Want some opinions on this - Rev. 12 in the stars

[QuantaFille]

We were shown this video in Sunday School this morning. We are making our way through the book of Revelation and we're in chapter 12. I am not exactly sure what to make of it, but I have an idea. I will come back and talk more when I am more awake (2 hours past my bedtime already) and have more time. I just want to see what other people think of it first.

[Manwë Súlimo]

Will people PLEASE stop trying to prognosticate the end of time?

Anyway, constellation forms are about the most arbitrary symbols ever. Like I saw in the video, four stars in a trapezoidal pattern is supposed to be a bird? Yea, okay.

[seanD]

We were shown this video in Sunday School this morning. We are making our way through the book of Revelation and we're in chapter 12. I am not exactly sure what to make of it, but I have an idea. I will come back and talk more when I am more awake (2 hours past my bedtime already) and have more time. I just want to see what other people think of it first.

Interesting. I've never been able to make heads or tails of Rev 12, one of the very few passages that looks like it's obvious symbolism yet without any explanation given for its meaning, which is odd.

[John Reece]

From The Revelation of Saint John (Black's New Testament Commentary; London: A & C Black, 1966), by G. B. Caird:

Who then in John's version of the story are the woman robed with the sun and the great red dragon? John calls each of them a semeion, which can mean portent, but which commonly also means a constellation interpreted as a portent. It is likely then that he envisaged them both as constellations in the sky. But it is a waste of time to search for them on any map of the stars. The woman is certainly not Virgo, the sixth of the signs of the zodiac; for she wears the twelve stars of the zodiac as a crown. She belongs, like all of John's other symbols, to the realm of vision. The dragon is not Draco, nor Serpens, nor the many-headed Hydra, but a combination of all three;* he is called the dragon and the serpent (xii. 9), and he has seven heads. The third of the stars of the sky which he sweeps with his tail leave no blank in the night sky; for this element in the picture is drawn from Daniel viii. 10, and the stars are angelic representatives of pagan powers. We must look beyond astronomy for an answer. The woman and the dragon are figures of the imagination, projected on the starry heavens.

The woman is the mother of the Messiah, not Mary, but the messianic community. This John makes abundantly clear now by a verbal echo of a prophecy about mother Zion (Isa. lxvi. 7-9), and later by speaking of the members of the church as 'the rest of her children' (xii. 17). She is the Jerusalem above who is our mother (Gal. 4. 26). The agony of her labour is the suffering endured by the loyal people of God as they waited for their anointed king. John's modern critics make much of what they take to be a curious lamentable anomaly, that in the present passage he can jump directly from the Nativity to the Ascension, without mention of the intervening life of Jesus. But the jump exists entirely in their own fancy, for there is no reference here to the Nativity but the Cross. The reason for this is that he is continuing his exposition of the second psalm, begun in the vision of the seventh trumpet. In the psalm it is not at his birth but at his enthronement on mount Zion that the anointed king is addressed by God, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you', and is given authority to smash all the nations with an iron bar (Ps. ii. 7-9). A king's birthday is the day of his accession. For the Christian exegesis of this psalm John had as guide the preaching tradition of the primitive church that Jesus 'was appointed Son of God with power after he rose from the dead' (Rom. i. 4). Sonship and enthronement belong inseparably together, and therefore the male child is no sooner born than he is snatched away to God and his throne. But for John as for the fourth evangelist, the Cross is the point at which Jesus entered upon his kingly glory. 'I conquered and sat down beside my Father on his throne' (iii. 21). Thus the interests of scriptural exegesis and Christian theology have dictated the way in which John has rewritten his myth. The prince is snatched from the dragon's clutches not by magic but by death; and his place of safety is not some secluded island but the throne of God, whence he will return to kill the dragon.

....

*See G. B. Gray (ICC) on Isa. xxvii. 1.