Note 8 — Chapter VI · EARLY BOOK-MAKING

If “Babylon” stands for Rome, it is but an adaptation of an older polemic; for Babylon is declared to have actually fallen, before it is announced that she “shall be cast down.”8 The eleventh chapter dilates on the Jewish temple; again and again we listen to a purely Jewish declamation over Jewish woes; the four-and-twenty elders and the Lamb “as though it had been slain, having seven horns, and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God,” are of Babylonian and Persian derivation; and the “second death” is Egyptian. In the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven,” twelve angels are at the gates, which bear the names of the twelve tribes; and the “twelve apostles of the Lamb” are represented only by “twelve basement courses” of the wall.