5. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven --12:4. The tail of the dragon was in the imagery of the sweeping power of the antagonist of the church and the destruction behind him in the wake of persecution, described in the symbol of pulling the stars from their orbits with the angry lash of his enormous tail. It was the vision of the presumptive power of the persecutors of the church. 6. And did cast them to the earth--12:4. The reference to casting down to the earth a third of the stars of heaven appears to have had application to the part of the political world that was subject to these destructions--Jerusalem, Judaism and the Jewish state. The application to geographical or political divisions could have had no meaning. The same expression in chapter eight referred to the three woes of destruction, one part each, as noted in the comments on that section. Here the imagery was that of a symbolic portion of the luminaries of heaven being dragged down by the dragon’ s tail. It signified his potent weapon in the power to harm in the pending events of the destruction of the Jewish world, represented by the destruction of Jerusalem, the downfall of Judaism and the end of the Jewish state. (2) The object of the dragon’ s rage--12:4-5. 1. And the dragon stood before the woman . . . for to devour her child--12:4. This statement indicated that the object of the dragon’ s deadly rage was the woman, which symbolized the church; and her child, which meant the martyred saints to which the woman would give birth in the pain of persecution and martyrdom. The woman’ s child was here employed not in a singular sense but in the collective use of the word. 2. To devour her child. The dragon was represented as standing before the woman in childbirth ready to destroy her child as soon as it was born--like Pharaoh in Egypt (Exodus 1:16-22), watching to destroy every male Israelite; and Herod (Matthew 2:13), ordering the slaying of every Jewish male. This dragon-persecutor was waiting for the opportunity to send the Christians to their martyrdom.