Babylon the Great: The Great city
For these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written.
Then he shall confirm a covenant Is. 42:6 with many Matt. 26:28 for one week; But in the middle of the week He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall be one who makes desolate, Even until the consummation, which is determined, Is poured out on the desolate.” Dan.9:27
Through the preaching of the Gospel he kept his promise—first to the Jews, and afterward to the Gentiles. Christ fulfilled this through his death and resurrection. This means that Jerusalem and the Sanctuary would be completely destroyed because of their rebellion against God and their idolatry; or, as some read it, the plagues will be so great that all will be astonished by them. (Geneva Bible: Notes, vol. 1 (Geneva: Rovland Hall, 1560), 363.)
Babylon the great/the great city is the highest achievement of humanity, but it must fall as the city of God descends. for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written. Lk 21:22 ; Ex. 9:13-14; Jeremiah 51:6
‘Shinar’. This place name evokes memories of Nimrod, the beginning of whose kingdom was ‘Babel’ (in Hebrew Babel and Babylon are spelled the same: בבל, bbl) ‘in the land of Shinar’, from which he went on to build Nineveh in Assyria (Gen. 10:8-11). Genesis. 11 also presents the attempt to build a tower into heaven ‘in the land of Shinar’ (Gen. 11:2). Shinar thus comes to be associated with rebellion against God: it is the land of the seed of the serpent, where God’s enemies dwell.
The phrasing of Genesis 15:16 and Daniel 8:23 does not match at the lexical level, but at the conceptual level the ideas communicated are synonymous.(The reference to ‘the transgression that makes desolate’ in Dan. 8:13 may be relevant here as well.)
The same can be said about the second such statement Gabriel makes to Daniel in Daniel 9:24, when he says, ‘Seventy weeks are decreed … to finish the transgression’. The idea that transgression has a full measure that will be fulfilled before the end will come seems to have informed the thinking of both Jesus, who told the brood of vipers (i.e. seed of the serpent) to ‘fill up … the measure of your fathers’ (Matt. 23:32), and Paul, who said that the enemies of the gospel ‘always … fill up the measure of their sins’ (1 Thess. 2:16).
James M. Hamilton Jr., With the Clouds of Heaven: The Book of Daniel in Biblical Theology, ed. D. A. Carson, vol. 32, New Studies in Biblical Theology (Downers Grove, IL; England: Apollos; InterVarsity Press, 2015), 48,52.
It deserves notice that there is a title which, in the Apocalypse, is applied to one particular city par excellence. It is the title ‘that great city’. It is clear that it is always the same city which is so designated, unless another be expressly specified. Now, the city in which the witnesses are slain is expressly called by this title, ‘that great city;’ and the names Sodom and Egypt are applied to it; and it is furthermore particularly identified as the city ‘where also our Lord was crucified’ (Rev.11:8). There can be no reasonable doubt that this refers to ancient Jerusalem. If, then, ‘the great city’ of Rev. 11:8 means ancient Jerusalem, it follows that ‘the great city’ of Rev.14:8, styled also Babylon, and ‘the great city’ of Rev.16:19, must equally signify Jerusalem. By parity of reasoning, ‘that great city’ in Rev. 17:18, and elsewhere, must refer also to Jerusalem.
But a weightier argument, and one that may be considered decisive against Rome being the Babylon of the Apocalypse, and at the same time proving the identity between Jerusalem and Babylon, is that which is derived from the name and character of the woman in the vision. We have seen that the woman represents a city; a city styled ‘the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified’ (Rev.11:8). This woman or city is also styled a harlot, ‘that great harlot,’ ‘the mother of harlots and abominations of the land.’ Rev.17:5,6
Now, this is an appellation familiar and well known in the Old Testament, and one that is utterly inappropriate and inapplicable to Rome. Rome was a heathen city, and consequently incapable of that great and damning sin which was possible, and, alas, actual, for Jerusalem.
Rome was not capable of violating the covenant of her God, of being false to her divine Husband, for she never was the married wife of Jehovah.
This was the crowning guilt of Jerusalem alone among all the nations of the earth, and it is the sin for which all through her history she is arraigned and condemned. It is impossible to read the graphic description of the great harlot in the Apocalypse without instantly being reminded of the original in the Old Testament prophets.
All through their testimony this is the sin, and this is the name, which they hurl against Jerusalem. We hear Isaiah exclaiming, ‘How is the faithful city become an harlot!’ (Isa. 1:21.) ‘Thou hast discovered thyself to another than me, and art gone up; thou hast enlarged thy bed, and made thee a covenant with them’ (Isa. 57:8).
Still more emphatically does the prophet Jeremiah stigmatize Jerusalem with this reproachful epithet, ‘Go, and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the Lord: I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals;’—but, ‘upon every high hill and under every green tree thou lay down, playing the harlot’ (Jer. 2:2, 20). ‘Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers;’ ‘thou hast polluted the land with thy whoredoms and with thy wickedness;’ ‘thou have a whore’s forehead, thou refuses to be ashamed.’ ‘She is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot.’ ‘Turn, O backsliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you.’ ‘Surely as a wife treacherously departs from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the Lord’ (Jer. 3:1, 2, 3, 6, 14, 20).
Though you clothe yourself with crimson, though you deck yourself with ornaments of gold, though you enlarge your eyes with paint, in vain you will make yourself fair. Your lovers will despise you; they will seek your life. (Jer. 4:30). What right has My beloved in My house, seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many?’ (Jer. 11:15.) ‘I have seen thy adulteries, and thy neighing, the lewdness of thy whoredom, and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem, wilt thou not be made clean? How much longer shall it be?’ (Jer. 13:27.)
One more argument for the identity of Jerusalem with the apocalyptic Babylon, and one which we consider conclusive, is to be found in the character ascribed to the city as the persecutor and murderer of the prophets and saints:
‘I beheld the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus’ (Rev. 17:6);
‘And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain in the land’ (Rev. 18:24); “Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her!” (Rev. 18:20).
Who can fail to recognize in this description the distinctive characteristics of the Jerusalem of ‘that generation’? Who is it that kills the prophets, and stones them that are sent unto her? Jerusalem. What is the city out of which it cannot be that a prophet should perish—that enjoys an infamous monopoly of murdering the messengers of God? Jerusalem. The blood of saints and of prophets is the immemorial stain upon Jerusalem; the brand of the murderer stamped upon her brow; and the generation that crucified Christ is described by Him as
‘the children of them that killed the prophets,’ and so ‘filled up the measure of their fathers’ (Matt. 23:30–32).
James Stuart Russell, The Parousia: A Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord’s Second Coming (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1878), 486–497.
Luke 21:32 ἡ γενεὰ αὕτη-this generation. This cannot well mean anything but the generation living when these words were spoken: (Lk.7:31, 11:29–32, 50, 51, 17:25; Mt. 11:16), etc. The reference, therefore, is to the destruction of Jerusalem regarded as the type of the end of the world. To make ἡ γενεὰ αὕτη-this generation mean the Jewish race, or the generation contemporaneous with the beginning of the signs, is not satisfactory. See on Lk.9:27, where, as here, the coming of the Kingdom of God seems to refer to the destruction of Jerusalem.
Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Luke, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark International, 1896), 485.
In Revelation, the Holy City was engaged in warfare with its demonic challenger Babylon, a warfare, we note, that took place both on earth and in heaven. But here is a point that must be stressed: both foes were represented within the city of Jerusalem, which as the place of crucifixion was the site of the greatest blasphemy and idolatry as well as of redemption (Rev. 11:8), the Lord having redeemed his city from every tribe and tongue and nation.
In John’s day the visible battleground was neither the topographical Rome nor the topographical Judea. The battleground was the churches of Asia. Nevertheless, even in Asia the ultimate conflict was between Jerusalem and Babylon. By their faithful witness Christians revealed the presence of the messianic city that comes down out of heaven from God.
The two opposing cities met in the heart of every Christian and in the inner struggle of every church.
For them the problem of choosing the holy city over its satanic enemy was simply the dilemma of obedient loyalty or treacherous idolatry. That is to say, the gospel story of Jesus in Jerusalem had become a powerful paradigm that included the gospel witness of the Christian prophet in Pergamum. Rev. 2:12–13
Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament, ed. C. Clifton Black, John T. Carroll, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 95.
How superstitiously did the Jews doat upon the outward temple, Jer. 7:4, and on the ark, 1 Sam. 4:3, and yet regarded not true piety and purity of heart; no, nor their own souls, which were the ‘temples of the Holy Ghost.’
Thus many, that carry the names of Christians, are more addicted to go and visit the ruins of that temple at Jerusalem which was made with hands, than to associate themselves with the true church of God, or to fit themselves for the heavenly place made without hands. How are most men even in God’s worship more taken with external matters, which are inventions of men and things made by men, than with spirit and truth, notwithstanding ‘the Father seeks such to worship him,’ John 4:23.
This also may not unfitly be applied to other things; for what care do men and women take to adorn their bodies, their houses, and other things, and in the meanwhile neglect their souls. Oh pray that you may approve things that are excellent, Philip. 1:10, duly distinguishing the things that differ, and ‘choose that good part which shall not be taken away,’ Luke 10:42.
William Gouge, A Commentary on the Whole Epistle to the Hebrews, vol. 2, Nichol’s Series of Commentaries (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; J. Nisbet & Co.; G. Herbert, 1866), 274.
The spiritual government is that by which Christ rules inwardly in the conscience by his Word and Spirit, the realm of grace; the temporal government (weltliche Regimente) is that by which Christ governs all external human affairs by law, in which he works not directly and immediately, but through the larvae, “masks,” of earthly governors and institutions. Only the elect experience the former; the latter they share in common with the unregenerate. (W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed (The Davenant Trust, 2017), 15.)
By paying attention to the chronologies of Jeremiah and Daniel, for instance, Jordan noticed that Jeremiah’s exhortation to the people of Jerusalem to submit to Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. 29) occurred after Daniel was already a leading adviser to the Babylonian king (Dan. 2). That sheds a completely new light on Jeremiah’s program: Surrender to Nebuchadnezzar is not a leap into the dark but an act of confidence in Yahweh who has placed Daniel, as He had placed Joseph, to prepare a place for His people.
Peter J. Leithart, “Introduction,” in The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan, ed. Peter J. Leithart and John Barach (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), xxvi.
The LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, told me to command them to tell their kings that the LORD had said: “By my great power and strength I created the world, human beings, and all the animals that live on the earth; and I give it to anyone I choose.
I am the one who has placed all these nations under the power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia, and I have made even the wild animals serve him. All nations will serve him, and they will serve his son and his grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then his nation will serve powerful nations and great kings.
“But if any nation or kingdom will not submit to his rule, then I will punish that nation by war, starvation, and disease until I have let Nebuchadnezzar destroy it completely. Do not listen to your prophets or to those who claim they can predict the future, either by dreams or by calling up the spirits of the dead or by magic.
They all tell you not to submit to the king of Babylonia. They are deceiving you and will cause you to be taken far away from your country. I will drive you out, and you will be destroyed. But if any nation submits to the king of Babylonia and serves him, then I will let it stay on in its own land, to farm it and live there. I, the LORD, have spoken.” Jer. 27:4–11. GNT
Christians will take an interest in what government is doing. We strike a balance between becoming too comfortable with the ways of the world, as Lot did (Gen. 19:1), and becoming isolationists who withdraw from the world (cf. the movement of monasticism).
We are in the world but not of the world (cf. Jn. 17:14, 16). Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon to take an interest in the affairs of their land of captivity. He wrote, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7).(Lyle W. Lange, God So Loved the World: A Study of Christian Doctrine (Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Publishing House, 2005), 652.)
On the other hand, the warnings of judgment can escalate until they result in a different kind of narrative, where pagan empire reaches its arrogant height and is finally overthrown by the one true God in an act of judgment which will, ipso facto-automatically, bring his own people not only into freedom at last after their exile, but into their own long-promised world sovereignty.
This results in a very different message from the command to settle down and seek the welfare of Babylon. Instead, in a diverse range of texts, the people are commanded to leave Babylon in a hurry and to avoid contracting uncleanness as they do so (Isa. 48:20; 52:11; cf. Zech. 2:6–13; Rev. 18:4.) N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, vol. 4, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 1274–1275.
Dr. G. K. Beale expounds on Revelation 18, illustrating the importance of obeying God's command to leave behind earthly comfort and security. Pointing out how Babylon in Revelation represents the world's sin and self-reliance, Beale urges believers to detach from the fleeting materialism of "Babylon" and place their trust solely in Christ.What agreement does Christ have with Beliar-the devil; Satan? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God said, “I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Therefore come out from them, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, (Isa. 52:11; Rev. 18:4) and I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”(Isa. 43:6; Hos. 1:10) 2 Cor. 6:15–18
The exhortation to separate from Babylon’s ways is patterned after the repeated exhortations of Isaiah and Jeremiah, especially that of Jer. 51:45: “Come forth from her midst, my people” (cf. Gen. 12:1; 19:15; Isa. 48:20; 52:11; Jer. 50:8; 51:6).
That the exhortation of Rev.18:4 also strongly echoes that in Isa. 52:11 is evident from the immediately following phrase in the Isaiah text: “do not touch the unclean,” which refers to the idols of Babylon. The exhortation in Jeremiah also includes separating from idol worship (see Jer. 51:44, 47, 52).
The reason that Babylon will be punished with such “plagues” is that “her sins have reached up to heaven.” Again, appeal is made to Jer. 51: “For her [Babylon’s] judgment has reached to heaven, it is lifted up to the skies” (Jer. 51:9 [note also an echo of Gen. 18:20; 19:13]). This foreshadows the judgment of the worldwide system, Babylon the Great. In some passages of the OT and early Judaism the expression becomes an idiom for an extreme degree of corporate sin (cf. Ezra 9:6; Jon. 1:2; 1 Esdras 8:75; 4 Ezra 11:43).
G. K. Beale and Sean M McDonough, “Revelation,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 1140.
Come out of her, my people,so that you do not take part in her sins
and so that you do not share in her plagues, Rev. 18:4.
“Fallen, fallen Babylon the great” (Rev.18:2) is the leading announcement of the entire passage, and it restates Isa. 21:9, originally an announcement of Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon. Those who remain in the city, who were not slaughtered in the great harvest, are commanded to leave (Rev.18:4), repeating a command of Jeremiah to the exiles. Both Jeremiah and the heavenly voice of Revelation. 18 buttress their exhortation with warnings about the coming of the Lord’s recompense, using the image of a cup of wrath:
Flee from the midst of Babylon,And each of you save his life
Do not be destroyed in her punishment
For this is Yahweh’s time of vengeance;
He is going to render recompense to her.
Babylon has been a golden cup in the hand of Yahweh
Intoxicating all the earth
The nations have drunk of her wine;
Therefore the nations are going mad. (Jer. 51:6–7; cf. 51:45)
Babylon the harlot evokes not only neo-Babylon but the original Babel, left unfinished on the plains of Shinar. She is Sodom, also Egypt, also Tyre the great city of trade (see below). As the “great city,” she is Nineveh, described as “the great city” four times in Jonah, a phrase used virtually nowhere else in the prophets (Jon. 1:2, 3:1, 3; 4:11; cf. Jer. 22:8)
All this fits neatly with biblical accounts of the fall of Gentile cities, yet I have argued throughout this commentary that the setting of the Apocalypse is pre- AD 70 and that the focal point of John’s visions is the end of the old covenant order, most dramatically and visibly evident in the fall of Jerusalem to Roman armies led by Vespasian and Titus.
In fact, the strongest evidence for this identification of the great city is in chapter Rev. 18, the discovery in Babylon of “the blood of the prophets and saints and of all who have been slain on the land” (Rev.18:24). That is closely parallel to Jesus’s statement about Jerusalem in Matt. 23:34–35:
“upon you may fall all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.”
Jerusalem is the city that has killed prophets, and will continue to kill them until the cup of martyr blood is filled to overflowing (Matt. 23:32; 1 Thess. 2:16). If Revelation. 18 alludes to Jesus’ prediction, it seems likely that it refers to the same city.
In how many different cities, after all, can we find the blood of all who have been slain? Jesus’s statement in Matthew. 23 makes it clear that Jerusalem is charged with all the blood of the righteous; Jerusalem, not Rome, is unmasked as the apocalyptic city of man. cf. (Dt. 32:35. Isa. 34:8. 63:4. Jer. 5:29. Hos. 9:7.)
Christ will forever separate the two “cities” within mankind, glorifying the city of God (Rev. 21), the heavenly Jerusalem, and ruining the city of man, the demonic and worldly Babylon (Rev.18:1–8). The world acts as a spiritual prostitute in its idolatrous, violent, and perverse self-exaltation (Rev.17:1–6).
But the parallels are numerous and compelling. Revelation. 18 speaks of the blood of the prophets, as does Matt. 23:34. Revelation speaks of blood being found in a city, and Matthew. 23 is a prophecy about Jerusalem. Both passages speak of the blood of “all” being charged to a particular city.
That Matthew speaks of blood being “charged” and Revelation of blood being “found” makes sense given the different times: Jesus speaks prophetically about coming events, the accounting of blood to the city that we have already seen in Revelation. 16; Revelation. 18 speaks of the uncovering of the city’s bloodthirstiness after the city has fallen.
The blood of the witnesses is part of a legal process, a charge and a discovery that leads to a sentence.
No other city within the biblical frame of reference qualifies. Rome piled up the corpses of Christian martyrs for several centuries, and there have been thousands of thousands of modern martyrs. The temporal frame of Revelation, however, precludes the possibility that it is talking directly about martyrs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or even the third.
Seleucids slaughtered Jews, Jews sometimes slaughtered other Jews, but, according to Jesus, only Jerusalem has shed blood of all prophets and wise men. When Jonah goes to the great city Nineveh, the Ninevites listened and repented. Jeremiah has no such luck, nor did Jesus. “A prophet is accepted except in his own country.”
Revelation was written, by virtually any account, in the first century, and at that time Jerusalem is the only city that, for an early Christian who knows the Olivet Discourse, remotely fits the description of Rev. 18:23.
The only alternative is to suggest that Babylon is not a specific city at all, but a generic city of rebellion, perhaps represented in the first century by Rome but not limited to Rome. We have seen that this option raises more problems than it solves.
If Babylon is the city of man, when did it fall? If the fall of Babylon is still future for us, then what are we to make of John’s insistence that the things he sees “must shortly take place”? ( Rev. 1:1; 22:10,12,20)
When we take seriously (a) the temporal frame of the book and (b) the prophecy of the city’s destruction, then the only consistent reading is that Babylon is Jerusalem.
Identifying the city as Jerusalem significantly affects the political economy of chapter 18. Commentators make much of the condemnation of consumerist trafficking lamented by the kings and merchants of the land, and by the shippers and sailors of the sea. The text can be deployed in a powerful critique of Mammon worship and the liturgies of consumption that support it.
Commenting on the list of goods in Rev.18:9–19, Mangina (2010: 208–209) writes,
The list exposes the way in which human beings, made in the image of God, are treated as mere commodities, convertible in principle with other goods. From the merchants’ perspective, human souls or lives (the word psyche means both) are no different in kind from silk, spices, or sheep, since the value of all these things is determined by the price they can command in the great marketplaces of Ephesus, Smyrna, or Rome itself.
There is a Mammonite ontology at work:
“Nothing ‘is’ what it is (i.e., as created and established by God). It ‘is’ only insofar as it can be traded for other things or exchanged, even more abstractly, for money. Each thing is worth nothing more nor less than what the market will bear.”
This is objectifying, but Mangina brilliantly observes that this objectification of human lives is rooted in a more fundamental subjectification:
“the market is, after all, a marketplace of fantasy and wishes, a field of dreams for those who have the resources to play.”
He takes note of the phrase “the fruit of the longing of your soul,” and connects it with the Augustinian insight that human beings are “constituted by desire.” For John as for Augustine, not only human beings but human communities are constituted by inordinate desire for things.
If the city is Jerusalem rather than Rome, however, these critiques are less tightly tethered to the text. We might attempt a historical reconstruction demonstrating that Jerusalem is a large-scale trader in the eastern Mediterranean. Alternatively, we might venture the proposal that Revelation. 18 is fundamentally about a different sort of commerce, the temple commerce Jesus himself condemns (cf. Jn. 2:13–22), which is both liturgical and “economic.”
Babylon is Sodom, so the righteous make like Lot and leave (Oecumenius 2011: 77). Commentators commonly take the exhortation “Come out!” metaphorically, as a reference to flight from worldliness or pagan culture that does not involve any spatial or geographic movement (Cyprian in Kovacs and Rowland 2004: 191; Boxall 2006: 257; Reddish 2001: 341).
On the interpretation offered in this commentary, the exhortation to leave is quite literal, repeating Jesus’s warning to flee the city when the abomination of desolation comes into view (Matt. 24:15–16).
The harlot is the queen of abominations, and her greatest abomination is consumption of holy martyr blood. When she intensifies the slaughter of the saints, the city is doomed and it is time for the faithful to leave.
For Christians in Asia, especially Jewish Christians, it is an exhortation to leave the doomed synagogues to enter a new city, new Jerusalem, the church, which is a new place, even if it is not merely a place.
Peter J. Leithart, Revelation, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain, vol. 2, The International Theological Commentary on the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments (London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury T&T Clark: An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018), 209-218.
But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal (Isa.8:16; 29:11; Rev. 5:1; 10:4; 22:10) the book, until the time of the end. Many Amos 8:12 shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” Da 12:4.ESV.
The verb, however, translated “going to and fro” may be rendered, as it is by Ewald, as “to peruse.” The veil then shall be removed, the seals broken when men peruse the prophecy carefully, and knowledge is increased. (H. D. M. Spence, Daniel, The Pulpit Commentary (London; New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1909), 337.)
Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,see now and know;
seek in the open places
if you can find a man,
if there is any who executes justice, who seeks the truth,
that I may pardon her. Jer. 5:1 MEV
The time is coming, says the Lord GOD,
when I will send a famine on the land,
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD.
They will wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they will run back and forth to seek the word of the LORD,
but they will not find it. Am 8:11–12 MEV
This is not like the other prophecies which were commanded to be hidden until the appointed time, as in Daniel 12:4, because these things would be accomplished quickly and had now begun. For within fifty years afterward, Jerusalem was destroyed: the godly were persecuted, false teachers misled the people, religion was corrupted, so that the world seemed to be at its end. (Geneva Bible: Notes, vol. 2 (Geneva: Rovland Hall, 1560), 14,122)
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