The city of Babylon was the capital of the ancient land of Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia.  It was situated on the Euphrates River about 50 miles south of Baghdad.  The tremendous wealth and power of this city, along with its monumental size and appearance, were considered a Biblical myth, until its foundations were unearthed and its riches substantiated during the nineteenth century. 

“Cush became the father of Nimrod….the beginning of his kingdom was Babel….in the land of Shinar (in Babylonia).”  “The Lord there confounded the language of all the earth; and from that place the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth.” Genesis 10:8-10; 11:9  (Amplified)  The name of Babel in the Bible means “confused.”  Throughout the Bible, Babylon was a symbol of confusion caused by godlessness.

The earliest known inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians.  Sargon united the people of Babylonia under his rule about 2300 B.C.  Many scholars believe that Sargon might have been the same person as Nimrod.

It was the Babylonians, under King Nebuchadnezzar II, who destroyed Jerusalem, the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, and carried God's covenant people into captivity in 606 BC, for 70 years.

The Bible also uses Babylon symbolically as the mother of false and blasphemous systems of worship. Revelation 17:3-6, “…and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored best, full of names of blasphemy…and the woman was …decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus…”

This horrible symbolic Babylon with her harlot daughters will be destroyed in the last days. “When the kings of earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her….After this I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting, ‘Hallelujah!  Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are his judgments.  He has condemned the great prostitute, who corrupted the earth with her adulteries.  He has avenged on her the blood of his servants….Hallelujah!’ ”  Rev. 18:9, 19:1-3  NIV