Hagar in the Wilderness

The woman of Revelation 12 starts out as queen of heaven but is quickly found not only on earth but all the way out in the wilderness. Even before the dragon is cast out, she leaves heaven.

Her story follows the story of Israel. A lamb’s blood is shed (v. 11) and the woman is saved from the threat of the dragon and finds a place prepared out n the wilderness (v. 6), to which she escapes with the help of the wings of Exodus-eagles (v. 14; cf. Exodus 19:4; Deuteronomy 32:1). There she is “nourished” by God (v. 14), like a nursing child.

But this typology has some puzzles. Jesus went to prepare a place for His disciples (John 14:2-3), but in the Old Testament, the prepared place is either the land of promise (Exodus 23:30) or the place of the ark in the temple (1 Kings 6:19; 1 Chronicles 15:1; 2 Chronicles 3:1). In Revelation 12, the prepared place is in the wilderness. Perhaps that is intended to evoke the wilderness sanctuary, the place prepared where Israel was nourished. Perhaps the vision plays off the inversions of the exile, where the land is the place of terror and threat, and the wilderness of Babylonian exile is the place of safety, a place prepared for Israel by Daniel and his friends.

There is an interesting inversion here of the vision of Zechariah 5:5-11, where a woman is placed in an ephod and carried by two women who look like storks to a place where a temple is built for her, a place “prepared” (LXX, hetoimasai). That is a false ark – a container flanked by winged creatures. The woman in Revelation 12 is the true ark (cf. Revelation 11:19). (This is reinforced by the double use of ekei, “there,” which is used nine times in Deuteronomy 12 to speak of “there, the place where Yahweh’s name dwells._

Israel is not the first woman in the wilderness who flees to a prepared place. That path is prepared by Hagar, who twice flees from Abraham’s household with her son and finds nourishment and a watered place prepared for her and her child in the wilderness (Genesis 16; 21:8-21).

What’s the force of these allusions? What’s the typology here? Paul’s allegory in Galatians 4 gives us some assistance. There, Hagar is a type of Sinai and the first Jerusalem who bears children of the flesh, in contrast to Sarah, the heavenly Jerusalem who brings forth sons of the Spirit. The woman in the wilderness is thus the first Israel, who gives birth to the King (salvation is of the Jews) and also has other children who will suffer at the hands of the beasts (12:17). Those other children are children of Hagar who confess the blood of the Lamb and are then exalted. 

This Hagar disappears from the story at the end of Revelation 12, and a heavenly city, a Sarah-bride and mother, descends from heaven at the end of the book. Revelation’s two heavenly women correspond to Hagar and Sarah, to Israel and church. For Revelation as for Paul, Abraham had two sons, sons of two women.