Mark 2 · The beast from the sea
Built from Daniel's Beasts
Ten horns, seven heads, and the leopard, the bear and the lion: John's beast gathers the four kingdoms of Daniel into one body.
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- Texts
- Revelation 13:1–2; Daniel 7:2–8, 17, 23
- Figure
- The beast from the sea
- Authority
- Scripture
What the text shows
The beast rises from the sea with ten horns and seven heads, crowns on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads (Revelation 13:1). It looks like a leopard, with a bear's feet and a lion's mouth (Revelation 13:2).
Daniel's four beasts in one
Daniel saw four beasts come up from the churning sea: a lion, a bear, a leopard with four heads, and a fourth beast with ten horns (Daniel 7:3–7). Count their heads and you have seven; their horns, ten. John's beast gathers all four into one body. He names them in reverse, leopard, bear, lion, as if looking back from the last kingdom to the first.
What Daniel's beasts are
The angel explains: the four beasts are four kings, and the fourth beast is a fourth kingdom (Daniel 7:17, 23). So the beast from the sea is first a power over nations, the sum of the empires that went before it. The sea it rises from is the restless world of the peoples; Revelation itself says the waters are peoples, multitudes, nations and tongues (Revelation 17:15).
First fulfillment, then further fulfillment
Daniel's visions were first fulfilled in the empires of his own horizon and in Antiochus IV (1 Maccabees 1). For John's readers, the NABRE note reads the composite beast as the Roman Empire and its seven heads as emperors (see Revelation 17:9–10). A further fulfillment at the end is read on top of this first one, not instead of it.
The Fathers
St. Irenaeus writes that the fourth kingdom will be divided among ten kings, and that the one to come will rise among them and bring down three (Against Heresies V.25.3; V.26.1). St. Hippolytus (On Christ and Antichrist 25–28) and St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lecture 15.12–13) agree Fathers in agreement. St. Augustine reads the beast instead as the city of the ungodly, the whole body of the wicked (City of God XX.9) A Father or Doctor.
The Church Church teaching
The Church has not defined who or what the beast is. She does teach that the final deception can take political form: whenever someone claims to fulfil within history the hope that can only be fulfilled beyond it, including in a secular messianism (CCC 676).
Where interpreters differ Disputed
- The sea beast is the Antichrist himself: St. Irenaeus.
- It is his kingdom: St. Hippolytus, who reads the land beast as the Antichrist's kingdom.
- It is the ungodly city, the whole body of the wicked: St. Augustine.
- It is Rome first, and the end later: modern Catholic commentary, including the NABRE notes.
The Church has not decided.
The response asked of us
Every beast in Daniel 7 passes away. The kingdom is given to the holy ones of the Most High, and it does not pass (Daniel 7:27). Empires are real, and they are temporary.
Sources
- Revelation 13 and Daniel 7, New American Bible Revised Edition, with notes: bible.usccb.org
- St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.25–26: New Advent
- St. Hippolytus, On Christ and Antichrist 25–28; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 15; St. Augustine, City of God XX.9 (to be checked against the editions cited before publication)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 676