The writers of scripture use the Hebrew/ Aramaic word translated “Babylon” or “Babel” nearly 300 times between Genesis and Revelation. That’s an awful lot of references to look up. If you had asked me before I looked which book of the Bible mentions that great city the most, I would have bet on one of the OT historical books. In fact, almost half the Strong’s entries are in Jeremiah, of all places (141). 2 Kings is a distant second with 28. Revelation, which dedicates parts of three chapters to her, has only six.
At some point, the attentive Bible student says to himself, “Hmm, Babylon is actually a major theme of scripture. Maybe I should look into that.” All right then. I hope you’ll find it’s not just an excuse for me to … babble on.
A Little History
First, we should define terms a bit. Babylon was an ancient city located on the Euphrates River in southern Mesopotamia. If that means nothing to you without a world map, today it would be about 85 km south of Baghdad in Iraq. It was one of the most significant cities in the ancient world, the capital of multiple empires, occupied by a series of ethnic factions over millennia. Today, Babylon is a ruin. A few thousand Iraqis live in villages on land it once occupied, but the main site worth digging in is uninhabited by anyone other than archeologists. In its heyday, Babylon’s walls enclosed four square miles and something in the order of 200,000 people.
The original Babylonian Empire was an Akkadian-speaking state ruled by the Amorites from 1894 BC through 1595 BC. In 1595 BC, the Kassites came from the Zagros Mountains in Iran and conquered Babylon. Their rule was the longest in Babylonian history at 576 years, and if you had asked anybody in the region at that time who was in charge of their world, they would have said “the Babylonians”, even though it was indisputably Kassites living in Babylon and running the show.
A Little More History
In 1155 BC, the Elamites took Babylon from the Kassites, becoming “the Babylonians” insofar as history is concerned. That lasted little more than 100 years, after which the Assyrians ruled Babylon, though Babylon was just one city in the larger Assyrian Empire dominated by the capital city of Nineveh.
Finally, at the tail end of the Assyrian Empire, a group of migrants from the south called Chaldeans took Babylon from the people living there. The Babylonians of that era were an ethnic mix: some Elamites, some Assyrians, some Kassites, perhaps even some long-in-the-tooth Akkadians, or any possible combination of the above, as happens when large-scale cross-cultural intermarriage ensues. That happens whenever men with adequate means of provision spot attractive women from another culture. Whatever, the conquering Chaldeans were promptly designated Babylonians. Go figure.
That’s why historians distinguish the Neo-Babylonian Empire from the Babylonian, because they were two very different ethnic entities notwithstanding that the same city was their capital. Scripture deals primarily with the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which is synonymous with the Chaldeans.
Babel and Babylon
Babylon has not only an historical but also a spiritual significance; it would hardly be worth spending much time on otherwise. The great city sat atop the site of the former Tower of Babel, the place of the first massive, organized rebellion against the will of God documented in Genesis 11, the place where God confused the languages of humanity. Babel or Babylon means confusion. Despite a passing resemblance to the English word “babble”, language experts tell us the two expressions are unrelated.
Notwithstanding the many different people groups that inhabited Babylon between Genesis and Revelation, there is what we might call a Babylonian spirit that characterized them all, an independence from God and pride in human achievement and glory that sometimes expressed itself in outright rebellion. There is the Tower of Babel, of course, but also Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image and Belshazzar’s feast, during which he drank from goblets stolen from the ruined temple of YHWH in Jerusalem and subsequently saw the famous writing on the wall that signified the end of his kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar epitomized that humanistic spirit when he said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?”, incurring seven years under God’s judgment as a result. In case we think anything about that statement reasonable, Isaiah 14 compares the spirit of Babylon to the rebellion of Lucifer.
Babylon and Judah
The majority of references to Babylon in the OT concern the 70-year Judean captivity. God used the Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire to judge the persistent idolatry and injustice of Judah in the years after the northern kingdom of Israel went into Assyrian exile. Babylon became the instrument by which God disciplined his erring children, following which God judged Babylon for its sins through the agency of the Medes and Persians. We won’t spend time examining that history, but I mention it because it’s important to recognize that Babylon is both the enemy of God and the enemy of his people, though the agendas of the Lord and the nation of Israel throughout history have rarely been precisely aligned for very long. They are not aligned even now. That will change one day soon.
The Babylonian exile was a hugely memorable moment for Israel. When Matthew divides his nation’s history into three great eras, he starts the first with Abraham, the second with David, the third with the Babylonian deportation, and ends that final era with the coming of Christ.
Spiritual Babylon
This is where I want to get to. The writers of the New Testament speak of a spiritual Babylon that existed then and exists today despite the fact that the city itself lies in ruins, and will exist into the future. In doing so, they are riffing on OT clues that Babylon was more than it seemed. It is the destruction of this spiritual Babylon — this entity the Lord calls a whore — that takes up so much of Revelation. It’s certainly possible that the city itself may one day be rebuilt, we cannot completely rule that out. However, I don’t believe a rebuilt physical Babylon is necessary for the fulfillment of the prophetic scriptures concerning her. She has left her mark on the empires of this world already.
As I pointed out at greater length in a post a couple of years ago, there was a good reason God depicted the five great empires of human history as a single, continuous statue top to bottom: each empire had a profound intellectual and ultimately spiritual impact on all those that followed it. As the head of gold, the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar’s day got that ball rolling, pitting the glory of man against the glory of God.
The Neo-Babylonians gave the world a new view of astronomy, the heliocentric model of planetary motion. Some scholars called this the first scientific revolution. It survived the Persian cultural upheaval, which meant the Greeks adopted it, then the Romans. Chaldean mathematicians formulated the Pythagorean Theorem before Pythagoras. Greek philosophy, transformative in the West, owes much to the Babylonian philosophers, who used something strikingly similar to the Socratic Method, all of which passed on to the Romans and was preserved by them for centuries. That head of gold in Daniel’s image set the tone for millennia of human culture.
If you thought spiritual Babylon disappeared after the conquest of the city for which it was named, that was an illusion. In fact, Nebuchadnezzar’s world shaped the one that followed.
Tomorrow’s post explores what scripture to say about spiritual Babylon.
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