The thirteenth chapter of the book of Revelation describes the appearance of two beasts. The first beast rises out of the sea,
13:1b having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names.
This entire section of Revelation is a riff on Daniel 7, in which four beasts rise out of the sea. The last of Daniel's beasts has ten horns (though we're not told how many heads it had). In Daniel, an eleventh horn, smaller than the others, pulls three of the original ten out "by the roots" to make room for itself, then delivers a speech. This bit doesn't appear in Revelation, though the beast's presence is taken to have the same meaning: an arrogant ruler forces everyone in the world to obey it.
Though that first beast is the more powerful of the two, and though it seems to be more important to the author of Revelation, it is not the beast that turns up in today's horror movies and death-metal albums. The second, much more famous beast "had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon." It serves the first beast, and forces others to serve it too.
13:16 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, 17 so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is the name of the beast or the number of its name. 18 This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.
The significance of that number is addressed in another node, and the possibility that early groups of Christians interpreted the number differently has also been noded elsewhere. But what about the mark of the beast -- the inscription of the name-or-number on hands and foreheads?
What did John mean?
When trying to understand a difficult text like Revelation, it is always best to search out the interpretations that the text itself provides, before running off to find explanations elsewhere. What does Revelation itself have to say about these kinds of identifying marks? One answer reveals itself in chapter 7:
7:2 I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to damage earth and sea, 3 saying, "Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads.
Two chapters later, the significance of this mark is explained:
9:3 Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. 4 They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.
John clearly wants the reader of chapter 13 to remember chapters 7 and 9 as she reads, since not only is there a reference to a marked forehead, but there are also allusions to God's authority over earth and sea (and grass, too), along with the description of God's servants as his "slaves." (The word doulos, which can mean either "servant" or "slave," appears in both Revelation 7:2 and Revelation 13:16. The NRSV, the NIV, the ASV, the NASB, and the good old KJV all translate the word doulos differently in the two chapters, perhaps out of a desire to avoid describing God's power over his servants as that of a slave-owner over his slaves.)
The squeamishness of English translators notwithstanding, John is creating deliberate echoes between chapters of his own text. The echoes continue long after the beasts have been introduced:
14:9 Then another angel, a third, followed them, crying with a loud voice, "Those who worship the beast and its image, and receive a mark on their foreheads or on their hands, 10they will also drink the wine of God's wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger..."
16:2 So the first angel went and poured his bowl on the earth, and a foul and painful sore came on those who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped its image.
20:4 I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands.
For John, then, accepting the mark of the beast is closely connected with worshipping the beast's image. His concern with idolatry has a very long pedigree in Jewish scripture, and would have been a pressing concern for a Christian living in the Roman Empire.
What had John been reading?
I already noted above that John was intimately familiar with the apocalyptic book of Daniel and had drawn much of its imagery from it. However, Daniel does not mention marks on hands or foreheads; in fact, Daniel doesn't mention foreheads at all, and none of his uses of the word "hand" fit John's context.
Two Old Testament books do mention hands and foreheads, however: Exodus and Deuteronomy. The verse that has had the strongest impact on the Jewish tradition is in Deuteronomy 6:
6:6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
"These words" refers to the prayer in verses 4-5, which is arguably the most important prayer in Judaism and one of the most important in Christianity too. Orthodox Jews take the command to "bind" God's words upon hand and forehead literally, and wear little boxes filled with scripture called tefillin. This tradition, still in practice today, was attested by Josephus (Antiquities 4.213) at around the same time as Revelation was being written. Incidentally, tefillin are traditionally worn on the left arm, not the right hand. I am not sure whether the Jewish communities that John knew had interpreted Deuteronomy in a different way (Deuteronomy doesn't specify a hand), or whether he had other reasons for choosing the right side (which is usually considered the "good" side of the body).
All this goes to show that John didn't invent with the idea of a "protective seal" that marks God's own. What is new in Revelation is the tradition's demonic inversion -- an "anti-seal" that would mark the Beast's servants, slating those who were marked with it for destruction when the inevitable Final Judgement of God comes.
How did later Christians interpret this passage?
Today's Christians have developed a fascination with an element of this passage that John seems to have put in as an afterthought: namely, the bit about buying and selling in 13:17.
Revelation never mentions Satanic commerce anywhere else (the references to buying things in 3:18 and 18:11 hardly seem relevant, and don't treat commerce as intrinsically bad). No passage in the Hebrew Bible seems to illuminate the reference either. God provides laws regulating commerce throughout the Torah, and the stories of many important purchases are narrated, but none of them really resonate with the warning in Revelation. The only faintly apocalyptic reference to commerce that I could find is in Ezekiel 7:12 ("let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude"), and we know that Daniel was reading Ezekiel since he described a similar series of four-faced beasts as Ezekiel does (compare Ezekiel 1:10 and Revelation 4:7). None of that seems to get us very far, though.
In the New Testament, there is a harsh judgement of commerce in the story of Jesus driving out the Temple moneychangers, which in turn alludes to prophecies in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Psalms . But neither the evangelists nor the prophets say anything about a demonic mark in these passages, or about angels, or about hands and foreheads, or about earth and water -- and Revelation is so vastly different from the Gospels in cosmology and Christology that it doesn't seem especially fruitful to compare them on this point anyway.
So I am not sure what John intended with the reference to buying and selling, but it has become a significant focus among modern interpreters, who are gravely concerned (often for good reason) about national ID cards, bar codes, microchip implants, and other forms of government surveillance and enforced capitalism. For those who think that commerce is intrinsically evil, Revelation could provide reasons to try to avoid the system, and many radical Christians do so by refusing to patronize banks or megacorporations. Even though the Bible does not condemn commerce as such, it does condemn usury (Nehemiah 5:7, Psalm 15:5, Ezekiel 18, etc.), upon which our our existence in the West arguably depends. Christians who await the end-times would rather play it safe, though obviously different denominations disagree on what it takes to be "safe."
Notes:
I realize that the book of Revelation describes a vision, and that some Christians therefore believe that John does not need to have read about Old Testament beasts in order to describe New Testament beasts. However, in my opinion, even the most radical visions are going to be influenced by the social context in which the visionary finds himself or herself. I do not doubt that John was a visionary; but at the same time, it seems clear to me that he saw supernatural beings in a shape that his tradition prepared him for, rather than the supernatural beings beloved by other traditions.
All quotations are taken from the NRSV. I was guided in my reading by the notes in the excellent Oxford Annotated Bible, and drew further connections with the help of the online concordance at Bible Gateway.
This writeup is respectfully dedicated to jessicapierce.
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