What Does Revelation 16:19 Mean?
And the great city splits into three parts, and the cities of the nations fall, and great Babylon is remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the burning of God's anger.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath.THE KEY
The city’s fracture does not erase its account: Babylon is remembered before God, and the cup reaches her.
THE MEANING
The great city breaks into parts, the cities of the nations fall, and Babylon comes into God’s remembrance. The cup is given to her: collapse and reckoning stand together in this scene.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that greatness makes a city unanswerable breaks here: Babylon is remembered before God and receives the cup.
THE ROOT
θυμοῦ
thymou
GROWS FROM
θυμ
θυμ (thym) carries anger, heat, and passionate inward drive.
“fierceness” in this verse is thymou. Under the two English words sits a doubled Greek anger vocabulary: θυμός (thymos, anger and heat) and ὀργή (orgē, anger and wrath). The first brings heat into view, so the cup’s contents are not merely intensity but anger made vivid as heat.
ALSO GROWS
thymoō: to anger, enrage
θυμόω
This verb keeps the θυμ stem and puts the heat of the root into motion as anger.
epithymia: desire, longing
ἐπιθυμία
This compound shares the θυμ element and shows the word family can name forceful inward desire as well as anger.
ὀργῆς
orgēs
GROWS FROM
ὀργ
ὀργ (org) names anger or indignation, the force of anger named in the cup.
“burning” in this verse is orgēs. ὀργή (orgē, anger or wrath) names the anger in the cup’s wine. Its relatives include the verb for becoming angry and an adjective for being prone to anger, carrying the same anger-family into both action and disposition.
ALSO GROWS
orgizomai: to become angry
ὀργίζομαι
The verb shares the org stem and names anger coming into motion.
orgilos: prone to anger, quick-tempered
ὀργίλος
This related adjective shows the root can describe a disposition toward anger, while this verse names anger as the cup’s content.
THE PATTERN
Across Scripture, the cup makes divine judgment a portion placed into the hands of those who must drink it.
For a cup is in the hand of the LORD, and the wine foams, full and mixed; he pours from it, but its dregs, all the wicked of the earth, drain and drink.For thus says the LORD God of Israel to me, Take this cup of burning wine from my hand, and make all the nations, to whom I send you, drink it.And he himself drinks from the wine of the seething of God, poured out undiluted into the cup of his swelling. And he is tormented in fire and sulfur before the face of the set-apart messengers, and before the face of the Lamb.THE THREAD
And he himself drinks from the wine of the seething of God, poured out undiluted into the cup of his swelling. And he is tormented in fire and sulfur before the face of the set-apart messengers, and before the face of the Lamb.Revelation 14:10 uses the same Greek word ὀργή (orgē, anger or wrath) as this verse, inside the same cup image. That repetition shows Babylon’s cup as part of Revelation’s recurring picture of anger poured out and received.
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