Read Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation Online
Authors: Elaine Pagels
Tags: #Biblical Studies, #General, #Religion
Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (4 page)
While John watched, he says, he heard the fifth angel blow his trumpet and saw a bottomless pit from which smoke arose “like the smoke of a great furnace” and from which a huge army of locusts emerged. Although as big as cavalry horses, these locusts have human faces, hair streaming behind them, teeth like lions, and scorpion tails that sting like serpents, leaving their enemies in hideous pain. Then the scene changes: John says that he saw
another mighty angel coming down from heaven wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire … Setting his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, he gave a great shout, like a lion roaring. And when he shouted, the seven
thunders sounded … Then the angel raised his right hand to heaven, and swore by him who lives forever and ever … “There shall be no more time.”
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When the seventh angel sounds his trumpet, John hears a divine voice proclaim that God and Jesus have won the victory: “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his anointed one [messiah], and He shall reign forever and ever.”
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But instead of signaling the end of war, as John expects, this trumpet call intensifies the conflict. After lightning flashes, thunder, earthquake, and hail, he sees two great signs appear in the heavens; first,
a woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth.
Then another sign appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns on his heads.… Then the dragon stood before the woman who was giving birth, in order to devour her child as soon as it was born.
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As we noted, now John sees something virtually unprecedented—war
in heaven
: Michael and his angels fighting the dragon.
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The dragon and his angels fight back but are defeated, so that
there was no longer any place for them in heaven; the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is
called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to earth, and his angels have been thrown down with him.
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Horrified and fascinated, John watches to see how this heavenly battle will play out on earth. Furious at having been thrown out of heaven, the dragon determines to destroy the woman. He pursues her. She escapes, having been given the wings of a great eagle, and flies into the wilderness to hide. When the dragon discovers her, he pours water from his mouth to sweep her away in a thundering flood, but she eludes him again as “the earth came to the help of the woman” and swallowed the threatening waters. Raging with frustration, “the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her children.”
Now the dragon stands on the seashore and calls forth two monsters as allies:
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten crowns, and on its heads were blasphemous names. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave it his power and his throne and great authority … In amazement
the whole earth … worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast; who can fight against it?”
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Arrogant, huge, spewing out blasphemies, the beast from the sea “was given authority over every tribe and people and language and
nation, and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it.” A second monster emerges from the land, a beast with power to force everyone on earth “to be marked on the right hand or the forehead” with “the mark, that is, the
name
of the beast”—apparently a number with secret meaning, “for it is the number of a human being: his number is six hundred sixty-six.” Only the children of the woman whom John saw in his vision dare resist—and for this the beast is determined to kill them.
What could these nightmare visions mean? And where is Rome—and the aftermath of war—to be seen in them? A close reader of the Hebrew Scriptures would see that John was invoking prophetic images to interpret the conflicts of his own time, just as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had interpreted the Babylonian War around six hundred years earlier. These ancient prophets had drawn upon what is perhaps the oldest story in the Bible, one that can be traced to ancient Babylonia, where priests inscribed it in cuneiform on clay tablets more than 2,500 years ago—a story probably told for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years before that. The story tells how, “in the beginning,” or even
before
the beginning of time, God fought against a great sea monster, the dragon of chaos, to bring forth the world. The Babylonian version tells how the sun god Marduk fought his mother, the great female dragon Tiamat, and her army of monsters, who embodied the ocean depths, the dangerous power of chaos. When Tiamat opened her huge jaws to devour him, Marduk drove the four winds into her mouth, distending her body, then split her in two “like a shrimp” to create from her the earth and sky, and placed them under his own dominion.
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Nearly three thousand years ago, Israel’s poets and storytellers,
familiar with such ancient stories, began to tell how Israel’s God, like Marduk, fought against a many-headed dragon, a sea monster whom they called by such names as Leviathan and Rahab. Some said that only after crushing and killing such monsters could God, like Marduk, establish the world and deliver it from the powers of chaos. Thus the author of Psalm 74 praises God for having vanquished Leviathan:
God, my king, is from old, working salvation in the earth. You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters; you crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
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John’s visions of such monsters, then, are modeled on creation stories even older than those in Genesis. Many scholars have pointed out that the opening chapters of Genesis were written considerably later than many other biblical writings—probably about
four hundred years
later than the chapters that follow—and later than some of the psalms.
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Yet whoever wrote the opening of Genesis probably
knew
the ancient dragon story, for Genesis says that even before God created the world, he began not with
nothing,
as Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers later claimed, but with a formless void, chaos, wind, and “deep waters”:
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was
a formless void [or chaos] and darkness covered the surface of the deep waters,
while a wind from God swept over the waters.
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Some people thought that this ancient story implied that God’s power is limited, since it suggests that God, like Marduk, had to contend with a supernatural antagonist
before
he could create the world. Israel’s storytellers, perhaps to reassure their hearers that God’s power is uncontested, morphed the sea monster Tiamat into
tehom,
the Hebrew term for “the depths,” the primordial sea over which they say that “wind from God” moved “in the beginning.” Then, to show that no sea monsters lurked in those primordial waters, the Genesis account says that Israel’s God actually “created the great sea monsters”—and did so only
after
he created all the other sea creatures, on the
fifth
day of creation.
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While the Babylonian story pictures the great sea monster as a
female,
the “mother of all monsters” and of all gods, Hebrew storytellers often speak of Leviathan as male. Others suggest that when God created these sea monsters on the fifth day of creation, he made them, like all the other animals, in pairs: Leviathan, a female monster from the sea, and Behemoth, a male monster from the land—apparently a version of the story that John of Patmos adapted to tell, in his Revelation, how the dragon’s two allies emerged, first the “beast from the sea” and then the “beast from the land.”
While we think of dragons as creatures of folktales and children’s stories, Israel’s writers conjured them as images of the forces of disintegration and death that lurk in the background of our world and threaten its stability.
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Poets and prophets took these images seriously—although not literally—to characterize Israel’s enemies in war. When, for example, Psalm 74 praises God for having “crushed the heads of Leviathan” and calls on him to “rise up” again and deliver his people from evil, the anonymous
psalmist has in mind the Babylonian soldiers who smashed God’s temple and burned it to the ground in the year 586:
The enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary. Your enemies have roared within your holy place. … At the upper entrance, they hacked the wooden trellises with axes, and smashed all the carvings with hatchets and hammers; they set Your sanctuary on fire, and desecrated the dwelling of Your holy name.
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The prophet Jeremiah, too, grieved and angered by the same war, speaks for Israel as he pictures the king of Babylon as a beast who devours God’s people:
King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has devoured me; he has crushed me … he has swallowed me like a monster … he has spit me out. May my torn flesh be avenged on Babylon!
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The prophet Ezekiel, a refugee from that same war, mocks Israel’s ancient enemy, the king of Egypt—here a standin for the Babylonian king who was the prophet’s contemporary—as if he were only a sea monster whom Israel’s God will haul up and kill like a fish:
The word of the Lord came to me, saying, Mortal, [say to the] … king of Egypt … You consider yourself a lion among the nations, but
you are like a dragon in the seas; you thrash about
…
and foul your clear streams.Thus says the Lord God … I will throw my net over you … haul you up in my dragnet. I will throw you on the ground, fling you on the open field, and cause … the wild animals of the whole earth to gorge themselves on you.
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Exiled in Babylon as a result of the war, Ezekiel pictures God scattering the dragon’s carcass in order to prophesy that God “will scatter the Egyptians”—that is, the Babylonians—“among the nations,” making them suffer as thousands of Israelites, himself included, suffered at their hands:
Thus says the Lord God: I am against you, Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the great dragon…
I will put hooks in your jaws, and make the fish of your channels stick to your scales, I will fling you into the wilderness. … I have given you as food to the animals of the earth and the birds of the air … and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations.
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The prophet whom scholars call Second Isaiah
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ironically says that the Lord must have fallen asleep while the Babylonians were destroying Israel. Now the prophet calls on the Lord to wake up and fight, just as ancient stories say he fought the dragon at the beginning of time:
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord! Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago! Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over?
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Yet calling on God to “wake up” and fight the forces of evil acknowledges that destruction and death still wield enormous power. So Isaiah revises the ancient story to suggest that “in the beginning,” when God fought the primordial dragon, he failed to actually kill it. Thus Israel’s prophets began to project God’s battle with Leviathan from the beginning of time to its end, anticipating that, as Isaiah says, “on that day”—the great day at the end of time—finally God will “kill the dragon that is in the sea”:
On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
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How shall this victory be won? Since Isaiah, like other prophets, sees the forces of evil embodied in foreign oppressors, he clings to the hope that God will send a messiah—a king divinely chosen to lead his people to victory. But in his own time, the prophet envisions God’s beloved, Israel, as a pregnant woman, crying out in anguish before she gives birth to the promised messiah: “O Lord, we sought you in distress, like a woman who writhes and cries out in labor pains when she is near her time.”
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John of Patmos was immersed in the prophetic writings, and here he draws upon their images of Israel as a woman and “the nations” as monsters who threaten her, picturing Rome as Isaiah and Ezekiel had envisioned Israel’s enemies six hundred years
earlier. John reshapes Isaiah’s vision of Israel as a woman laboring in childbirth to make it the central drama of his prophecy
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as he seeks to interpret the struggle that he and other followers of Jesus now face. Convinced that what he believes Isaiah foresaw has now happened—that is, Israel
has
given birth to the messiah, Jesus of Nazareth!—John envisions her as the “woman clothed with the sun,” being menaced by a “great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns”
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that furiously stalks her in order to devour her child the moment he is born. Thus John characterizes the Roman forces that killed Jesus. But John wants to show that despite Rome’s apparent success in killing Israel’s messiah, Jesus actually escaped, “caught up into heaven,” while his mother, Israel, has fled into the wilderness. Now John pictures the dragon, the savage forces embodied in Rome, unleashing its fury on God’s people. Raging with frustration at the messiah’s escape and sensing his own impending doom, the dragon turns to “make war on … her children.”
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Although John apparently envisioned Israel as, in effect, Jesus’ “mother,” many Christians in later generations have taken the woman “clothed with the sun” as an image of Mary. Such variant interpretations show how John’s graphic and evocative images, read in later generations, took on wider resonances.
