In the preface to his 1671 tragedy, Samson Agonistes, John Milton invokes a surprising precursor: the German biblical exegete David Pareus, who had described the Book of Revelation as a tragedy. This essay locates, in Milton’s attraction to Pareus’s analysis of tragedy, an ambitious and sophisticated theory of reading. Pareus, I show in this essay, saw the form of tragedy as consisting in a careful patterning of acts and choruses. For Pareus, and by extension Milton, this form demands a particular type of practice from readers. The challenge for those readers becomes to search for the proper harmony among the various parts, a process that is made more time-consuming, and thus more effective at providing spiritual exercise, by the text’s obscurity. While those few scholars who have considered Milton’s interest in Pareus have been most interested in what it reveals about the character of Samson, I argue that Milton and Pareus share a theory in which biblical tragedy serves as a prophetic interpolation of readers into divine history.