Come out of her, my people

This note is interpretation, not translation, and the reading in it is Jon’s. It names no institution and identifies no one. It sets out the marks this book and the older scriptures give for the city a reader is told to come out of, and the marks given for the one they are called into, so that anyone can hold what they belong to up against both. That is the use the book itself puts them to.

The book asks the question, and asks it twice in the same words. One of the seven messengers who had the seven bowls comes to John and says: come, I will show you — and shows him the great prostitute (17:1). Four chapters later, one of the seven messengers who had the seven bowls comes to John and says: come, I will show you — and shows him the bride, the wife of the Lamb (21:9). The Greek of the two openings is the same sentence. Two women are being set beside each other on purpose.

Both turn out to be cities. Both are adorned. To both of them the kings of the earth come. The question the arrangement puts to a reader is not which institution in history is which. It is which of the two they are standing in. That is why the call at 18:4 exists at all: it is addressed to God’s own people, inside her, who have not left.

Whose voice it is. The text says only another voice from the sky, and this translation leaves such voices unnamed, as it does at 1:8, 4:1 and 16:15. But the speaker calls them my people, and this book says plainly who bought them: by Your blood You purchased for God people out of every tribe and language and people and nation (5:9). Either it is Him, or it is someone speaking for Him.

What her name means. The Greek scriptures do not transliterate it. They translate it. “Therefore its name was called Synchysis” — Confusion — “because there the Lord confused the speech of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). The builders had meant something else by the name; in Akkadian it reads as the gate of the god. Scripture calls it Confusion.

The first mark: a name made by the people who live there. “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose head will be in the sky, and let us make ourselves a name” (Genesis 11:4). Against that, everything this book says about names is given rather than taken: I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, and my own new name (3:12); his name on their foreheads (14:1; 22:4). She also has a name on her forehead (17:5). Everyone in this book is marked on the forehead. The question is whose name it is, and who put it there.

The second mark, and it is the sharpest: she says what only God may say. Isaiah has her speaking in her heart: Egō eimi, kai ouk estin hetera — I am, and there is no other (47:8). Nine chapters earlier, in the same book, God says of Himself: Egō eimi, kai ouk estin eti (45:18); I am God, and there is none besides me (46:9); I am the Lord God, and there is none besides me (45:5). It is not idolatry in general. It is one sentence, reserved, found in her mouth. The king of Babylon says the same thing a different way: I will ascend into heaven, I will set my throne above the stars, I will be like the Most High (Isaiah 14:13–14).

The third mark: the vessels of God’s house, used in another worship. Belshazzar sends for the vessels his father took from the temple in Jerusalem, drinks from them, and praises gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood and stone (Daniel 5:2–4). The charge afterwards is put exactly: you lifted yourself against the Lord of heaven, and brought the vessels of His house before you, and praised gods who do not see or hear or know, and the God in whose hand your breath is, Him you did not glorify (5:23).

And the call to leave is addressed to precisely those people. Come out of the midst of her, be separated, touch nothing unclean — you who carry the vessels of the LORD (Isaiah 52:11). The holy things are inside her, in the wrong worship, and the people carrying them are told to go.

The fourth mark, which is the method: a cup. The older text states the mechanism plainly. “A golden cup was Babylon in the hand of the LORD, making all the earth drunk; the nations drank of her wine, therefore the nations go mad” (Jeremiah 51:7). The madness is in the Hebrew; the Greek softens it to staggering. This book takes the cup and hands it to her: she holds a golden cup full of abominations (17:4), and the inhabitants of the earth are made drunk from the wine of her immorality (17:2).

Then it names what is in the cup. “By your pharmakeia all the nations were deceived” (18:23). The word is drug-making. So the sequence is given end to end: a cup, a drink, drunkenness, madness, deception. It is not argument that turns people, and it is not force. It is something administered.

What is in the cup, and what the word for it means. The cup is gemon bdelygmatōn, full of abominations (17:4), and she is called the mother of the prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth (17:5). Bdelygma is the word the Greek scriptures use for idols and for what belongs to them. Ezekiel, shown what was being done inside the temple, sees abominations and all the idols of the house of Israel carved round the wall (8:10) — the two words in one phrase.

The law is more specific still, and it is worth reading slowly. “The carved images of their gods you shall burn with fire. You shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it for yourself — for it is a bdelygma to the LORD your God. And you shall not bring a bdelygma into your house” (Deuteronomy 7:25–26). The one place the law names an abomination together with gold and silver, it is the gold on other gods. Here it is in a gold cup, in the hand of a woman gilded with gold.

Two things are forbidden entry to the house in the same way. That, and “you shall not bring the hire of a prostitute into the house of the LORD for any vow” (Deuteronomy 23:18). This book puts both in one woman’s hands.

Jesus uses the word once, and the subject is money. The Pharisees, being lovers of silver, heard him and sneered; and he said to them: you are the ones who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts — what is exalted among men is a bdelygma before God (Luke 16:14–15).

And the word marks the door of the other city: nothing common goes into it, nor anyone doing a bdelygma or a falsehood, but only those written in the Lamb’s scroll of life (21:27). What is in her cup is exactly what is kept out of the bride’s city.

A cup was already the sign of the covenant. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you” (Luke 22:20). Paul had the same words from the same night, and drew from them the sentence that puts the whole matter in two halves: ou dynasthe potērion Kyriou pinein kai potērion daimoniōn — you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot share the table of the Lord and the table of demons (1 Corinthians 10:21). Two cups, named in one line, and the point of the sentence is that nobody drinks from both.

What a cup does, in his account, is make you a sharer. “The cup of blessing which we bless — is it not a koinōnia in the blood of Christ?” (10:16). And of the other: “I do not want you to become koinōnoi of demons” (10:20). Which is the word the call out of her is made in: come out, so that you do not synkoinōnēsēte in her wrongs (18:4). The same root three times. A cup is not a drink. It is a sharing, and the call is about which one a person is in.

And her cup has blood in it too. This is the part that makes it a counterfeit rather than merely an alternative. “And I saw the woman drunk from the blood of God’s people and from the blood of the witnesses of Jesus” (17:6).

Set the two side by side and every element is reversed. In the one, his blood, given for them, shared with them, and the drinking is the sharing. In the other, their blood, taken from them, drunk by her. Same vessel, same substance, and the direction of everything turned round.

The book finishes the figure by handing the cup back: in the cup she mixed, mix double for her (18:6). And the cup she is given at the end is not hers — it is the cup of the wine of the anger of God, which this book has already poured for anyone who worships the animal (14:10) and which it remembers her with at 16:19.

Which is the scene in Daniel, exactly. Vessels that belong in the house of God, in hand, at a feast, with gold and silver gods being praised over them (5:2–4). Nobody in that room had to renounce anything. The vessels were the right vessels. What had changed was what was being honoured while they were held.

Paul names the same three, and then gives the way out. Pharmakeia occurs three times in these writings. Twice here, at 9:21 and 18:23. Once in Paul: the works of the flesh are immorality, uncleanness, indecency, idolatry, pharmakeia, hostilities, strife, jealousy, rages, selfish ambition, divisions, factions, envy, drunkennesses, carousings (Galatians 5:19–21). Three of Babylon’s four charges stand in one sentence of his: immorality, drugging, drunkenness.

What he does next is the part worth having. He does not answer a list of practices with a list of prohibitions. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — against such things there is no law” (5:22–23). The answer to what is in the cup is something that grows. And the chapter opens by telling them not to go back: for freedom Christ set us free; stand firm, and do not be put under a yoke of slavery again (5:1).

This book answers the same way. Its reply to Babylon is not a rule. It is a city with a river, and standing in it a tree of life bearing twelve crops, and leaves for the healing of the nations (22:2). Her pharmakeia deceived the nations; the leaves heal them. The object is the same in both sentences.

So the two, mark for mark. She says I am and there is no other; the bride says nothing about herself and is shown. Her people made themselves a name; the bride’s people are given one. She is gilded with gold and precious stone and pearls, which she holds; the bride’s linen is the righteous acts of God’s people (19:8), which they did. She has no husband anywhere in this book; the bride is adorned for hers (21:2). She holds a cup that makes the nations drunk; the city holds out water, and the last invitation in the book says on what terms: let the one who wishes take the water of life dōrean — free (22:17).

That last word is the test in a single syllable. Dōrean is the word Jesus used when he sent out the twelve: dōrean elabete, dōrean dote — freely you received, freely give (Matthew 10:8). It is the word Peter used when a man offered money for the gift of God: your silver perish with you (Acts 8:20). And it is the word the book closes its invitation with. Whatever charges for it is not the bride.

What this note does not claim. That any particular body is the city in question. The marks above are given so a reader can do the work themselves, on whatever they belong to, including whatever the writer of this note belongs to. Nor does it claim the marks are a checklist where three out of five convicts; they are descriptions, and the book expects to be read by people already inside, which means the reading has to be done honestly or not at all. And it does not claim that finding a mark means leaving a building. The call at 18:4 is about not sharing in what she does — synkoinōneō, the word used elsewhere for taking part in the works of darkness and for taking part in Paul’s affliction. It is about participation, and participation is the thing a person controls.