Babylon

Babylon was the ancient Mesopotamian city, on the Euphrates River, that conquered Judah and carried its people into exile (2 Kings 24-25). Scripture also uses the name for a recurring kind of power: a proud, God-defying empire that persecutes God’s people and is finally judged by him. Revelation 17-18 pictures this most fully: “Babylon the great,” a harlot city riding a beast, destroyed just before Christ returns. Interpreters have long disagreed about exactly what, or whom, John’s Babylon names.

Biblical Basis

Genesis traces the name itself to the tower of Babel: “therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). Centuries later the literal city, under Nebuchadnezzar, became the instrument of God’s judgment on Judah, destroying Jerusalem and its temple and deporting the people (2 Kings 24:1-25:21).

Isaiah’s oracles against Babylon (chapters 13-14, 47-48) already treat the city as more than a place. Craig Carter observes that in these chapters “Babylon was more than a mere city; Babylon was a symbol of human pride and of the rebellion of pagan gods against Yahweh,” bound up with “enchantments and sorceries… and astrology.”¹ Isaiah predicts Babylon’s own humiliation (47:1-15) and calls the exiles to leave it: “Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea… The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob!” (Isaiah 48:20). Carter notes that this typological use continues into the New Testament: “Later in Scripture, Babylon appears in this symbolic role as a way of speaking of the world system organized in opposition to God (Rev. 18).”¹

In Revelation, Babylon appears as a woman “arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls” (Revelation 17:4), “seated on many waters,” explained as “peoples and multitudes and nations and languages” (17:1, 15), riding a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns (17:3). She is “drunk with the blood of the saints” (17:6) and identified as “the great city that has dominion over the kings of the earth” (17:18). An angel pronounces her fall: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality” (14:8), and heaven is called to rejoice over her destruction (18:20-19:3) while an earlier voice cries, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins” (18:4), echoing Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s calls to leave the literal Babylon (Isaiah 48:20; Jeremiah 51:6, 45).

Historical Development

The early church generally expected Antichrist as a single, future, Satan-empowered individual. Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel states the consensus: at the world’s end there would arise “an eleventh little king,” “a man in whom Satan will dwell utterly and bodily,” identified with Paul’s “man of sin, the son of perdition.”²

A shift toward locating this power inside the church itself, rather than purely outside it, began in the Middle Ages. Charles Hodge traces it to the Franciscan Joachim of Floris (d. 1202), whose followers, called “Spirituales,” “came to denounce the Church of Rome as the mystical Babylon of the Apocalypse.” John Peter of Oliva (d. 1297) pressed the same identification further, and his writings on it were formally condemned as “blasphemous and heretical.”² By the eve of the Reformation, Hodge notes, “that Church was held up by a succession of theologians or ecclesiastics, as the Babylon of the Apocalypse which was to be overthrown and rendered desolate.”²

The Reformers made this identification their own, near-unanimous position: “the Reformers with one voice pronounced the same judgment, and, making little distinction between Babylon and Antichrist, held up the Papacy as the antichristian power predicted by Daniel, by St. Paul, and by St. John.”² Herman Bavinck likewise dates the identification to this period, though as part of a wider renewal of millenarian speculation he regards with more caution: chiliasm “came up again before and during the Reformation, when many began to view Rome as the harlot of Revelation and the pope as the antichrist.”³

Rome answered in kind. Robert Bellarmine devoted the third book of his De Romano Pontifice to refuting the Protestant reading, arguing from six biblical “signs” that Antichrist, a single future individual rather than an ongoing institution, had not yet appeared.²

Opposing Views

Reformed interpreters have not spoken with one voice on exactly what Revelation’s Babylon designates, even where they agree it stands under God’s judgment.

The historicist reading, articulated by the Reformers and defended at length by Hodge, holds that John’s vision depicts “the apostate Church,” the woman, sustained by “the world-power,” the beast, and sees this most fully realized, though not necessarily exhausted, in the medieval and Reformation-era papacy.² Hodge treats the identification as open to further or partial fulfillment rather than a single, once-for-all event: the prophecy concerning Antichrist “may have had a partial fulfilment in Antiochus Epiphanes, in Nero and Pagan Rome, and in the papacy,” with a further fulfillment still possible.²

Bavinck reads Babylon in Revelation as Rome, but as the empire and city of John’s own day rather than an institution persisting into the church’s later history: the beast “has his center ‘Babylon’ (Rome), the great harlot, who rules over all the nations,” whose fall precedes Christ’s appearing.³ Carter’s reading of Babylon’s use across Scripture points in a related but distinct direction, treating the name itself as a recurring symbol for “the world system organized in opposition to God” rather than a label fixed to one historical referent.¹

Objections and Responses

The historicist reading is Reformation-era anti-Catholic polemic, not exegesis of the text itself. Hodge grounds the identification in the Apocalypse’s own symbolic structure rather than in polemical convenience: Scripture consistently pictures apostasy from God as adultery, so that “the harlot spoken of in chapters xvii. and xviii. is understood to be the apostate Church” by the same pattern used throughout the prophets, and the woman’s described wealth, dominion, and persecution of “the blood of the saints” match traits Daniel and Paul had already ascribed to the Man of Sin.²

Rome, papal or imperial, has never suffered the sudden destruction Revelation 18 describes, so the identification must be mistaken. Hodge answers that the historicist reading does not require the judgment to be already complete. Quoting Maitland: “Where Babylon ends, Antichrist begins… Rome is still standing, therefore, Antichrist has not yet come: we are still in the times of Babylon.”² He likewise cites D. N. Lord’s reading of the eighteenth chapter’s destruction not as the papacy’s total overthrow but its “denationalization” and spoliation, a real but partial judgment rather than a claim that the prophecy has already been fulfilled in full.²

Related Doctrines

• Antichrist
• End times
• Second Coming of Jesus
• Amillennialism
• Kingdom of God
• Revelation

References

1. Craig A. Carter, “God as the One Who Alone Is to Be Worshiped (Isa. 41-48),” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 6. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Charles Hodge, “Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 787-834. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩²