2---6.
ἵνα ὅταν ''τέκῃ τὸ τέκνον αὐτῆς " καταφάγῃ. ἄρσενα,! ὃς μέλλει "ποιμαίνειν πάντα τὰ ἔθνη ἐν ῥάβδῳ ° σιδηρᾶ" καὶ ’ ἡρπάσθη τὸ τέκνον αὐτῆς πρὸς τὸν θεὸν καὶ πρὸς τὸν θρόνον
αὐτοῦ.
425
5. Καὶ ἔτεκεν vidyn Matt. ii. 16-20, Luke xiii. 30°31, Acts iv.
25-27.
6. καὶ ἡ γυνὴ Ἱἔφυγεν eis τὴν Epnuov, ὅπου ἔχει ἐκεῖ dar 27, xix.
A A lal 15: 6). τόπον ἠτοιμασμένον ἀπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ, ἵνα ἐκεῖ " τρέφωσιν αὐτὴν " ἡμέρας Sib. ο
Χιλίας διακοσίας ἑξήκοντα.
17,1 Cor. xii. 2, 4. 11, Win. § 5, 20 f., Moult. i. 58-59. ον. 40)? s Cf. on xi. 2-3.
q Matt. ii. 13, cf. Ps. Sol. xvii. 9.
viii. 196 f. p Acts viii. 39,0 Thess. iv. r (= τρέφεται, 14) for constr. see x.
ow? with heavenly food, like ancient Israel (Ps. Ixxviii. 24,
1 Read αρσενα P, 95, Meth., Andbav (Ws., Bs.) for the solecistic αρσεν (AC’ Lach., Ti., Tr., Al. Sw., WH) [appeva (the Attic form, Thumb 77, Helbing 20)
SQ, 1, etc., Areth., Bj.]: a. (Vict.) or v. (Pr.) a redundant gloss 2
Wetstein cites
a verbal parallel from Aristoph., Eccles., 549-550 (ἄρρεν γὰρ ἔτεκε παιδίον . ἥκκλη-
σία ;).
pus impellit, sed celsus et erectus in medio incedens”; ibid. viii. 14, for ser- pents devouring children. The mother of Zoroaster had also a vision of wild beasts waiting to devour her child at its birth. This international myth of the divine child menaced at birth readily lent itself to moralisation, or afforded terms for historical applications, e¢.g., the abor- tive attack on Moses, the prototype of messiah (Baldensperger, 141, 142) at his birth (Ac. vii. 20 f.) and the vain efforts of Herod against the messiah. The animosity of Pytho for Leto was due to a prophecy that the latter’s son would vanquish him.
Ver. 5. In accordance with the rab- binic notion which withdrew messiah for a time, the infant, like a second Moses, is caught up out of harm’s way. He has no career on earth at all. This is intelligible enough in a Jewish tradition; but while no Christian pro- phet could have spontaneously depicted his messiah in such terms, even under the exigencies of apocalyptic fantasy, the further problem is to understand how he could have adopted so incongruous and inadequate an idea except as a pictorial detail. The clue lies in the popular messianic interpretation of passages like Ps. ii. where messiah’s birth is really his inauguration and enthronement. The early application of this to Jesus, though not antagonistic to an interest in his his- toric personality, tallied with the wide- spread feeling (cf. note on i. 7) that his final value lay in his return as messiah. Natiuitas quaedam eius ascensio: ‘‘ The heavens must receive him” (Acts iii. 21) till the divine purpose was ripe enough for his second advent. This
κ
Cf. Cooke’s North Semitic Inscript., 221-222.
tendency of primitive Jewish Christianity serves to explain how John could refer in passing to his messiah in terms which described a messiah, as Sabatier remarks, sans la crotx et sans la mort, and which even represented his ascension as an escape rather than a triumph. The ab- sence of any allusion to the Father is not due so much to any reluctance on the pro- phet’s part to call Jesus by the name of Son of God (cf. ii. 18), which pagan usage had profaned not only in such mythical connexion but in the vocabulary of the Imperial cultus, as to the fact that the mythical substratum always gave special prominence to the mother; the goddess- mother almost invariably displaced the father in popular interest, and indeed bulked more largely than even the child.
Ver. 6. ἀπὸ κ.τ.λ.,-- ὑπό of agent (so Acts ii. 22, iv. 36, etc., Ps. Sol. xv. 6, and a contemporary inscription in Ditten- berger’s Sylloge Inscr. 655° συντετηρ- npéva ἀπὸ βασιλέων kal Σεβαστῶν) only here in Apocalypse. On the flight of the faithful to the wilderness, a stereotyped feature of the antichrist period, cf. A. C. 211 f. Apocalyptic visions, particularly in the form of edited sources or adapted traditions, were not concerned to pre- serve strict coherency in details or con- sistency in situation. Thus it is not clear whether the ἔρημος was conceived to exist in heaven, or whether heaven is the background rather than the scene of what transpires. What follows in 7-12 is the description (from the popular re- ligious version of the source) of what John puts from a definitely Christian standpoint in iii, 21, v. 5, where (as in Asc. Isa. Gk. ii. 9-11) the downfall of Satan is ascribed to Jesus himself.