Rev. 17: Who Is the Harlot Babylon? Part 1

Opening

Ask your group to guess, before you open the Bible tonight: who do people today claim the “Harlot Babylon” is? You’ll probably hear a range of answers — a political figure, a religious institution, “the culture,” even specific countries. Revelation 17 is one of the most over-identified passages in the whole book, precisely because it crowds so many symbols into one scene. Tonight’s session is mostly detective work: before we can ask what Babylon means for us (that’s next session), we need to carefully sort out who’s actually on stage.

A crowded cast

Revelation 17 introduces the Great Harlot, seated on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, drunk with the blood of the saints and dressed like royalty. An angel offers to explain “the mystery of the woman and of the beast” (17:7), and what follows is one of the densest pieces of symbolism in the book: seven heads that are also seven hills and also seven kings, an eighth king who is somehow also one of the seven, ten horns that are ten kings, and finally the beast and the kings turning on the harlot herself and destroying her. For the fuller unpacking of every character in this scene, see expl/content/harlot/who-is-the-harlot-babylon-part-1.md.

It helps to notice how deliberately this beast echoes the beast of chapter 13: both have seven heads and ten horns, both are described in language that parodies God’s own eternal “was, is, and is to come” (compare Revelation 1:8 with 17:8, 11), and both ultimately go down in defeat despite looking unbeatable. This scarlet beast is the same imperial power already introduced earlier in the book, now viewed from a different angle — the angle of what supports and adorns it.

The seven hills are the most straightforward clue in the chapter: the text says so directly (17:9), and everyone in the first century would have recognized Rome, famously built on seven hills, immediately. This isn’t a coded prophecy about the Papacy, a future world capital, or any other city that has occupied Rome’s old ground since — the original readers weren’t meant to wait centuries for a decoder ring. It was their own empire, staring back at them.

The ten kings and the harlot herself

The ten horns are ten kings “who have not yet received a kingdom” but who receive authority together with the beast for a brief, decisive moment, pooling their power behind imperial rule (17:12-13). Most interpreters read the number symbolically — representing the totality of Rome’s supporting client-kingdoms and allied powers, rather than ten specific historical rulers waiting to be named.

The harlot herself, richly dressed and seated on all this power, turns out to have deep roots in Israel’s own prophetic literature. She’s described in ways that deliberately invert the Bride of chapters 19 and 21 and echo, in an unsettling way, the faithful woman of chapter 12 — same wilderness setting, same maternal language, but heading toward destruction instead of rescue. She also shares a whole cluster of specific traits with Jezebel, the false teacher already named back in the letter to Thyatira (2:20-22): both use seduction to draw God’s people into idolatry, both chase economic advantage, both persecute the faithful, and both meet sudden, decisive judgment. That’s worth sitting with for a moment — the harlot of chapter 17 isn’t a wholly new problem. She’s the same temptation the churches were already being warned about, now shown at empire scale.

The seven kings: a genuinely open question

Now for the passage this session most wants to slow down on. Revelation 17:10 says of the seven kings: “five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while.” Interpreters have long tried to use this verse to pin down exactly when Revelation was written — and it’s worth being honest with your group that this is a live, actively debated question among careful, faithful scholars, not a puzzle that’s already been solved.

The trouble starts with a basic question: where do you start counting? Ancient historians themselves didn’t agree — Suetonius’s list of Roman rulers begins with Julius Caesar, while Tacitus effectively starts the imperial line with Augustus, the first ruler to hold the title “emperor” formally. Modern scholars face the same fork, and different starting points genuinely lead to different centuries:

• Starting from Julius Caesar (counting him as the first, even though he was never formally “emperor”) gives you: Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius — five fallen — with Nero as “the one who is,” and Galba, who reigned only a few months in 68-69 AD, fitting neatly as the seventh who “remains only a little while.” This scheme points to a date in the mid-to-late 60s AD, before Jerusalem’s fall in 70 AD — sometimes called the “early date” for Revelation.
• Starting from Augustus (excluding Julius as not a true emperor) shifts the whole count one slot later, which starts pointing toward Vespasian or later as “the one who is.”
• A third approach skips the three short-lived rivals of the chaotic “Year of Four Emperors” (68-69 AD) — Galba, Otho, and Vitellius — as illegitimate or not worth counting at all, which pushes the count still further, potentially landing on Vespasian, Titus, or Domitian as the sixth king. This scheme supports a later date for Revelation’s composition, well into Domitian’s reign (roughly 95-96 AD) — the “late date.”

David Aune’s commentary is often cited for surveying nearly a dozen different possible emperor-lists depending on where you start and whom you exclude — which itself tells you something important: this is not a settled calculation with one obviously correct answer, even among scholars using the same historical evidence.

So which date is more widely held? The majority position among both critical and evangelical scholars remains the later date, Domitian’s reign around 95-96 AD, resting mainly on the external testimony of the early church father Irenaeus (writing around 180 AD), who states that John received his vision “towards the end of Domitian’s reign” — testimony echoed by several other early church writers. But the early, Nero-era date is a serious, actively defended minority position, not a fringe theory, and it draws on real internal evidence too: the vivid persecution imagery that fits Nero’s reign especially well, and the absence of any clear reference to the Jerusalem temple’s destruction in 70 AD, which some scholars find surprising if Revelation was written decades after that event.

Here’s a reason this whole debate favors a more symbolic reading, without dismissing the historical question as unimportant: the number seven functions throughout Revelation as a number of completeness — seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls — not typically as a literal headcount. On this reading, “five have fallen, one is, one yet to come” may be evoking the totality and permanence of arrogant, God-opposing imperial power across history, rather than encoding a puzzle with one specific correct emperor-list. Importantly, that symbolic reading and the historical dating question aren’t mutually exclusive — a scholar can hold that John used conventional “kings” language to evoke total, ongoing imperial tyranny while still using other evidence (persecution context, early church testimony, the state of the seven churches) to date the book’s composition on independent grounds.

The honest posture for your group tonight: serious, faithful, careful readers of Scripture land in different places here, using real evidence on both sides. That’s worth naming directly rather than smoothing over.

Discussion questions

Understanding the text

1. Why is it significant that “seven hills” would have been instantly recognizable to Revelation’s first readers as Rome, rather than a coded reference to some future city?
2. What specific traits does the harlot of chapter 17 share with Jezebel from the letter to Thyatira (2:20-22)? Why might that connection matter?
3. Walk through the three different starting points for counting the “seven kings” (Julius Caesar, Augustus, or skipping the 69 AD rivals). Why does each one land on a different century for Revelation’s composition?

So what for us 4. Does it surprise you that faithful, serious scholars genuinely disagree about when Revelation was written? How do you personally hold a question like this — as a puzzle to solve, a distraction, or something else? 5. The harlot represents a system supporting an empire’s power — economic, cultural, religious. What are the “seven hills” of your own culture — the recognizable, everyday supports of the systems you live inside? 6. Jezebel’s influence entered the church from within, through relationship and compromise, not a hostile invasion. Where might a “Jezebel-shaped” compromise be quietly present in your own community of faith?

Closing prayer

Ask God for humility in the face of a genuinely disputed question like Revelation’s date — the confidence to keep studying carefully, without needing every detail settled to trust what the text is clearly saying. Pray also for discernment to recognize the “seven hills” of your own time and place — the systems of power, wealth, and belonging that quietly ask for loyalty God alone deserves.