For a long time, I read the expression “Come out of Babylon, My people” almost the way everyone else does: as a call to leave a bad place, a corrupt system, a power hostile to God. Babylon appeared at times as an empire, at times as idolatry, at times as a symbol of decadence, at times as the image of a lost world. All of these say something. But precisely because they say too many things at once, they clarify nothing to the end.
So I began asking the question differently: all right, but where does Babylon actually begin? What is it in essence?
What is it that makes Babylon Babylon?
The walls? The king? The idols? The army? Commerce? Corruption? Or are all these only the visible forms of something deeper?
To answer that, I was forced to go back to a question that almost nobody asks seriously: what is civilization, really? Because Babylon is almost automatically linked to the idea of civilization. And that is exactly where I felt we had to slow down and stop repeating ready-made formulas.
We use the word “civilization” almost always in an admiring way. It sounds noble. It sounds elevated. It sounds like the opposite of barbarism. But the moment you try to say exactly what it is, you begin to see that things are not simple at all. People can live together without civilization. They can have family, clan, village, tradition, memory, authority, rules, even morality without having what we call “civilization.” So collective life is not yet civilization. That was the first cut I had to make.
Civilization does not simply mean that people live together. Civilization means that their life is organized by something that rises above them and remains over them. That is where I ran into the key word: institution.
At once, many things came together. Because when you say “civilization,” what you are really saying is: institutions. You are saying administration, law, function, army, tax, record, chancery, judgment, roles, hierarchy, stable order. It is no longer only a matter of people who know one another and understand one another directly, but of a form that catches them all and organizes them.
But what is an institution? Here again, dead definitions get you nowhere. Put simply, an institution appears the moment order no longer rests in the concrete person, but in a function that surpasses him. The man comes and goes, but the role remains. Today one man is the judge, tomorrow another, but “the judge” as a function remains. Today one man is the king, tomorrow another, but “the throne” remains. Today one man is the scribe, tomorrow another, but “the scribe” as a cog in an order remains. At that point something new appears: man no longer matters first of all as man, but as the bearer of a form.
And that is precisely where I began to see more clearly how strange civilization really is. Because an institution is not a living thing in itself. It is not a tree, not a river, not a being. It is an abstraction. It is an invented order, fixed and maintained. It exists only insofar as people submit to it and act as though it had a reality of its own. In other words, civilization does not begin when man lives together with man, but when man begins to live under abstract forms.
That raised the next question: fine, but how can an abstraction become strong? How can something that has no flesh, blood, and voice of its own come to rule concrete human beings? And the answer came almost inevitably: through writing.
That is where the light came on for me.
Without writing, you do not have civilization in the full sense of the word. You may have collective life, traditions, rules, even forms of authority and order. But you cannot have that kind of world in which the norm remains, travels, multiplies, is imposed, and is applied on a large scale. Without writing, the institution remains limited. With writing, it acquires a spine.
Why? Because writing takes memory out of man and places it outside him. Up to that point, the rule lives in people. After that, the rule lives in a sign. Up to that point, order depends on who remembers and who is present. After that, order can continue without those who first spoke it. Up to that point, truth or command is tied to a living relationship. After that, it is tied to a text. And from there the consequences begin.
The day man put his norm into writing, he did more than note something down. He raised above himself a form that could demand obedience from him even when he no longer wanted to obey. At that point, writing ceases to be a simple aid to memory and begins to become power. It does not merely preserve; it fixes. It does not merely conserve; it freezes. It does not merely remind; it obligates.
From there I was pushed to another step: if writing makes full institution possible, then not every “civilized” city is yet Babylon. Something else is still missing. Because a city may have its own rules, its own memory, its own local order. In such a setting, people may still feel that the rule is theirs, that it arose among them, that it concerns them directly, that they live in it and not merely under it.
But what happens when that local form is taken out of its place, fixed, standardized, and stretched over others? What happens when what arose in one concrete setting begins to be presented as the norm for all? At that point the nature of things changes. Convention ceases to be a living convention and becomes something imposed. And the moment it is imposed, it can no longer honestly be called a “convention.” It becomes regime.
That is where I understood empire more clearly.
A city may have order. An empire needs transportable order. A city may still live through people. An empire must live through forms. A city may function through local memory. An empire needs archive, decree, census, code, register. A city still breathes through relationship. An empire breathes through document. And that is exactly where writing becomes essential. Without it you may conquer. But you cannot administer. You cannot preserve. You cannot standardize. You cannot control from a distance. You cannot turn life into a classified and enforceable reality.
That is how I arrived at Babylon.
Not as a mere city, but as the name of a mutation. Babylon begins at the moment when writing no longer serves only local order, but begins to carry an exported, standardized, and imposed order. Where the written sign ceases to be memory and becomes domination, there Babylon begins. Where the form raised above man demands submission merely because it has been fixed, there Babylon begins. Where abstraction crowns itself and demands to be lived as reality, there Babylon begins.
At that moment, man is no longer seen simply as man. He becomes an administrative object. He becomes subject, taxpayer, soldier, servant, guilty party, owner, category. He is translated into the language of the system. And that, to me, is one of the great tragedies of civilization: the living man begins to be replaced by the registered man.
From there another door opened for me, perhaps an even more important one. Because if Babylon is this imperialization of writing, then the problem does not stop at politics. It goes further, into religion.
And here a distinction must be made that many do not want to make. One thing is a law embraced by a concrete people, within a concrete history, within a concrete relationship, where the answer is: “yes, we will do it.” There, even with all the problems of that framework, something recognizable still exists: address, response, acceptance, living context. Quite another thing is the situation in which the text is detached from that framework, universalized, sacralized, and then placed over everyone as an absolute norm. There the mechanism changes.
The Septuagint appears precisely at such a turning point. I am not speaking of it here as a mere translation, but as a moment when the text enters a different logic: it is no longer simply carried by a community, but begins to circulate with the prestige of a broad, transportable, invocable norm. From that moment on, writing begins to function religiously in exactly the way it had earlier functioned politically.
This seems to me to be the key.
What had been imperialized politically by decree, code, and archive begins to be imperialized religiously through canon, translation, interpretation, and sacralization. The text is no longer merely text. It becomes “it is written.” And “it is written” is one of the heaviest formulas in history. Because through it, the will of concrete men, the interest of centers of power, a certain interpretation and a certain historical construction are raised into an impersonal form, then invoked as standing above man.
That is where the rupture occurs.
Two people who yesterday could live in peace with one another can end up striking each other today because a text has appeared between them that demands it. Not because reality itself necessarily drove them against one another, but because a written form was placed above them and declared binding. Suddenly, living conscience is suspended. Man no longer asks: is it true? is it right? is it moral? He asks: is it written? And if it is written, then the discussion is over.
It was there, for me, that the horror became clear in a new way. “It is written” is not merely a religious formula. It is the mechanism by which a historical claim tries to turn itself into an absolute obligation. And when that obligation is sacralized, defended, preached, and imposed, writing ceases to be a witness to truth and becomes its substitute. It no longer points toward something. It demands submission in place of that something.
And then what happens? The New Testament is added, fixed in place, tied to everything already fixed, and in the end what people simply call “the Bible” appears: that is, a written form elevated to the rank of the “Word of God,” not as living testimony to be understood, but as final, closed, obligatory, enforceable norm. Here we are no longer talking about writing in general. Nor about just any book. We are talking about writing enthroned.
And so I was compelled to follow the question all the way through: if this is so, is this not exactly the same imperialization we were speaking of in connection with Babylon? Is “Babylon” perhaps not only what happened once in Mesopotamia, but also what happens whenever a text is raised above man and he is required to submit to it as to an absolute reality?
For me the answer became hard to avoid.
Yes, this is the same logic. And the fact that in religion it appears in sacred garments does not change the structure. On the contrary, it makes it more powerful. Because man no longer has to face merely law, but “the law of God”; not merely text, but “the Word”; not merely norm, but a divinized norm. At that point Babylon is no longer merely a political empire. It becomes an empire over conscience.
But once I got there, I realized it would not be honest to stop at religion alone. Because the same logic plainly reappears in the secular world. The modern state, secularism, constitutions, rights, norms, procedures, forms, registers, databases: all of these operate on the same skeleton. Here too we have “certain people” formulating their vision, fixing it in writing, elevating it to the rank of norm, and then imposing it on everyone, including those who never approved it. They may not invoke revelation, but “the rule of law,” “values,” “democracy,” “progress,” “the law.” But the mechanism remains recognizable.
In other words, Babylon can wear a mitre, a gown, a robe, or a modern suit. It can speak religiously or secularly. It can quote canon or constitution. What defines it is not the vocabulary, but the fact that a written, abstract, impersonal form is invoked as binding and enforceable over living man.
Only here did the expression “Come out of Babylon, My people” begin to shine differently for me.
If Babylon were only a city, the exit would be simple: you leave it. If it were only a political power, you would wait for its collapse. If it were only a false religion, you would change religions. But if Babylon is this order in which absolutized writing has risen above reality and demands submission in place of truth, then coming out can no longer mean only a change of place or label.
To come out of Babylon means something harder and deeper. It means ceasing to confuse the imposed text with truth. It means refusing the spell of “it is written” when “it is written” is demanded of you in place of discernment, conscience, and living truth. It means refusing to call “revelation” what in fact functions as an apparatus. It means refusing to bow to form merely because it bears seal, prestige, antiquity, or sacred aura.
This is not a call to chaos. Nor a call to illiteracy. Nor contempt for every text. It is a call to separate from organized falsehood. Because that is exactly what writing becomes when it hides its character as a construction, crowns itself, and demands to be received as ultimate reality. At that point it is no longer a simple instrument. It becomes an idol. And that is why it can demand sacrifices.
To come out of Babylon, then, means to come out of the world in which man is governed by abstractions elevated to the rank of destiny. It means to come out of the world in which the institution is more real than the man, the text more real than truth, and the form more real than conscience. It means to break the spell by which we are constantly told, religiously or secularly: it does not matter what you see, what you understand, and what is right — what matters is what has already been written.
Perhaps that is the heart of it. Babylon does not begin with a brick, nor with a tower, nor with an idol. Babylon begins the moment man accepts to live under a written form presented to him as more real than reality itself. That is where it begins. And that is where the coming out must begin too.