Revelation 17

Chapter 17 is the most politically explicit chapter in the book. The angel's decoding of the seven mountains as seven kings (17:9-10) has generated centuries of interpretation. In first-century Rome, the seven hills were a standard identifying reference — the Palatine, Aventine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Caelian. But the angel says the heads are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one who is, one not yet come, and then an eighth who belongs to the seven. Attempts to identify these kings with specific Roman emperors have produced different lists depending on where one begins the count (Julius Caesar, Augustus, or Caligula) and whether one counts all emperors or only those who reigned significantly. The beast that was and is not and is about to rise from the bottomless pit (17:8) uses language that parodies the divine self-description who was and is and is to come from chapter 1, making the beast an explicit anti-God figure. The most widely held modern reading of the eighth king is that it is the Nero redivivus figure — Nero, who died, returns. The ten kings without yet received kingdoms are usually identified with the allied client kings of the eastern frontier.

The structural analysis the angel provides goes further than any other interpretive passage in the book. The woman is the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth (17:18) — a description that fits Rome in the 90s CE precisely. But the figure is also Babylon, the historical empire that destroyed Jerusalem; and Tyre, the merchant city of Ezekiel 26-28; and the anti-pattern of the holy city Jerusalem. The relationship between the woman and the beast is complex — she rides the beast (controls it, at least for a time) but then the beast and its ten kings turn on her and hate her and devour her flesh and burn her with fire (17:16). The self-consuming quality of imperial power — the beast turning on the city that defined its identity — is one of the book's most perceptive political observations. Rome's stability was always partly an illusion maintained by force; Revelation predicts that the empire's internal dynamics will eventually destroy even the great city at its centre. The Lamb's conquest of the beast and the kings (17:14) is stated as already certain: those with him are called and chosen and faithful — the same three terms that define the communities of the seven letters.