'Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand; it shall come as a

destruction from the Almighty ... and Babylon, the glory of kingdoms,

the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew

Sodom and Gomorrah' (Isa. 13:6 -19).

The fall of Babylon is placed in a setting of worldwide judgment:

'I will punish the World for their evil' (Isa. 13:11).

The fall of Babylon is accompanied by signs in the heavens:

'The stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give

their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon

shall not cause her light to shine ... therefore I will shake the

heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of

the Lord of Hosts, and in the day of His fierce anger' (Isa. 13:10 and

This is dated for us in Matthew 24 as being 'immediately after the

tribulation of those days', and is closely connected with the Lord's

The fall of Babylon is to be sudden:

'Babylon is suddenly fallen and destroyed: howl for her' (Jer. 51:8).

'Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour

is thy judgment come' (Rev. 18:10).

The gradual decline of Babylon in no sense corresponds with this

emphasis upon its sudden end.  In the days of Alexander the Great, Babylon

was a city strong enough to have attempted resistance against him.  It did

not do so, but welcomed the conqueror, who commanded the rebuilding of its

temples.  Babylon therefore was not suddenly destroyed when the Medes took

the kingdom.  In the time of Tiberius, Strabo speaks of Babylon as being 'to

a great degree deserted'.  Peter wrote his epistle from Babylon, where a

church had been formed.  In a.d. 460 a writer says that Babylon was inhabited

by some Jews, and from Babylon soon after this, was produced the Babylonian

Talmud.  In a.d. 917 Ibn Hankal speaks of Babylon as 'a small village'.  In

a.d. 1100 a fortified town is mentioned, named Hillah (from Arabic 'to rest,

to take up abode').  In a.d. 1811 Hillah was visited by Rich who found a

population of between six and seven thousand Arabs and Jews.  The land which

supports even this number of people cannot be called 'desolate, so that no

man shall dwell therein' (Jer. 50:3).  If Hillah has been built out of the

stones that composed the greater buildings of Babylon, then the words of

Jeremiah 51:26 have never yet been fulfilled.  'They shall not take of thee a

stone for a corner, nor a stone for foundations; but thou shalt be desolate

for ever'.

No useful purpose will be served by lengthening these evidences.  We

believe that the testimony of Scripture is clear and unambiguous: that

Babylon, in the land of the Chaldeans, on the Euphrates, will be revived to

accord with the description of Isaiah 13, Jeremiah 50 and 51 and Revelation

17 and 18: that in the day of the Lord, and accompanied by signs in the

heavenly bodies, Babylon will be suddenly destroyed and become like Sodom and

Gomorrah.  Throughout the thousand -year reign of Christ, Babylon will remain

a witness to all the world, a prison -house of every unclean spirit, a place