Armageddon: A History of the Location of the End of Time

Abstract

Abstract Rev 16:16 is a textbook case for any reception history analysis. Indeed, its reception has several successive tipping points, as in any reception history. In Revelation, as the text makes clear, it is a Hebrew literary name whose interpretation was not easy: from Tyconius to the most contemporary commentators, Armageddon is understood as a code name whose key remains lost. It was not until the 16th century that the name of a mountain was recognised, har Mageddo, the mountain of Magedon, linked to the fortress of Megiddo in the Jezreel plain. From Joachim of Flora onwards, the location of the eschatological battle is sought geographically. This change of lexical category marks a major interpretive revolution, for if one can locate the place on a map, then the war that takes place there becomes concrete. By virtue of geography, what belonged to myth—and thus to non-time—becomes tangible and is inscribed in a future temporality. From Alexander the Minorite to Hal Lindsey, the battle of Armageddon becomes a mirror of the geopolitics of the Latin and Anglo-American world. This ubiquity of the term over the last forty years has had a paradoxical effect: its withdrawal from geographical considerations. Thanks to the mechanism of antonomasia, the toponym tends to cover, by synecdoche, all the events of the end of time. It thus becomes the proper name of the end of time.