When Noah’s great-grandson Nimrod started to become a mighty one in the earth and set himself up as “a mighty hunter in opposition to Jehovah,” the beginning of his kingdom was at Babel, Babylon. It was at Babel that men, in defiance of Jehovah, decided to make a celebrated name for themselves by building a city with a religious tower. This was an apostasy, a falling away from the worship of Noah’s God, a rebellion against Jehovah’s sovereignty. But their building program resulted in dismal failure. Jehovah came down and confused their language. No longer able to communicate with one another, they divided off according to language groups and were scattered from Babel “over all the surface of the earth.” (Gen. 10:8-10; 11:1-9)

Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon

Of the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar’s time, M’Clintock and Strong’s “Cyclopædia” says: “Babylon, as the centre of a great kingdom, was the seat of boundless luxury, and its inhabitants were notorious for their addiction to self-indulgence and effeminacy. [The theologian Curtius] asserts that ‘nothing could be more corrupt than its morals, nothing more fitted to excite and allure to immoderate pleasures. The rites of hospitality were polluted by the grossest and most shameless lusts.’” After describing the depraved sex worship and corruption of that city, the “Cyclopædia” concludes: “Babylon even stands, therefore in the New Test[ament] (Rev. xvii, 5) as the type of the most shameless profligacy and idolatry.”