by Randall S. Frederick

Here, the negative connotations of “modern Babylon” take root. Despite Nebuchadnezzar being depicted as God’s agent of change, despite the king’s depiction as God’s instrument of divine justice, despite a preference for the Jewish understanding of changes taking place and which God – according to all of the Major Prophets – instigates, Babylon is characterized as evil, not because the Hebrew scriptures say so, not because the prophets say so, but because Jewish historians come to frame it that way.

It is the location of the Israelite people having lost their identity, their power, their economy. According to Jewish historians, Babylon is evil even as the prophets are claiming Babylon is the hand of God, the catalyst for change. After all, it was the prophet Samuel who outright said God did not want the Israelites to have a king. But the people want one anyway. It is a repeat of the reluctance to embrace collective action seen in Exodus 20:18-21.

The Israelites see thunder, lightning, a trumpet, and a smoking mountain, and they become afraid and tremble. They stand far away and tell Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die”. They ask Moses to be their intercessor and they would listen to him.

The pursuit of power had always been outside of the intentions of God, yet the Israelites persisted. They were given a king who proved Samuel’s warnings to be correct. Yet they persisted. A new king, Saul, was installed and his failure to live up to the expectations of the people became evident straight away. After all, the people of Israel wanted to replace God as their leader. Big shoes to fill, those.

Saul’s failure to live up to the expectations placed upon him was evident before he was even crowned. Undeterred, the people look for a new leader. Jewish historians will come to claim that David was a “man after God’s own heart” despite his personal failures. King David is only a “man after God’s own heart” as long as he continued to expand the empire. When he ceases to do this, the depictions of him change. He is morally compromised, confused, overwhelmed by depression, fails to take action, and finally requires the young girl, Abishag, to “keep him warm” in his final days. Hardly a triumphant ending.

His son Solomon, repeating David’s mistakes, will continue to make head-tilting decisions. Solomon marries dozens of foreign wives, something later Jewish historians and powerbrokers like Ezra and Nehemiah would claim was profane and not to be tolerated. Like his father, Solomon clearly enjoyed the company of women. Unlike his father, Solomon’s excesses will be public. He builds a harem to house his many wives and concubines, diminishing whatever moral or ethical capital may have been accumulated during his father David’s reign. Here too, Jewish historians claimed that Solomon was so wise (for diminishing the daughters of his political allies?) that surely he was gifted by God. No direct confrontation emerges from these political narratives until the kings cease their expansion of the Israelite empire.

Notice that David betrays his own military so that he may engage in an affair without stigma. He kills the husband of his new sexual conquest, Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan appears, like Samuel, to admonish the king but just as quickly vanishes from the records. Solomon builds temples to appease his many wives. He houses his wives in a harem. He diminishes the institution of marriage, worships other gods, makes agreements with other nations, adopts their culture, but – unlike his father David – suffers no consequences. Why? Because he oversees the construction of the Temple. Because he expands the empire. He builds an empire large enough to be broken in half. Only later will the historians, writing their narrative of empire in 1 Kings, acknowledge that something was wrong.

Solomon loved many foreign women. Besides the daughter of the king of Egypt he married Hittite women and women from Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Sidon. He married them even though the Lord had commanded the Israelites not to intermarry with these people, because they would cause the Israelites to give their loyalty to other gods. Solomon married seven hundred princesses and also had three hundred concubines. They made him turn away from God, and by the time he was old they had led him into the worship of foreign gods. He was not faithful to the Lord his God, as his father David had been. He worshiped Astarte, the goddess of Sidon, and Molech, the disgusting god of Ammon. He sinned against the Lord and was not true to him as his father David had been. On the mountain east of Jerusalem he built a place to worship Chemosh, the disgusting god of Moab, and a place to worship Molech, the disgusting god of Ammon. He also built places of worship where all his foreign wives could burn incense and offer sacrifices to their own gods.

Even though the Lord, the God of Israel, had appeared to Solomon twice and had commanded him not to worship foreign gods, Solomon did not obey the Lord but turned away from him. So the Lord was angry with Solomon and said to him, “Because you have deliberately broken your covenant with me and disobeyed my commands, I promise that I will take the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your officials. However, for the sake of your father David I will not do this in your lifetime, but during the reign of your son.

It is worth noting that even here, the offense is Solomon’s as much as the women who led him astray. Israel makes mistakes but there is still room for deniability. Solomon may have done something wrong, but it’s also the fault of the women. Right? Doesn’t it feel more accurate to blame the women for his sins? Curiously, such allowances are not made for later kings of Israel like Ahab, whose wife (singular) Jezebel compelled him to make the same mistakes that Solomon had. 

Ahab, like Solomon, turns from the Yahwist religion, one expression of Judaism. Unlike Solomon, he does not engage in syncretism or pluralism. Instead, according to the Biblical account, Ahab rejects the Hebrew God entirely for the deities of his wife Jezebel, the gods Baal and Asherah. Trying to correct the mistakes of Solomon, Ahab tries to reunite the divided kingdom, uniting with Jehosophat the king of Judah. Yet the scriptures explain this is a sinful act on Ahab’s part. It defies logic.

Solomon and Ahab are not the same, though they are guilty of the same offense, abandoning the God of deliverance for material and political abundance. They accumulate power without ever spending it. They hoard money and power. They make alliances that serve their goals. Yet while Solomon is celebrated as the wisest of all kings, Ahab is vilified as milquetoast, easily led astray by his wife. One can only see these two kings as a study in contrast. If their public expressions are similar, does the fault reside in their personal lives? If so, Ahab is at least loyal to one wife. Ahab’s offense – purely made up of the accusations against him rather than textual evidence – is that he is dominant outside the bedroom rather than inside of it. Solomon, by contrast, is moral and wise because he uses and exploits women privately.

The two men run parallel. Solomon is rewarded for accumulating women, money, and resources, while Ahab is ridiculed and villainized for seeking peace. Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, is the closest parallel in the Hebrew scriptures to the Whore of Babylon. John, the author of Revelation, makes a point of reminding the Christian community of this. In recalling his Revelation on the isle of Patmos, he begins with an open letter to all the churches. To the church in Thyatira, he writes what Jesus has told him.

I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

Like Ahab, Jezebel is demonized for activities that make little sense. Especially since she, like her husband, parallels another biblical figure. Esther, the queen of Persia, also uses her sexuality to secure peace for her people and the elevation of her religion. At the heart of the prophets is a confusing ethic, one that allows for sexual excess and political compromise so long as the Jewish people remain in power yet vilifies those who do the same activities for the same reasons (or, in Ahab’s case, exceed conventional morality and better fulfill the character of the law). Is it any wonder then that the Major and Minor prophets point out the selective religiosity of their leaders? Now in exile to Babylon, suffering from the loss of national unity and communal identity, the prophets insist that the people of God see through the veneer of triumph, of success, and cast down their idols of money and power. Is it any wonder that John the Baptist continues this same message four centuries later, that it becomes the refrain of Jesus’ ministry, that it is echoed in the letters of Paul, Peter, and James in the Early Church?

Yet in John’s account of the apocalyptic vision, the churches are brought back to this narrative of conquering and destruction, only subverted. Instead of being oppressed and killed, Jesus is eternally alive and subduing his enemies. Instead of being destroyed, the people are God destroy. In case his audience misses any of this, Jezebel is revived. Within Jewish and now Christian imagination, Jezebel is mystically resurrected and given eternal importance. She cannot be forgotten, her “offenses” misremembered. 

If John was writing about an actual woman, actually named Jezebel (after the long-dead queen), who was actually leading members of Thyatira into actual sexual immortality, this is a hard sell. John’s revelation begins like his gospel, with mystical language and imagery. In John’s vision, Thyatira is one of the “seven lampstands” he sees. Standing among the lampstands is “someone like a son of man” whose voice is “like the sound of rushing water” and this “someone” is holding “seven stars in his right hand” and (presumably in his left hand?) “the keys of death and Hades.” It’s so immediately outrageous, so beyond the ordinary and literal that he needs to correct himself with an explanation. Jesus (Is it even Jesus, this “someone like a son of man” who holds flaming stars and the keys of death and hell? Who else could it be, if not Jesus?) explains, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive forever and ever!” This Jesus, the one who is both in Heaven and seated beside God yet also standing among lampstands – it is all very confusing, after all – continues his explanation. “The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels[e] of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.” So to then claim, immediately after, that Jezebel is an actual woman in the actual church of Thyatria during this actual things with her fellow congregants seems too far a stretch. 

It is far more likely, given John’s record-breaking number of metaphors and mystical numerology and symbology, that “Jezebel” is instead figurative. “Jezebel” is a callback to the “evil” queen who presumably seduced her adaptable husband Ahab. She is “struck down” only in that she is no longer a queen, but instead now a whore. There is an unintentional irony in this. The insult to her name and remembrance does not bring her down, but instead elevates her. Jezebel has become not just a whore, but The Whore of Babylon, the woman who seduces with religion and violence.

What John and those who invest attention in his revelation never seem to catch is that Jezebel was a minor character. The supposed failure of Israel was not hers, but that of Ahab her husband. If Solomon is wise and kingly because he marries so many women that he must house them in a harem (presumably, with consorts and other aspirants for kingly favor), then Ahab is cowardly because he sleeps with only one woman. If Solomon is righteous for ignoring these women except to exploit them, then Ahab is sinister for listening to his wife and bringing her into his royal counsel. But Solomon’s fault, like Ahab’s, is that he allows for syncretism and the erosion of Yahweh in the nation and here, while both men are guilty, Solomon’s fault is minimized as the accumulation of political capital while Ahab’s fault, his great error, is that he does the very same. But unlike Esther, who is to be remembered as a queen (and not the harem girl, a whore who impresses the king with her beauty and sexual abilities), Jezebel is to be remembered as a whore (and not a queen who advised her husband and sought what she thought was best for him and his kingdom). By invoking Jezebel and giving her the title of the Whore of Babylon though,  John is reviving more than Jezebel in the memory of his audience. He is reviving the memory of Babylon too. One that, like Jezebel, reconstructs history and religion in inauthentic ways for a new purpose. 

Turning meanings, erasing the text when necessary, supplanting meaning, and quite literally rewriting the “word of God” to construct new meanings to confuse and compel premature actions has always been the work of Satan. From Genesis to the Gospels, even into the revelation of John, twisting the word of God for one’s own interests is recalled as “evil.” And this is very much what the historians of Israel, the mystics of the Early Church like John, on through to Evangelicals today have done to, with, by, and for their understandings (plural) of Babylon. 

Babylon will become a byword for evil, religious compromise, and the profaning of the ways of God despite never having been that. The confusion is evident, devolving into a gibberish of babble. Kevin DeYoung of Ligonier Ministries writes, 

Babylon is a symbol of all that’s wrong in the world. It’s the system, the way things are in a sinful creation. Babylon is worldliness. If you study Revelation 17, you’ll notice three things about the prostitute Babylon. First, she is attractive. She has royal clothes, purple and scarlet. She glitters with gold and is decked out in pearls and precious stones. She’s got her best threads on, alluring and seductive.

Second, the influence of Babylon is pervasive. She sits on many waters, which are peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages (Rev. 17:15). Babylon the city literally sat on many waters (Ps. 137:1; Jer. 51:13), but water here is a metaphor for influence. Babylon is connected and powerful. She is not one kingdom in one place at one time but the pervasive worldliness that reigns in every country, every culture, and every government.

Third, Babylon is impressive. John says, in verse 6, “When I saw her, I marveled greatly.” He was astonished at her influence, her power, and her hold on the inhabitants of the earth. The ways of the world always seem more impressive than the way of a crucified Savior.

Bruce McConkie, a Mormon theologian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints writes in his The Millenial Messiah (1982) that,

In prophetic imagery, Babylon is the world with all its carnality and wickedness. Babylon is the degenerate social order created by lustful men who love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. Babylon is the almighty governmental power that takes the saints of God into captivity; it is the false churches that build false temples and worship false gods; it is every false philosophy … that leads men away from God and salvation. Babylon is false and degenerate religion in all its forms and branches. Babylon is the communistic system that seeks to destroy the freedom of people in all nations and kingdoms; it is the Mafia and crime syndicates that murder and rob and steal; it is the secret combinations that seek for power and unrighteous dominion over the souls of men. Babylon is the promoter of pornography; it is organized crime and prostitution; it is every evil and wicked and ungodly thing in our whole social structure” (424).

McConkie’s understanding of Babylon has been immortalized as part of the canonical texts for the Latter-Day Saints. He is quoted in the Doctrines of the Gospel materials for the church, a primary instructional model for all Mormons.

The Seventh Day Adventists are not far off. One of their former Vice Presidents, Mark A. Finley writes in “Spiritual Babylon Revealed” that,

Old Testament Babylon was established in direct opposition to the plain commands of God. It was a human system of religion based on the traditions and authority of men rather than God. It was man-centered rather than God-centered… Modern Babylon is a system of religion which uses idols in its worship. Its statues, images and religious icons revive the idolatry of Ancient Babylon.

In scripture, the closest we come to intimate depictions of these historical figures, Nebuchadnezzar, his son Belshazzar, and Darius the Mede are sympathetic to the Jewish religion. They each publicly proclaim the authenticity of Daniel’s god. There is passive tolerance of Daniel’s religion and diet, each culminating in eventual acceptance. There is no conflict. Not with Nebuchadnezzar, not with Belshazzar, not with Darius the Mede. There is no insistence that the Jewish people forsake their religion, no ancient “war on Christmas” during the exile to, in, or with Babylon. Where the claims of Reformed theologians, Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists, or any other corner of Evangelicalism get these ideas is entirely apart from (and contradictory to) scripture until one gets to John’s Revelation, and even then we can see his visions are so riddled with metaphors, symbology, parallels, numerology, that even he cannot explain what he is seeing. In fact, John claims, one “like the son of man” who stands among heavenly lampstands (churches?) holding burning stars (angels?) has to explain. Yet John is the only witness to this encounter and, as he says himself, there are things he chose not to recount from his vision. He is hardly credible.

Further, John is not an active participant in the expanse of the church and when he reappears, he is a political exile for the outrageous claims he has made. In the text, John says he had ended up on Patmos “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” Ben Witherington, in his commentary on Revelation for the New Cambridge Commentary, writes that Patmos was a Roman penal colony where there appears to have been mines there that the prisoners would have worked. Patmos, you will surmise, was a colony for the insane. For this reason, it was almost excluded from the canon of Christian scriptures. Eusebius of Caesarea, an early church historian when the canon was being formed, felt that Revelation should not be included in the Christian scriptures because John was so uniquely bizarre, disconnected from the Synoptic Gospels, the teachings in Paul’s epistles, and the letters of Peter and James. He sorted John’s Revelation as notha, Greek for “illegitimate, unknown father, cross-bred, mixed, mongrel” (Histoire Ecclésiastique, Vol. 3.25.4). It was a damning label.

Such readings are profoundly counter-textual. There is more traction for reading Babylon as a center of imperialism, of displays of power, of empire. As Walter Brueggeman writes in Out of Babylon (2010), 

The great geopolitical fact for ancient Israel in the sixth century BCE was the Babylonian kingdom located in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. To some extent the kingdom of Egypt to the south of Israel functioned in the sixth century, as it often did, as a counterweight to the great northern power. There is no doubt, however, that Babylon was the defining, generative power in international affairs, and so constituted an immediate threat to Israel. Babylon was a very ancient kingdom with advanced cultural and scientific learning. It experienced an important revival in the sixth century with the founding of a new dynasty… The new dynasty presided overby two kings – father and son – had enormous expanionist ambitions, and so pushed relentlessly to the west. The dynasty came quickly to a sorry end through a series of ineffective leaders, culminating in the defeat of the kingdom at the hands of Cyrus, the rising Persian power to the east. Thus this Neo-Babylonian dynasty was only a brief episode in the long history of the ancient Near East (1-2).

This is not to say that Babylon did not have an impact on the Jewish people, dispersed from Israel. Babylon, as a very real location of trauma as well as an imagined place in later generations, reverberates through time. There is a reason John is able to invoke the memory of Babylon, centuries after it was destroyed. Brueggemann continues,

For the Bible, however, the existence and aggressive military policies of Babylon constituted a defining moment in history – and therefore in faith – for ancient Israel. Babylon’s military adventurism under Nebuchadnezzar inevitably led his armies to the Mediterranean Sea and inescapably toward Jerusalem and the state of Judah.. It is not difficult to summarize these ‘facts on the ground’ [of the Babylonian siege and exile of the Jewish people in Israel and Judah]. What requires careful attention, however, is the additional ‘fact on the ground’ that the story told about these events amounted to a vigorous, sustained interpretation by a determined interpretive community. That community produced an ideological explanation that came to be constitutive for the ongoing community of Judaism (3).

And Christianity.

Among those Jews carried off to Babylon, a small, intentional, intense group seized the interpretive initiative and established the governing categories for how the destruction and deportation were to be understood. This cadre of interpreters opined about the causes of the destruction, the way of coping in the displacement, and the prospects for ending the displacement and returning home. All of which is only to say that the dominant narrative account of Jews in the sixth century is not an objective, disinterested report, but rather one that beats the ideological fingerprints of the group that created this particular interpretation of events that is appropriate to those who offer the interpretation (3-4).

The Israelites, without a nation, began to develop a new identity, one of a shared religious experience rather than a dually divided and often antagonistic national identity. Israelites and Judahites (or “Jews”), the displaced people, unify. The prophets speak from this effort. Challenges came when Jews reverted to a belief in Israel, to their national rather than cultural or religious identities. Though there were differences of opinion, the unity of the Jewish people continued to the time of Jesus.

Zealots, even those close to Jesus, continued to hold a vision of empire, of conquering, of political power. Theirs was not an attitude like Daniel, but one that envisioned the resurgence of a political and military superpower. Persia and later Rome would continue to suppress the Jewish tendency toward violence and would restore order, albeit an order that refused to accept the claims of Judaism as an oppressed people claiming ethical, political, economic, and theological superiority. The attitude of Empire is always superiority, at its best a kind of paternalism that did what was best for the masses and at its worst, despotism that would use violence – shock and awe – to suppress hope.

In the prophet Isaiah, the leader who follows Darius the Mede, Cyrus the Great, shows even greater favor to the Jewish people by dispersing their captivity under Babylon and allowing them to return to Israel, even giving them funds to rebuild their temple so long as they remain a vassal state. According to the Bible, Cyrus the Great, king of the Achaemenid Empire, was the monarch who ended the Babylonian captivity. In the first year of his reign, he was prompted by God to decree that the Temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt and that Jews who wished to could return to their homeland for this purpose. Moreover, he showed his interest in the project by sending back with them the sacred vessels that had been taken from the First Temple and a considerable sum of money with which to buy building materials. Thus ends the role of both Babel and Babylon in the Hebrew Bible. 

Historians object to multiple details, plural,  of the Biblical accounts, plural, of the Babylonian siege. Details that are not contradicted by other, less partial, sources are strenuously questioned. Since the Tower of Babel narrative in Genesis, the claims made in the Hebrew Scriptures do not align with known history. In fact, in many ways, they contradict known history. What remains are cosmetic details with personal interactions that cannot align with the narrative. 

For this reason, scholars believe that Daniel’s description of Babylon is really a coded way for later writers (who claim textual authority with the Book of Daniel) as actually describing the activity of the 2nd century BCE Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Book of Daniel is a roman a clef, or “novel with a key”, that early audiences would have been able to unlock and understand, to better translate as pointing toward the 2nd Century rather than the earlier period of Jewish captivity.

Continued in pt. 4