From Babel to Babylon
The word does not actually appear in the Hebrew Bible as "Babylon"; the Hebrew spelling is בבל, transliterated as Babel. Babel carries symbolic weight well beyond the historical city, most familiar from the Genesis account of a tower and the confusion of languages, and has long stood as a byword for pride, division, and human overreach. The Book of Revelation extends this symbolism into the figure of "Babylon the Great," a corrupt power condemned there in vivid terms.
A psychological reading
In the Gnostic teaching of Samael Aun Weor, a 20th-century esoteric writer, Babylon is read not as a literal city to be destroyed but as a symbol for what he called the internal "psychological city" — the accumulation of negative patterns a person carries within. This is a specific teaching within one esoteric current rather than an interpretation shared across Christian tradition generally.