Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Revelation 17:16

Revelation 17:16. And the ten horns which thou sawest and the beast. The ten horns and the beast are mentioned in combination because the latter is the essence of the former, and the former are the expression of the latter.

These shall hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and shall burn her utterly with fire. What an unexpected result! The woman has been sitting on the beast, reckoning on it as her servant and ally, and guiding it in perfect harmony with its temper and designs. All at once the scene is changed. Defeat has taken place, and what is the effect? The bond which in prosperity had bound the wicked co-labourers together is dissolved, the partners in evil fall out, the one section turns round upon the other, and she who had found ready instruments in the beast and its heads for accomplishing the work to which she had spurred them on sees them, in the hour of common despair, fall upon herself and mercilessly destroy her. The individual expressions do not call for much remark: (1) Desolate is the word corresponding to the ‘wilderness' of Revelation 17:3, she is to be made truly a wilderness; (2) Flesh is plural in the original, probably because of the many who perish, or of the many possessions that the harlot owns; (3) The thought of thus eating flesh is taken from the Old Testament; ‘when the wicked came upon me... to eat up my flesh' (Psalms 27:2); ‘who also eat the flesh of my people' (Micah 3:3); (4) Shall burn her utterly with fire. The language is most probably taken from the Old Testament, in which to be so burned is the punishment of fornication on the part of a priest's daughter (Leviticus 21:9). The whole is a picture of complete destruction.

To seek historical fulfilment of his in such events as Nero's burning Rome will appear to most men, in the simple statement of it, absurd. A great principle is proceeded upon, one often exemplified in the world, that combinations of the wicked for a common crime soon break up, leaving the guilty associates to turn upon and destroy one another. But it is difficult not to think that there was especially one great drama present to the Seer's mind, and suggestive of this lesson that drama which embodied in intensest action all the great forces that move the world the drama of the life and death of Jesus. He thought of the alliance that had been made between the Jews and the Romans to crucify the Redeemer, an alliance so soon broken and followed by the destruction of Jerusalem. In that he beheld the type of similar alliances in all future time.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Revelation 17:16

Old Testament

New Testament