---
title: Revelation 17:18
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/revelation-17-18/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/revelation-17-18.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Revelation 17:18
testament: NT
section: Prophecy
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Revelation 17:18

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> And the woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.”

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (2013 revision): "And the woman whom you saw means the great city that has a kingdom over the kings of the earth"

## JW Usage

Watchtower commentary takes the "great city" symbolically — as the headquarters of false religion in influence over the world's political powers. The "kingdom over the kings of the earth" is read as religious authority over secular rulers (the Constantine-Christendom paradigm), not as geographic political rule from a literal city. Babylon the Great is therefore not Rome the city but the global ecclesiastical system Rome's bishops have come to represent.

## Protestant Usage

The angel does the interpretation himself: "the woman whom you saw [is] the great city that has a kingdom over the kings of the earth." He does not say "world empire of false religion" — he says "the great city." Read alongside v9 (seven mountains) and v15 (peoples and nations she sits on), the identification fits one city in John's day: Rome. And the judgment imagery in chapter 18 — merchants weeping over lost trade, sea captains lamenting lost cargo, the inventory of luxury goods — describes the destruction of an imperial trading capital, not of an ecclesiastical system. The Watchtower must override the angel's plain statement to insert "false religion" where the text says "city."

## NWT Issue

The NWT renders estin ("is") as "means" — the same is-to-means shift seen at 17:9 and 20:14. Consensus reads "And the woman that you saw is the great city" (ESV/NASB/NIV/KJV). The rendering reinforces a strictly symbolic reading where the text uses the unmarked copula. The angel's identification is flattened from "is X" to "stands for X," giving the Watchtower more interpretive room than the Greek allows.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [Babylon the Great Is a City, Not a Religion](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/babylon-the-great-city.md) — Revelation 17:18 / Revelation 17:9 / Revelation 18:11-13 [Eschatology]