This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY. BABYLON THE GREAT. THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. The third occurrence introduces the vision and long narrative explanation of the woman on the beast in the desert in chapter 17: Here, Babylon is identified with ‘the great city’ which is destroyed, creating a parallel with Rev 11.13 (to which we shall return), The judgement of Babylon is actually a very close parallel to the sin of Babylon mentioned in 14.8, though English translations disguise this: the ‘wine of the fury of her adultery’ is met with the ‘wine of the fury of his wrath’ and this parallel is an important expression of the justice of God’s judgements, for which God is praised in Rev 16.7 and in chapter 18. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath. The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. The second reference comes at the end of the sequence of bowls in chapter 16: It is worth noting here that Babylon has global significance, from the reference to ‘all nations’, and is depicted by John as a particular centre of idolatry, which I think is what the ‘adulteries’ must be referring to, drawing on the OT use of the sexual metaphor for spiritual unfaithfulness. The first is in a characteristic anticipation of what is to be expounded more fully later:Ī second angel followed and said, “‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.” (Rev 14.8) The reason I didn’t give space to this is that the ‘Rome’ position is taken by the vast majority of commentators, and that the reasons for the ‘Jerusalem’ position are not at all persuasive in my view.īut Peter Leithart’s ITC commentary, rather surprisingly, does take the ‘Jerusalem’ position (whose previously best known exponent was Kenneth Gentry), so it is worth rehearsing some of the key issues in the discussion. Someone commented to me that I don’t give much space to debating this, or considering the other main possibility, that it is in fact an allusion to Jerusalem, thus highlighting the twin pressures experienced by John’s first readers from both imperial culture and an antipathetic Jewish community. In my commentary on the Book of Revelation, I assume without much discussion that references to ‘Babylon’ are in the first instance (for John and his readers) allusions to the power of Rome and the imperial system.
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