Nor does John confine himself to strictly Jewish sources. He
may denounce Greco-Roman civilization in all of its richness and splendor as the
work of the Devil, but he appears to know and borrow freely from pagan
iconography. Seven is a sacred number in Jewish tradition, to be sure, but it
was also significant in the astrological beliefs and practices of classical
paganism, which knew only seven heavenly bodies. Twelve is the number of the
tribes of Israel, but it is also the number of signs in the zodiac. Astrology,
in fact, is condemned in the Bible as one of the great besetting sins of
paganism—"offerings to the sun and moon and constellations, all the host of heaven"—and yet John may have invoked
precisely these images and associations in the text of Revelation.
Among the most sublime and exalted scenes in Revelation, for
example, is the "great portent" that will appear in heaven to mark
the beginning of the end-times: "[a] woman clothed with the sun, with the
moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." The woman,
pregnant and already in labor, is stalked by "a great red dragon,"
which waits to devour the newborn child as soon as she gives birth. But the
archangel Michael—a figure who first appears in the book of the Daniel, John's
single favorite source in the Hebrew Bible—makes war on the red dragon, who is
here and now revealed to be Eve's original tempter, "that old serpent,
called the Devil and Satan."
Conventional readings of Revelation see the woman as the
Virgin Mary and the newborn infant as Jesus. … But it is also possible to
discern less orthodox origins and meanings. "St. John's mind sets to work
on the lines of a very old mythic pattern," writes Austin Farrer, who
suggests that John borrowed the figure of the woman from pagan
astrology—"the Lady of the Zodiac" who is "crowned with the
twelve constellations." Other scholars see the goddess Artemis, who was
worshipped in such splendor in the Artemesium at Ephesus, or the goddess Roma,
the "queen of heaven" whose divine child the Roman emperor was
imagined to be and whose attributes are found on imperial Roman coinage from
the first century.
Indeed, precisely the same figure is found in sacred myths
all over the ancient world—"a high goddess with astral attributes: the sun
is her garment, the moon her footstool, the stars her crown." Even the dire
predicament of a laboring woman beset by a ravening monster is a familiar motif
in pagan iconography. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for example, struggles to save
her son from attacks by snakes and scorpions, and the Greek goddess Leto is
menaced by a python when she is pregnant with Apollo. "In each of these
myths the dragon seeks the child, not yet born, in order to devour or kill
him," explains Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. "The woman, still
pregnant, is pursued for the child she carries. She gives birth with the dragon
only moments way, and the male child she has just delivered is caught up to the
Heavens, safe from the dragon's reach."
Above all, the "war in heaven" between the
archangel Michael and the red dragon—the eschatological high point of
Revelation—is strongly reminiscent of the so-called combat myth that can be
found in stories of creation in pagan texts from all over the ancient Near
East. (“A History of the End of the World”, pages 93-94)
To see the sources of the quotations cited – buy the book.
Doug
