  Citation: König, Judith. 2022. The ‘Great Whore’ of Babylon (Rev 17) as a Non-Survivor of Sexual Abuse. Religions 13: 267. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel13030267 Academic Editors: Ute Leimgruber, Doris Reisinger and Aje Carlbom Received: 1 March 2022 Accepted: 17 March 2022 Published: 21 March 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article The ‘Great Whore’ of Babylon (Rev 17) as a Non-Survivor of Sexual Abuse Judith König Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany; judith.koenig@ur.de Abstract: The article aims to re-read Rev 17:16 amid the catastrophic patterns of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Employing narratological methods as well as a close reading of the text, it is argued that Rev 17:16 can be coherently read as the violent sexual punishment of an anthropomorphic female character. Signals in the text point to God’s involvement in this punishment and to its overall positive evaluation. Considering reader’s realities in the context of sexual abuse and its cover-up, the article argues for the necessity of taking a positional stance while reading biblical ‘texts of sexual terror’. Such a positional stance must have visible effects on a responsible reading and interpretation of the ‘great whore’s’ story. Keywords: Whore of Babylon; sexual abuse; sexual violence; female cities; revelation of John 1. Introduction Reading biblical texts is always challenging. Depending on the personal and collective context in which the process of reading and meaning-making takes place, the obstacles change. Reading a text is not independent of place, time, and the interpreter’s characteristics and experiences. It is also not independent of the interpretive community of which the interpreter is part of. This article aims to acknowledge the catastrophe of sexual abuse and its cover-up in the Catholic Church as an essential and fundamental context for reading and interpreting biblical texts today. This is not a theoretical issue. People who have been sexually abused are an integral part of the Catholic Church, an integral part of its parishes, an integral part of the scientific community. Taking this into consideration, the paper will re-read the narrative of the ‘great whore’ Babylon in Revelation. It will ask if the character depicted in Rev 17 is city or woman, and it will ask how explicitly Rev 17:16 shows Babylon as a victim of sexual abuse. Finally, the text will be discussed in light of the following question: can and should Catholic biblical scholars remain impartial in offering different interpretive possibilities while reading texts that speak of sexual violence? If not, then what does this mean for exegetical debates moving forward? 2. Method and Perspective The perspective on Revelation will mainly be a narrative one. The text will be examined in close reading, taking seriously the intertextual ties between biblical texts. Questions of historical context are considered but are not the focus of this investigation. Instead, a modern reader’s perspective that also takes up questions of power and gender relevant to this special issue’s overall theme will be centralized. 3. The ‘Whore’s’ Origins: Texts of Terror and Personified Cities in the Hebrew Bible Countless characters inhabit the pages of biblical texts. They are old and young, beautiful and hideous, male and female, rich and poor, and everything in between. Biblical characters are born and die, they love and hate each other, they build and destroy. Yet, Religions 2022, 13, 267. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13030267 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions