Babylon is Fallen!

John Martin’s etching of the Fall of Babylon shows an imagined ancient cityscape threatened by every kind of violence imaginable. The foreground shows Belshazzar, a Babylonian ruler who desecrated the stolen vessels of the Temple at Jerusalem by drinking from them during a feast (Daniel 5:1–2), being stabbed in the back (Daniel 5:30). His wife and female relations plead for mercy with the conspirators. Battle scenes fill the middleground as the city is invaded by the Persian army led by Cyrus the Great, who will win this battle and rule the city.

The city represents the pinnacle of human achievement, with an extensive network of walls, columns, statues, rooftop gardens, and bridges. A great tower (echoing that of Babel in Genesis 11:1–9: a monument to heavenly aspiration and creaturely hubris), rises to an impossible height and looms over the city as it appears to be destroyed by the elements. God’s wrath at Belshazzar’s sins is manifest in the dangerous skies, lightning bolts, and widespread chaos of the scene.

The traditions of Romantic art celebrated nature’s tremendous power, in reaction to an Enlightenment focus on human reason and rationality. In the words of art historian Kathryn Calley Galitz, the Romantic movement’s ideas of nature ‘offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought’ (Galitz 2004). In this etching, the power of nature against the ordered city is an embodiment of divine will. The Babylon of ancient history is falling into ruin, foreshadowing and (in Martin’s hands) mimicking the second fall of ‘Babylon’ at the end of time in Revelation 18. The cult statue of Babylon’s patron deity Marduk—visible with his dragon in the very centre of this etching—is unable to challenge the power of the one true God.

In Revelation, the angel from heaven declares that ‘the kings of the earth have committed fornication with [Babylon], and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury’ (Revelation 18:3 NRSV). The grand building projects and organized public spaces of Martin’s imagined reconstruction of ancient Babylon show why the city’s appeal might have been so strong. He conjures up its luxuriant power even as he shows its terrible demise.

References

Kathryn Calley Galitz. 2004. ‘Romanticism’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, available at www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm [accessed 25 October 2021]

Endre Rozsda’s abstract Surrealist painting of the Tower of Babel offers not so much a clear depiction as a suggestion of ideas and forms. The overall impression is one of chaos and colour. 

Dark, ladder-like, horizontal forms erupt from the bottom of the painting. Sets of wavy lines counter the strong horizontals, suggesting human forms, but never defining them clearly. Vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows draw the viewer’s attention toward the upper left of the painting, while cooler colours prevail on the right. Zooming in on the painting does not produce further clarity, but makes it appear even more abstract. Confusion abounds. It is an apt metaphor for the Tower of Babel, and (by extension) for the fall of the great imperial cities that are its descendants. 

Like other Surrealists, Rozsda was interested in exploring the unconscious mind through his painting. Instead of representing Babel/Babylon as a symbol of human achievement or as a symbol of human folly, Rozsda allowed his painting of the tower to emerge from a place of complexity and mixed feelings. He described his work as a ‘research space’ where he explored the themes of time, perception, colour, and architectural forms (Rosenberg 1998). The painting represents the tower as a kind of paradox: it seems that people are climbing scaffolding to create the tower and, at the same time, the piecemeal nature of the painting makes it seem as though the tower is crumbling and falling. Construction and deconstruction are happening simultaneously. The painting depicts a kind of history of overweening human ambition. 

The abstract imagery of fragmentation and distorted time feels applicable to the destruction of the city of Babylon, the home of the mythic Tower of Babel. Roszda painted this in Paris after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution before it was crushed by the Soviets. The chaos and disorder of this painting is a haunting memorial to the difficulty of challenging fragile empires, echoing in the biting words of the angel in Revelation 18:6 (NRSV), ‘Render to her as [Babylon] herself has rendered’.

References

Rosenberg, David. 1998. ‘Entretiens avec Endre Rozsda’, in Endre Rozsda: Retrospective, ed. by Magyar Balint (Budapest: Mucsarnok), pp. 75–89

This tapestry was made in the late fourteenth century in France and is part of a series, known as the Angers Apocalypse tapestries, depicting the book of Revelation. This one shows John’s vision of the fall of Babylon (Revelation 18:1–3).

An angel from heaven emerges from the clouds to make his announcement that Babylon has fallen (Revelation 18:2; also 14:8). Medieval viewers would have understood the long ribbon-like banderole that the angel holds to signify that the angel is speaking to John. John stands at left, slightly separated from the scene, looking on at the judgement which unfolds as though watching a stage drama.

The broken buildings of the fallen city are in a heap in the centre of the tapestry. It has not been destroyed by a warring army, but by corruption from within (18:3, 5, 7, 23b–24). So the buildings of the city crumble in on themselves. Babylon implodes because the greed of city rulers produced poor governance and lack of care for its physical structures; because those with power preferred to live in luxury, rather than care for their city.

The chaotic arrangement of the broken buildings contrasts with the regular pattern of the wheat that forms the background of this image. Not only is the wheat orderly, but it is ripe and ready to harvest, recalling the Harvest of the Wheat in Revelation 14:14–16. That too is an episode of accountability and triumph in the larger cosmic battle that plays out through the narrative of Revelation.

The Babylon of history (sharing its name in Hebrew with the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11) was both a city and an empire. The Neo-Babylonians, at the height of their power, conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and forced most of the kingdom of Judah’s population into exile. The texts of the Hebrew Bible associate this event with devastation and intense sorrow. The visionary Babylon of Revelation 18 is thus not only a place haunted by different forms of evil; it recalls a specific and great harm done to the people of God.

Today, the tapestry invites us to consider that corruption and decline of individuals and communities are not always initiated by external forces. Greed corrupts us internally, leaving little care or concern for our communities. Such greed begets deception and violence, which in turn destroy faith and trust.