Bible Commentaries
Revelation 17

Verses 1-18

(III) XVII:I-XXII:5.

XVII 1-2 The Prefatory Vision —An Angel tells John to come and he will show him the judgement of the great Harlot, seated over many waters, with whom the kings of the world committed wantonness, for she has made the world drunk with the wine of her lustfulness. 1. ’Seated on’: as we say that a town is ’on’ the Thames, etc. 2. This ’fornication’ means that the world’s Powers, whatever their regime, have joined in the worship of the Goddess Rome and allied themselves to her essential paganism. 3a. A deeper ecstasy.

3-18 The Double Preparatory Vision.

(a ) 3b-6. A Woman, seated on a scarlet Beast covered with blasphemous names and having 7 heads and 10 horns. She is dressed in purple and scarlet, gilded, bedizened with precious stones and pearls. In her hand is a gold cup filled with her abominable harlotry. On her forehead, a significant name: ’Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and of the filth of the earth’. John stood appalled, seeing her drunk with the blood of the martyrs. The Angel proceeds to explain this.

7-18. The Beast he had seen was, and is not, but is about to ascend from the abyss and go to destruction. All, who were not from the origin in the Book of Life, shall go marvelling after the Beast when they see that it Was, and Is not, and Shall be. (’Here is the meaning, thou that understandest!’) The Seven Heads are Seven Hills, where she is enthroned. But they are also seven Kings: 5 are fallen; the 6th is now; the 7th is not yet come; but once come, he can remain but for a brief while. As for the Beast that was and is not—why! it is an 8th, and yet is one of the 7, and goes to perdition. The 10 Horns are 10 kings—well, they are not yet kings, but they take their authority along with the Beast, for an hour. They have but one mind; and as for their authority, they hand it over to the Beast. These shall war with the Lamb and he shall conquer them . . . (He adds): The Waters that the Woman sits above are races and nations and languages. These Horns and the Beast shall hate the Wanton and strip and burn and devour her. This Wanton is the City, the Great City, that has royal rule over the kings of the earth.

Further explanation of XVII I ff. —The Harlot is the City Rome (18): the Beast is the Empire on which the City is seated (3b ff.): the ’waters’ (15) the medley of nations composing it. The 7 Heads are the 7 Hills of Rome (9); the domini colles (’Hence’, i.e. from the Janiculum, ’may you see the seven lordly hills—Hence may you reckon up the whole of Rome’: Martial): purple and scarlet’ (4), its flamboyant ostentation, contrasted with the ’white’ of the Bride of the Lamb, below and passim: ’gilded’; bedizened with gold, or possibly alluding to prostitutes who actually gilded themselves. ’Pearls’: contemporary Roman women were quite mad about them: The name on her forehead (5)’: perhaps not merely symbolical; prostitutes used to write their names over their doors.

10 ff. But the 7 heads are also 7 kings: John explicitly states that a symbol may have more than one meaning. Of these, one as it were incarnated the Beast itself. ’It was, and is not, and is to have its advent’ (11). Supreme parody of the Lamb! Can we be more explicit? Not with absolute certainty. The Beast undoubtedly represents the total Roman Empire and indeed the worldenduring succession of such Powers as would be selfsufficient. The temporal expression of the enduring Power seems stricken to death, but only to revive. The chaotic year following the enforced suicide of Nero must have looked like the end of the Empire. But with the Flavian dynasty it came to life again. Thus Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia had come to an end: Rome would do so too, but something would replace it. We, nearly 2,000 years later, have seen similar phenomena: the Beast may even now be reemerging from its abyss, ravening for world-domination and the extermination of Christ and of his Church. But John, picking up afresh the symbolism of the 7 Heads, is clearly pointing to individuals. The system I prefer is this—Starting with the first Emperor, Augustus, you then have Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero. These five, says John, arc dead. The chaotic year of Galba, Otho and Vitellius followed who can hardly have seemed real emperors to anyone, certainly not to one living, like John, in Asia, and under the Flavian dynasty of which Vespasian was the Emperor, the 6th, therefore, in the list. Then is to come one who reigns only for a very brief space— Titus, in fact, who ruled for scarcely a year—a brief flash of extreme popularity destined not to survive (10). Such are the 7. Domitian followed (11), ’an eighth, who is yet one of the seven’. How so? The people had had a morbid affection for the mad genius Nero. Impossible to believe that he was dead! (Compare the belief about Barbarossa, and even Lord Kitchener, and many others.) He was alive—he was in Parthia—at least he would come to life again. Men spoke of ’Nero redux’: ’Nero redivivus’. The myth reached Jewish and even Christian circles: the Sibylline Books keep speaking of a Nero who should return as devil incarnate, rival of God, from across the Euphrates. And even pagan Rome had nicknamed the horrible Domitian ’Nero’: this prevailed as late as Tertullian. The Beast, therefore, was a man (see § 969d): he seemed identifiable with Nero: but Domitian was Nero-restored-to-life—he was, then, the 8th, yet one of the 7, and, incarnated the Beast. But he too was ’on his way to perdition’. The 10 Horns (12). In Daniel 7:7 there are 10 horns on the head of his 4th Beast, kings who coalesce into an empire. In Apoc too the ’horns’ are kingdoms, incorporated into the Roman Empire and unanimously working its will against the Church but ultimately turning against the Empire and destroying it, the Beast itself helping them. These kingdoms are to receive a very brief authority along with the Beast (12); but after the fall of Rome they will turn also against the Beast, and the Empire itself was indeed to break up into mutually warring parts: then, it is authoritatively declared, they too shall be defeated by the Lambs (14) And indeed, how swiftly vanishing, how uncreative, were the Huns, the Vandals, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths and the rest! Still, to the end, there will be the attempt to create some anti-God omnipotent State: the battle lasts till the end of time, ever-renewed.