There is a woman in the last book of the Bible who flees, and almost no one watches her go. She appears in Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet and a crown of twelve stars upon her head — and then she runs, pursued by a dragon, into a wilderness, where for twelve hundred and sixty days she is hidden and nourished. Two verses, no more (12:6 and 12:14). She is seldom explained, and more seldom still beloved.
This book is about her. It attempts one thing: to give her back to who she is. For whoever reads Scripture as Scripture reads itself — verse beside verse, image beside image — discovers that this woman is no riddle but an old acquaintance. She is Israel: the people clothed with the light of its God, crowned with its twelve tribes, borne on the very wings that once carried it up out of Egypt.
And so this book, though it concerns the last book of the Bible, is written first of all for Jewish readers. Not to win anyone over against their will, and not to annex a people into a story that would not be its own. The opposite. It means to show that the woman's road through the wilderness is, from beginning to end, the road of Israel, and that the promises made to her remain hers. Israel is Israel. Where this book speaks of the congregation, it does so as a branch grafted into the old olive tree — never as a trunk that replaces the root (Romans 11).
It is a book of images. I have tried to show the woman as John saw her — the sun, the eagle, the flood, the earth that comes to her aid — and to let those images speak by setting them beside their origin: the Sea of Reeds, Sinai, the city of refuge, the prophet who promises to allure his bride. Where the road runs through dark country, that is not passed over in silence. There is a night in this story, and this people does not know it from a book. But the woman is not lost in it. She is carried through the night, and at the end she does not come running out of the wilderness, but leaning.
Who she is, what she flees, on whose wings she rests, what she lives on, how long her night lasts and how it ends — that is what the pages hereafter mean to work out, step by step. The question with which the book opens is also the question with which it closes, and it is the loveliest that Scripture asks of her: who is this coming up out of the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved?
There is a woman in the last book of the Bible who flees, and almost no one watches her go. She appears in Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet and a crown of twelve stars upon her head — and then she runs, pursued by a dragon, into a wilderness, where for twelve hundred and sixty days she is hidden and nourished. Two verses, no more (12:6 and 12:14). She is seldom explained, and more seldom still beloved.
This book is about her. It attempts one thing: to give her back to who she is. For whoever reads Scripture as Scripture reads itself — verse beside verse, image beside image — discovers that this woman is no riddle but an old acquaintance. She is Israel: the people clothed with the light of its God, crowned with its twelve tribes, borne on the very wings that once carried it up out of Egypt.
And so this book, though it concerns the last book of the Bible, is written first of all for Jewish readers. Not to win anyone over against their will, and not to annex a people into a story that would not be its own. The opposite. It means to show that the woman's road through the wilderness is, from beginning to end, the road of Israel, and that the promises made to her remain hers. Israel is Israel. Where this book speaks of the congregation, it does so as a branch grafted into the old olive tree — never as a trunk that replaces the root (Romans 11).
It is a book of images. I have tried to show the woman as John saw her — the sun, the eagle, the flood, the earth that comes to her aid — and to let those images speak by setting them beside their origin: the Sea of Reeds, Sinai, the city of refuge, the prophet who promises to allure his bride. Where the road runs through dark country, that is not passed over in silence. There is a night in this story, and this people does not know it from a book. But the woman is not lost in it. She is carried through the night, and at the end she does not come running out of the wilderness, but leaning.
Who she is, what she flees, on whose wings she rests, what she lives on, how long her night lasts and how it ends — that is what the pages hereafter mean to work out, step by step. The question with which the book opens is also the question with which it closes, and it is the loveliest that Scripture asks of her: who is this coming up out of the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved?