Who is the whore of Babylon?

The vision in Revelation 17

An angel carries John into a wilderness and shows him a woman seated on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. She is dressed for a triumph.

The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of the sexual immorality of the earth.

On her forehead is written “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF THE PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (17:5), and she is “drunken with the blood of the saints” (17:6). The English name comes from the King James Version, which calls her “the great whore” (17:1). Modern translations, the World English Bible among them, say “the great prostitute.”

The angel’s own key

Unusually for Revelation, the vision comes with an explanation, and it points to a place. The waters she sits on “are peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages” (17:15). The seven heads “are seven mountains on which the woman sits” (17:9), and they are also seven kings (17:10). The last line leaves no doubt that she stands for a city.

The woman whom you saw is the great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.

In about AD 95, one city reigned over the kings of the earth, and it was famous for its seven hills. Rome even had a goddess of itself, Roma, and in AD 71 the emperor Vespasian struck a coin showing her seated on seven hills. John’s woman looks like a dark mirror of that coin. Calling Rome “Babylon” made sense too: Babylon had destroyed the first Temple, Rome the second, in AD 70. Where the real Babylon is today is in Where is Babylon today?

Why a prostitute?

The image is borrowed from the Hebrew prophets, who called great trading cities harlots. Isaiah says Tyre “will play the prostitute with all the kingdoms of the world” (Isaiah 23:17). Nahum calls Nineveh “the alluring prostitute, the mistress of witchcraft, who sells nations through her prostitution” (Nahum 3:4). Even her golden cup has a source.

Babylon has been a golden cup in Yahweh’s hand, who made all the earth drunk.

Her lovers are kings and merchants. When she falls, the merchants weep over their lost cargo, a list that reads like Rome’s imports and ends with “people’s bodies and souls” (18:13): slaves. The charge is not private vice but an empire’s wealth, idols and violence. A voice calls, “Come out of her, my people” (18:4). Revelation also has two other women to set beside her: the woman clothed with the sun (12:1), and the new Jerusalem, “prepared like a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). Two cities, two women.

Later targets

In the book itself, the beast she rides turns on her and burns her (17:16). After the Bible, the image became a weapon. Woodcuts from Lucas Cranach’s workshop in Luther’s New Testament of 1522 show her wearing the papal triple crown, and many Protestants identified her with Rome’s church for centuries. Some scholars read her as Jerusalem instead, the “great city” of Revelation 11:8, “where also their Lord was crucified.” Modern prophecy writers see a future world religion or a global economy. Rastafarians call any system of oppression Babylon, and a city of excess is still “a Babylon.” Herald tells it the way the text does: a city personified, dressed like Rome’s own goddess.