Of Beasts and Women: Progressive History, Tales, or What Else? The Revelation of John between Hegemony and Religious Cohabitation(s)

What John depicts in the seven letters to the ἐκκλησίαι (Rev 2-3) is further developed by the following visions of the text, which re-visualize and relocate elements reported in the first part with a more structured and re-contextualized meaning. In this essay, I read some of the visions of Revelation in light of the group dynamics reported in the opening seven letters. According to John’s visions, the two beasts of Rev 13:1-18 represent a socio-cultural dynamic arising from the place occupied by public religion in the socio-political network of Asia Minor; more specifically, the second beast emerges as a kind of mirror in which the effects of such a relationship are reflected among some Jews. If the two beasts of Revelation 13 represent, in action, prototypes of cultural and religious agencies both perceived and depicted by John as deviant and not in line with the “true” Judaism, the whore-Babylon of Revelation 17-18 emerges as the prototype of a city in which previous deviant agencies live and operate. In such a framework, I aim at supporting the contemporary minority position of Italian scholarship which identifies Babylon with a Jewish reality, providing some further elements in favor of such an interpretation.