Revelation Chapter 18 Verse 2

2 And he called out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul and hateful bird;

In 14:8, an angel proclaimed, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great.” In verse 2 that message is repeated, and once again the past tense is used to stress the certainty of that event. In like manner, over 100 years before the actual fall of ancient Babylon, Isaiah 21:9 said, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.”

Verse 2 goes even further and tells us that the city has (past tense) become a dwelling place of demons, foul spirits, and every foul and hateful bird. The description of this city is very different from the holy city we will see in Chapter 21, of which 21:27 will tell us: “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination.”

Isaiah 13:17-22 describes the destruction of historical Babylon by the Medes using very similar language to what we read of the fall of Rome in verse 2 —

Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them ... And Babylon ... shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

Was this a literal description of Babylon’s fall? No. As we discussed earlier, ancient Babylon fell without a shot being fired. Is the language in verse 2 a literal description of Rome’s fall? No. Why then is the city described that way? It is symbolic of the depth of Rome’s fall. Barclay explains:

Surely the most dramatic part of the picture is the demons haunting the ruins. The pagan gods banished from their reign haunt the ruins of the temples where once their power had been supreme.

The language denotes utter devastation and utter desolation. That is what it meant in Isaiah 13 about Babylon, and that is what it means here about Rome.

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