Revelation 11:8

Revelation 11:8. Their enemies are not satisfied with putting them to death. Dishonour and contumely are heaped upon them after they have been slain. The use of the singular for the plural number in speaking of them in this verse is remarkable, for the true reading is not, as in the Authorised Version, ‘their bodies shall lie' but their dead body lies. There must be a sense in which the witnesses, though spoken of as two, may be regarded as one. Their dead body lies in the street, in the broad open way, where there are many passers-by to behold the contempt and the profanation (comp. Psalms 79:3). This street belongs to the great city, several characteristics of which are next given. Spiritually it is called Sodom and Egypt, and there also their Lord was crucified. That this city is in the first place Jerusalem not, as many suppose, Rome seems clear from the statement that it is the city in which the Lord was crucified. But the question still arises, What does ‘Jerusalem,' so spoken of, denote? The literal Jerusalem alone it cannot be, not only because all such names are in the Book of Revelation allegorically used, but also because the city is ‘spiritually,' that is allegorically, called Sodom and Egypt. Sodom and Egypt, however, were both remarkable for three things, their sinfulness, their oppression of the people of God, and the judgments by which they were overtaken. As these ideas, again, correspond exactly with the course of thought in the present passage, we are justified in thinking that they are the ideas mainly associated in the mind of the Seer with the two names. ‘The great city,' therefore, is something sinful, persecuting, doomed to judgment. Still further the thought of both Jews and Gentiles must be connected with this city mention of the crucifixion leading us to the one, of Sodom and Egypt to the other. We are thus led to regard ‘the great city' as a designation for a degenerate Christianity which has submitted to the world.