'Babylon' in Revelation is secretly a code name for Jerusalem, and the book's judgments are really about AD 70

This claim comes out of a preterist reading of Revelation: the view that most or all of the book's judgments were fulfilled in the past, in Rome's destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Some versions of that view treat "Babylon" as a stand-in for Jerusalem itself, on the theory that Revelation is fundamentally a lawsuit against apostate Israel. The text doesn't support that identification. John explicitly ties Satan's throne in Pergamum to "the beast from the sea" of Revelation 13, and that beast is tied to the Roman imperial cult, the worship of the emperor. The chain Heiser draws is chaos-power to Babylon (John's own label) to Rome, the actual empire persecuting the churches in his own day: a straight line from Egypt to Babylon to Rome as history's successive chaos powers.

The scroll in Revelation 5 adds another problem for a Jerusalem-only reading. It's modeled on the sealed scroll of Ezekiel 2, and Ezekiel's own book judges both Judah (chapters 4-24) and the surrounding Gentile nations (chapters 25-32): it isn't aimed at one ethnic group. If Revelation's scroll follows that shape, its judgments fall on "the unrighteous among both Jews and Gentiles," not on Jerusalem exclusively. That one observation, on its own, undercuts a reading that wants Revelation's whole plot to be about a single city's fall; the fourth horseman's covenant-curse quartet in Revelation 6:8 makes the same bicovenantal point again, since it echoes Ezekiel 14's judgment aimed at Jerusalem while the same curses bind the nations too.

There's also a direct answer to an objection some preterists raise: if Babylon is Rome, why does the beast (also apparently Rome's power) later turn and destroy the prostitute Babylon? Heiser's answer is that Rome rotted and consumed itself from within well before any outside army arrived, so a self-destructive empire devouring its own decadence isn't a contradiction. Revelation still has real things to say about Israel elsewhere in the book; "Babylon" specifically just isn't a coded reference to Jerusalem, and reading the whole book as a treaty-lawsuit against Jerusalem fulfilled in AD 70 is flagged by Heiser as an overstatement of a genre that's real but narrower in scope than that.