Babylon's Splendor Under a Darkened Sky

“Burden” is massa, from the verb to lift: a load laid on the prophet, or an utterance lifted up. It heads each of the oracles against the nations that run through chapter 23. Babylon comes first, though in Isaiah’s day it was an unruly province under Assyria, still generations from ruling the world.

The “high mountain” is literally a bare one, stripped of trees so that a signal on it can be seen from far off. Babylon’s own name, Bab-ili, means “gate of god” in Akkadian, and some readers hear an allusion to it in the “gates of the nobles”. The raised hand is a field signal: go.

“Them that rejoice in my highness” is a phrase Zephaniah 3:11 uses of the proud in Jerusalem, there with contempt; here it describes troops exulting in the LORD’s cause. The speaker is God in the first person, calling out the muster roll with three possessives: my sanctified, my mighty, my highness.

The Hebrew begins with a single word, qol, “a sound!”, an exclamation like “Hark!”. Jeremiah 51:27-28 names the peoples summoned with the Medes against Babylon: the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashchenaz. The noise rolls down from the mountains to the north and east, the direction the invaders came from.

“The end of heaven” is the horizon, the line where sky meets land, as in Deuteronomy 4:32, “from the one side of heaven unto the other”. “The whole land” can equally be read “the whole earth”, the same Hebrew word, and the chapter goes on to exploit that double sense.

“Destruction from the Almighty” is a pun in Hebrew, shod mishaddai, destruction from Shaddai. Joel 1:15 repeats the whole line word for word. “Howl” is the cry of mourning that the prophets use for people watching their world fall, and it recurs through the oracles on the nations.

Hands hang limp, the grip gone, and the heart melts like wax. The same melting heart is what Rahab reported of Jericho when the spies came, “our hearts did melt” (Joshua 2:11). The verse moves from the outer body to the inner man in two short clauses.

“Amazed one at another” pictures people staring at each other stunned, each seeing his own fear in his neighbour’s face. The book uses the same childbirth pangs of Isaiah himself when he sees Babylon’s fall in 21:3: “pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth”.

“Cruel” is akhzari, merciless, the word used of the ostrich that abandons her eggs in Lamentations 4:3. The day comes “to lay the land desolate”, but the verse ends with its aim narrowed to “the sinners thereof”. The destruction has a target, not only a scale.

“Constellations” is kesilim, the plural of Kesil, “the fool”, the Hebrew name for Orion (Job 9:9; Amos 5:8). The whole line reads “the stars and their Orions”, the brightest groups of heaven. Jesus echoes this language in Matthew 24:29, “the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light”.

“World” is tevel, the inhabited earth, the widest word Hebrew has for it. “The terrible” are aritsim, the ruthless, the tyrants of the earth. The verse picks up the refrain of 2:11-17, where the lofty looks of man are humbled, and applies it to the ruling power of the whole world.

Ophir was the far-off source of Solomon’s finest gold, reached by ships from the Red Sea (1 Kings 9:28); its location, somewhere in Arabia, East Africa or India, is still argued. “Golden wedge” is a single word for a bar of refined gold. Men will be harder to find than the rarest ingot.

The Hebrew stacks two words for anger at the end: “the wrath” that overflows its banks and “the burning of his nose”, the idiom for fierce anger. Haggai 2:6 uses the same shaking of heavens and earth, and Hebrews 12:26 takes it up from Haggai. The earth is pictured jolted out of its seat.

The roe is the gazelle, the fastest animal the hunter knew; the sheep that no one gathers recall Micaiah’s vision of Israel “as sheep that have not a shepherd” (1 Kings 22:17). Babylon was full of foreign merchants, deportees and hired soldiers, and each makes for home.

The verse shuts every door the previous one opened: whoever is caught in the city is run through, and whoever is swept up with them falls by the sword. “Thrust through” is daqar, to pierce, the verb of Zechariah 12:10, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced”.

Psalm 137:8-9 is the exiles’ prayer that Babylon be served as it served Jerusalem: “that dasheth thy little ones against the stones”. For “ravished” the written Hebrew has a coarse verb, and the tradition of reading aloud substitutes the milder “lain with”, one of a handful of such public-reading substitutions.

The Medes, from the Iranian plateau, had been Babylon’s allies when the two destroyed Nineveh in 612 BC. Here the ally is stirred up against it. When Babylon fell in 539 it was to Cyrus, with Medes and Persians together, and the Book of Daniel names “Darius the Median” as the city’s new ruler (5:31).

The Medes and Persians were famous archers. “Pity” is racham, from the same root as rechem, “womb”; there is no womb-compassion here for the fruit of the womb. The verse lists the young men, the unborn and the children, the whole future of a people.

The Chaldees, Kasdim, were the tribal people of southern Mesopotamia whose kings, Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar, made Babylon an empire. “Overthrew” is the noun mahpekhah, a word used almost exclusively of Sodom’s overthrow (Deuteronomy 29:23; Amos 4:11), so the comparison is built into the vocabulary.

Babylon’s end was a slow emptying rather than one fire: after Seleucus founded Seleucia on the Tigris around 305 BC, its people drained away, and by the first centuries AD travellers described walls with little inside them. The Arabian nomad, who would pitch a tent anywhere, is pictured passing it by.

“Doleful creatures” translates a word found only here, perhaps howling animals or eagle owls. The “owls” are literally “daughters of the desert”, probably ostriches. “Satyrs” is se’irim, “hairy ones”, the ordinary word for he-goats, which Leviticus 17:7 also uses for the goat-demons Israel sacrificed to.

The creatures that cry in the houses are most likely jackals and hyenas, and the King James “dragons” comes from a Hebrew word for jackals that resembles the word for sea monsters. “Her days shall not be prolonged” turns on Babylon the warning Moses gave Israel, “ye shall not prolong your days” (Deuteronomy 4:26).