The ruined city Babylon is a city where things that used to happen don’t happen anymore. John’s description is under the rubric “no longer” (ou eti, used 6x in Revelation 18:21-24). In Babylon, music, crafts, milling, light, and weddings have ceased. The old has passed, the new has come, but the new isn’t something to celebrate.
Revelation’s other city is also a place of novelty, identified with the new heavens and new earth (21:1), the city over which the Lord speaks, “Behold I make all things new” (v. 5; the lovely, rhyming Greek phrase is Idou kaina poio panta). In chapters 20-22, ou eti again appears 6x, as the first things come to an end and new things appear. For new Jerusalem, the first things are not missed: Satanic deception of nations (20:3); the sea (21:1); death (21:4); mourning, crying and pain (21:4); curse (22:3); night (22:5).
In Revelation, as in the rest of the Bible, the city is a center of innovation. Whether novelty is good or bad depends on what “first” or “old” things are ending and what “new things” are coming to be.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
The Possibility of Possibility
"Might could” is a Southern expression meaning “maybe I could” or “I might be able to,” conveying…
The False Promise of No Contact
Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that…
