(fi) An example of composite structure, better knouTi to modern students of the Apocalypse (through Gunkel's ScAo?)/. M. Chaos), but more difficult to exhibit with precision, is the vision in ch. 12 of the Messiah-mother and the Dragon seeking to devour her child. The teaching of 'John' is, again, evident enough. Satan has been overthrown by the birth and ascension of the Messiah. He has been cast down from heaven, but he is still permitted to persecute the Messianic community on earth. If his wrath is fierce, it is because his time is short. Let the persecuted lend their ear to the loud voice saying in heaven : 'Now is come salvation — and the Kingdom of our God' (vv.17. 12. 10). It is clear, however, that, apart from a desire to use materials which laj- to his hand in fragments of Jewish apoca- Ij-pses, which borrowed and combined Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek myths, he would not have expressed his meaning in the waj' we find in this chapter. The scene begins in heaven, and the woman is described (v.i) in language appropriate to a goddess. Then she appears (v.o), without explanation, on the eartli, where she finds refuge and nourishment in the wilder- ness. The Dragon is then cast out of heaven to the earth (v.S), although this ejection seems already to be assumed at v.4, and on the earth he pursues the woman to her retreat in the wilder- ness. A Cliristian meaning can douljtless be put into it all, but no one narrator could ever spontaneously have told the story in this way. For a brief and lucid attemiit: to conceive the possible process through which the immediate and remote materials passed in the hands of ' John,' see Porter, op. cit. 230 ff.
(2) Of problems turning on more special points we have good instances in ch. 13. We may feel satisfied that the first Beast is, in general, the lioinan Empire embodied in the person of the Emperor, while tiie second (the lamb tiiat 'spake as a dragon,' v.") is the priesthood of the Imperial
* The words ' the testimon.v of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy ' are a gloss (see the Conunentaries), but they are entirely true to the writer's thought (li), and form with 1 Co 123 an interest- ing witness to the test applied to prophets in the early Church.
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cultus exercising a lamb-like office with all the ferocity of dragon-like tyrants. We may be satis- fied also that under the imagery of the first Beast the author must have thought both of Nero and Domitian. Still the questions remain : (a) What is the ' deadly wound ' that was healed (v.'-)? (6) Who is the ' man ' whose number is the number of the Beast (v.i^)? (c) Is the 'number' 666, or, as in some MSS, 616? These three questions are closely interdependent. It has been argued that, as the Beast is rather the Empire than an individual Emperor, the wound should refer to some event of public rather than of personal import. To the objection that v.^^ speaks expressly of the 'number of a man,' it is replied that, on the analogy of 21", this may simply mean that the number is to be reckoned in a human and not in a heavenly or angelic way. It is found that the Greek letters * of the phrase meaning ' the Latin Kingdom ' give the number 666, while the value of the letters in 'the Italian Kingdom' is 616. Against the identification of the Beast with Nero it is further argued that the Hebrew equivalent of 'Nero Csesar,' rightly spelt {i.e. with the yod ['] in ' Csesar '), t gives not 666 but 676. Accepting this point of view, we should still have to ask, What were the events that were respectively the inflicting and the healing of a deadly wound, and we are pre- sented with the alternative theories : assassina- tion of Julius Cajsar (wound), accession of Augustus (healing) ; end of the Julian dynasty in Nero (wound), rise of the Flavian dynasty (heal- ing). On the other hand, it is contended that, apart even from v. '8, the whole passage is too intense and too definite in its reference to exclude particular Emperors from the view of the author or his readers. He must have thought of Nero. Almost as certainly he must have thouglit of Domitian, whom he conceived as Nero Rcdiriviis (17"), and, not improbably, he also thought of Caligula, to whose attempt to set up his own statue in Jerusalem the Apocalypse of the blasphemous beast (considered as material borrowed by 'John ') might be supposed to have originally referred. :J: This might explain the variant 616, which is the number of Caligula's name. The omission of the yod in writing the Hebrew form of Csesar is not a serious difficulty (see Mollatt, op. cit.). Finally, Gunkel, finding the Bab. original of the Beast in the chaos-monster Tiamat overcome (in the crea- tion myth) by Marduk, has shown that the Heb. words n;jiD"ip Dinp(r'Ao?w kadhmdnlyah=' the primi- tive monster') give the number 666. It might be supposed, therefore, that what struck 'John' was that the number of this primaeval beast, tradition- ally familiar to him, was also the number of a man, viz. Nero. There are serious linguistic objections to this view (see Moffatt), but it may suggest to us that the number containing three sixes had a traditional meaning. It may have meant the constant eflbrt and failure of what is human to attain the Divine perfection, of which the number 7 was the symbol : so near yet so far off, ' O the little more, and how much it is.'