Jeremiah 50:8
Jeremiah 50:88Flee from the midst of Babylon; depart from the land of the Chaldeans; be like the he-goats that lead the flock.
Cited as Old Testament background for the "come out of her, my people" call in — and applied entirely to false religion. In the Watchtower reading, 's flight from Babylon prefigures the modern Witness's flight from Christendom into Jehovah's organisation; the literal-political dimension of the original verse is read as fully transposed onto a religious-organisation key.
was a literal political instruction: God's people were to flee a real city before its real destruction. Pair the verse with , where the angel tells John that Babylon the Great is "the great city that has a kingdom over the kings of the earth" — a description of imperial Rome, not an abstract concept of false religion. The "come out" call in echoes and 51:45 in a register the first readers would have recognised: political and economic separation from a corrupt imperial system, not congregational migration from one denomination to another. The Watchtower's "Babylon = false religion" reading requires overriding the angel's own explanation in .