“And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”
And their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was also crucified — the witnesses' bodies lie exposed in the great city, identified as Sodom (sexual sin, Genesis 13:13), Egypt (oppression, Exodus 1-12), and the place of Christ's crucifixion (Jerusalem). The multiple identifications frame the city as embodying sin and opposition to God; the bodies' exposure (nekros, corpse) compounds the humiliation.
Church Fathers on Revelation 11:8
“And their dead bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt.” But He calls Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt, since it had become the heaping up of the persecuting people. Therefore it behooves us diligently, and with the utmost care, to follow the prophetic announcement, and to understand what the Spirit from the Father both announces and anticipates, and how, when He has gone forward to the last times, He again repeats the former…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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