The Seventh Sign - Plot

Plot

Signs of the apocalypse are appearing, along with a mysterious wanderer. Father Lucci (Peter Friedman) is the Vatican official investigating them. He dismisses the occurrences as natural, but Abby Quinn (Demi Moore) believes that they are real.

In the film, Jürgen Prochnow portrays Jesus' return to Earth in the year 1988 to judge humanity.

In Jewish mysticism the Chamber of Guf (also Guph or even Gup) Hebrew for "body", also called the Otzar (Hebrew for "treasury"), is the Hall of Souls, located in the Seventh Heaven. Every human soul is held to emanate from the Guf. A possible (though not a literal) reading of the Talmud, Yevamot 62a, is that the Messiah will not come until the Guf is emptied of all its souls.

The final judgment is averted by an act of faith that prevents the final sign of the apocalypse from occurring. In the film, through a flashback, Prochnow also portrays the original Jesus on the eve of his crucifixion. Father Lucci is revealed to be Cartaphilus, a Roman Centurion and Pilate's porter who struck Jesus before his death and was sentenced to wander the Earth until Christ returned to judge mankind. The Lucci-Cartaphilus character is a combination of the Longinus and the Wandering Jew legends. In the movie, Abby- who is soon to give birth- discovers that she is actually the reborn woman some identify as Seraphia, the woman who offered Christ water during the Crucifixion but was turned away by Cartaphilus. She learns that the prophecies lead up to the birth of her child, who may not survive because there will be no more souls left for the newborns unless someone offers their own.