King or Kingdoms in Revelation 17? An Exegetical Inquiry into Peter Leithart's Interpretation

"Rev. 17:10 explains the seven heads as seven kings, but the word “king” can refer to a kingdom, as represented and embodied in the king, its head. In chapter 13, we concluded that the seven heads are the heads of Babylon, Persia, four-headed Greece, and the final terrible beast who tramples. The scarlet beast is the sea beast, and his seven heads represent the same empires." (Peter Leithart, Revelation 12-22, 193)

This interpretation is also held by Gentry in his work, After Jerusalem Fell. Of course, it is necessary to make this argument because if basileus means "king" and not "kingdom" then the overwhelming majority of scholars and teachers throughout history that take this text as referring to Domitian are correct to do so and the Preterist understanding of Revelation is incorrect. 

So is there any objective means by which we can judge between these two interpretations? A few things.

1. The word basileus doesn't ever refer to a "kingdom" but always means "king" in the New Testament. It appears 115 times and every single one of them refers to an individual or group of individuals that rule a kingdom. It never refers to kingdom either directly or via synecdoche. 

2. Although the word hepta "seven" that modifies the plural of basileus (basileis), which is masculine and is indeclinable because it is a cardinal number, the word ogdoos is an ordinal number and is declinable. It is a masculine singular adjective modifying the unwritten basileus which is a masculine and assumed from the plural. If basileia "kingdom" were assumed, the word would appear as ὄγδοη, which is feminine. That means an assumed basileus is its antecedent, and as said before, this always means “king” in the NT. 

3. The beast is said to be one who "was, is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss," a phrase made up of two components which refer to individuals in the book, not entire kingdoms. The term is a play on God the Father's eternality and Jesus' description of one who is and who was dead and is alive forever more. Instead, this individual is not and that is explained as his having been in the netherworld, the place of the dead. Kingdoms in the book are not spoken of this way, but individuals are. They simply are cryptic ways of saying that the beast was a physically dead human being, a king. This fits the fact that he is wounded with a fatal wound. 

4. Christians are dying for not worshiping the beast and his image. There is no worship of the Roman Empire imposed upon Christians nor is the image historically of Roma. Instead, Caesar worship of the individual king is required and that is expressed by worshiping his image. 

5. The fact that the beast "was and is not" means that the sixth king is not the beast, since a king now "is." This means that the king, or kingdoms if Leithart were right, would be one or more of the five, since he is dead and in the netherworld. He is said to be an eighth which assumes that he is not the seventh either. So these can't be referring generically to the Roman Empire and must therefore be referring to kingdoms that persecuted Christians (again, if Leithart is right). The problem with this is that, if the kingdom must be one of the five and is not the sixth or seventh, that means that the Roman Empire is the eighth but not any of the previous kingdoms/empires, since there is no other kingdom/empire that pops up and persecutes Christians in between the Roman Empire that Leithart concludes "almost died" (which is a horrible translation of οὐκ ἔστιν btw) and the later Roman Empire that persecutes Christians. If he concludes that these are completely different nations, the Roman Empire can only be the eighth, which doesn't work out in the schema he creates in his commentary (i.e., Babylon, Persia, and four-headed Greece, which Leithart must then see as four separate kingdoms rather than the one kingdom that Daniel describes it as and ignores that it follows the kingdom of Greece rather than existing as the kingdom of Greece in Daniel). If this is true, then Babylon, Persia, and only three of Greece's four heads would be the kingdoms that have fallen because the sixth kingdom "is," which would mean that John is writing during the fourth king of the Greek Empire, again, making no sense. Likewise, as Daniel rightly indicates, the Greek Empire only has one king and he dies very quickly, bringing the empire to an end and giving rise to the kingdoms of the diadochi and eventually the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires (the Seleucids being the sixth which, ironically, would be the only one that is not the beast even though Daniel's whole point is that it is the terrible beast. So the seven kings here are not these seven kingdoms. 

I agree with the critique of the purely symbolic interpretation and would level it at Leithart's view as well, but Leithart quotes it thinking that he is not guilty of it.

"Hitchcock’s critique hits the nail squarely: [T]he problem with the symbolic interpretation in this text is that the symbol hasno concrete, meaningful referent. If all the text means is that the Roman rule is complete, why is the vision so detailed and particular in noting that ‘five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. And the beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth, and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction.’ Also if seven is the number of completion, why add the reference to the beast as the eighth? The symbolic approach fails to do justice to the intricate details of the text. (473)

The solution that Preterists come up with is laid out by Leithart as follows:

"After reviewing several “preterist” solutions that identify the heads with a succession of Roman emperors, Hitchcock (2007) concludes that the best answer is to say that “king” means “kingdom.” This “is supported by the parallels between Rev. 17:9-12 and Dan. 7:17, 23, where references to kings and kingdoms are interchangeable, thus revealing that a king represents the kingdom he rules” (481). Besides, “the seven heads are seven mountains (vv. 9–10), and ‘mountains’ or ‘hills’ often symbolize kingdoms or empires in the OT and in Jewish writings” (482). He argues for this interpretation from more specific parallels with Daniel 7 . . ." (194)

The problem with this approach is that it notes that the kingdoms in Daniel are described by their kings, and this is true enough, however, it conflates the fact that a kingdom can be described by characteristics of its king with the idea that the word "king" can mean "kingdom." This, as I have noted, is completely false. If John meant "kingdom" he would have used the word for kingdom, as he does throughout the book and even in the very context of Chapter 17. He used the word "king" because he meant to refer to an individual king.

Hence, the king here is an individual and specific king who was one of Rome's first five emperors and has died and has a second manifestation in the eighth legitimate emperor of Rome, Domitian, not a kingdom in general and Leithart (and Gentry's) attempt to get around it fail to be exegetically probable and should therefore be rejected.