The Bounds of Their Habitation, Tier 1, Cluster A
Abstract
Paper 1 argued that Genesis 11 describes a configuration rather than a polity, and that the narrator’s substitution of Babel for the city’s own self-designation established Scripture’s right to name empires by what they are rather than by what they call themselves. This paper follows the exercise of that right across the canon. It traces the name “Babylon” from a city on the Euphrates, through a Chaldean state that ceased to exist as a political power in 539 BC, to a first-century Mediterranean empire that shared with it no dynasty, no language, no religion, no institutions, and no territory in common except by conquest — and finally to a summary designation for the type as such. It then treats the second half of the same device: the recombination in Revelation 13:1–2 of the four beasts of Daniel 7 into a single composite animal, which converts a sequence of successive kingdoms into a statement about one persistent thing wearing successive bodies. The paper argues that these two operations together constitute a purpose-built analytical device for the persistence of imperial identity across discontinuous regimes, and that the device does work the international relations literature’s category of strategic culture attempts and cannot complete. It closes with the rule governing the name’s application, which is required because a transferable name is a dangerous instrument in careless hands.
1. The argument
An empire falls. Its dynasty is extinguished, its capital taken, its administrative language displaced, its gods discredited, its records dispersed. Two centuries later, a different people, speaking a different tongue, worshipping different gods, governing by different institutions, occupying different ground, behaves in a way that is recognizably the same. The subject populations recognize it first, and they recognize it before the analysts do.
The political science literature has a name for this problem and no solution to it. The name is strategic culture, and Paper 1’s introduction to this collection noted its difficulties in passing.[1] This paper takes them up directly, because the biblical device that answers them is the subject at hand.
The difficulty is structural rather than a matter of insufficient research. Strategic culture locates persistence in a nation: it explains durable behavior by reference to durable national habits, transmitted by education, memory, geography, and institutional practice. This works reasonably well where the nation is continuous. It fails exactly where the interesting cases are, which is where the polity is not continuous — where the state was dismembered, the elite liquidated, the ideology inverted, and the behavior nonetheless resumed. And it cannot address the smallest and largest cases at all, because it has defined its object as national, which excludes both the congregation and the transnational order by definition.
Scripture’s device does not locate persistence in a nation. It locates persistence in a structure and gives the structure a name, then applies the name wherever the structure appears. The name is Babylon. The application runs for something over a thousand years of narrated time and crosses at least four distinct political orders. It is not metaphor loosely deployed. It is a naming rule with specifiable conditions, and the conditions are the four marks of Paper 1.
The claim of this paper: the canon treats the imperial identity as the persistent thing and the regime as its temporary occupant, and it built two devices to say so — a transferable name and a composite body.
2. The referent: Babylon as a state
It is worth being precise about what the name originally denoted, because the argument depends on the discontinuity being real and total.
The Neo-Babylonian state was brief. Nabopolassar took the throne in 626 BC; Nebuchadnezzar II reigned from 605 to 562; four successors followed in twenty-three years; Cyrus took the city in 539.[2] Under eighty-eight years from foundation to fall. Within that span it destroyed Jerusalem, burned the temple, and deported the population of Judah, which is why the canon has so much to say about it.
The prophetic material against it is specific and it is territorial. Isaiah 13 and 14 address the king of Babylon by title and describe the city’s desolation. Jeremiah 50 and 51 are the longest sustained oracle against any foreign nation in the prophets, and they name the Chaldeans, the Medes who will come against them, the river, the walls, the images of Bel and Merodach. Daniel narrates the court of Nebuchadnezzar and the last night of Belshazzar. This is not typology yet. This is a particular city, with a particular king, judged for particular acts against a particular people.
Then the state ends. The city persists for centuries as a provincial center under Persian, Macedonian, Seleucid, and Parthian administration, declining slowly into insignificance. By the first century of the Christian era there is no Babylonian empire in any sense, and no serious prospect of one.
This is the fact that makes the later usage remarkable rather than sloppy. When a first-century writer says “Babylon,” no reader can suppose he means a going concern.
3. The transfer
3.1 First Peter 5:13
The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son. (1 Peter 5:13)
Three readings have been offered. The first is literal: a Christian assembly in the Mesopotamian city, or in the Roman garrison town of Babylon in Egypt. The second is that the term designates the condition of exile as such, without a fixed geographical referent. The third, held by the great majority of commentators ancient and modern, is that Babylon here designates Rome.[3]
The reasons for the third reading are cumulative and they are strong. Mark is placed with the writer, and the early tradition connects Mark with Peter at Rome.[4] There is no evidence of a Petrine mission in Mesopotamia and considerable evidence of one in Rome. The letter’s whole frame is one of resident aliens and strangers scattered through Asia Minor, which makes a designation of the imperial center as the place of exile fitting rather than obscure.[5] And the usage is not idiosyncratic: it is attested in Jewish apocalyptic writing of roughly the same period, where Rome is called Babylon as a matter of course.[6]
What matters for this paper is what the substitution does. Peter is writing from the capital of the world and he declines to name it. He supplies instead the name of an empire that had been dead for six hundred years and had destroyed the temple. The substitution asserts an identification: this is that. The city of the Caesars is doing what the city of the Chaldeans did, and the correct name for it is therefore the name of the thing it is doing.
This is the operation of Genesis 11:9 performed again. The narrator there refused bab-ili, the imperial self-designation, and supplied a name describing what the project had become. Peter refuses Roma, the imperial self-designation, and supplies a name describing what the city is. The canon’s first act of renaming an empire and its late apostolic act of renaming an empire are the same act.
3.2 Revelation 17–18
The Apocalypse makes the identification explicit rather than allusive.
And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. (Revelation 17:5)
The text then supplies its own decoding key twice. First: “The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth” (17:9). Second: “And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth” (17:18). A city on seven hills exercising rule over the kings of the earth, addressed to congregations in first-century Asia Minor, admits of one referent, and the ancient commentators did not hesitate over it.[7]
Two features of the presentation carry the argument forward.
The name is described as a mystery. The word in 17:5 is not decorative. It signals that the name is being used in a disclosed rather than an ordinary sense: this is Babylon under a description, and the description is the point. The text is telling the reader that a naming operation is in progress.
The judgment material is drawn from the oracles against the historical city. Revelation 18 is built substantially out of Isaiah 13, Isaiah 47, Jeremiah 50 and 51, and Ezekiel 26–28.[8] The fall of the merchant city, the lament of the kings, the silence of the millstone, the double repayment, the stone cast into the sea — these are Jeremiah’s images against the Chaldeans redeployed against a different empire on a different sea. The redeployment presupposes that the oracles were never merely about the Chaldeans. If the material transfers cleanly, the target was the type all along.
3.3 The third stage: the type as such
There is a further step in Revelation that is easy to miss because it looks like a fourth reference rather than a change in kind.
Babylon in chapters 17 and 18 is not only Rome. It is the mother of harlots, the seat of the merchants of the earth, the place where the blood of prophets and saints and of all that were slain upon the earth is found (18:24). That last phrase exceeds any first-century polity’s actual body count and is meant to. The passage has moved from identifying a present instance to summarizing the type across its whole history.
The name has therefore done three things in sequence. It named a city. It was transferred to a second city displaying the same structure. And it became the standing designation for the structure itself, of which both cities were instances. The third stage is what makes the device analytical rather than merely rhetorical, because it means the name is no longer indexed to any occupant at all.
4. The recombination: Daniel 7 into Revelation 13
The transferable name handles persistence across regimes. It does not by itself say what the relation among the regimes is. That is the work of the second device.
4.1 Daniel’s sequence
Daniel 7 gives four beasts rising from the sea in succession: a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear raised up on one side with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, with iron teeth and ten horns. The interpreting angel states the frame plainly: “These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth” (7:17).
Daniel 2 has already given the same sequence in a different image — the metal image of gold, silver, brass, and iron mixed with clay — and Paper 11 takes up the metals and the stone.[9] The identification of the four kingdoms has been argued for two millennia and continues to be. The traditional identification runs Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome; a widely held alternative runs Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece.[10] This paper does not require either. What it requires is the shape: a sequence of discrete kingdoms, each replacing the last, each with a body of its own.
4.2 Revelation’s composite
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. (Revelation 13:1–2)
Four observations.
The animals are Daniel’s. Lion, bear, leopard, taken from Daniel 7:4–6, with the ten horns of Daniel’s fourth beast (7:7) supplied to the same body. There is no ambiguity about the source; the correspondence is exact and the dependence of Revelation on Daniel at this point is one of the least contested claims in the literature on the Apocalypse.[11]
They are given in reverse order. Daniel lists lion, bear, leopard. John lists leopard, bear, lion. The reversal is the vantage point: Daniel looks forward from the first, John looks back from the last. The reader standing inside the fourth kingdom sees the sequence receding behind him.
The four bodies have become one body. Daniel’s beasts arise and are replaced. John’s beast has the leopard’s body, the bear’s feet, and the lion’s mouth simultaneously. What was four is now one animal with four provenances.
The heads sum. Daniel’s beasts carry one head, one head, four heads, and one head: seven. John’s beast has seven heads. The arithmetic is unlikely to be accidental, and it makes the point without a word of commentary — everything that was distributed across the sequence is now gathered into the single body.[12]
4.3 What the recombination asserts
| Daniel 7 | Revelation 13 | The change |
|---|---|---|
| Four beasts, four kings | One beast | The plurality was of occupants, not of things |
| Successive: each rises, each falls | Simultaneous: one body, four features at once | Succession described a body count, not a life span |
| Lion, bear, leopard, fourth | Leopard, bear, lion, ten horns | Vantage point moves to the end of the sequence |
| Seven heads distributed | Seven heads on one neck | Nothing was lost between regimes |
| “Four kings which shall arise” | “Who is able to make war with him?” | The question shifts from identification to capacity |
The claim embedded in the recombination is the claim of this collection. The successive empires of Daniel were not four separate phenomena that happened to resemble one another. They were one phenomenon in four occupancies, and when the last of them is described, it is described as carrying all of the earlier ones in its own anatomy.
This is why the device is not typology in the loose sense. Typology, as ordinarily used, holds that a later thing resembles and fulfils an earlier one. The recombination says something stronger and more specific: that the later thing is composed of the earlier ones, that the mouth doing the speaking in the fourth kingdom is the first kingdom’s mouth, and that no regime change in the interval subtracted anything.
5. The naming rule
A transferable name is a dangerous instrument, and the history of its abuse is long. Reformers called Rome Babylon; Rome returned the compliment; dissenting movements have applied it to established churches, established churches to dissenting movements, and political writers of every description to whichever power they liked least.[13] If the name can be applied to anything, it describes nothing, and the device collapses into invective.
The canon does not apply it arbitrarily. The conditions can be stated, and stating them is necessary before the device can be used analytically.
Condition 1: The four marks must be present. The name transfers on structure, and the structure is the one specified in Genesis 11: concentration organized against dispersal, an enforced common idiom, a self-conferred name, and a central monument. Rome met all four in a form no first-century reader could have missed. A polity that is merely large, merely powerful, or merely hostile does not meet them.
Condition 2: The name is a refusal of a self-designation. In every canonical instance the name displaces something. Bab-ili is displaced by Babel; Roma is displaced by Babylon. Where there is no self-designation being refused — no name the body has made for itself and asserts — the operation has nothing to perform. This follows from Paper 1’s third proposition: the self-conferred name is the diagnostic mark, and it is also the thing the renaming acts upon.
Condition 3: The application is made from underneath or from outside. Peter writes as a resident alien; John writes from Patmos; the seventy nations of Genesis 10 are the scattered, not the builders. The canon’s imperial namings are never performed by a rival center against a competitor. This condition disqualifies most polemical uses immediately, since most are made by one center against another center, each of which would meet the four marks on inspection.
Condition 4: The name is terminable. Babylon in the canon is always under sentence and the sentence is always specific: the city falls, the kingdom is divided, the millstone is cast into the sea. The name is never a permanent essence attached to a people. It is a description of a condition that a body is in, and Paper 12 will show that the condition admits of exit — Nineveh repented, and Nebuchadnezzar was restored. Any use of the name that treats it as an unalterable identity attached to a nation or a race has abandoned the canonical usage entirely, and has done so in a direction the canon explicitly forecloses.
These four conditions are what distinguish the device from the polemical habit that borrowed its vocabulary. They also make it testable, which the polemical habit is not.
6. Against strategic culture
6.1 What the concept was for
Strategic culture entered the literature to solve a real problem. Rational-choice models of state behavior predicted convergence: states facing similar strategic environments with similar capabilities should behave similarly. They did not. Snyder introduced the term in a 1977 study of Soviet nuclear doctrine to account for the persistence of distinctively Soviet approaches that were not derivable from the strategic situation.[14] Booth extended the critique of ethnocentrism in strategic analysis two years later.[15] A second wave, associated with Gray, treated culture as the encompassing context within which all strategic behavior occurs.[16] A third, associated with Johnston, attempted to render the concept falsifiable by separating culture from the behavior it was meant to explain.[17] The constructivist turn in international relations generally gave the whole family of cultural explanations a hospitable setting.[18]
The concept has produced valuable work, and the criticisms that follow are directed at its structure rather than at its practitioners.
6.2 Four difficulties
Circularity. This is the objection Johnston pressed and it has never been fully answered. If strategic culture is inferred from behavior and then invoked to explain that behavior, the explanation is empty. The proposed remedies — deriving culture independently from texts, from military doctrine, from educational curricula — help, but they tend to recover the behavior in another form rather than an independent source of it.[19] Gray’s response, that context and behavior cannot be separated because the analyst is inside the culture too, is philosophically defensible and analytically disabling.[20]
Continuity dependence. Strategic culture is transmitted, and transmission requires carriers: institutions, elites, educational systems, professional militaries, archives. Where these are destroyed the mechanism should fail, and the concept predicts that it will. The interesting cases are the ones where it does not fail — where the carriers were liquidated and the behavior resumed anyway. The concept has no account of this and cannot have one, since the account would have to locate persistence somewhere other than in the transmission chain.
Scale restriction. The unit is the nation, or occasionally the alliance or the service branch. This is not incidental; the concept was built for national comparison. It follows that the concept cannot be applied downward to institutions below the state, and cannot be applied upward to a structure that spans states. Both restrictions are fatal for the purposes of this collection, which requires that a congregation and a hegemon be describable in the same terms.
Moral neutrality by design. Strategic culture describes styles. It does not distinguish between a national preference for maritime strategy and a national preference for the deportation of populations; both are cultural facts about a state’s strategic behavior. This is a deliberate feature of a descriptive social science and not a defect within its own terms. But it means the concept cannot answer the question a subject population actually asks, which is not what style this power has but what kind of thing it is.
6.3 The comparison
| Strategic culture | The canonical device | |
|---|---|---|
| Locus of persistence | The nation and its transmission mechanisms | The structure, named independently of any occupant |
| Behavior when regime is destroyed | Predicts discontinuity; cannot explain resumption | Predicts nothing about continuity of state; the name transfers on structure |
| Unit of analysis | The state, occasionally the service or alliance | Scale invariant by construction (Paper 1, Proposition 1) |
| Criteria of application | Inferred, contested, often circular | Four marks, stated in advance, testable against a body |
| Direction of application | Analyst to object, typically from a rival center | From underneath or outside (Condition 3) |
| Moral content | Excluded by design | Present: the name is a judgment as well as a description |
| Terminability | Culture changes slowly, direction unspecified | Explicit: the condition is exitable and the sentence is specific |
6.4 The claim, stated carefully
The claim is not that Scripture supplies a better social science, and it is not that the device is falsifiable in the way an empirical hypothesis is. It is narrower.
Strategic culture asks: why does this nation keep behaving this way? The canonical device asks: what is this body, and is it the thing that has appeared before? These are different questions, and the second is the one that survives regime discontinuity, because it does not require any transmission mechanism at all. Two bodies six hundred years and two thousand miles apart can be the same thing under this device without any causal chain connecting them, because the identification is structural rather than genealogical.
That is exactly the move the political science literature cannot make, since a structural identification with no causal chain is, in its terms, not an explanation. The canon is content with it because it is not offering an explanation. It is offering a recognition. And recognition is the operation that subject populations actually perform, which is why they are consistently earlier than the analysts.
7. Four propositions for the framework
Proposition 5: The name attaches to the structure, not to the polity. No continuity of state, dynasty, language, religion, or territory is required for the identification to hold. This is what makes the device usable where strategic culture fails, and it is what makes it applicable to bodies that are not states at all.
Proposition 6: Succession is occupancy. Revelation 13 recombines Daniel’s four into one to say that the sequence of empires was a sequence of tenancies. The analytical consequence: the fall of a particular imperial order is not the end of the imperial order, and should not be analyzed as though it were.
Proposition 7: The renaming is always a refusal. Every canonical application of the name displaces a self-designation. In diagnostic use, the question “what does this body call itself, and who conferred that name?” is prior to the question “does this body meet the marks.”
Proposition 8: The name is terminable and the sentence is specific. No people, nation, or institution bears the name essentially. The condition is exitable — this is the material of Paper 12 — and any use of the name as a permanent attribute of a population is outside the canonical usage and contrary to it.
8. Objections
“Babylon in 1 Peter is literal.” A minority position, and it faces a straightforward difficulty: it requires a Petrine mission to Mesopotamia for which there is no early evidence, against a Roman association for which there is considerable early evidence, and it must treat the parallel Jewish usage of Babylon for Rome as coincidental. The reading is not impossible. If it were correct, the argument of this paper would lose one witness and retain Revelation 17–18, where the identification is made by the text itself in 17:9 and 17:18.
“The four kingdoms of Daniel are disputed, so the recombination argument rests on sand.” The recombination argument requires that Daniel 7 present a sequence of successive kingdoms and that Revelation 13 fuse the animals of that sequence into one body. Both hold under every identification of the four that has been seriously proposed. The paper deliberately takes no position on the identification, which is Paper 11’s business.
“This is supersessionist reading dressed as analysis.” The device does not claim that Rome inherited Babylon’s role in a scheme of salvation history. It claims that Rome displayed the structure Genesis 11 described, and that the canon therefore applied the structural name to it. The relation is one of instantiation, not inheritance. Anyone may test the claim by asking whether the four marks were present in the Rome of the first century, which is a question about Rome and not about the interpretation of history.
“The device licenses calling anything Babylon.” This is the serious objection and Section 5 exists to answer it. The four conditions are restrictive in practice: the requirement that the four marks co-occur, that a self-designation be under refusal, that the application come from underneath rather than from a rival center, and that the name be treated as terminable. Most historical uses of the name fail Condition 3 immediately, and a good many fail Condition 4. A device with stated conditions can be misapplied; so can every analytical category. What matters is whether the conditions can be checked, and these can.
“A structural identification with no causal chain explains nothing.” Correct, in the sense intended, and conceded in §6.4. The device is not offered as a causal account of why the behavior recurs. It is offered as an identification of what recurs. The two are different tasks, and the political science literature has largely conflated them, which is one reason it has struggled with cases where the causal chain is visibly broken and the behavior is visibly the same.
9. Conclusion
Genesis 11 refused an empire’s name for itself and supplied a name describing what the project was. Peter, writing from the capital of the world a thousand and more years later, performed the same refusal on the same grounds. John made the identification explicit, drew the judgment material directly from the oracles against the Chaldeans, and then extended the name past any single occupant to the type as such. Alongside this, Revelation took Daniel’s four successive beasts and fused them into one animal wearing all four provenances at once, in reverse order, with the heads summing to seven, and asked who was able to make war with it.
Between them these two operations state the canon’s account of imperial persistence. The name transfers on structure and requires no continuity of state. The composite body asserts that the succession of kingdoms was a succession of occupancies, and that nothing was lost in the handovers. Neither operation depends on a transmission mechanism, which is why neither fails at the point where strategic culture fails, and neither is restricted to the nation, which is why both remain available at the scale of a congregation and at the scale of a world order.
The device has one further property, and it governs the whole of this collection’s use of it. The name is terminable. Babylon in Scripture is always under a specific sentence, never a permanent essence, and never attached to a people as such. Paper 3 takes up the positive doctrine implied by that limit — plural, bounded nations as the ordered arrangement rather than a problem awaiting a solution — and shows that when the canon supplies its answer to Babel at Pentecost, it does not restore the one language.
Notes
- Snyder (1977) for the origin of the term; Johnston (1995) for the sharpest internal critique; Gray (1999) and Poore (2003) for the ensuing exchange.
- The Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder supply the framework for the fall of the city; texts in Pritchard (1969). Oppenheim (1964) for the general history.
- Elliott (2000) surveys the options and the history of the discussion; the Roman identification is held by the great majority of commentators. Hunzinger (1965) is the standard focused treatment.
- The association is attested in Papias as reported by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15, and in Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1.
- 1 Peter 1:1, 1:17, 2:11. Elliott (1981) develops the situation of the addressees as resident aliens at length, and the frame bears directly on the sense of 5:13.
- 4 Ezra 3:1–2, 28–31; 2 Baruch 11:1, 67:7; Sibylline Oracles 5.143, 159. Texts in Charlesworth (1983); see Stone (1990) on 4 Ezra.
- Revelation 17:9, 18. Aune (1998) and Beale (1999) both treat the seven-hills reference as decisive for the first-century referent. Rome’s identity as the city of seven hills was a commonplace in Latin literature and appears on imperial coinage.
- Isaiah 13:19–22, 47:7–9; Jeremiah 50:39, 51:6–9, 51:63–64; Ezekiel 26:16–18, 27:12–36. Bauckham (1993) analyses the composition of Revelation 18 from these sources, and Beale (1984) treats the Danielic and prophetic dependence of the Apocalypse generally. Paper 10 takes up the cargo list.
- Daniel 2:31–45.
- The Babylon–Medo-Persia–Greece–Rome identification is the traditional one and is presupposed in the New Testament’s use of Daniel. The alternative sequence separating Media from Persia is standard in the critical commentaries and is tied to a second-century dating of the book; see Collins (1993) and, for the traditional position argued on its own terms, Baldwin (1978). This paper’s argument is neutral between them.
- Beale (1984) is the fullest treatment of the dependence; see also Aune (1998) and Beale (1999) on Revelation 13:1–2.
- Beale (1999) notes the summation of the heads. The observation is not original to the modern commentators; the correspondence is visible on the face of the two texts.
- On the history of polemical application, see Hill (1971) for the English seventeenth-century material, which is the best-documented case of the name’s use as an instrument of controversy in both directions.
- Snyder (1977).
- Booth (1979).
- Gray (1999).
- Johnston (1995).
- Katzenstein (1996); Wendt (1999).
- Lantis (2002) surveys the attempts and their difficulties.
- Gray (1999); Poore (2003) attempts a mediation.
References
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