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...)
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