. Paris may drag the Bible to the city dump and enthrone a harlot in Notre Dame, but her government has fallen fifty times since that occurred; and the heel of the invader has for years at a time been planted brutally upon her throat. Satan cannot actually get rid of the witnesses. Sure, he "kills them" again and again; but they rise again!

The breath of life from God entered them ... The resurgence of the Word following every "killing" of it is the most consistently recurring phenomenon of human history, as is also the constantly appearing rebirth of the church after every period of decline and apostasy. This, interpretation does not deny the companion truth of a literal resurrection of the church at the last day, a truth seen proleptically in the following verse.

And they stood upon their feet ... However frequently it may seem that the Church and the Word are "killed," it is not long until they again, "stand upon their feet." The "killing" in these verses should be placed in quotation marks, for it never actually occurs.

When this interpretation of this chapter is compared with "the notion of two individual persons appearing in the Mid-East city of Jerusalem, being mobbed by the citizens, left unburied for half a week, and then coming alive again, it will be seen that such an event could not have the smallest fraction of the impact evident in the view adopted here. Inherent in the error of literalizing this passage is the false theological conception that God could accomplish something in this age of our present world through the instrumentality of Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Enoch, Joshua, Peter, Paul, or others, brought back to earth either in a reincarnation or a resurrection, or in a recall from a state of having been translated (as in the case of Enoch), that could not be accomplished by the faithful people of any other age. Such a view does an injustice to God and is contrary to all reason. The power that was effective in all those worthies mentioned (no agreement at all, of course, on which ones), was not theirs, but it was in the Word which they delivered. Once this is understood, the alleged reappearance of any such ancient heroes becomes ridiculous and preposterous.