Friday, September 2, 2022

Ian Boxall on Revelation 12:6 and the woman fleeing into the wilderness

  

The woman fled into the wilderness, where a place had been prepared for her by God. Rather than representing the flight of Mary and Joseph into Egypt, the flight of the woman into the wilderness evokes that journey in reverse, out of Egypt at the Exodus (cf. Ezek. 29:3, where Pharaoh is likened to a dragon). It is a reminder that the story of God’s people as John witnesses it is the story of a new Exodus. Though the wilderness is often viewed as a place of danger and desolation (hence Babylon is there at 17:3), it is also the place of preparation, where God cared for his people prior to their entering the promised land. The place … prepared for her by God echoes the sealing of the one hundred and forty-four thousand, or the measuring of God’s sanctuary and its worshippers (7:1–7; 11:1–2). It offers assurance of divine care, though not exemption from suffering. She is fed there (cf. the story of Hagar, Gen. 21:14, 19) for one thousand, two hundred and sixty days (see on 11:2 and 3). The ecclesial interpretation of the woman has sometimes suggested a eucharistic reading of her being fed or ‘nourished’ (picking up on the relationship between the manna and the eucharistic bread: e.g. John 6). The illustration in the thirteenth-century Trinity Apocalypse, for example, shows an angel approaching the woman with the host and a chalice (van der Meer 1978: 159). (Ian Boxall, The Revelation of Saint John [Black's New Testament Commentary; London: Continuum, 2006], 181-82, emphasis in original)

 

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