The Judgment of Babylon
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1 The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
2 On a bare hill raise a signal; cry aloud to them; wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles.
3 I myself have commanded my consecrated ones, and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger, my proudly exulting ones.
4 The sound of a tumult is on the mountains as of a great multitude! The sound of an uproar of kingdoms, of nations gathering together! The Lord of hosts is mustering a host for battle.
5 They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens, the Lord and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.
6 Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; as destruction from the Almighty it will come!
7 Therefore all hands will be feeble, and every human heart will melt.
8 They will be dismayed: pangs and agony will seize them; they will be in anguish like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at one another; their faces will be aflame.
9 Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.
10 For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.
11 I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant, and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.
12 I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir.
13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger.
14 And like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people, and each will flee to his own land.
15 Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword.
16 Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.
17 Behold, I am stirring up the Medes against them, who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold.
18 Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children.
19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pomp of the Chaldeans, will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them.
20 It will never be inhabited or lived in for all generations; no Arab will pitch his tent there; no shepherds will make their flocks lie down there.
21 But wild animals will lie down there, and their houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will dwell, and there wild goats will dance.
22 Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces; its time is close at hand and its days will not be prolonged.
The Judgment of Babylon
Introduction
The Babylon oracle consists of chapters 13-14. Babylon was a contemporary power, but Isaiah associates Babylon with the Day of the Lord and God's universal cosmic work. Although God has already been working through Assyria to demonstrate his power, he will use Babylon in the future. This is a reminder that God is the one who is in control of history. It is not the mere function of human free will but God’s divine sovereignty working behind the scenes to bring about his specific purposes.
The image of Babylon goes beyond the narrative in the prophets and the historical books of the Old Testament. We know from history that the Babylonian Empire became the primary and dominant world power after taking over Assyria. However, the image of Babylon is used as a sign of evil and apostasy. The reason the Biblical writers in the Old and New Testaments used Babylon for this image, especially in apocalyptic literature, goes back to Genesis 11 and the construction of the Tower of Babel.
Genesis 11 is at the heart of the Old Testament worldview that permeates the New Testament. Those at the Tower sought to make a name for themselves by building a tower that reached the realm of the gods. (Notice I said “gods” here. This is because they were not seeking Yahweh but the divine beings that sinned against Yahweh in Genesis 6:1-4.) They were seeking divine knowledge and ungodly worship. The Tower was not a skyscraper building but a ziggurat, a tiered pyramid structure where communion with the divine took place at the top through human sacrifices. The apostasy of humanity against God led to their dispersion throughout the world. They gave away to these “sons of God,” who were demonic powers according to Deuteronomy 32:8. Later in the same chapter Moses says the following: “They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded” (32:17). Although this verse is referencing Israel’s worship of demonic powers through pagan practices, the apostacy continued through the nations mentioned in verse 8. These nations would have no direct relationship with Yahweh. Instead, they were allowed to worship and follow other gods. Passages in Isaiah point to a day when the disinheritance will be reversed. This reversal begins when the Messiah is born.
The apostasy at the Tower of Babel on the plain of Shinar, where the Babylonian nation is located, becomes an image of God’s enemies and the demonic powers behind them. That is why Isaiah uses Babylon as the first in a series of nations that Yahweh will judge for their rejection of him.
The Day of the Lord (13:1-16)
13:1 - The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
Isaiah begins his oracle against Babylon. The Babylonian Empire would not occur until a century after Isaiah’s lifetime. The empire is overtaken by the Medo-Persian Empire in 539 BC. The reasons for judgment against the nation go beyond the current times of Isaiah and Judah. It goes back to Genesis 11 and the apostasy against God that took place there under the leadership of Nimrod, who founded Babylon and Assyria on the plains of Shinar, according to Genesis 10:6-12. “Nimrod” means “rebellion.” He is also called a “gibbor” in Hebrew. This word is translated as “mighty warrior” or “man of renown.” The word is also closely associated with “Nephilim,” found in Genesis 6. For Old and New Testament writers, Nimrod serves as the theological link between the sin of the fallen sons of God in Genesis 6 and the continued rebellion and rejection of God throughout scripture. The theological significance of Babylon as an image of evil and apostasy cannot be overstated. It becomes a symbol of rebellion against Yahweh.
13:2-5 - On a bare hill raise a signal; cry aloud to them; wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles. I myself have commanded my consecrated ones, and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger, my proudly exulting ones. The sound of a tumult is on the mountains as of a great multitude! The sound of an uproar of kingdoms, of nations gathering together! The LORD of hosts is mustering a host for battle. They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens, the LORD and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.
Isaiah begins to describe the “Day of the Lord,” the culmination and termination of human history. He begins by describing God’s wrath and the worldwide destruction that takes place.
There is a gathering of armies at the gates of the nobles. The rulers at the time tried to create a defense against God, but they failed. The Persians, led by Cyrus the Great, are deemed “consecrated ones.” This is not because they are holy in their devotion to Yahweh. It is a reminder that God uses other nations as his instruments to accomplish his judgment. The armies of Persia have been divinely set apart to destroy and punish Babylon.
Isaiah specifically says that nations will participate in this judgment. The Medes and the Persians come together to conquer Babylon. However, this is a move of mutual destruction. As we see throughout history, the Lord may use certain nations to inflict his judgment on others. Ultimately, every nation that does not come to the Lord will be destroyed. The weapons used are the weapons of God’s indignation, and the whole land will be destroyed.
13:6-8 - Wail, for the day of the LORD is near; as destruction from the Almighty it will come! Therefore all hands will be feeble, and every human heart will melt. They will be dismayed: pangs and agony will seize them; they will be in anguish like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at one another; their faces will be aflame.
Wailing will be heard in anticipation of the Day of the Lord, a day of destruction from the Almighty. The splendor of the Persian army caused extreme fear among the Babylonians. The pangs and agony that grip the Babylonians are compared to a woman in labor. They will be in shock and horror and filled with great anxiety (their faces will be aflame).
Paul speaks about this in 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3:
2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
When Christ returns, he will deliver judgment against his enemies like God did to the Babylonians. In doing so, Christ will establish his earthly reign in the millennial kingdom. The world will react similarly on that day, and there will be no escape.
13:9-13 - Behold, the day of the LORD comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant, and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless. I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir. Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the LORD of hosts in the day of his fierce anger.
There will be judgment on the sinners. Moral retribution and cosmic disaster are marks of the Day. The stars and the constellations that do not show their light may be a figurative reference to the Babylonian astrologers, known for their ability to discern meanings from the heavenly bodies; they will be unable to do so because the sun and moon will refuse to give their light. The cosmic destruction is a sign of God’s judgment on secret and forbidden knowledge that was part of the sin of Genesis 6. When the divine beings fell, they not only corrupted humanity by producing Nephilim offspring with human women. They also brought heavenly knowledge that included sorcery and discerning the future through the movement of the stars. 1 Enoch 7:1 says the following, “And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.”
The judgment against Babylon is a shadow of the judgment of the world. Isaiah is clear that God is speaking about Babylon’s destruction as “a day of the Lord,” but the destruction is a prelude to the complete destruction of sin. God’s anger against sin cannot be measured. Humanity chose to rebel against him rather than bring themselves to him and follow him. They relied on the deception of demonic powers rather than the holiness of God. In the end, all of creation will be cleansed with fire. According to 2 Peter 3:11-13,
11 Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
When that day comes, it will be a complete reversal of creation. God will make all things new. The order brought to chaos in Genesis 1 will be undone in judgment.
13:14-16 - And like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people, and each will flee to his own land. Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.
The picture of the gathering with which the poem began (2–5) is balanced at the end by this picture of scattering. In turn, the verses reveal three facets of the Day: no protection (14), no escape (15), and no mercy (16). They gathered in arrogant triumphalism (3–5), and now they have everything to flee from (14) and nowhere to escape to (15). Humankind without God is without safety and home.
Whoever is caught: literally ‘all who are swept away,’ i.e., into flight from the ferocity of the battle. But they might as well have stayed, for the sword will still find them and, should any reach their home (16), it is to see that the enemy got there first. Of course, the Lord is no puppet master, making automatons jump to his bidding (cf. 10:5–15). People are simply being themselves (Titus 3:3). 14:26 notes that the guiding power in history is the ‘stretching out of his hand.’ Yet, in so many ways, the Day is the withdrawing of his hand as he judgmentally leaves sinners unrestrained to implement all the savagery of the fallen nature. The more people turn their backs on God, determined to ‘be themselves,’ to be masters of ‘their own world,’ the less human they become, therefore, the less humane. When the Day comes, sin will take center stage as the total and savage destroyer it has always been, and those who did not want God will get what they wanted: they will be given up (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28) to be themselves.
The End of Babylon’s Kingdom (13:17-22)
Having announced and described the Day of the Lord, Isaiah turns to the foreseen fall of Babylon. The Old Testament typically sees calamity coming against the backdrop of ultimate disaster. Jesus uses this teaching device when he describes the destruction of Jerusalem and his Second Coming in Luke 21.
13:17-18 - Behold, I am stirring up the Medes against them, who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold. Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children.
This case involves divine direction (I will stir) and human energies (the Medes). The Lord is in executive management of history, not just on the (last) Day but in all its interim foreshadowings. The choice of the Medes as the destroyers of Babylon is unexpected. We are accustomed to thinking of Babylon falling to the Persians, but, on the other hand, often the Medes take priority over the Persians, as in ‘the law of the Medes and Persians’ (Dan. 6:8, 12) and the description of Babylon’s conqueror as ‘Darius the Mede’ (Dan. 5:30). We must leave it to Isaiah to have his own reasons for singling them out here.
Silver … gold: they cannot be ‘bought off’; their sole motivation is conquest, and in this, they are merciless (18; cf. 14–16).
Slaughter: ‘dash in pieces’. The verb is unusual in relation to death by arrow, but it is probably chosen to link with its use in verse 16. The picture is of such a torrent of arrows striking home that bodies are left ‘mangled/shot to pieces.’ They have no concern for life (young men), no restraint of pity (infants), no thought for the future (children)—nothing but the fulfillment of their own imperialism!
13:19-22 - Next, Isaiah reviews the moral ground of the overthrow (19), its permanence (20), completeness (21–22a), and proximity (22b).
Sodom and Gomorrah (19; Gen. 19) are the classic instances of divine overthrow (cf. 1:7). The allusion underlines the ultimate divine energy behind the ‘front-line’ activity of the Medes. The absence of human inhabitants (20) and the replacement of humankind by beasts (21–22) emphasize the finality of the overthrow. And why has all this happened? Because of the Babylonians’ pride (cf. 11), Pride is not only on the Last Day but also in every interim experience of divine anger, and pride is a killer, leaving utter ruination and emptiness in its wake. Not even a passing Arab nomad nor a shepherd taking an afternoon siesta will be there, but only that which replaces (jackals, owls, hyenas) and repels human settlement.
Desert creatures should probably be ‘desert wraiths’ and wild goats, ‘goat-demons’ (Lev. 17:7). The Bible can use folk superstitions simply for effect without extending credence to them.
Her time (ēt) is not a calendar date but a season-appropriate date for an event. Assyria destroyed Babylon in 689 BC (see Ch. 21), but it recovered; likewise, it was intact after Cyrus captured it (539 BC), but its continued nuisance value provoked Darius Hystapes to desolate it in 518 BC, and so it has remained.
Third Section of Isaiah
Neo-Babylonian Empire
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
1 When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them,
2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
9 But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
1 The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
6 The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan.
7 The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan.
8 Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.
9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.”
10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
11 From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and
12 Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.
2 On a bare hill raise a signal; cry aloud to them; wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles.
3 I myself have commanded my consecrated ones, and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger, my proudly exulting ones.
4 The sound of a tumult is on the mountains as of a great multitude! The sound of an uproar of kingdoms, of nations gathering together! The Lord of hosts is mustering a host for battle.
5 They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens, the Lord and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.
6 Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; as destruction from the Almighty it will come!
7 Therefore all hands will be feeble, and every human heart will melt.
8 They will be dismayed: pangs and agony will seize them; they will be in anguish like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at one another; their faces will be aflame.
2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
9 Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.
10 For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.
11 I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant, and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.
12 I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir.
13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger.
11 Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness,
12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!
13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
14 And like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people, and each will flee to his own land.
15 Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword.
16 Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.
17 Behold, I am stirring up the Medes against them, who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold.
18 Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children.
19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pomp of the Chaldeans, will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them.
20 It will never be inhabited or lived in for all generations; no Arab will pitch his tent there; no shepherds will make their flocks lie down there.
21 But wild animals will lie down there, and their houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will dwell, and there wild goats will dance.
22 Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces; its time is close at hand and its days will not be prolonged.
