The Hammer Is Broken

“By Jeremiah” is literally “by the hand of Jeremiah”. Chapters 50 and 51 together form the longest oracle in the book, a hundred and ten verses against the empire Jeremiah had told Judah to serve. Chapter 51 ends by telling how this scroll was carried to Babylon and sunk in the Euphrates.

Bel means “lord”, the title of Marduk, and Merodach is the Hebrew form of Marduk himself, so the verse names Babylon’s chief god twice, by title and by name. “Images” is gillulim, a contemptuous word that may mean dung pellets, a favourite of Ezekiel’s.

“Out of the north” was the direction of Babylon’s own attack in Jeremiah’s early chapters (1:14, 6:1). The Medes and Persians who took Babylon came from the north and east; the Nabonidus Chronicle records Cyrus’s army fighting at Opis on the Tigris before the city fell in 539 BC.

Israel and Judah return “together”, as promised in 3:18: “the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel”. “Going and weeping” recalls 31:9, “They shall come with weeping.” “Seek the LORD” answers 29:13: “ye shall seek me, and find me.”

“Join ourselves” is lavah, the verb behind the name Levi, when Leah said, “now this time will my husband be joined unto me” (Genesis 29:34). A “perpetual covenant” is berit olam, the everlasting covenant promised in 32:40.

The “shepherds” are rulers, the ones cursed in 23:1, “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep”. “From mountain to hill” recalls the hilltop shrines of 2:20, “upon every high hill… thou wanderest”. A “restingplace” is a fold where a flock lies down at night.

The enemies’ excuse is a legal plea, “We are not guilty”. It contradicts 2:3: “Israel was holiness unto the LORD… all that devour him shall offend.” “Habitation of justice”, used in 31:23 for Jerusalem, is here a title for the LORD himself.

“Remove out of the midst of Babylon” is the cry of Isaiah 48:20: “Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans.” The he-goat walks at the front of a mixed flock, the first out of the fold when the gate is opened; the exiles are told to be the first to leave.

“An assembly of great nations” anticipates 51:27–28, which names Ararat, Minni, Ashchenaz and the Medes. “A mighty expert man” translates a word that can mean skilful or successful; many Hebrew manuscripts read instead a warrior “who bereaves”, leaving no one alive.

“Chaldea” here means the land and its people. The verse reverses verse 7: those who devoured Israel said they were not guilty; now those who plunder Chaldea are “satisfied”, and no guilt is charged against them.

“Heifer at grass” is literally a heifer threshing, and Deuteronomy 25:4 let the treading ox eat as it worked, so it grew fat. “Bellow as bulls” is literally “neigh like stallions”. The destroyers are pictured as livestock fattened and noisy on another nation’s harvest.

“Your mother” is Babylon, the mother city of the Chaldeans. “The hindermost of the nations” uses acharit, latter end, as in Balaam’s saying, “Amalek was the first of the nations; but his latter end shall be that he perish for ever” (Numbers 24:20).

Babylon’s end was slow. Cyrus entered the city in 539 BC without destroying it, as his own cylinder inscription boasts. Its decline came over centuries, through revolts, reprisals and the shift of power to new capitals. The verse sets out the whole process as one outcome.

“She hath sinned against the LORD” is exactly the charge the enemies used in verse 7 to excuse devouring Israel. The same sentence is now brought against Babylon. “Spare no arrows” is a command to the archers not to hold anything back.

Giving the hand was a sign of surrender (1 Chronicles 29:24), so “she hath given her hand” means Babylon has submitted. “Foundations” renders a word found only here, perhaps towers or buttresses. “As she hath done, do unto her” is the demand of Psalm 137:8, sung by exiles by the rivers of Babylon.

Babylon’s walls enclosed fields as well as streets; Aristotle says the city was so large that some districts had not heard of its capture three days afterwards (Politics 3.3). The flight of foreigners “every one to his own land” repeats Isaiah 13:14, also said of Babylon.

“Broken his bones” renders a verb formed from the noun for bone, found only here, something like “has boned him”. The first lion took the northern kingdom in 722 BC; the second, in 587 BC, gnawed on what was left.

Assyria had been punished through Babylon: Nineveh fell in 612 BC to the Babylonians and Medes. The instrument of Assyria’s fall is now to receive the same treatment, with the Medes again among the attackers.

Carmel, Bashan, Mount Ephraim and Gilead are all lands of the northern kingdom, west and east of the Jordan, famous grazing country; Amos called the rich women of Samaria “kine of Bashan”. Micah 7:14 prays the same, “let them feed in Bashan and Gilead”.

“Them whom I reserve” uses the verb from which she’erit, remnant, is formed: those I leave remaining. Micah 7:18 joins the same two ideas: the God “that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage”.

Both names are puns on real places. Merathaim, “double rebellion”, echoes mat marrati, the marshy Sea Land of southern Babylonia. Pekod, “punishment”, echoes the Puqudu, an Aramean tribe east of the Tigris, named also in Ezekiel 23:23. “Utterly destroy” is the verb of the ban, charam.

“Great destruction”, shever gadol, is what Jeremiah said would come upon Judah from the north (4:6, 6:1). The phrase comes back to its source, pointed now at the empire that brought it on Judah.

In 23:29 God’s word is “like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces”. Babylon has been the hammer in God’s hand, and 51:20 will call it “my battle axe”. The eikhah, “How”, of lament is used over a tool that has been broken after its work is done.

Herodotus (1.191) tells that Cyrus diverted the Euphrates and entered along the riverbed while the city was feasting, so that those in the centre did not know the outer districts had fallen; Daniel 5 sets Babylon’s last night at a feast too. “Thou wast not aware” fits both accounts.

“Armoury” is otsar, a treasury or storehouse, the word used for God’s storehouses of snow and wind (Job 38:22, Jeremiah 10:13). “The weapons of his indignation” is the phrase Isaiah 13:5 uses in its own oracle against Babylon.

“From the utmost border” means from every direction, the ends of the land. “Storehouses” renders a word found only here, most likely granaries. “Cast her up as heaps” compares the city to grain piled on a threshing floor, heaped up for carrying away.

The “bullocks” are Babylon’s young warriors, as Egypt’s mercenaries were fatted bullocks in 46:21 and Isaiah 34:7 speaks of bullocks among the slain. “Go down to the slaughter” is the language of the stockyard applied to an army.

Nebuchadnezzar carried the temple vessels to Babylon (52:17–23), and Daniel 5:2–3 has them used as drinking cups at the feast on the night the city fell. The fugitives who carry news to Zion speak of “the vengeance of his temple”, the sanctuary’s account being settled.

“The Holy One of Israel” is Isaiah’s characteristic title for God, used there about twenty five times. In the Book of Jeremiah it appears only twice, here and in 51:5, both times in the oracle against Babylon.

The words were used of Damascus in 49:26. The Nabonidus Chronicle says Babylon itself was entered “without battle” in 539 BC after the defeat at Opis, so the street fighting pictured here belongs to the language of prophetic judgment rather than a record of that day.

“O thou most proud” is a single word, zadon, Pride, used as a name for the city. Habakkuk 2:5 had already called the Chaldean “a proud man”. The root is the same as the “proud men” of 43:2 who called Jeremiah a liar.

“Shall stumble and fall, and none shall raise him up” echoes Amos 5:2 on Israel: “The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise… there is none to raise her up.” Amos’s lament for Israel is turned against the empire that exiled Judah.

“They refused to let them go” is the language of the Exodus, where Pharaoh “refused to let them go” (Exodus 4:23, 7:14). Babylon is cast as a second Egypt, and the release that follows as a second exodus.

Proverbs 23:11 says almost the same about the fatherless: “their redeemer is mighty; he shall plead their cause with thee.” The go’el was the next of kin who bought a relative out of slavery (Leviticus 25:48). “Rest” and “disquiet” are a Hebrew pair, hirgia and hirgiz.

“A sword” is a single word, chereb, cried out five times in verses 35 to 37, like a chant. “Wise men” are Babylon’s scholars and diviners, famous across the ancient world; in Daniel 2:2 “Chaldeans” is already a term for astrologers.

“The liars” are baddim, empty talkers, the word used of Moab’s boasts (48:30); Isaiah 44:25 uses it of diviners whose omens God frustrates. “They shall dote” means they shall act as fools. The experts and the soldiers fail together.

“The mingled people” is erev, the foreign contingents and mixed populations inside the empire, the word used of the “mixed multitude” that left Egypt with Israel (Exodus 12:38). “Become as women” was a stock taunt for soldiers who lost their nerve, repeated in 51:30.

The chant of “sword”, chereb, turns in this verse into “drought”, chorev, the same consonants with different vowels. Babylon lived on canals from the Euphrates. “Mad upon their idols” uses emim, terrors, as a word for images, crazed by their own horrors.

The creatures are those Isaiah 13:21–22 placed in ruined Babylon. “Owls” are literally “daughters of the ostrich”. By the time of the geographer Strabo, around the turn of the era, the city was largely deserted; he quotes a comic poet: “The great city is a great desert” (Geography 16.1.5).

The sentence was spoken over Edom in 49:18, and Isaiah 13:19 used Sodom and Gomorrah of Babylon too. Sodom is the book’s image for a place wiped out and never rebuilt, the most complete ruin it can name.

Verses 41 to 43 repeat 6:22–24, where the enemy “from the north country” was coming against Jerusalem. The same lines are now turned against Babylon, with one addition: “many kings” rising from the ends of the earth.

In 6:23 the last words were “against thee, O daughter of Zion.” Here they are “against thee, O daughter of Babylon.” The description of the army, cruel, merciless, roaring like the sea, is unchanged; only the target has been changed.

In 6:24 the people of Jerusalem said, “We have heard the fame thereof: our hands wax feeble: anguish hath taken hold of us.” Here the speaker is the king of Babylon himself. The words once spoken in fear of him are now spoken by him.

These verses repeat 49:19–21 on Edom. “Who will appoint me the time?” is legal language, to summon someone to court, as Job asks, “who shall set me a time to plead?” (Job 9:19). No one can summon God to a hearing.

The Edom oracle is reused with only the names changed: Teman becomes the land of the Chaldeans. Babylon, which scattered Israel’s flock (verse 17), is now itself pictured as a flock dragged off, and its “habitation” is a naveh, a sheepfold.

In 49:21 the cry of Edom’s fall reached the Red Sea. Here the cry over Babylon is heard “among the nations”, across the empire Babylon had ruled. The same pattern has been widened to fit the greater power.