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Echoes of Revelation
Revelation never quotes the Old Testament outright, yet no New Testament book refers to it more. See both texts side by side, why they don’t match, and what John does with them.
Revelation 17:5, Babylon the Great, a mystery
The name Babylon the Great comes from Nebuchadnezzar's boast in Daniel 4:30, the pride that was judged in one hour.
Revelation 17:5; Revelation 16:19, in every translation this tool compares.
A boast that once went before a famous fall can become a nickname for pride itself. In Daniel 4 King Nebuchadnezzar looks over his city and boasts that he built this great Babylon by his own power. That same hour he is struck down to live like an animal. John reads the woman's name: mystery, Babylon the Great. The title carries the king's pride and his fall.
The words Babylon the Great (Babylon he megale). The Greek of Daniel 4:30 has the king's question: is not this Babylon the great (Babylon he megale), which I built? Revelation 17:5 writes the same two words as the woman's name, and 16:19, 18:2 and 18:10 repeat them.
In Daniel the words are the king's boast about his city; in Revelation they are a name written on a woman's forehead. John adds mystery, a word that in the Greek Old Testament carries end-time meaning only in Daniel 2, Beale says. Daniel's Babylon was one city. Beale and the CSB Study Bible read John's Babylon as Rome and, beyond it, the proud world system.
Beale says that as the king was judged for pride, so end-time Babylon is about to be judged. Daniel 4 runs through the chapter: John's amazement (17:6-7), the one hour (17:12; 18:10) and the title Lord of lords (17:14). For Beale the mystery is how the kingdom of evil will fall: by turning on itself (17:16-17).
Not Daniel's Babylon itself. In Daniel the words name the city the king built. John writes them as a title on a woman's forehead and calls it a mystery.
Beale says the first part of the name, Babylon the Great, was already seen in 14:8 as an allusion to Daniel 4:30 (4:27 in the Aramaic numbering), where it shows the reach of the king's power and glory and is part of the self-praise for which he is judged. The prefix mystery confirms the Daniel background: it introduces the account of the king's pride in Daniel 4:9 in the Greek version called Theodotion, and it carries end-time meaning only in Daniel 2:18-19, 27-30, 47. John's great amazement in 17:6 also matches Daniel's reaction in Daniel 4:19 in the Greek, which the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible notes too. The CSB Study Bible says the phrase is taken from Nebuchadnezzar's boast in Daniel 4:30, and its cross-references at 18:2 cite Daniel 4:30. The Greek of Daniel 4:30 in the vault reads ouch aute esti Babylon he megale. The grade is drawn here: the two words match, and the setting is Babylon's pride and fall.
Heiser's first point against reading the woman as Jerusalem is the name itself: she is identified as Babylon the Great, which takes the ambiguity out. For John, he says, the city of Babylon no longer mattered. Babylon is a symbol for Rome and, behind Rome, for the whole system opposed to God.
The CSB Study Bible allows three readings: a rebuilt end-time city (which Jeremiah 51:26 makes unlikely), a code name for Rome, or any proud society. Beale reads it as the world's economic and religious system across the ages, focused in Rome. Some, as Beale reports, distinguish the Babylon of chapter 17 from that of chapter 18; he rejects this. MacArthur holds that this Babylon is distinct from the historical city, that its true identity is still to be revealed, and that all false religion flows from Babel. He makes Babylon the capital of the Antichrist's empire (16:19; 17:18), and separates religious Babylon in chapter 17 from commercial Babylon in chapter 18.
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- G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (New International Greek Testament Commentary), comment on 17:5, 17:6 and 17:7
- CSB Study Bible, note on Revelation 16:17-21 and cross-references at 18:2
- NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible, note on Revelation 17:6
- Septuagint, Daniel 4:30 and 4:19, Interlinear Greek-English Septuagint
- SBL Greek New Testament (MorphGNT), Revelation 17:5
- Michael S. Heiser, Revelation 17-18: The Fall of Babylon the Great, video lecture (Naked Bible Revelation series)
- John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), note on Revelation 17:5, 16:19 and 18:3
