Why Is Jesus Called the Lion of Judah? Jacob’s Blessing and Revelation 5:5

Jesus is called the Lion of Judah because he comes from the royal tribe that the Bible pictures as a lion, from its first book to its last. In Genesis, Jacob calls his son Judah “a lion’s whelp”, a young lion, and in Revelation a heavenly elder presents Jesus as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David”.

When the title reaches us, it comes through tears. John has wept because no one in heaven or on earth can open the sealed book, and the elder tells him, “Weep not: behold, the Lion.” John turns to look, and what he sees is a Lamb that has been slain. The king from Judah’s tribe wins by dying, and the song that follows says he did it for us.

The King James Bible uses the phrase only once, in Revelation 5:5. John sees “in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals” (Revelation 5:1), and an angel asks, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?” No one in heaven or on earth is able, and John says, “I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book” (Revelation 5:2–4). Then one of the elders speaks:

And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

Revelation 5:5

In that one sentence the elder gives Jesus two names from the Old Testament. The Lion of the tribe of Judah goes back to Jacob’s blessing of Judah in Genesis 49, and the Root of David recalls Isaiah, who foresaw “a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek” (Isaiah 11:10). At the end of the book Jesus takes that name for himself: “I am the root and the offspring of David” (Revelation 22:16).

The elder says the Lion “hath prevailed”. He has already won a victory, and that victory is what makes him able to open the book. When John looks, he sees “a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). The victory was won by dying.

The title begins with Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons, the men who gave their names to Israel’s tribes. He blessed them “every one according to his blessing” (Genesis 49:28), and to Judah he said:

Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?

Genesis 49:8–9

Jacob pictures Judah as a lion at three ages: a cub coming up from its prey, a grown lion lying down to rest, and an old lion that no one dares to wake. In the next verse he says that Judah’s tribe will hold power “until Shiloh come” (Genesis 49:10).

Jewish and Christian readers alike have heard a king in these lines. Rashi, the medieval Jewish commentator, took the young lion to be David: “He prophesied this with reference to David who, when he began his military career, was but as a whelp … but who later on became as a lion when they made him king over themselves.” And on “until Shiloh come” he wrote that it “means until the King Messiah will come, whose will be the kingdom.”

Christians have read the same lines as a prophecy of Christ. Hippolytus, a presbyter, or priest, of the Church of Rome at the beginning of the third century, wrote that “our Lord Jesus Christ, who is also God, was prophesied of under the figure of a lion, on account of His royalty and glory.” The “lion’s cub”, he said, “means him who sprang from Judah and David according to the flesh.” So both readings find a king from Judah in the blessing, and they differ on who that king is.

Judah was the fourth son of Jacob and Leah (Genesis 29:32–35), and his story is not a simple one. When his brothers plotted against Joseph, it was Judah who asked, “What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood?” and proposed instead, “Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites” (Genesis 37:26–27). When he ordered his daughter-in-law Tamar burned and she showed that he was the father of her child, he admitted, “She hath been more righteous than I” (Genesis 38:24–26). And years later in Egypt, when Joseph’s cup was found in Benjamin’s sack and Benjamin was to be kept as a slave, Judah offered himself in his brother’s place: “let thy servant abide instead of the lad a bondman to my lord” (Genesis 44:12, 17, 33).

Rashi linked one line of the blessing to Judah’s part in Joseph’s story. He took “from the prey, my son, thou art gone up” to mean that Judah turned away from killing Joseph: “from that murderous deed you withdrew”.

The lion passes down through the kings who came from Judah. Lions were a common emblem of royalty in the ancient world, and when Solomon, David’s son, made his throne, figures of lions stood beside the seat and on its six steps.

Passage	Who	What it says
Genesis 49:9	Judah	“a lion’s whelp” who lies down “as an old lion”
1 Kings 10:19–20	Solomon, son of David	Two lions beside his throne, twelve on its steps
Revelation 5:5	Jesus, “the Root of David”	“the Lion of the tribe of Judah”

The New Testament places Jesus in Judah’s tribe through David (Hebrews 7:14). How the kingship came to Judah, and how Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s family to David, you can read in what tribe Jesus was from.

In Revelation 5 the Lion and the Lamb are the same person. The elder announces a Lion, and what stands “in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders” is a Lamb that bears the marks of death (Revelation 5:6). The Lamb takes the book, and heaven sings why he is worthy: “for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Revelation 5:9). So the Lion prevailed by being slain.

All through the New Testament the two pictures belong to one person. When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him, he used the other title: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). In Revelation, Jesus promises his followers a place on his throne “even as I also overcame” (Revelation 3:21), and the chapter of the Lion ends with a hymn to the Lamb: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing” (Revelation 5:12).

Some readers connect the Lion and the Lamb with Isaiah’s picture of peace among the animals, but Isaiah pairs the lamb with the wolf: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together” (Isaiah 11:6). Later he writes, “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock” (Isaiah 65:25). Those verses describe a world at peace, and it is in Revelation 5 that the Lion and the Lamb are one.

Scripture uses the lion for strength, and strength can serve good or evil. So Peter can warn that “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). And the prophets give the lion’s roar to God himself: “he shall roar like a lion: when he shall roar, then the children shall tremble from the west” (Hosea 11:10), and “The lion hath roared, who will not fear? the Lord God hath spoken” (Amos 3:8).

Hippolytus drew a similar contrast, though his was between Christ and the Antichrist rather than the devil of Peter’s letter. Christ is pictured as a lion “on account of His royalty and glory”, he wrote, and the Antichrist “on account of his tyranny and violence”, because “the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God.” The lion’s other meanings across the Bible are gathered in what a lion symbolizes in the Bible.

Ethiopia’s royal house traced its descent to King Solomon, David’s son. Prince Ermias Sahle-Selassie, the last emperor’s grandson, is president of the Crown Council of Ethiopia. In a lecture at the Library of Congress, which the Council published in 2010, he explained that “all monarchs must trace their lineage back to Menelik I who was the offspring of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.” The story is told in the Kebra Nagast, the Book of the Glory of Kings. The Bible records the queen’s visit to Solomon and says that afterwards “she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants” (1 Kings 10:13), and the son comes from the Ethiopian tradition.

Emperor Haile Selassie’s full title, as his grandson gives it, was “His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and Elect of God.” Such titles, the prince said, “have been traditionally given to Ethiopian kings to recognize the Old Testament emphasis of Ethiopian Christianity and declare the regent’s sacred duty and subservience to God.” In Ethiopian Orthodox belief, he explained, the Lion of Judah himself is Christ, and he described the imperial crest as “an empty throne waiting in expectation for the return of Christ.” The history of that church is told in Christianity in Ethiopia.

Rastafari grew in Jamaica from the 1930s and takes its name from Ras Tafari, the title and name Haile Selassie bore before he was crowned. Prince Ermias, describing the movement in the same lecture, says it has “little or no formal organization” and that “there is significant variation within the Rastafari movement”, but that its central belief is “the divinity and messiahship of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I.”

For Rastafari, Haile Selassie is Jah, God, seen as “both the reincarnation of Christ and the lion mentioned in the Bible’s Book of Revelation”, and that is why they call him the Lion of Judah. The lion also stands for their strength against the oppression they have endured, and it appears on the Rastafari flag.

John was told to behold a Lion, and he saw a Lamb as it had been slain. The elder’s first words are for us as well: “Weep not.”

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