The beast from the sea

Daniel 7's four beasts collapsed into one, rising from the sea and given authority by the dragon. The number comes in 13:18 with a note that it takes wisdom. DDD's Behemoth article (B. F. Batto) says Revelation 13 is plainly informed by the Leviathan and Behemoth tradition: John's two beasts, one from the sea and one from the land, echo the same paired sea monster and land monster behind Job's Behemoth and Leviathan and, further back, Ugarit's sea dragon and El's calf Atik. Beale's commentary adds that first-century readers would have taken the sea beast as Rome, matching the standard Jewish reading of Daniel 7's fourth beast as Rome (attested repeatedly in Midrash Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud), and that the beast's tie to the dragon marks it as transtemporal. Daniel 7:12 already has each defeated empire's life passed on to the next, so the power behind Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome is read as continuous and not as a series of unrelated evils.