Revelation 17:9
Revelation 17:99This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits.
Watchtower commentary takes the seven mountains symbolically — as seven world powers in succession (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Anglo-American world power). The mountains do not refer to a literal city on seven hills because Babylon the Great is the world empire of false religion, not a geographic location.
The first-century reader hearing "seven mountains" alongside "kingdom over the kings of the earth" (v18) would have heard Rome — the city was universally known as the urbs septicollis, the city on seven hills. Coins, poetry, and graffiti from John's era make the identification automatic. Even the Watchtower's "succession of empires" reading is a specific symbolic framework imposed on a text whose original audience had a different reading immediately at hand. The seven-mountains clue points to a city, the kingdom-over-kings clue points to Rome — and v18 closes the identification.
The NWT renders eisin (third-person plural of "to be") as "mean" rather than "are" (consensus ESV/NASB/NIV/KJV all read "are seven mountains"). This is a recurring NWT pattern: in apocalyptic and sacramental equations the NWT prefers "means" over "is" (compare "this means my body" rather than "this is my body"). The shift reinforces the Watchtower's symbolic-only reading of identification statements where the text itself uses the unmarked copula.