How can the blood flow for a thousand and six hundred furlongs?
Those sentences which are colored in orange are from Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati book Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) and those which are colored in black are Jerry Thomas’s response.
"…And cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.' (14:19, 20.) C. Now, are not their yarns even bigger than those of the Puraanaas? The Christian God must suffer terribly when he is in a fit of anger. Is his wrath water or some other fluid that winepresses are full of it. It is impossible for blood to flow, for "the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs," as it coagulates at once on coming in contact with air. How can it, then, flow. Hence such things are false.
Answer: For the interpretation of the symbolic language in the prophetical books, please read the article Introduction to the Revelation and Figurative Language of Prophetical Writings. Maharishi missed on the prophetical language in most of the questions in revelation.
John Gill comments: “Even unto the horses' bridles, for the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs; which is only an hyperbolical expression, setting forth the largeness and universality of the destruction of the wicked, and the impossibility of their escaping it. In like manner the Jews express a great slaughter of men; so of the slaughter at Bither, by Adrian, they say {e}, they went on slaying wicked, "until a horse plunged in blood up to his nostrils", and the blood ran four miles into the sea; which is not to be understood literally, but as expressing a prodigious effusion of blood: and as to the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs, perhaps there may be an allusion to the measure of the land of Israel, and the common notion of it among the Jews, who make it to be the square of four hundred parsoe: hence they often speak of the land of Israel shaking and moving four hundred "parsoe", upon some extraordinary occasions; and a "parsa" contained four miles, so that four hundred "parsoe" made a thousand and six hundred miles; and if miles and furlongs are the same, in which sense only the land of Israel could be so large, here is the exact space.”
