The Bible specifically describes not one, but two “Babylons.” Not long after the great flood, one “Babylon” was founded—the ancient city-state established by a man named “Nimrod” (Genesis 10:8–10). The second Babylon is a modern church-state system described in Revelation 17–18. Its leaders will literally fight Christ at His Second Coming (Revelation 17:12–14)!
Think about that! Hundreds of millions of people in this end-time “Babylon” are so deceived that they will have the audacity to literally do battle with the returning Son of God and the armies of heaven!
To understand how this system called “Babylon” began, let us go back to the earliest days of man’s history. In Genesis 10—soon after the flood—mankind began to multiply again. Wild animals also multiplied, and people needed protection. At this point, a son of “Cush” was born. The Bible tells us, “Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; therefore it is said, ‘Like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.’ And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar” (Genesis 10:8–10).
So this “mighty hunter”—said to have been a powerfully built man—began to gather people together into cities for protection, and also to put them under his personal control. The beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom was “Babel”—Babylon. From there, he went on to establish other cities and to gather men together in a relationship that made them feel “independent” from God—not needing God’s protection. Finally, mankind—having “one language and one speech” (Genesis 11:1)—began to build a massive skyscraper or “tower” that has been called the tower of “Babel” (vv. 4–9).
God knew that, under this Babylonish system, mankind was quickly drawing away from Him and would soon invent weapons and means to destroy himself. God said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them” (v. 6). The creative power of the human mind was such that God knew mankind might invent terrible weapons capable of destroying the earth, and that His plan to give mankind 6,000 years to write the lessons of human suffering could be cut short before He intended! So God came down to “confuse their language” and to scatter them over the face of the earth.
But history and consistent, pervasive stories and ancient legends from nearly all nations indicate that the philosophies and religions started by Nimrod and his wicked wife, Semiramis, have continued down to this day. After Nimrod’s death, his wife Semiramis claimed that he was now the “sun-god,” as author Alexander Hislop wrote:
The Chaldean Mysteries can be traced up to the days of Semiramis, who lived only a few centuries after the flood, and who is known to have impressed upon them the image of her own depraved and polluted mind…. That beautiful but abandoned queen of Babylon was not only herself a paragon of unbridled lust and licentiousness, but in the Mysteries which she had a chief hand in forming, she was worshipped as Rhea, the great “MOTHER” of the gods, with such atrocious rites as identified her with Venus, the MOTHER of all impurity, and raised the very city where she had reigned to a bad eminence among the nations, as the grand seat at once of idolatry and consecrated prostitution…. Thus was this Chaldean queen a fit and remarkable prototype of the “Woman” in the Apocalypse, with the golden cup in her hand, and the name on her forehead, “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the MOTHER of harlots and abominations of the earth.” The Apocalyptic emblem of the Harlot woman with the cup in her hand was even embodied in the symbols of idolatry, derived from ancient Babylon, as they were exhibited in Greece; for thus was the Greek Venus originally represented (The Two Babylons, pp. 5–6).
