The Harlot Babylon part 2

by Jerry Huerta

copyright 2020

In part one, the identity of Babylon in Revelation 17 was revealed as the apostate church in the last days that is supported in New Testament texts such as 2 Thessalonians 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1-4; 2 Timothy 3:1; Luke 8:11-13; Hebrews 3:12-14. In this interpretation, Babylon’s fall or judgment runs parallel with the prophetic and illustrated history of the seven churches and the continuing judgment of their covenant relationship with God, which is precedented in Old Testament text such as Jeremiah 3 and Ezekiel 16 (1 Peter 4:17). Seventh-day Adventist Hans K. LaRondelle maintains this view of Babylon in Revelation 17,

The symbolic language of Babylon as the great ‘prostitute’ in Revelation 17 is covenantal language that continues the framework of the covenant of the OT prophets. . . . Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, and especially Ezekiel, described apostate Israel and Jerusalem as the wife of Yahweh who had become in their time the greatest prostitute on earth. She would not escape her judgment, the covenant wrath of God.[1]

The seating of the woman during the reign of the sixth king is significant to her identity. Adventism has been somewhat indecisive and confused about this issue. Concerning the criterion that “five are fallen” in Revelation 17:10, the Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary presents three conflicting views on the issue, the first, with a taint of Idealism, suggest the heads are,

Representative of all powers that oppose God’s people and work on earth, irrespective of number, the statement would simply mean that a majority of the powers so represented had already passed off the stage of history.[2]

The second view they cite enumerates the fallen heads as Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Papacy.[3] The third alternative harkens back to the traditional view that Babylon is the papacy, in which the heads represent Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece.[4] The ramification of these different identities affects the sixth king that reigns. In speculating on the identity of the sixth head, the commentary conspicuously drops the first view. It presents the second view’s ramification that the sixth head is either France or the United States, while the third view demands the traditional interpretation that it is Rome in John’s time.[5] The first view has no credibility and neither does the third, insomuch that it forces the view that the 6th-century papacy is seated on the beast during the reign of the sixth head in their scheme, the 1st-century Roman Empire, which is fallacious and leads to scriptural and historical hyperbole.

If the papacy represents Babylon, it renders her one of the heads, the fifth in the commentary’s second view and the seventh in the third. Since the papacy has existed for over a thousand years, it does not agree with the short span of the seventh (verse 10). It renders the woman as a head seated on a beast with seven heads by any view. In order to avoid such a dilemma, the Revelation relates the heads, mountains, and kings as appositives, nouns that rename nouns, just as in Revelation 20:2. The heads are specific kingdoms in relation to Daniel 7. The KJV is an inadequate translation of Revelation 17:10. What is translated, “And there are seven kings,” is best rendered, “and they are seven kings,” as in the NASB and many other translations. The woman sits upon seven heads that are seven kingdoms. Furthermore, since the kings are sequential, so are the mountain kingdoms; five are fallen, and one is (it reigns). One must note, Babylon is not a harlot until she fornicates with kings of the earth, before her judgment and during the reign of the sixth king. Mountains and hills are commonly used as symbols of kingdoms in prophecy (Psalms 30:7; Isaiah 2:2, 41:15, 68:15-16; Jeremiah 51:25; Ezekiel 35:3; Daniel 2:35; Habakkuk 3:11; Zechariah 4:7). Christ’s declaration that his covenant people are “the light of the world, a city that is set on a hill,” in Matthew 5:14, supports the woman is not one of the heads but the great city in question. The great city does not sit on the seven mountains all at once, but consecutively, starting when his people were taken captive to Babylon. God used his covenant people to be a light to ancient Babylon, then Medo-Persia, then the Greek Empire and after that the Roman Empire and then the fifth kingdom, the papacy. John was taken to the future to witness that the judgment of God’s fallen covenant people, prophesied in 2 Thessalonians 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1-4; 2 Timothy 3:1; Luke 8:11-13; Hebrews 3:12-14. Apostate Protestantism sits upon the beast with seven heads during the reign of the sixth head/mountain/kingdom, the beast that rises out of the earth, that appears as a lamb, but enviably speaks as a dragon.

It must be noted that the original view of the seven heads in Adventism is conspicuously absent in the Adventist’s Commentary. Adventist Uriah Smith, whose work was endorsed by Ellen G. White,[6] held that the heads of the beast in Revelation 13 and 17 were, “seven forms of government that have existed in the Roman Empire,” namely, “Kings, Consuls, Decemvirs, Dictators, Triumvirs, Emperors, and Popes.”[7] The citation is from a track published by Smith to quash the rising interpretation that the heads,

were to take in the great governments of the earth, which had been already symbolized in prophecy, some of them three times over, and which had passed away centuries before, never again to appear or to have any influence among men. Such kingdoms as these, it is contended, are included among the heads of the dragon, the new enumeration being given as follows: 1. Babylon; 2. Medo-Persia; 3. Grecia; 4. Rome pagan; 5. Rome papal; 6. United Italy; 7. A future head yet unknown; 8. The papacy restored.[8]

Since White endorsed Smith's work, it is evident that she was in accord with Smith's rejection that the heads were the same as the beasts in Daniel 7. Smith added a footnote that held the new view as "calculated to work mischief by confusing and unsettling the mind of the reader in regard to prophetic applications."[9] Even so, by 1980, the Adventist Commentary presented the view as a viable interpretation of the heads in Revelation 17, while Smith’s view disappears altogether. While proponents of White might hold doggedly to Smith’s rendition and condemn the Commentaries as revisionism, it is untenable to hold that the kingdoms in Daniel 7 were to “never again to appear or to have any influence among men.” Smith’s comment conflicts with John's use of the same beasts in Daniel 7 for the beast that rises out of the sea. Daniel 7:11-12 states that the little horn endures until it is committed to the burning flames, which is easily exegeted as referring to Revelation 19:20. At the same time, the other beasts have their dominions taken, but their lives “prolonged for a season and time.” The prolonging of their lives is easily exegeted as the absorption of various attributes from one kingdom to the next. No doubt, the papacy absorbed the attribute of the marriage of state and religion from the other beasts, including the Roman Empire. This absorption is easily supported in Revelation 13:2. The sea beast is a composite of a leopard, bear, lion, as well as the ten-horned beast. The ten horns on the sea beast in Revelation 13 indicate the western Roman Empire’s dominion was taken, but lived on through the sea beast, just as the other beasts in Daniel 7:12. Here we have a definite indication that the heads are kingdoms, as in the second and third views of the Commentary and not the “seven forms of government that have existed in the Roman Empire” held by earlier expositors. It certainly does not have the dilemma of holding the papacy is Babylon, which would have the 8th head seated upon the beast during the reign of imperial Rome, the 6th head, as in the scheme of the earlier expositors.  

In returning to the Commentaries three views, the ramifications of the second and third hold that the perspectives are either our time or John’s, respectively. If the sixth head is either the United States or France, then the perspective of Revelation 17 is our time, but if it represents Imperial Rome, it has to be John’s time. One cannot render Babylon as the papacy seated on the beast during the reign of pagan, Imperial Rome, without making the connection between the sixth head and Babylon lack synchronization. In essence, under the Commentary’s third view that Babylon is the papacy, the sixth head’s reign has already passed. The flaw in the connection might be the reasoning behind the early Adventists’ need to see the heads as seven forms of government of Rome, even as it still has the papacy as Babylon, seated at the time Imperial, pagan Rome reigns. No such lack in synchronization occurs under the second view in the Commentary, as the papacy is rendered one of the five kings that have fallen, while the sixth king reigns. However, the second view does require LaRondelle’s view of Babylon, which cannot apply to the heads, insomuch as the beasts in Daniel and Revelation cannot be held to a covenant relationship with God and fallen from moral rectitude in any sense. The second view requires that Babylon be a contemporary entity in our time, in fulfillment of 2 Thessalonians 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1-4; 2 Timothy 3:1; Luke 8:11-13; Hebrews 3:12-14.

What is lacking in the Commentary’s second view is a correlation between the imagery in the book. As revealed, the heads in Revelation and the beasts in Daniel are connected and acknowledged in the Commentary. Nevertheless, the authors were at a loss for the precise identity of the sixth head under the second view, dismissing the correlation with chapter 13 that if the first beast correlates with the fifth head, then the sixth head has to correlate to the two-horned beast. Furthermore, the image made to the first beast must be the seventh head in Revelation 17. This view accounts for all the beasts in Revelation. The sea beast in Revelation 13:1 is the fifth kingdom that has fallen, that “was, and is not” at the time of the sixth head/kingdom rules. This view renders the beast from the earth in Revelation, 13:11, the sixth kingdom that reigns while the fifth head “is not.” The only beast to account for is the seventh, which is the “image” made to the fifth beast by the two-horned beast in Revelation 13:14-15. The seventh reigns for only a short time before the healing of papacy is complete in the historicist’s perspective. From the future perspective in Revelation 17, the harlot Babylon can no longer be construed as the papacy, as the traditionalists have in the past, but must represent apostate Protestantism that is drunk with the blood of the saints.

Protestant missionary imperialism at the time of the Laodicean church, Daniel’s “time of the end” and “cleansing of the sanctuary,” is the object of this work. Further evidence and documentation of the exploitation of the true church by apostate Protestantism, Babylon can be located in the book below, Thy Kingdom Come: Re-evaluating the Historicist's Interpretation of the Revelation. When the Protestants wrought a secular society, it stripped society of the protections in the scriptures against exploitation.

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you. Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. (James 5:1-7)

Again, the object of this work is to correlate the imagery in Revelation with the Hebraic cultic calendar. The book below reveals the source of the torment of the souls in the fifth seal are the horsemen in the previous seals. Traditional Hebraic scholars view God’s locust army, which has the appearance of horsemen (Joel 2:4), as the antitype of Rosh Hashanah. Contemporary historicists also acknowledge that Christ’s manifestation before the “Ancient of days” in Revelation 5 parallels his manifestation in Daniel 7:13. At the same time, the Hebraic scholars view the opening of the books as portraying Rosh Hashanah. It invariably follows that Christ’s voice signifies the trumpets that herald the new moons (days of darkness) that pertain to the seven months between the spring and fall festivals, announcing Rosh Hashana. Again, Christ’s voice in Revelation 4:1 represents the antitypical trumpet that announces judgment at Rosh Hashana. The prayers of the fifth seal are answered in Revelation 8, which leads to the end of the torment by the horsemen/locusts, as they are sealed in chapter 7. This end is conveyed in the fifth trumpet (Revelation 9:7), which supports the unremitting advancement from the first partition of the typical sanctuary to the second, synchronizing the Hebraic feasts with Revelation 1 through 11. The denunciation Babylon is drunk with the blood of the saints is seen in apostate Protestantism. This exploitation is the source of the torment of the souls in the fifth seal. Historically, Protestant missionary imperialism represented the rider of the white horse that led to wars for the resources of the world at the first attempt at globalism. The wars fulfilled the imagery of the rider of the red horse. Contemporaneously, the Protestants ended their churches’ intercession in commerce and exploitation ensued (the rider of the black horse), resulting in famines and death (the rider of the pale horse).

[1] Hans K. LaRondelle, Babylon: Anti-Christian Empire, in Symposium on Revelation—Book II, DARCOM 7, ed. Frank B. Holbrook (Silver Springs, MD: Biblical Research Institute, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1992), 158-158

[2] The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, vol. 7, s.v. “five are fallen,” (Review and Herald Pub. Ass., 1980), 855-856.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.

[6] “At the 1881 General Conference session, King urged those assembled to carry out the council given by Mrs. White in 1879 that SDA books should be sold widely among the public, and forcefully argued that two small books written by Uriah Smith, Thoughts on Daniel and Thoughts on the Revelation, could be published together in an attractive form for sale by canvassers to the public” Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopaedia, Volume 10, page 660, King, George Albert (1847-1906)
[7] The Seven Heads Of Revelation 12, 13, and 17 by Uriah Smith, 1896, https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/1411.2

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

This post is a postscript to the book above, which is available here.