When Rome is not enough: five challenges in the preterist reading of Revelation 17

Abstract

This article offers a critical assessment of the preterist identification of the great harlot in Revelation 17 with first‑century imperial Rome, arguing that this reading, though capturing an important allusive layer, proves insufficient as an exhaustive interpretive key when measured against the chapter’s full symbolic network. Drawing on intertextual exegesis, the study explores five lines of tension: the lexical problem of oros and its Danielic background as “kingdom‑mountain”; the narrative paradox of dominion and self‑destruction in the relationship between the woman, the beast, and the ten horns; the theological disproportion between the category of mystērion and its reduction to a mere geopolitical cipher; the arbitrariness of attempts to count the seven kings as individual Roman emperors; and the limits of applying the covenantal metaphor of porneia to a political entity lacking prior allegiance to Yahweh. In dialogue with Old Testament apocalyptic traditions, Second Temple literature, and contemporary scholarship, the article shows that, when taken as an exhaustive key, the preterist paradigm tends to reduce semantically dense categories to individualized historical equivalences. As an alternative, it proposes understanding the harlot as a trans‑historical apostate religious system that operates in instrumental alliance with successive global political powers in persecuting God’s covenant people, while not excluding concrete allusions to first‑century Rome.