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