The Kings from the East — What Can Be Said, and What Cannot

Revelation 16:12 says that the sixth angel poured out his Vial upon the great river Euphrates, “and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.”

By this point, the drying up of the Euphrates need not be treated as a mystery. Thanks to the careful labors of earlier Historicist interpreters, and to the later course of history that vindicated their reading, we can recognize with substantial confidence the long exhaustion of Ottoman power. The identity of the “kings from the east,” however, is much less clear. And that means this is one of those places where humility is not a weakness, but a duty.

That contrast is reflected in the older commentators themselves. On the Euphrates, there was substantial agreement: Barnes reads it in continuity with the Turkish power of Revelation 9, and other Historicist writers follow the same line. But on the “kings from the east,” the agreement is far less exact. Barnes says the passage does not tell us who they are. Gill surveys several options. Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown take a very different line altogether. So while the drying up of the Euphrates can now be recognized with substantial confidence, the identity of these kings still calls for caution. We may weigh possibilities, and some are stronger than others, but we should not pretend to have certainty where Scripture has left room for restraint.

The Babylon Background Matters

The first thing to notice is that the image reaches back to ancient Babylon. In the Old Testament, the Euphrates was the great river of Babylon, and Babylon fell when the way was opened for eastern conquerors under Cyrus. The background is not accidental. The drying of the Euphrates in Revelation 16 plainly echoes the drying of the literal Euphrates before the fall of literal Babylon. That means the first and safest thing we can say is this: whatever else these kings may involve, the image points to powers or agencies raised up in God’s providence against Babylon after the Euphratean barrier is removed.

Kings Can Mean More Than Individuals

A second observation helps. In prophetic Scripture, “kings” do not always mean solitary monarchs in a narrow sense. Daniel 7 moves freely between kings and kingdoms, so the language can point to ruling powers or political orders as well as personal rulers. That does not prove that Revelation 16 is naming modern nation-states. But it does mean we are not required to read the phrase as though it could only refer to a few individual men. The text leaves room for organized powers, kingdoms, or grouped national forces.

That matters here because once the Euphrates dries up, the text says the way is prepared. In other words, once what had hindered passage, access, or movement is removed, other powers become more historically relevant. That is why one serious option is that the “kings from the east” may include actual eastern powers or kingdoms that become more prominent after the old Euphratean barrier is gone.

Could the “Kings from the East” Be Actual Eastern Powers or Kingdoms?

This is the most interesting option and the one that deserves the fullest discussion.

Once the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the political map east and southeast of Europe changed dramatically. The old imperial framework that had held together vast and diverse territories was gone. The Ottoman Empire was dissolved after World War I, the sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the empire gave way not to one stable successor but to a rearranged world of mandates, republics, and independent states. Former Turkish provinces such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine were distributed under British and French mandate control, while Balkan and Near Eastern regions that had once been held inside one imperial structure moved into a far more fragmented order. 

That matters because the sixth Vial is preparatory. The river dries up so that the way may be prepared. Once the Ottoman barrier was removed, the old field east of Europe did not become simpler. It became more open, more unstable, and more exposed to outside rivalry. The post-Ottoman world became a landscape of successor states, unresolved borders, competing national projects, and strategic corridors. In that sense, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire did not merely end an old order. It opened a path into a new one. 

This is where Russia becomes especially important. Russia’s modern strategic world was directly shaped by Ottoman decline. Britannica says the Russo-Turkish wars reflected Ottoman decline and resulted in the gradual southward extension of Russia’s frontier and influence into Ottoman territory. Access to the Black Sea, influence in the Balkans, pressure in the Caucasus, and the broader Eastern Question all tied Russia’s strategic posture to what happened as the Ottoman order weakened. In plain terms, the collapse of Ottoman power materially changed Russia’s southern world. For Russia, that was not a distant event. It was a major geopolitical transformation. 

China, on the other hand, is different. China’s rise to major-power status was not directly caused by the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the way Russia’s southern strategic world was reshaped by it. Modern China’s rise is much more directly tied to the fall of the Qing dynasty, the 1911 Revolution, civil war, Japanese invasion, the Communist victory in 1949, and later state-driven modernization. So we should not force the case and pretend that Ottoman collapse somehow created modern China. It did not. 

Yet there is still a broader connection worth noticing. The fall of the Ottoman Empire belonged to the wider breakup of the old imperial world after World War I. Central and eastern Europe and adjacent regions were thrown into upheaval by the collapse of the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires together. In that broad sense, the Ottoman collapse formed part of the same age of imperial dissolution and geopolitical rearrangement that also formed the background to China’s twentieth-century transformation. That is not a direct causal line, as with Russia. It is a shared world-historical setting. But it still matters. The old imperial barriers were breaking down across the world, and the political field was being remade. 

From our own vantage point, this option becomes more suggestive still. Russia and China now openly speak the language of a world no longer ordered under Western primacy. Reuters reports Xi Jinping pressing an “equal and orderly multipolar world” and, elsewhere, speaking of a new global order that challenges the U.S.-led Western system. Putin has likewise stated that Russia is also committed to the ideals of a multipolar world. More striking still, China and Russia declared a “no-limits” strategic partnership in February 2022, just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Xi later reaffirmed that same partnership even after the war had been underway for years. In other words, the modern rhetoric of world power increasingly does speak in terms that many people instinctively hear as “East” versus “West,” even if the official language is more often multipolar than bipolar.  

That present alignment is not imaginary. Reuters reports that China and Russia have recently coordinated diplomatically over the current Middle East crisis, including cooperation at the U.N. Security Council over the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters also reports a 2025 Russia-Iran strategic partnership and current allegations of Russian intelligence and cyber assistance to Iran during the present conflict. North Korea, too, belongs geographically to East Asia, and Russia and North Korea signed a mutual-defense pact in 2024 under which each promises military assistance if the other is attacked. North Korea should therefore be noted, though only briefly, as one more element in the wider eastern picture. 

None of that proves that Revelation 16:12 names Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea individually. It does not. But it does make one thing more plausible than it once seemed: if the “kings from the east” include actual eastern powers or kingdoms, then the post-Ottoman world has certainly produced the kind of setting in which such a reading can be contemplated seriously. The barrier is gone. The field is open. Eastern and Near Eastern powers have become increasingly significant. And the language of challenge to the West is now plain enough that even secular analysts speak in those terms.

So this second option has real weight. Once the Ottoman world dissolved, a new strategic age opened. Russia’s southern and Balkan ambitions were directly affected. China emerged later in the wider post-imperial age as a major power contesting Western primacy. Iran remains central to the post-Ottoman Middle East. North Korea, though only briefly mentioned here, stands with Russia in military alignment and belongs geographically to the East as well. Taken together, that does not give us a neat prophecy chart. But it does show why many readers feel that Revelation’s language about “kings from the east” has become more rather than less suggestive in the modern world. 

But the matter does not end with modern geopolitics alone. If Babylon in Revelation is the prophetic name for Rome, then the significance of these kings cannot be reduced to a vague anti-Western posture alone. Their ultimate role belongs to the fall of Babylon itself. In present history, eastern powers such as Russia and China speak far more openly against the U.S.-led Western-led order than against Rome in particular. Yet if Rome is not merely a city but the symbolic center of a larger Babylonian order, then pressures directed against that wider order may ultimately still prove relevant to Babylon’s final downfall. In that sense, the kings from the east need not be explicitly anti-Vatican to stand in providential relation to the fall of Babylon.

Other Serious Options

Still, this is not the only option, and it would be careless to write as though it were.

Gill records another long-standing Protestant reading: that the drying of Turkish power would open the way for Jewish conversion and restoration. He does not identify the kings themselves with the Jews, but he treats the fall of Ottoman power as something that could remove a major hindrance to their restoration and to the wider spread of the gospel.

Matthew Henry moves in a similar direction. He says that the downfall of popery, together with the weakening of Mahomedism, could remove long-standing obstructions and open a way for both the Jews and other eastern nations to come into the church of Christ.

Elliott seems to go farther still, associating the “kings from the east” more directly with the Jews’ restoration to their own land after the decay of Ottoman power, though within a broader prophetic setting that also included spiritual and missionary expectations. Since Elliott appears to have leaned in that direction, later events such as the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 would likely have been seen by him as important confirmation of that expectation.

Likewise, Barnes leans in a related but broader direction, suggesting that the drying of the Euphrates may remove an obstacle to the conversion of eastern rulers to the true faith. On that reading, the kings from the east are not primarily military challengers, but beneficiaries of a barrier removed.  

Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown offer a more exalted interpretation still. They note that the Greek phrase literally means “from the rising of the sun,” that is, from the east, and they connect that imagery with the Lord’s own coming in glory. On that basis, they interpret the “kings from the east” not as ordinary earthly rulers, but as a heavenly company associated with Christ and His saints coming against Babylon. This is not the most natural reading here, but it deserves mention because it shows just how varied the tradition has been on this point.

What Cannot Be Said With Certainty

What cannot responsibly be said is that Revelation 16:12 gives us one specific modern alliance that can be identified with certainty. The text does not name Russia. It does not name China. It does not name Iran. It does not name North Korea. It does not tell us that one twenty-first-century alignment is the complete and final answer to the image.

That is why caution is so important here. The drying up of the Euphrates can be identified with much greater confidence than the precise identity of the kings from the east. On the first point, older Historicists spoke with notable agreement. On the second, they did not. We should learn from that.

A Provisional Conclusion

So what can be said, and what cannot?

We can say that the image reaches back to Babylon, to the drying of the Euphrates, and to the preparation of the way for powers raised up against Babylon. We can say that kings in prophetic Scripture may signify ruling powers or kingdoms, not only individual monarchs. We can say that the fall of the Ottoman Empire opened a far more fragmented and unstable eastern field, in which successor states, great-power competition, and gathering pressures became much more visible. We can say that Russia was directly reshaped by Ottoman decline, and that the wider post-imperial age also formed the background to China’s later emergence as a rival to Western primacy. We can also say that in our own time eastern and Near Eastern powers do in fact speak and act in ways that make the language of East-versus-West feel newly plausible.

But we should also say this plainly: the exact identity of these kings has not been granted to us with certainty. The safest path is therefore to let the text say what it says, to refuse false dogmatism, and to recognize that the main point is preparatory. The barrier is removed. The way is opened. The final overthrow of Babylon draws nearer.