8. Then another angel followed him through the skies, shouting, "Babylon is fallen-
that great city is fallen-because she seduced the nations of the world and made them drink the wine of her passionate immorality."
It is a city
16. And they gathered all the rulers and their armies to a place called Armageddon in Hebrew.
17. Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air. And a mighty shout came from the throne of the Temple in heaven, saying, "It is finished!"
18. Then the thunder crashed and rolled, and lightning flashed. And there was an earthquake greater than ever before in human history.
19.
The great city of Babylon split into three pieces, and cities around the world fell into heaps of rubble. And so God remembered all of Babylon's sins, and he made her drink the cup that was filled with the wine of his fierce wrath.
20. And every island disappeared, and all the mountains were leveled.
21. There was a terrible hailstorm, and hailstones weighing seventy-five pounds* fell from the sky onto the people below. They cursed God because of the hailstorm, which was a very terrible plague.
[edit] Futurist View
Alternatively, a Futurist approach to interpreting the harlot of Revelation yields a view that is in complete harmony with the Golden Rule of Interpretation, which states, "When the plain sense of scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense." While John does use symbolic language in his description of the character and events of the harlot named Babylon, he does not employ any formula which leads the reader to understand anything other than a literal physical city which will sway many with her immorality (Revelation 17:2), exert extensive political and economic control on the earth (Revelation 17:4, 9-10, 15), and bring about a great persecution to followers of Jesus (Revelation 17:6). The account that follows details in plain language Babylon's ultimate demise and the reaction of those who witness it.
Critics of this perspective may point to the fact that Babylon has already been destroyed as evidence that the harlot of John's prophecy could not refer to the same city. However, similarities between Zechariah's vision of the ephah (Zechariah 5:5-11) and John's vision of the harlot give the interpreter confidence in the literal future rise and fall of Babylon. Even though he began to prophesy after the initial fall of the Babylonian empire (Zechariah 1:1), Zechariah sees a woman named "Wickedness" taken to Shinar, i.e. Babylon (Daniel 1:2), indicating that evil will reign once more in that region of the world. Employing the hermeneutic method of a consistently literal, normal, grammatical, historical, contextual interpretation of Scripture will lead the reader to an understanding that the harlot named Babylon described in Revelatio
