THE CITIES OF REVELATION

The Christian world of the book of Revelation, like that of much of the New Testament, is a world of cities. The readers to whom the book is addressed lived in seven of the great cities of Asia Minor. Most readers to whom it subsequently passed would also have lived in cities. Jewish Christians, like John and many of his readers, lived, both geographically and symbolically, between Jerusalem and Rome. And since this was also a world in which cities were commonly personified as women, Rome appears in Revelation, not as the goddess Roma, the form in which she was worshipped in the cities of Asia, but as ‘the great whore’ (17:1). She is also called Babylon the great city, after the Old Testament city which destroyed Jerusalem and in which Jerusalem's citizens lived in exile. Babylon is the city of Rome, built on seven hills (17:9), but she also represents the corrupting influence which Rome had on all the cities of her empire. She is ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores’ –who are presumably the other cities, like those of Asia, who share in her luxury and her evil. When she falls, so do ‘the cities of the nations’ (16:19) – presumably including Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum and the rest.

But if Babylon is the actual city of Rome, Jerusalem is not the actual city which the Romans had captured and sacked some time before Revelation was written. There are, indeed, two Jerusalems in Revelation.