Revelation 13: The Beasts

Straight after the vision of the Woman and the Dragon (see previous post), John is stood on the coast, watching a beast with 7 heads and 10 horns rise out of the sea. It is like a leopard with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. The dragon (Satan) gives the beast power and authority over the earth.

One of the beast's 7 heads is mortally wounded, but mysteriously heals.

The beast uses its earthy power to spew blasphemies against God and make war on his servants.

John sees a second beast rise from the earth: it is like a horned lamb which speaks like a dragon, and uses the power of the first beast to make the people of earth worship the first beast and blaspheme God. The second beast performs miracles, which convince the people to worship the first beast.

'And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.'

What are we to make of all this?

The Old Testament prophet Daniel has a dream of four beasts rising out of the sea; he is told these beasts represent four kingdoms. A beast like a lion represents the Babylonian Empire. A beast like a bear represents the Persian Empire. A beast like a leopard represents the Greek Empire. The fourth beast, with ten horns, represents the Roman Republic.

Daniel's dream sequence ends with the 'one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven... And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion.' The Messiah descending from Heaven to conquer the world.

The Babylonian Empire (lion) was conquered by the Persians (bear). The Persians were conquered by the Greeks (leopard). And the Greeks were conquered by the Romans (ten horns). The Roman Republic became an empire.

John's Beast from the Sea is a composite of Daniel's four beasts: leopard, bear, lion, ten horns. It represents the new and expanded Roman Empire.

The seven heads represent the emperors who had ruled since the transition from republic to empire: Augustus onwards. Although there is considerable disagreement among scholars as to exactly which emperors they are supposed to represent.

There are some clues that one of emperors is Nero. One of the beast's heads recovers from a mortal wound: there was a popular rumor that Nero had been killed by his own sword. It was a surprise when it turned out false. There is also the numerological evidence: the numbers of the letters in the Hebrew spelling of Nero Caesar add up to 666.

Nero is the emperor most famous for persecuting Christians - he burnt Christians alive as torches to illuminate his garden.

So, the first beast, the Beast of the Sea, is the Roman Empire.

The second beast, the horned lamb performing miracles, is the Roman pagan cult, which treated the emperor as a god. The mark of the beast, without which one cannot buy or sell, could be Roman currency, which was printed with the heads of the emperors. Elaine Pagels, whose book is my main source for the historical context for Revelation, speculates that it could represent some bureaucratic stamps or marks necessary to buy or sell.

I have to go to work now, so am ending this post here!

Revelation 12: The Woman and the Dragon

After seeing God's Heavenly Temple opened for business, John's next vision is a sequence of achronological historical flashbacks, rather than a continuation of the ongoing End of Days vision.

John sees sees a pregnant woman in Heaven, sent down to earth, wearing a crown of 12 stars. In various Jewish prophetic works, the nation of Israel is imagined as a woman, God's bride (or, when Israel has been worshipping other gods, a adulterous whore). Her crown of 12 stars represents the twelve tribes of Israel; she is pregnant with the messiah. This is an allusion to a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Israel struggling to give birth to the messiah: 'Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O Lord.'

Later Christians interpreted the woman as Mary, mother of Jesus, immaculately conceived in Heaven. Later still, some interpreted it as the mother of the future Second Coming of Jesus.

John sees a great red dragon in Heaven, whose tail drags a third of the stars to earth. The great red dragon is Satan; a third of Heaven's angels fell with him.

The dragon stands before the woman, waiting to eat the newborn child, 'who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron'. The child - Jesus - escapes and ascends to God.

'And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.'

Ideas about fallen angels had been developing for a few centuries before Revelation was written; the idea had become popular as a way to absolve God of blame for evil in the world. In the Book of Enoch, a group of angels falls from Heaven because they lust after human women. In the Book of Jubilees, 9 out of 10 angels fall with the Evil One, and vow to obstruct God's will for the rest of time. The the Life of Adam and Eve, Satan, the brightest angel, is cast out of Heaven for refusing to bow down to Adam. Thus to Jews familiar with these then-popular books, fallen angels were associated with lust, pride, and a stubborn will to stop God's good works.

Revelation adds more references to the mix. In many ancient Mesopotamian creation myths, the greatest god in the pantheon defeats the chaos dragon before he can fashion the universe, often from the serpent's corpse. Order from Chaos. The gods did not fashion the universe out of nothing: in the beginning, there was chaos, normally imagined as a vast ocean, ruled by the primordial chaos dragon, who went by many names: Tiamat, Leviathan, Rahab, etc. In ancient Mesopotamia (and many other parts of the world), the Cosmos, created and managed by the gods, was seen as constantly under threat from the forces of Chaos, led by the great dragon of the waters.

There are a few scattered remnants of the ye olde Israelite version of this myth scattered through the Bible. Psalms celebrate God's defeat of the serpent Leviathan, or Rahab. Ezekiel likens the king of Egypt to the old dragon, who God is totes gonna destroy.

In Isaiah's allusion to the ye olde myth, he suggests that God did not properly destroy the chaos dragon in the beginning, but will do so... 'on that day'.

The creation story that now opens the Bible, written during the Babylonian exile, is intended to subvert ye olde combat myth. Reading it closely, we see that God does not create the universe from nothing, as later Jews and Christians tended to assume.

'And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.'

The primordial chaos waters are there in the beginning, but there is no combat. God merely has to speak the light and the earth and the living creatures into existence. So this myth one-ups the combat-based creation myths that preceded and competed with it: God is so powerful, he doesn't even need to fight a chaos serpent before he can get to the business of creating.

And, if there are any great sea dragons that you might think of as primordial chaos serpents, God created them: Genesis specifically mentions that 'God created the great sea-monsters'. None of them existed before God made it so; none of them was an obstacle to his creative power.

The Book of Job alludes to this re-imagined Leviathan, who has gone from primordial chaos serpent to one of God's playthings: in his speech to Job, God implies he could quite easily catch Leviathan with a hook, play with him, and cook him up as a banquet.

The Book of Revelation fuses the fallen angel myths with the chaos dragon combat myth, and ties it to the history of Israel.

After Satan, the dragon, the serpent, is cast out, a voice in Heaven cries out, "Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! For the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time."

The dragon spends his earthly time persecuting the aforementioned woman, Israel, who flees into the wilderness. Being 'in the wilderness' is a recurring motif in Jewish texts: Moses led the Israelites for 40 years in the wilderness, under God's protection. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews were once again 'in the wilderness' - they were no longer in their homeland. A few years before Revelation was written, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and many Jews were exiled from the Holy Land - once again, they were 'in the wilderness'.

The serpent spews water from his mouth - chaos water from the chaos serpent - hoping to kill her with a flood, but she is saved by the Earth. The dragon is angry, and declares war on the woman's offspring: those who keep God's commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.

(To be continued...)

Revelation 8-11: The Seven Trumpets

The Lambs opens the seventh seal, and there is a silent half-hour break in heaven before the next seven-long sequence commences: the Seven Trumpets, blown by seven angels. Seven is a holy number; John's Revelation uses it a lot.

Trumpet 1: hail and fire and blood rains on the earth, burning trees and grass.

Trumpet 2: a flaming mountain crashes into the sea, poisoning the water, killing a third of oceanic life and destroying a third of ocean-going ships.

Trumpet 3: the star called Wormwood falls from Heaven, poisoning a third of the world's rivers.

Trumpet 4: a third of the moon, a third of the Sun, and a third of the stars are obscured by darkness.

Trumpet 5: an angel, carrying the key to the bottomless pit, descends from Heaven and unlocks the abyss. Black smoke rises from the pit, darkening the sky. Demons emerge from the pit: they are like locusts the size of horses, with human faces, long feminine hair, and stinging tails like scorpions. They wear crowns of gold, and breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings is like chariots going into battle. These demons are led by Abaddon, AKA Apollyon, the angel of the bottomless pit. The demons are tasked with targeting those not graced with God's seal, and torturing them for five months. But they are not allowed to kill them.

Trumpet 6: The four angels bound in the River Euphrates are freed, and they lead an army of 200 million mounted soldiers (I'm imagining angels), whose lion-head mounts spew fire, and smoke, and brimstone, which kills one-third of the human population.

Revelation was written in the decades after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the coast of the southern Italy. The mountain exploded with a deafening roar, shaking the earth. Dense black smoke rose from the crater, darkening the sky for 3 days, and poisoning the sea and rivers nearby. Molten lava rained from the sky. Not long afterwards, the Roman oracle Sibyl of Cumae, based nearby, issues an oracle that was widely circulated in the Roman world: earthquakes, darkening skies, and raining fire were signs the world was coming to an end.

This event may have been on John's mind as his own vision of the End of Days came to him.
Interlude: an angels descend to the earth, and says, depending on which translation you're using:
"There will be no more delay... When the seventh angel blows his trumpet, God's mysterious plan will be fulfilled."
or
“Time shall be no more... when the seventh angel is ready to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be completed."

The angel gives our delightful narrator a book, and tells him to keep prophesying to many people.

Are we ready yet to sound the seventh trumpet?

No.

There is some admin to take care of first. John measures the Temple of God, but not the outer court. He sees two unnamed prophets who have an assortment of powers: fire breath, rain prevention, turning water to blood, and smiting the earth with plagues.

When they have finished prophesying, the beast rises out of the bottomless pit to make war on them, and kill them in the city 'where our Lord was crucified' - Jerusalem. People are happy the prophets are dead, for they had been tormenting the people of the earth.

After 3 days, the prophets are raised from the dead and ascend to Heaven. An earthquake destroys part of the city.

Trumpet 7: a great voice in Heaven cries, "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever." The Divine Assembly praises God, and his Heavenly Temple is opened for business.

There is lightning, and thunder, and earthquakes, and great hail.

To be continued...

Revelation 6-8: The Seven Seals

The Lamb opens the first seal on God's scroll, and the first Horseman of the Apocalypse appears: he rides a white horse, carries a bow and wears a crown. He is sent forth to conquer.

The first Horseman is Conquest, who for some reason has been transformed by popular culture into Pestilence, the horseman who spreads disease. (In Gaiman and Pratchett's 'Good Omens', Pestilence has been replaced by Pollution, the former having quit after the discovery of antibiotics.) The original is more likely to represent imperial expansion, the subjugation of smaller nations by an evil empire - Rome.

The Lamb opens the second seal, and the second Horseman appears. He rides a red horse and carries sword. He has the power to take peace from the world, so that men shall kill one another. He is War.

John's Revelation was written shortly after the First Roman-Jewish War, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple. An extremely traumatic event for the Jews and Jewish Christians. Wars had been a regular feature of Roman life for decades; in the civil war of 68CE, four different emperors were crowned and assassinated.

With the third seal opening, the third Horseman appears. He rides a black horse and carries a pair of balances. A voice cries out, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!” Roman citizens would have recognised this as inflation, caused by food shortage: Famine. The oil and wine are unaffected, because the Horseman only targets essentials. At the time Revelation was written, inflation was escalating throughout the empire.

The fourth seal releases the fourth horseman: Death, who rides a Pale Horse. Hades, the Greek god, has a cameo appearance here: he follows Death. The duo is given the power to kill with sword, with hunger, with disease, and with the beasts of the earth.

As the fifth seal is opened, souls cry out to God for vengeance. They were killed on Earth for holding to God's testimony, and now they want their blood avenged on the earth-dwellers. They are told to wait: the time for vengeance will come.

The sixth seal opens. An earthquake. The sun blackens. The moon reddens. Stars fall. The richest men hide themselves in mountain dens, terrified that the Day of Wrath has come at last.

There is a delay before the the seventh seal can be opened. An angel descends carrying the seal of God; he must seal the foreheads of Gods servants before the end of the world can continue in earnest. The angel seals 12,000 virgin men from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, and a great multitude of people from other nations, who wear white robes and praise God before his throne.

It is time to open the seventh seal...

Revelation 1-5: Ascending to Heaven

Over the past few days I've been re-reading the Book of Revelation. When I read through the Bible a few years ago, I sped through Revelation, not taking it in very well. It's a trippy, angry, difficult book - not one of my biblical favourites. But it has now become extra-relevant to the fiction-in-progress, so here I am, re-reading and organising my thoughts on it.

The book is a letter, a history, and a prophecy of the future; three books in one. Written and circulated around 100CE, Revelation contains references to events and politics of the time, obscured by symbolic imagery and numerology. At this time, Judaism and Christianity were not so thoroughly split: this book, like the Gospel of Matthew, belongs to the Jewish Christian tradition which emphasizes the importance of the tribes of Israel, and looks down on Gentile converts to Pauline Christianity. It is steeped in Jewish lore, chock full of references to other Jewish prophetic works. Hidden meanings and obscure references make it difficult for the modern reader.

In the first chapter, John describes his meeting with Jesus on the isle of Patmos:

"one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and this face was like the sun shining in full strength."

Jesus dictates instructions to the 7 churches of Asia Minor, and commands John to write about his coming visionary experiences in a book. The epistolary prologue doesn't interest me very much. In the section addressed to the church of Pergamon, John's Jesus commends the congregation for holding on to their faith while living in the shadow of 'Satan's Throne': historians believe this refers to the Great Temple of Zeus, the Pergamon Altar, which was once the pride of the city. Early Christians believed the pagan gods were demons tricking humanity away from the true God.

Once John's Jesus is done telling off or congratulating the 7 churches, our narrator turns around and sees a door leading to Heaven. He ascends and sees the throne of God, which is similar in appearance to when it was seen by the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel:

'A throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald... From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and... before the throne there was as it were a sea of glass, like crystal. And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,

“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty."'

In front of the main God Throne there are 24 smaller thrones, where 'elders' sit, wearing white robes and gold crowns.

At God's right hand there is a scroll, sealed with seven seals, and none could be found to open this scroll containing the future, and our narrator was sad.

“Weep no more", says one of the elders, "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”

Oh great, thinks our narrator, the conquering Jewish Messiah has come. Those familiar with Jewish lore of the time would have understood the Lion of Judah to be a reference to the expected Messiah, a fierce warrior who would restore Israel to glory.

John looks up, and sees a slain Lamb take the book, causing the divine assembly to burst into song: "for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation," etc.

In the aftermath of Jesus' crucifixion, ideas about the Jewish messiah had to change. The conquering Lion messiah had not come; instead there had been Jesus, a Lamb slain on Passover, a sacrifice whose blood washed away sins and redeemed humanity. John's vision here illustrates these changing ideas, and confirms Jesus the Lamb as identical to the expected Lion. But his conquest is not over the living enemies of Israel, but over Death and Sin. The Messiah has already come.

The Lamb starts opening the seals...

(To be continued...)