Interpreting the book of Revelation has challenged and frustrated legions of scholars over time. Few dismiss the book, and many find that reading it becomes a passion. A good deal of the attraction to the book lies in the fact that because the book is

itself arcane and full of secret allegories at whose original reference we can only guess, it has offered all the more opportunity to researchers who can with impunity discover in its passages the message they themselves put there out of a sense that so menacing a document, full of hitherto misunderstood detail, can have application only to the unprecedented world-historical crisis of their own moment in time. 1

St. Augustine wrestled with the book, trying to untangle literal and figurative readings. He finally adopted a spiritual interpretation. Joachim of Fiore, an abbot of the twelfth century, maybe was the first, but certainly was not the last, to claim that the meaning of the book was divinely revealed to him.

Joseph Mede, a teacher of Milton, wrote Key of Revelation, which appeared in 1627. In part a response to Jesuit attacks on Protestant readings, he placed England as the chosen nation, and in working the numbers predicted that Christ would bind Satan and return to earth between 1625 and 1716. Isaac Newton also worked out a complex mathematical approach to prophecy and world history, and others have followed.2 The current popularity of Hal Lindseys’s views is evidence that the book of Revelation has not lost its power to command attention and commentary. As Adventists, we are not alone in our fascination with the book, nor are we alone in claiming to have the "right" interpretation.

One of the most enthralling and challenging passages is Revelation 13, with two beasts, a dragon, and the most famous of numbers: 666. Although precise details may differ, it does seem clear that these beasts are the archetypes of evil arrayed against good. The temptation is thus compelling to identify one’s enemies with the beasts, particularly when one is under threat.

Nero was perhaps the first person to be identified with 666. Just as with ours, every age has sought to identify the beasts and dragons with various tyrants and threats. The Great Whore has been Babylon and the persecuting Caesars of Rome. The great poet, Dante, identified images of Revelation with Philip of France and the Avignon Papacy. Protestants in the sixteenth century identified the papacy as the Antichrist. Blake identified the images with the political totalitarianism of his day, and closer to our own time Hitler seemed to take seriously his role as the Antichrist.3 In this tradition of identification Usama Ben Laden and Saddam Hussein no doubt take current stage for many.

The type of Adventist interpretation, at least as presented in the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide to these passages, is in effect to de-mythologize the text, to "solve" the mystery (as many others in the past have claimed), to identify and codify the passages, to explain, to eschew ambiguity. The symbols are reduced to one-to-one correspondence: the "mortal wound" of the beast from the water is when Gen. Alexander Berthier arrested Pope Pius VI in 1798 with the intention of terminating the papacy. The puzzle of the prophetic dates has all been worked out and the whole great prophetic chapter is all neatly explained.

Forgive me, but I am among those who are left unsatisfied with such an approach. The history of devote claims about the book should, I think, serve as a cautionary tale. The multiple approaches and interpretations, perhaps even with the vastly improved scholarly tools available today, suggests that what is said about the book tends to say as much about the interpreters as it does about the book it self. This is perhaps inevitable. This realization should perhaps make us a little more humble in our claims. I am intrigued by St. Jerome’s comment that "Revelation has as many mysteries as it does words."4 I would like some of the mystery back.

Whatever else it may be, the book of Revelation is in its reimaging of motifs, passages, and symbols of the Old Testament a wondrous panoply of a powerful imagination at work in the painting of the conflict between good and evil. Spielberg and Star Wars doesn’t come close, although reading Revelation one can see the genesis of the genre. Revelation as Northrop Frye notes, however, is not "a visualized book in the ordinary sense of the word."5 It would not work as a movie or even a series of movies.

Rather, "What the seer in Patmos had a vision of was primarily, as he conceived it, the true meaning of the Scriptures, and his dragons and horsemen and dissolving cosmos were what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah, whatever or however he saw on Patmos."6 The book is the summation of all that has gone before in Scripture and completes the "U" shape structure of the Bible by returning to humanity in the form of a city what was lost in the garden: the new city being the civilization of what the garden originally promised.

But to get to the passage at hand: Chapter 13. Symbolically the dragon is death, and as Frye states:

To kill death is to bring to life. In contrast to many other mythological systems, in the Bible the dragon seems to be a consistently sinister image. This is not only because of its antisocial habits of breathing fire and eating virgins, but because, of all sinister animals, it has the unique advantage of not existing, and so admirably symbolizes the paradox of evil, which is a powerful and positive force in our present mixture of things in time, but which by itself is pure negation or non-being. 7

Non-being must be turned into being, presented as the powerful symbols of the bride and groom that usher in the return of the reign of God.

Another aspect is to note the two beasts of Chapter 13: one rising out of the sea (v. 1), and the other rising out of the earth (v. 11), and remember that, symbolically, they harken back to Job and the Behemoth—the beast of land, and the Leviathan—the beast of the waters (Chapters 40 and 41). To appreciate the sense of the power of God it might be useful to compare and contrast the two passages.

In Job, the beasts are part of the God’s creation and form a part in God’s challenge to Job and a part of God’s "answer" to Job’s wrestling with the question of his own guilt and innocence. In Revelation, the beasts are not long aligned with God but with the dragon—the force of evil. On the human side, there is in both a sense of powerlessness. Job declares that he is "of small account" who has no more to say (40:4–5), and in Revelation there is the despair of "Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it" (13:4).

In both, there is also the sense of eventual satisfaction born of patience. Job finally declares of God, "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (42:2). Tucked in the middle of Revelation 13 is a puzzling, but hopeful note (if one is listening, as no doubt Job had to listen to God after the long days of listening to his friends): one must hear the call for the "endurance and faith of the saints" (v. 10).

However one reads Revelation—as literal time prophecy in the millenarian tradition or as spiritual journey—it might be well to remember Job’s last words in our pronouncements of a final, complete meaning of the book of Revelation:

Therefore I have uttered
what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I
did not know.
"Here, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you
declare to me."
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes. (42:3–6)

The majesty displayed in the power of God calls us all to repentance—perhaps even a repentance of our interpretations. God and his revelation to Job perhaps should—if I should be so bold to suggest—also be at the heart of our approach to a beginning of an understanding of the book of Revelation.

Notes and References

1. Bernard McGinn, "Revelation," in The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 523–24.
2. For this review of commentators on Revelation and others see ibid., 523–41.
3. See Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1982), 95.
4. Quoted in McGinn, "Revelation."
5. Frye, Great Code, 135.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 188.

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