¹⁸ The woman you saw is the great city^(A) that rules over the kings of the earth.”

¹⁹ The great city^(A) split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered^(B) Babylon the Great^(C) and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath.^(D)

² With a mighty voice he shouted:

²³ “He gave me this explanation: ‘The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on earth. It will be different from all the other kingdoms and will devour the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it.^(A)

⁴⁰ Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others.^{(A) 41} Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay.

⁴ Its tail swept a third^(A) of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.^(B) The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child^(C) the moment he was born.

The Birth of Jesus

2 In those days Caesar Augustus^(A) issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.^(B)