(Download) "How Typical a Roman Prostitute Is Revelations "Great Whore"?(Critical Essay)" by Journal of Biblical Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: How Typical a Roman Prostitute Is Revelations "Great Whore"?(Critical Essay)
- Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 231 KB
Description
John of Revelation famously introduces the woman Babylon as a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "Come, I will show you the judgment of the great [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]," 17:2; cf. 17:5, 15-16; 19:2). But would early readers or hearers of Revelation have tended to see Babylon, based on John's description of her, as a typical Roman [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]? What were the typical, or stereotypical, traits of a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] by the latter half of the first century C.E.? And how well does Babylon fit the profile? These are the principal questions that animate this article. In pursuing them, we argue that John's representation of Babylon as a prostitute mimics a pattern of gender-based derision characteristic of coeval Roman writings, a pattern contingent on features of ancient prostitution that we elucidate. Imagining Rome as a prostitute who declares herself empress, John relies on the same logic that informs Roman authors who characterize imperial figures as pimps and whores. In Revelation, however, it is not the empress who is characterized as a prostitute but the empire itself. Ancient Mediterranean sex workers came in two principal types: the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. The first term might be translated "brothel worker" "brothel slave," or, more colloquially, "streetwalker" depending on the context. The second term is best translated "courtesan" Although John terms Babylon a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], scholars have tended to treat her as a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (1) By the beginning of the Common Era, however, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] was largely a literary construct--"not a historical entity, but a cultural sign" as classicist Laura K. McClure puts it. (2) Even more typical of the scholarly approach to the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Babylon is recourse to the topos of the harlot in the Hebrew Bible. A parade example is G. K. Beale's fourteen-page treatment of Rev 17:1-16, which is dense with textual references to OT harlots and their attributes. (3) Our point is not that Jewish Scripture is irrelevant to the depiction of the woman Babylon in Revelation, or even that the courtesan topos is irrelevant to it. Our point is rather that the scholarly approach to Babylon has been excessively "bookish" Reading the myriad commentaries, monographs, and articles on Revelation, one might be forgiven for supposing that the primary, indeed only, knowledge (cultural, if not carnal) that John's original audiences had of prostitutes was derived either from elite Greek or Latin literary texts or from Jewish Scripture. (4) By and large, the social realities of prostitution in the Roman world have not been adduced by such scholars to reconstruct the immediate connotations of the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] for such audiences--connotations far from the scriptorium or the symposium, as we shall see, and much closer to the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or brothel. (5)
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