Part 1: Who is the Harlot Babel?

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Some people say it’s the Pope; some say it’s the economy. It could be anyone — even the Church. So who is the Harlot Babel?

Overview

Chapter 17 is about the Harlot Babel, but identifying her isn’t straightforward, because so many characters in this chapter interact with each other. Let’s look at them one at a time.

It begins with the Great Harlot: the kings of the earth commit adultery with her, and she intoxicates the whole earth. Then an angel starts unpacking the mystery surrounding her. The first clue is that she sits on a beast (from chapter 13) with seven heads and ten horns, and the woman herself is identified as Babel. (English Bibles print “Babylon”; it is the same name as the Babel of Genesis 11, and this site uses “Babel” throughout.) The seven heads turn out to be seven hills, or seven kings who rule one after another, with the beast itself as an eighth king. The ten horns are ten kings who rule at the same time and hand all their power over to the beast.

The beast then fights against the saints, but Jesus takes up that fight himself — and the whole scene ends with the beast and the kings turning on the harlot, hating her and destroying her.

That’s a lot of players for one chapter, but each one is needed to complete the picture. This chapter builds up, piece by piece, to a full description of the devil’s system. Let’s break it down.

The scarlet Beast

This beast has many parallels to the First Beast in chapter 13. The table below marks matching details in bold and matching outcomes in italic.

This beast is also a picture of the emperor, military power included, and its scarlet color points to royalty.

Three times, in verses 8 and 11, the beast is described as the one who

• once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction
• once was, now is not, and yet will come
• once was, and now is not, … is going to his destruction

This is a parody of God’s own description as the Eternal One in Rev. 1:8, the One who was and is and is to come.

The seven hills and seven kings

The seven hills the woman sits on are seven hills that identify Rome — a near-universal conclusion among interpreters, since Rome was famous in antiquity as “the city on seven hills.” For the first readers, Rome was the seat of the emperor, praised as Lord of lords and King of kings as though he were equal to God — this is not a prophecy about the Pope, or anyone else who later happened to live in Rome.

At the same time, hills can also stand for kingdoms, since the text goes on to interpret them as kings, and each king has an associated kingdom. That reading is supported by the greatest kingdom pictured as a mountain in Isaiah, by Babel described as a mountain, and by the mountain that fills the earth in Daniel as the new godly kingdom. Edom’s own mountainous homeland gave rise to similar language (Edom's mountain, Mount Seir), though there the mountain is Edom’s literal territory rather than a purely symbolic image.

Who are the seven kings? Five have already fallen, one currently reigns, and a seventh is still to come and will reign only briefly. Together they describe a chronological sequence, showing that throughout this span of time the kings support the beast. This is one of the most debated passages in Revelation for dating the book: some scholars try to count actual emperors from Julius Caesar or Augustus onward to land on a specific “sixth king” (usually Nero), arguing this points to a date in the late 60s AD; the majority view, following the early church’s own testimony (Irenaeus) that John wrote under Domitian in the mid-90s AD, reads the sequence more symbolically, as we do here. We won’t try to name a specific sixth king; the point is not an exact headcount but that the final countdown is close, a call to stay alert. For a fuller look at how this dating question plays out across the site, see who wrote Revelation, and when.

The beast itself then comes as an 8th king who is also one of the seven. In later Christian tradition (though not the New Testament’s own vocabulary), Sunday came to be called “the eighth day”: the day Christ was raised, and so the first day of a new creation. If that later association is in view here, the beast’s appearance as an eighth king would be a false claim to the same kind of renewal — a counterfeit resurrection. The theme of the beast’s own resurrection has already come up in chapter 13 and in chapter 16, where the frogs recall both the plague of frogs in Egypt and the Egyptian goddess Heqet, associated with birth and resurrection.¹ Put those pieces together and the beast’s appearance on the eighth day reads as a claim to invincibility. But it’s a false claim: he has already been unmasked as “the one who was, who is not, and who goes to destruction.” This confirms that the beast is one of the seven — not a superhero standing above them.

The 10 kings

The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. They act together, at the same time, handing their power over to the beast’s agents, who then submit to the beast’s agenda. Together they represent the beast’s power over the — potentially whole — world at that moment in history. The number 10 may again be symbolic; for the first readers, it likely pointed to the supporting kings of the Roman Empire.

Their stated purpose is to wage war against the Lamb. Things work out rather differently, as we’ll see.

The Harlot

She has many parallels — mostly as a deliberate contrast — with the bride in chapter 21 and the woman in chapter 12. The table marks what matches in bold and what differs in italic.²

She also shares a lot of similarities with Jezebel, who caused her own trouble in Thyatira.

Finally, she works alongside the second beast from chapter 13, without being the same figure.³ She does in trade and culture what the second beast does in religion.⁴

The Harlot and the second beast

The last row holds a reversal. The second beast marks other people’s foreheads; the harlot carries a name on her own, as if she herself were owned, and marked out for judgment.⁵

So the roles mirror each other across the two chapters: the first beast supports the harlot in chapter 17, just as the second beast supports the first beast in chapter 13.

Dig Deeper

Sources