own lifetime Jehovah God called his descendant Abraham out from the neighborhood of Babylon in the land of Shinar. When inviting Abraham out Jehovah said to him: “I shall make a great nation out of you and I shall bless you and I will make your name great; and prove yourself a blessing. And . . . all the families of the ground will certainly bless themselves by means of you.” And after Abraham arrived in the Promised Land hundreds of miles to the west of Babylon, Jehovah said: “To your seed I am going to give this land.”

29. (a) In what manner did Jehovah make certain the promised Seed would come through Abraham and Isaac? (b) Then why was Babylon the Great against Abraham’s descendants?

²⁹ When, over thirty years later, Abraham obeyed Jehovah and proceeded to offer up as a human sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, Jehovah’s angel stopped Abraham and said: “I shall surely bless you and I shall surely multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens and like the grains of sand that are on the seashore; and your seed will take possession of the gate of his enemies. And by means of your seed all nations of the earth will certainly bless themselves due to the fact that you have listened to my voice.” (Gen. 12:1-3, 7; 22:1-18) This made it certain that the promised Seed of God’s woman would come through Abraham and his son Isaac as an earthly channel. When this Seed came to power, it would mean hurt to the Great Serpent, Satan the Devil, the god of Babylon the Great. For this reason she, as the woman enemy of God’s woman, was against that Seed and the line of descent by which the Seed would come.

Part Two

1. (a) For how long did Babylon the Great have its seat in the ancient city of Babylon? (b) How did Babylon the Great hold sway over other world powers? (c) To what end has she taken advantage of her religious control?

THE principal seat of Babylon the Great as a world empire of false religion was in the ancient city of Babylon on the Euphrates River. This continued to be the case until Babylon fell from her position as the third world power of Bible history in 539 B.C. and yielded place to the Medo-Persian World Power. Two other world powers preceded the Babylonian World Power, and those two were (1) the Egyptian and (2) the Assyrian. Nevertheless, Babylon the Great, the world empire of Babylonish religion, had also held sway over those two earlier world powers. She took advantage of her religious control over them to use them against the Seed of God’s woman by trying to destroy the line of descent by which the Seed came. Babylon the Great is an international harlot, and she yields herself to the political rulers of the earth in order to gain her religious objectives. She thus unites religion to politics.

2. In Egypt, what did Babylon the Great try to do? With what measure of success?

² After Joseph, the grandson of the patriarch Isaac, died as the prime minister of Egypt, Babylon the Great as a religious force worked with Egypt’s Pharaohs in a try at destroying Joseph’s people, the Hebrews. These were then guests, alien residents, in the land of Egypt. Pharaoh made them slaves at hard labor, to kill them off. This failing, Pharaoh decreed that all Hebrew male babies should be killed at birth. Babylon the Great must have felt triumphant over God’s woman, who was represented in Egypt by the Hebrews, the sons