Who Is Babylon the Great in Revelation 17?

Revelation 17 describes the most vivid figure in the book and then declines to name her. A woman in purple and scarlet, holding a golden cup, riding a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, with a title written across her forehead: "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH". John says she was drunk with the blood of the saints and that the sight astonished him.

The honest answer to who she is: the text gives three specific clues, and Christians have built five serious identifications out of them, each of which explains some clues well and strains on others. Nobody reads all three clues comfortably. That is worth knowing before anyone tells you the answer is obvious.

The three clues the text supplies

The angel offers to explain the vision, and what he gives is not a name but a set of markers.

And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. Revelation 17:9

The Greek word is orē, which covers both mountains and hills. Rome was known across the empire as the city on seven hills, celebrated in the Septimontium festival, and Roman poets used the phrase as a byword. That is the single strongest piece of evidence in the chapter.

Verse 10 then reuses the same seven heads for something else entirely: "there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come." So the heads are geography and dynasty at once, which already warns against reading either woodenly.

Verse 18 closes with the plainest statement in the passage: the woman "is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth". Present tense. Whatever Babylon is, John's readers were living under her.

Ancient Babylon itself is not a candidate. It had been a ruin for centuries by John's time. The name is being used the way Egypt is used for slavery, as a pattern with a history: the empire that destroyed the temple in 586 BC, deported the people, and stood in Scripture for arrogant world power. Peter appears to use it the same way when he sends greetings from "the church that is at Babylon" in 1 Peter 5:13.

The five main identifications

First-century Rome

The reading of most modern commentators. Seven hills, a city ruling the kings of the earth, a persecutor drunk on the blood of martyrs, and an economy of imported luxury that chapter 18 describes in detail. The count of kings in verse 10 can be made to work with Roman emperors, though where you begin the list changes the answer.

The difficulty is the ending. Babylon falls in a single hour and is never rebuilt. Rome declined over centuries and is still there.

Apostate Jerusalem

The preterist favourite, argued by Kenneth Gentry and by David Chilton in The Days of Vengeance. Its case rests on the word harlot. In the prophets, harlotry is what a covenant people commit, not what a pagan empire commits: "How is the faithful city become an harlot" (Isaiah 1:21), and the extended indictments of Ezekiel 16 and 23. The woman's purple, scarlet, gold and precious stones echo priestly and temple garments. Revelation 11:8 has already called a city "the great city" and located it "where also our Lord was crucified". And Babylon is charged with the blood of prophets, which is the exact charge Jesus lays on Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37.

The difficulty is verse 18. First-century Jerusalem did not reign over the kings of the earth in any ordinary sense, and it had no seven hills that anyone in Asia Minor would recognise.

The Roman Catholic Church

This was the mainstream Protestant reading for roughly three centuries, and it should be reported accurately rather than either endorsed or waved away. Luther, Calvin and John Knox all identified the Babylon of Revelation with papal Rome. The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646 stated at 25.6 that the Pope of Rome "is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition". The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 carried similar language. Nineteenth-century commentators such as Albert Barnes and E. B. Elliott worked it out at length within a historicist framework.

Most Protestant bodies no longer teach it. American Presbyterian revisions removed the antichrist clause from their confession, and the churches that still subscribe to the older text usually append a note distancing themselves from it. Where it survives today it is chiefly in Seventh-day Adventism, whose historicist reading of Revelation retains it, in a few strictly confessional Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist bodies, and in some independent fundamentalist churches. The Catholic Church, for its part, answers that Revelation 17 describes a persecuting power contemporary with John and that the seven hills point to imperial Rome rather than to the church that later occupied the same city.

A future revived world system

The futurist reading, found in John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. On this view Babylon has not yet appeared. Many futurists divide the material, taking chapter 17 as a coming apostate world religion and chapter 18 as a coming world economic and political order. A minority expect a literally rebuilt Babylon on the Euphrates, on the argument that Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 50 predict a destruction more total than history has yet delivered.

The difficulty is verse 18 again. A city that "reigneth" in John's present tense is hard to place two thousand years after the sentence was written.

Every seductive godless order

The idealist reading, associated with William Hendriksen and with G. K. Beale. Revelation ends with two women and two cities: the harlot Babylon and the bride, the new Jerusalem. On this view they are not two dated entities but two permanent options, and Babylon is whatever civilisation in any century offers comfort, wealth and belonging on terms that require you to compromise. Rome was one instance. It was not the only one.

The difficulty is that this reading has to treat the seven mountains and the seven kings as atmosphere rather than as information, and the angel introduces them as the key.

The same woman from four angles

The rows are not denominations, and a reader can hold one row here and a different row elsewhere. What the table shows is that the argument about Babylon is rarely an argument about chapter 17. It is an argument about how the whole book relates to time, which is set out in how to read Revelation.

The chapter almost everyone skips

Revelation 18 is where the vision turns from symbol to invoice, and it is the most concrete chapter in the book.

Three groups mourn Babylon, and every one of them mourns a loss of income. The kings who "lived deliciously with her". The merchants "for no man buyeth their merchandise any more". The shipmasters and sailors "as many as trade by sea", who made their fortunes on her freight.

Then comes the cargo manifest, twenty-eight commodities in a single sentence.

The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory ... and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. Revelation 18:12 to 13

Richard Bauckham, in The Climax of Prophecy in 1993, showed that this list tracks the actual luxury import trade of the early empire item by item, in roughly the order a Roman inventory would use. Thyine wood was citrus wood from North Africa, prized for table tops at prices Pliny found scandalous. Silk came overland from China. And the list ends where a cargo list ends, with livestock and then with human beings, "slaves, and souls of men". The Greek behind that last phrase is sōmata, bodies, the ordinary commercial term for slaves, followed by psychas anthrōpōn, human lives.

That placement is the point. Whatever else Babylon is, the text indicts her for an economy in which people are the last line of the manifest. Then the lament: "in one hour so great riches is come to nought."

And one instruction, given before the judgement falls.

Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. Revelation 18:4

That command works on every one of the five identifications, which may be the most useful thing to notice about the whole passage. Readers who cannot agree on the woman's name have generally agreed on what the chapter asks of them.

Where this leaves you

The clues do not all point the same way, and every serious answer pays for its strengths somewhere. What decides the question for most people is not chapter 17 at all. It is a prior decision about when Revelation was written and whether its images name particular institutions or recurring patterns.

Settle that, and Babylon settles with it. Leave it unexamined, and you will keep hearing five confident answers with no way to tell what is actually being argued about.