Babylon the great city appears in Revelation as a prostitute, offering her wine of passion to the nations (Revelation 14:8; 17-18). She resembles the prostitute from the book of Proverbs, Lady Folly.
Both offer illicit love and the wine of passion (cf. Proverbs 7:1). Both try to seduce simpletons. Both are deadly. Those who drink the wine that Babylon offers fall with her, and end up burning in the fiery passion of God. Lady Folly’s house leads down to Sheol, and everyone who visits ends up dead.
These parallels add an overlay of “wisdom literature” to the Apocalypse. More specifically, the parallels expose the folly of idolatry. Babylon encourages the nations to worship the beast; her wine is the wine of a false sacrament, the wine of the table of demons. And her fall is the inevitable fall of idolatry.
Idolatry is folly, and like folly its end is catastrophic.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
