Seven Heads

Seven Heads July 29, 2015

In a 2007 Bibliotheca Sacra article, Mark Hitchcock examines various theories about the identity of the seven heads of the beast in Revelation 17:9-11. It’s been proposed that the number seven is purely symbolic of fulness, and that the heads are not to be identified with any historical characters. Hitchcock’s critique hit the nail squarely: “the problem with the symbolic interpretation in this text is that the symbol has no concrete, meaningful referent. If all the text means is that the Roman rule is complete, why is the vision so detailed and particular in noting that ‘five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. And the beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth, and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction.’ Also if seven is the number of completion, why add the reference to the beast as the eighth? The symbolic approach fails to do justice to the intricate details of the text” (473).

As he goes on to point out, this abstract symbolic mode of interpretation doesn’t fit the way similar prophecies work elsewhere in the Bible: “symbols in Daniel have historical referents. When Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, he said, ‘You are the head of gold’ (Dan. 2:38). The angelic interpreter identified the four beasts as ‘four kings who will arise from the earth’ (7:17), and the ram and the goat are identified as the ‘kings of Media and Persia’ and ‘the king of Greece’ (8:20-21). Even more significantly symbols in Revelation have identifiable, specific referents: the seven «tars are seven literal messengers (Rev. 1:20), the seven lampstands are seven literal, historical churches (v. 20), the Lamb is Jesus (5:5-7), the golden bowls of incense are the prayers of the saints (v. 8), and the dragon is the devil (12:9)” (473-4).

It goes against the grain of contemporary interpretation, but if we’re going to read Revelation as ancients would have, it seems we’ll have to determine some specific historical referent for the symbols.

 After reviewing several “preterist” solutions that identify the heads with a succession of Roman empires, Hitchcock concludes that the best answer is to say that “king” here refers to “kingdom.” This “is supported by the parallels between Revelation 17:9-12 and Daniel 7:17, 23, where references to kings and kingdoms are interchangeable, thus revealing that a king represents the kingdom he rules” (481). Besides, “the seven heads are seven mountains (w. 9-10), and ‘mountains’ or ‘hills’ often symbolize kingdoms or empires in the Old Testament and in Jewish writings” (482).

He also argues for this interpretation from more specific parallels with Daniel 7: “the successive-kingdoms approach fits the Old Testament imagery of the beast and its heads drawn from Daniel 7. The imagery of the seven-headed beast in Revelation 13 and 17 clearly alludes to Daniel 7, where there are four beasts with a total of seven heads (each beast had one head except for the leopard, which had four). The statement in Revelation 13:2 that the beast is like a leopard, a bear, and a lion alludes to Daniel 7. Also the ten horns of the beast in Revelation 13:1; and 17:3, 7, 12 recall the ten horns of the fourth beast in Daniel 7. The four beasts that come up out of the sea and the seven heads on these beasts (Dan. 7) symbolize four great kingdoms. The parallel between the four beast kingdoms and seven heads in Daniel 7:3-7 and the beast and seven heads in Revelation 17:9-11 is unmistakable.” He rightly identifies the beasts with four great late ancient empires: “Daniel 7:17 and 23 state that the four beasts are four kings although they in fact represent four kingdoms or empires: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome” (483).

And he finds historical support in the view of Andreas of Caesarea, who “said the seven kings in Revelation 17:9-10 represent seven successive kingdoms, each of which was associated with a specific king: Assyria (Ninus), Media (Arbakus), Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar), Persia (Cyrus), Macedonia (Alexander), the old Roman Empire (Romulus), and the new Roman Empire (Constantine), with the eighth (v. 11) being the kingdom of the Antichrist” (481).

But here his excellent analysis breaks down, I think. One might conclude from his comparisons of Daniel 7 and Revelation 17 that the beast of Revelation is a composite of the four beasts of Daniel, and that the seven heads of Revelation’s beast are the seven heads of Daniel’s beasts. Instead, Hitchcock reaches back to the beginning of biblical history to say that the seven heads represent empires from Egypt on – Egypt, Assyria, neo-Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, each of which is represented by an individual king (484). The other kings are kings yet to come – a reunited Roman empire, and then the kingdom of antiChrist. But here his charge of arbitrariness against some preterist readings bounces back at him. Why not start with the Bible’s first empire, Babel, represented by Nimrod? What makes Egypt an empire and not, say, Phoenicia, with its colonial outposts around the Mediterranean?

What’s the alternative? Keeping strictly to the terms of Daniel 7. If “five have fallen,” that would seem to refer to the heads of Babylon, Persia, and three of the four heads of the third beast; the “one that is” is the final head of the third beast, and the coming seventh head is the head of the fourth beast. The beast himself is identified with an eighth head that comes “out of” the seven, like the little horn with a mouth and eyes that springs up in Daniel 7:8.That suggestion is surely not without its difficulties. What would it mean for the empire that “is” in John’s time to be an empire attached to a Hellenistic beast? But something like this seems to be the only way to curtail the arbitrariness of assigning historical referents to ancient symbols.

(Mark Hitchcock, “A Critique of the Preterist View of Revelation 17:9-11 and Nero,” Bibliotheca Sacra 164 [2007] 472-84.)


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