Who Are the Two Witnesses in Revelation 11?

Revelation never tells you. That is the first thing to know about the two witnesses: the text describes them in detail, gives them a mission, a wardrobe, a set of powers, a death and a resurrection, and withholds their names. Every identification you will ever be offered is an inference drawn from that description.

The candidates are few and the reasoning behind each is worth following. Moses and Elijah, because the powers match those two prophets almost item for item. Enoch and Elijah, because neither of them died. Two individuals not yet born. Or not individuals at all, but the witnessing church shown as a pair, because two is what a legal testimony requires.

What the passage says

The scene sits in the middle of Revelation, between the sixth and seventh trumpets.

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. Revelation 11:3-4

Fire comes out of their mouths against anyone who tries to harm them. They have "power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy", and power "over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues". When their testimony is finished, the beast out of the bottomless pit makes war on them and kills them. Their bodies lie unburied in the street of "the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified", for three and a half days, while the watching world rejoices and exchanges gifts. Then the breath of life from God enters them, they stand up, a voice calls them to come up, and they ascend in a cloud with their enemies watching.

Ten verses, and a great deal of specific detail attached to no names at all.

The imagery comes from Zechariah

The two olive trees and the two candlesticks are not new pictures. They are lifted from a vision in Zechariah 4, given to the prophet during the rebuilding of the temple after the exile.

Zechariah sees a golden lampstand with seven lamps, and beside it two olive trees, one on each side, feeding oil into it. When he asks what they are, the angel gives him the line the whole vision turns on, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts", and then identifies the trees.

Then said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord of the whole earth. Zechariah 4:14

The two anointed ones in Zechariah's day are usually taken to be Zerubbabel, the governor of the house of David, and Joshua, the high priest: the civil and priestly leadership of the restored community, supplied by the Spirit rather than by their own strength. The word for "anointed ones" is literally sons of oil.

John has adjusted the vision. In Zechariah there is one lampstand and two trees; in Revelation there are two of each. Whatever else the witnesses are, they stand where Zerubbabel and Joshua stood, sustained directly by God and set before the Lord of the whole earth.

Moses and Elijah

This is the most widely held identification, and the case for it is built on the powers.

Turning water to blood and smiting the earth with plagues is Moses in Exodus 7 through 12. Shutting heaven so it does not rain is Elijah in 1 Kings 17, and James 5:17 puts that drought at three years and six months, the same span as the witnesses' ministry. The fire from their mouths recalls the fire Elijah called down in 2 Kings 1.

Two further arguments are usually added. Moses and Elijah appear with Christ at the transfiguration in Matthew 17, the only place in the New Testament where the two stand side by side. And Malachi 4:5 promises that Elijah will be sent "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD", which gives at least one of the pair a warrant for returning.

The objection is Moses. He died, in Deuteronomy 34, and God buried him. Whether he could die again is the question the next view is built to answer.

Enoch and Elijah

This is the oldest identification on record. Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome and Victorinus of Pettau, the earliest commentator on Revelation whose work survives, all named Enoch and Elijah, and the view stayed common through the medieval period.

The logic is tight. Genesis 5:24 says Enoch "was not; for God took him". Second Kings 2:11 has Elijah carried up by a whirlwind. Neither man died. Revelation 11:7 says the witnesses are killed, and Hebrews 9:27 says it is appointed unto men once to die. Put those together and the two men who still owe a death are the obvious candidates.

The objection is that Enoch's ministry, as Jude 14 describes it, was a prophecy of judgment rather than a career of miracles, and none of the powers in Revelation 11 match anything recorded about him.

Two future individuals

A number of futurist interpreters decline to guess. On this reading the witnesses are two literal people who will appear during a future tribulation, unnamed because the text does not name them, and empowered in ways that recall Moses and Elijah without being them. The Elijah language is taken as a ministry in the spirit and power of Elijah, in the way Luke 1:17 says that of John the Baptist, who told the priests plainly in John 1:21 that he was not Elijah.

The strength of this position is restraint. Its weakness is that it explains nothing.

The witnessing church

The reading favoured by many commentators of the last century is that the two witnesses are not two people at all.

The argument runs through the imagery. Revelation 1:20 has already told the reader that lampstands mean churches. Deuteronomy 19:15 lays down that "at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established", the legal minimum for a testimony to stand. A church portrayed as two lampstands is therefore a church presented as a witness adequate in law.

The rest of the picture supports it. The witnesses prophesy for the same 1,260 days that the holy city is trodden underfoot. They are killed by the beast and vindicated by God, which is what Revelation says repeatedly about the whole company of the faithful. The great city is called Sodom and Egypt as well as the place where the Lord was crucified, which reads more naturally as a symbolic name for the world's hostility than as a street address.

The objection is that the deaths, the three and a half days and the watching crowds are described with the concreteness of a report rather than of a symbol.

The historicist reading

There is a further reading that most modern articles skip. Historicist interpreters, who take Revelation as a map of church history from the apostles to the end, have identified the witnesses with the faithful minorities who kept testifying during the long centuries they assign to the 1,260 days, counted as years rather than days.

On this account the witnesses are groups like the Waldensians, followers of Peter Waldo of twelfth-century Lyon, along with the Albigenses, the Bohemian Brethren and the Lollards: dissenting movements that preached, were suppressed, and appeared extinguished shortly before the Reformation, which historicists read as the resurrection of the witnesses. E. B. Elliott laid this out at length in the nineteenth century, and it was the standard Protestant reading for a long stretch of history.

How the four readings handle the passage

Everything above sorts along the same four approaches that divide the whole book. If you have not met them, how to read Revelation sets them out.

The 1,260 days

The number is not incidental. Twelve hundred and sixty days is three and a half years on a 360-day calendar, and Revelation gives the same span three ways: 1,260 days in 11:3, forty-two months in 11:2 and 13:5, and "a time, and times, and half a time" in 12:14, echoing Daniel 7:25, where the saints are given into the hand of the little horn "until a time and times and the dividing of time".

Where that half-week comes from, and why some readers stretch it into 1,260 years while others hold it to three and a half literal ones, belongs to the argument about Daniel's seventieth week. How long the tribulation is works through it properly.

Why the passage stays open

Two witnesses prophesy, are killed, and rise. The report is specific enough to feel like history and symbolic enough to resist being pinned to a calendar, and Christians have argued about it since the second century without either side running out of arguments.

What decides your answer is not this chapter. It is what you already think Revelation is doing: describing the first century, the whole of church history, a future crisis, or the permanent shape of the conflict between the church and the world. Settle that, and the two witnesses fall into place almost on their own. Leave it unsettled, and you will keep meeting confident answers that contradict each other, each one perfectly reasonable inside a framework its holder has never named out loud.