[B-Greek] Revelation 16:19 - the great city
Iver Larsen
iver at larsen.dk
Tue Dec 27 03:15:46 EST 2005
> My question is concerning Revelation 16:19. (I am not enrolled anywhere as a student of Greek, by the way.)
> Grammatically speaking, are "the great city," in this verse, and "Babylon the Great" two seperate entities?
Grammatically speaking, you cannot tell, and the author does not expect you to be able to tell from the grammar alone.
> That is, would someone reading this in Greek get the idea that John was referring to two different entitles
> before he did any additional research?
That depends on who this someone is. If the person is familiar with the content and language of revelation, including
the common Hebraic overlap structure, it is very clear that "the great city" and "the great Babylon" in the next
sentence refer to the same city.
> I know many commentaries say these are the same, often pointing to Rev. 17:18. But Rev 11:8 also
> refers to a "great city."
In the following context of Revelation, the "great city" is repeatedly identified with Babylon, so that is a strong
contextual argument, since that is how the author often refers to Babylon.
> In a footnote to this verse in the Ronald Knox translation reads: " 'The Great City' may be Jerusalem (11:8); but
> many commentators understand a double reference in this verse to Babylon, that is, Rome."
The city mentioned in 11:2,8 and 13 is clearly marked as Jerusalem. In v. 2 it is called the "holy city" and in v. 8 it
is the "city where their Lord was crucified". Cohesion requires that the city in v. 13 is still the same city.
Otto Nordgreen mentioned a couple of commentators who apparently try to identify the city in 16:19 with Jerusalem based
on passages in Ezekiel and Zechariah. If this is the case, then it would be an example of a serious mistake in
exegetical method, which unfortunately is too common to ignore. The mistake is to go searching for potential "answers"
in far away contexts, when the immediate context of the book itself makes the question abundantly clear. Immediate
context always has priority over distant context.
Hughes suggests a third option as follows, and because of that identifies the two "cities" in 11:8 and 16:9. He says:
"The great city, where the corpses of the witnesses are exposed to the public gaze, should not be taken to mean some
particular geographical location or metropolis. It denotes, rather, the worldwide structure of unbelief and defiance
against God."
I don't accept this interpretation, but won't go into details.
I had to go beyond Greek grammar itself and move into exegesis, because the question could not be answered from grammar
alone.
Iver Larsen
Translation consultant
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