VI: The Prophets' Visions

Babylon the Great Counterfeit court

the religious-political order that commodifies the sacred

Root
Isa 21:9 · Babel (H894)
Old Testament chain
  1. Gen 11:1-9
  2. Isa 13:19
  3. Isa 21:9
  4. Isa 47:5-8
  5. Jer 51:7-8
  6. Dan 4:30-31
  7. Rev 18:2
New Testament
Rev 14:8; Rev 16:19; Rev 18:1-24; Rev 18:2

Babel begins as the tower raised to make a name apart from Yahuah (Gen 11:4). Isaiah hears the cry, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen" (Isa 21:9), and Jeremiah calls her "a golden cup in Yahuah's hand, that made all the earth drunken" (Jer 51:7). Nebuchadnezzar boasts "is not this great Babylon, that I have built" and the sentence falls while the word is in his mouth (Dan 4:30-31). In Revelation Babylon is not simply a city but a ruling order, a religious-political system that corrupts worship and coerces allegiance, whose crime is the commodification of everything Yahuah made sacred. "Fallen, fallen" is doubled for certainty and spoken in the past tense because the verdict is already settled.

From The Courtroom of Heaven, pp. 227–228, 305–307, 316