This note is interpretation, not translation, and the reading in it is Jon’s. It asks one question of Revelation: who is said to destroy the earth, and what is that destruction made of? The book names one who ruined the earth, the great prostitute (19:2), and says God will destroy the destroyers (11:18). This note reads that ruin as the corruption of the nations, not as physical damage to the planet. The Hebrew scriptures it draws on describe a people and a land defiled by idols, by shed blood, by sexual unfaithfulness and by taking what is not yours.
What the two verses say.The time … for destroying those who destroy the earth (diaphtheirai tous diaphtheirontas tēn gēn, 11:18). The destroyers are not named in that verse. Then: he has judged the great prostitute who ruined the earth with her immorality (hētis ephtheiren tēn gēn en tē porneia autēs, 19:2), and the next clause is he has taken back from her hand the blood of his servants. So the book gives both how she ruined it, with her porneia, and what goes with it, blood. The verb is phtheirō, to ruin or corrupt, and its compound diaphtheirō. Between them they occur four times in this book, in three verses: 8:9 (a third of the ships were destroyed), 11:18 (twice) and 19:2.
What ruin means. The verb is used of character: bad company corrupts good habits (1 Corinthians 15:33, phtheirousin); of minds corrupted (1 Timothy 6:5, diephtharmenōn); of the outer person wasting away (2 Corinthians 4:16, diaphtheiretai). It is also used of a moth destroying a treasure (Luke 12:33), and in Romans 8:21 creation is enslaved to decay (phthora) and waits to be freed. Next to porneia at 19:2, the natural reading is the corruption of people, and the book says who: the kings of the earth committed immorality with her, and the people living on the earth got drunk on the wine of her immorality (17:2), and all the nations have drunk (18:3). “The earth” in this book often means the people on it: the whole earth followed the animal, amazed (13:3). The physical ruin the book does describe is in its own judgments (8:7–9; 16:3), and those are God’s, not something it says people did to the planet.
The ones who ruin are ruined.If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him (1 Corinthians 3:17, phtheirei … phtherei). In Genesis the earth was corrupted and God says I am about to destroy them with the earth (6:11–13): one root, shachat, four times in three verses. Jeremiah says it to Babylon, destroying mountain, you who destroy the whole earth (51:25). Revelation 11:18 is the same turn.
What the book says the ruin is made of. Those who survive the plagues and still do not change are named by what they do: they did not change their minds about the works of their hands, to stop worshipping the demons and the idols … and they did not change their minds about their murders, their sorceries, their sexual unfaithfulness or their thefts (9:20–21). Babylon is drunk from the blood of God’s people and from the blood of the witnesses of Jesus (17:6), and in her is found the blood of prophets and of God’s people and of all who have been slaughtered on the earth (18:24). Her merchants were the great ones of the earth and the nations were led astray by her sorcery (18:23). So the book’s own list is idols, blood, sorcery, sexual unfaithfulness, theft and trade.
Idolatry, blood, sexual unfaithfulness and taking what is not yours. The scriptures name these together, and in Psalm 106, Romans 1 and Revelation 9 idolatry comes first. The pieces, each in the text: 1. Leaving God comes first. Hosea puts what is missing first: no truth, no loyalty, no knowledge of God in the land (4:1), and only then the list, cursing and lying and murder and theft and adultery (4:2); a spirit of whoredom has led them astray (4:12). Paul says the same order: they exchanged the glory of God for images (Romans 1:21–25), therefore God gave them up (1:24, 28), and the list that follows has greed in it (pleonexia, 1:29) next to murder. 2. The idols themselves defile the land.They have polluted my land with the corpses of their detestable idols and filled my inheritance with their abominations (Jeremiah 16:18); for the blood they had shed on the land and for their idols with which they had defiled it (Ezekiel 36:18); they will no longer defile themselves with their idols and their detestable things (37:23). 3. And the behavior idolatry leads to does too. Psalm 106 gives the sequence: they served their idols (106:36), sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons (106:37), and the land was polluted with blood (106:38), they were defiled by their works and whored by their deeds (106:39). Blood pollutes the land (Numbers 35:33). Sexual unfaithfulness does (Leviticus 18:25; Jeremiah 3:2, 9). So does taking what is not yours: they covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them (Micah 2:2; the verb is gazal, to seize by force), woe to those who join house to house and field to field until there is no room (Isaiah 5:8), woe to him who piles up what is not his (Habakkuk 2:6). 4. Greed is called idolatry.Greed, which is idolatry (Colossians 3:5, pleonexia, hētis estin eidōlolatria); a greedy person, who is an idolater (Ephesians 5:5). Jesus: you cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24). The love of money is a root of all the evils (1 Timothy 6:10). 5. Habakkuk puts the land, the animals and the blood in one verse.The violence done to Lebanon will cover you, and the ruin of its animals, because of human blood and violence to the land, to the city and all who live in it (2:17), and the same last line stands at 2:8, after the woe on the one who takes what is not his (2:6). Revelation 18 has these in one city: she is found with blood (18:24), her merchants are the great ones of the earth (18:23), and the nations are led astray by her sorcery.
Where this stops. This note does not say these verses are about physical pollution, carbon or climate; none of those is in the text. It reads the ruin as the corruption of the nations, with the land bound up with them as in the Hebrew scriptures. And it does not say who the prostitute is; that is not decided here, and the Babylon note says where the book leaves it.