For those who are Revelation focused, it comes as quite the shock to hear Yahweh call Babylon a vulnerable virgin in Isaiah 47–repeatedly. But then, our view of Babylon has been much confused by some propagandistic fictional writings of the 19th and 20th centuries that were accepted at face value without any sort of comparison with what we know either Biblically or archaeologically. Believe me, the truth about Babylon is important because it changes how certain passages are understood and seriously effects how we should react to how they are thrown around now, often entirely out of context.
Transcript below, barely edited. I have a life 😉
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Isaiah and the Messiah 9 –Isaiah 47
Last week, Marduk (aka Bel) and Nebo were smacked down and displaced by Yahweh in our final idol polemic. As gods exist mainly for the purpose of propping up the powers that be, once Marduk and Nebo were dishonored, Babylonia itself will be Yahweh’s next target.
Of course, the main big baddies of the Old Testament world were Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. Up until the time of Cyrus, they respectively ran the largest and most powerful empires in the known world. Each successively fell to greater powers. Egypt was conquered and ruled by the Assyrians somewhere around 672 BCE, and the Assyrians fell to the Medes after that and Babylonia fell to King Cyrus of Persia around 539 BCE. Why do I say “around” those dates? Well, those are Roman calendar dates and the empire was in its infancy. As I mentioned last week, it wasn’t as though they dated things “539 BCE” because (1) Rome was a tiny little insignificant backwater beyond the reaches of the known world at that time and (2) the Roman calendar itself was a total mess until like the 60’s BCE when Julius Caesar fixed the calendar (not the final fix, but a much needed one). Just remember this when someone tells you something like “Tammuz was born on December 25th, 2500 BCE”—not only did December 25th not exist back then, but neither did “2500 BCE” and, for that matter, there is no historical birthdate recorded for that god or his sister Geshtinanna, or his mother, Sirtur, or his wife Ishtar for that matter because no one in the ancient world recorded birthdays until the times of the Roman Emperors. But the atheist Zeitgeist groups who put out that kind of information aren’t the types of people who are really averse to lying in pursuit of agenda.
But people who specialize in chronology do their best to backtrack by taking common events in many different civilizations into account and merging them. But everyone knows that it isn’t rocket science. It is, however, a very impressive bit of engineering to piece together the big puzzle.
Isaiah 1-39 focus mainly on Yahweh’s dealings with Israel and the Assyrian Empire, and all of a sudden in Is 40 we have gone forward roughly 150 years in time, prophecy-wise, to Yahweh’s dealings with the Babylonian exiles and Yahweh assures them that what He did to Assyria He will soon do to Babylonia. And I will mainly be calling the empire Babylonia. Babylon was a city, the capital city of Babylonia and later the home of the winter palace of Cyrus the Great.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com.
All Scripture this week is taken from the ESV, the English Standard Version because that is what my interlinear is in. And unlike my usual MO, I will be saying Yahweh instead of God and Lord because there are so many different voices speaking back and forth in Isaiah 40-55 that it will help eliminate confusion. Otherwise, I always use titles because I don’t like to use His name carelessly or casually. Just a personal preference.
Now, before we get into the Scripture, you need to know that Babylonia was an ancient Empire—and a great one from the time of Hammurabi, who would have been a contemporary of the patriarch Abraham until the time it was conquered and absorbed by the Persians. So, really, the Babylonian Empire runs parallel to the entire story of the Bible from Abraham on. We even use the Code of Hammurabi to help us unravel some of the legal situations we see recorded in the pre-Sinai laws of Scripture, the laws of the nations. By the time that Israel became a great, albeit short-lived, Empire, Babylonia had been a world force for many hundreds of years. They did come under the subjection of the Assyrians and Medes from 911-619 BCE, at the end of which the Babylonians rose to power again and they rebelled against their foreign overlords. These empires rising and falling has actually been a minor theme in Isaiah up to this point with Yahweh pointing out that these empires and are always temporary and their gods irrelevant but He Himself alone is eternal.
A few more things I want to mention because the subject of Babylon is much abused because of some anti-catholic propaganda of the 19th century that got picked up by some folks and mistaken for legit archaeology. We get this idea that Babylon was just like mega-idolatrous but really there is no such thing in the ancient world. Everyone was totally idolatrous. You had gods for absolutely everything because they saw the universe as an enclosed system which the gods themselves were a part of and subject to. Sure, Ra (Egypt) or Shamash (Babylonia) or Malakbel (Canaan) had the responsibility for making sure the sun did its thing, but they were subject to fate and were at the mercy of the universe just like people. Tammuz was a shepherd god but he didn’t create the sheep. Ishtar was the goddess of war and prostitutes but it didn’t prevent her from being defeated by her sister, the goddess of the underworld. They were not omniscient or omnipotent. If you knew how to pronounce their true name, you could gain mastery over them—a pagan concept we see in modern times as well within certain Christian sects including the Hebrew Roots and Black Hebrew Israelite movements. They were part of the system—they didn’t create it and they weren’t outside it like Yahweh. That is key to understanding paganism.
What Babylon was famous for was magic, astronomy, and astrology. Of course, astronomy is science and it is cool. Did you know that we still use Babylonian constellation names translated into Latin? That’s how good they were at this stuff. It’s what else they did with it that was bad. They worshipped the host of heaven. So not only did they have Shamash, the sun god who they had to take care of or else the sun might not come up and they would be consumed by the forces of chaos, but they also worshipped the sun and stars themselves. So, in that way they kind of were more idolatrous than some nations, but it was really just an extension of a theme. This was called astral worship. And of course, they were huge into astrology, which I don’t have to explain because, you know, open your newspaper and you can see your silly horoscope.
But let’s talk about Babylonian magic because that might not be what you think. Folks tend to make stuff up because neo-paganism is only a couple hundred years old and mostly based on romantic literature that is only a few hundred years old. They take signs and symbols and myths and legends and ignore archaeology, which makes it a created lifestyle instead of a legitimate ancient religion. If you want to see a real modern version of ancient paganism, check out Hinduism.
Archaeologists have found three main magical tomes from Ashurbanipal’s library. Ashurbanipal was an Assyrian king in the 7th century and the kingdoms were united at this time so this teaches us about magic in that region. Which, of course, is super cool because it helps us to understand what is written in Isaiah!
Enuma Anu Enlil—seventy clay tablets on ancient horoscopes and almanacs, as well as astronomical texts. It also taught practitioners how to interpret weather.
Summa Alu—100 tablets of omens regarding various subjects.
Summa Izbu—dream interpretation and significance of animal and human deformities.
What we do not see are magic spells like in the movies but more along the lines of using omens and such and trying to control the gods in order to protect themselves and ward off evil. Most magic in the ancient world served a protective purpose and even the worst of societies looked down on and regulated against any offensive use of magic.
Magic is the belief that everything is continuous with everything else. So, through manipulation of one thing, you can control another thing. Some people mimic this same belief through prayer rituals, sacred naming, and careful wording of prayers in such a way as to try and control their gods. That being said, liturgical prayer isn’t the same thing—the whole thing is the intention behind it. Is it like a spell? Or is It like a doxology?–liturgical praise that we see throughout the Bible. Or the Lord’s prayer. We have to realize that magic seeks to control the divine in some way because, for them, the natural did not exist apart from the divine. This is why the Israelites were forbidden to practice magic because it is like going around God instead of through Him or trying to manipulate Him like He is part of the system instead of the Creator of it. But the nations didn’t see anything wrong with doing this.
There are also two keywords we will see throughout and the first one is yashab, which appears six times in fifteen verses, and it means “sit”. The other is bo, which you might recognize as the name of a Torah portion and it means either “come” or “go.”
Alright, I have laid down enough background material so let’s get to the text. Short chapter this week:
47 Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon;
sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans!
For you shall no more be called tender and delicate.
Here we have one reference to come and two to sit. This is all with reference to commands being given as judgment by Yahweh.
Let’s deconstruct this. We have a summons to “sit in the dust” which is a sign of mourning in the ancient world. Something terrible has happened. “Oh virgin daughter”—and this should shock everyone who only sees Babylon described as a whore. Oh, not so simple, is it? Right here we have Babylon described the same way that Israel and Judah were described whenever they would be conquered. The young virgins are always the most vulnerable—and the most likely to be left alive and suffer the consequences of being left alive. “Sit on the ground without a throne”—that is the language of a reversal of fortune. What we are going to see today is the Babylonian Empire (labeled by the name of its capital city) described in the same terms of what it did to Judah seventy years beforehand. This is not what actually happened to Babylonia, as it fell to Cyrus rather peaceably and he was not an oppressive jerk about it, but this is shame language as she has lost her authority and splendor and will become just another conquered nation paying tribute to a greater power.
2 Take the millstones and grind flour, put off your veil,
strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers.
This is slavery language—specifically slavery language for women and not men. Milling flour was seen as the lowliest of the jobs for a slave girl. It was backbreaking work. She had to strip off her veil and the long robe that a noblewoman wore. She had to hike up her skirt and work in the irrigation ditches.
3 Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your disgrace shall be seen.
I will take vengeance, and I will spare no one.
This could refer to sexual slavery, which was very much a concern for women who were enslaved by any country that was not subject to Israel’s strict laws concerning sexuality. Or it could be figurative. Once again, we see no indication that Cyrus’s armies went on any sort of rampage. He really took over countries without a lot of bloodshed or drama compared to most. Isaiah is poetry that is being spoken to an exiled population and this type of poetry is called “revenge” poetry. Like Psalm 137, which leaves little to the imagination.
The sentence, “I will take vengeance, I will spare no one”—that word translated vengeance is naqam, and it means the basic establishment of justice for someone who has done wrong. Obviously, there is no one-word English translation for it. Vengeance is a bit heavy, but not sure what is a better option. The whole sense of this here is that there will be a reversal of fortune and there will be a form of retribution. The conqueror being conquered and fading into obscurity as a vassal state of a larger series of empires from the Persians to the Medes, to the Greeks and Parthians is appropriate to this promise. Babylonia will never be anyone’s master ever again.
4 Our Redeemer—the Lord of hosts is his name—is the Holy One of Israel.
BOOM! The prophet breaks in and speaks. Yahweh took down Assyria and now Babylonia is next, and He is on OUR side, Israel.
5 Sit in silence, and go into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans;
for you shall no more be called the mistress of kingdoms.
Again, the command to sit and go.
Babylonia was a mistress of kingdoms for sure, as it ruled over one hundred lesser kingdoms. And still, not being called a whore but a virgin. Compared to Yahweh, Babylonia is powerless—with no husband to save her. Yahweh gave her authority to punish His people and Babylonia abused that authority, just like Assyria before it, and will suffer the same fate.
6 I was angry with my people; I profaned my heritage; I gave them into your hand;
you showed them no mercy; on the aged you made your yoke exceedingly heavy.
You didn’t conquer them by your might or through your gods, I gave them to you to punish them for their transgressions—but you did not display my own merciful character. This bit about making the yoke exceedingly heavy on the elderly is much debated by scholars. My gut feeling is that exile would have been harder on the elderly than for the younger people. That was a long journey and it is likely that many did not survive the trip. It also would have been harder for them to lose everything they ever knew than for the young. Also, they would have lost their sons in the war. Just my take.
7 You said, “I shall be mistress forever,” so that you did not lay these things to heart
or remember their end.
Remember whose end? Assyria’s. The only way Babylonia could rule forever was if she was the highest power in the universe, but without Yahweh she was nothing.
12When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, he will punish the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the boastful look in his eyes.
13 For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I have understanding;
I remove the boundaries of peoples, and plunder their treasures; like a bull I bring down those who sit on thrones.
14 My hand has found like a nest the wealth of the peoples; and as one gathers eggs that have been forsaken, so I have gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved a wing or opened the mouth or chirped.” (Is 10:12-14)
Yahweh might use you to do His work for Him to punish someone else, but that doesn’t mean He endorses you or your methods. If you are arrogant about it, He will take you down too. Don’t long to be the tool of the Lord in disciplining someone He loves because He rarely uses good people to do it.
8 Now therefore hear this, you lover of pleasures, who sit securely, who say in your heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me; I shall not sit as a widow or know the loss of children”:
Two appearances of sit and both spoken by Babylonia personified as a Queen reassuring herself of her exalted position.
We have here a speech of judgement. Charges are being laid out and the sentence follows. What are the charges? One, Babylonia has been living large through conquest and oppression and has grown arrogant and not only refuses to acknowledge Yahweh, the source of her power, but also says, “I am and there is no one besides me.” Those are the words of Yahweh Himself in 45:5, 6, 18, 22 and 46:9 as well as Zephaniah 2:15. So totally not cool. This sort of blasphemy cannot stand.
She issues the challenge: “I shall not sit as a widow or know the loss of children.” This meant one thing in the ancient world. MY husband and MY children will not be lost in battle. That’s for the wives and mothers of my enemies to suffer.
9 These two things shall come to you in a moment, in one day; the loss of children and widowhood shall come upon you in full measure, in spite of your many sorceries and the great power of your enchantments.
Two references to sit in verse eight and now two references to come in verse nine. No coincidence.
This is a direct response to the challenge. Not only will it happen, but without warning, suddenly. That’s what “in a moment” and “in one day” means—not a literal moment, of course, or one literal day, but the conquest will be so quick that they will hardly know what hit them. Life will change almost overnight from ruler of the world to just another fallen vassal state. Cyrus will conquer Babylonia’s armies (the ones that did not defect to him, anyway), and none of their magicians would fortell it or be able to prevent it with their magic.
Let’s look at similar language about the fall of Israel from Isaiah 9:14, speaking of its fall to Assyria:
So the Lord cut off from Israel head and tail, palm branch and reed in one day—
And it also did not happen in one day, it’s just part of the literary genre to phrase it that way. We get into trouble when we get too literal with prophetic poetry. Leads to folks ditching the faith altogether. We can’t rewrite history in order to make the Bible more accurate to modern tastes—that would be butchering the way God communicated to ancient people who thought about and understood and communicated things differently than we do
10 You felt secure in your wickedness; you said, “No one sees me”; your wisdom and your knowledge led you astray, and you said in your heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me.”
It is an interesting concept, to feel secure in one’s own wickedness but we have to realize that most wicked people feel absolutely justified about what they are doing—which ought to sober us up and good because we are great with self-justification as well—heck, everyone is. Babylon, indeed any powerful organization, is going to be more amoral than immoral. Immoral means that you are wanton and trying to be revolting. Amoral is what happens when someone sees themselves as outside or above the system that applies to mere mortals. Do you think that the Nazis felt wicked? Of course not, but they did feel they were in the right. They did good and they did evil—all in service of their cause. The ancient world was a brutal place, but we don’t have reason to believe that, after conquest Babylonia treated its exiles badly. Actually they absorbed them and they became part of the empire. But they were getting rich at the expense of others through commerce, conquest, and taxation. Babylon isn’t labeled in Scripture as being wicked because of idolatry—that’s the stuff that was made up later in midrash and for the sake of slandering Catholicism. No, Babylon was rich and comfortable. It’s why the overwhelming majority of Jews never left once Cyrus let them go. Babylonia wasn’t the kind of place where one needed to rely on any god because life was good. And that’s the problem.
She says, “No one sees me.” And isn’t that the eternal cry of the rich and powerful? That they cannot be judged or held accountable? Their wisdom and knowledge is a direct reference to their reliance on magic, the sorcery, and enchantments that they felt would give them both security and foreknowledge through divination and protection through enchantments. And again: you said in your heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me.” I don’t have to tell you again why that is bad.
11 But evil shall come upon you, which you will not know how to charm away; disaster shall fall upon you, for which you will not be able to atone; and ruin shall come upon you suddenly, of which you know nothing.
Here we go, she exalts herself again and BAM, two more mentions of bo, come, promising judgment.
This is straight-up mocking their reliance upon magic to protect and save them. Evil shall come and your charms will be ineffective. Disaster will come, and you won’t have anyone to appeal to for atonement. And ruin will come suddenly and all your prognosticators will be none the wiser. It was actually their belief that their knowledge of the universe is what gave them power over it to protect themselves. In that, they really were comparing themselves to God, so this wasn’t just an empty cheap shot.
12 Stand fast in your enchantments and your many sorceries, with which you have labored from your youth; perhaps you may be able to succeed; perhaps you may inspire terror.
But hey, try it all anyway! Go ahead! Actually reminds me of Elijah on Mt Carmel with the prophets of Ba’al Hadad. And that “inspire terror” remark is probably a reference to the religious awe their magicians would inspire with their efforts to control the universe.
13 You are wearied with your many counsels; let them stand forth and save you, those who divide the heavens, who gaze at the stars, who at the new moons make known what shall come upon you.
The Babylonians expended a great deal of effort accumulating knowledge of just everything and anything that they thought could give them some magical influence on the universe. As I mentioned earlier, they wrote huge volumes on it and these volumes were clay slabs that were inscribed and then baked. Which, of course, is good or we would be left without much of any documentation like in northern Europe where boggy and generally damp conditions aren’t very conducive to the preservation of artifacts. But all this effort—meaningless! They don’t have the right kind of information! This makes reference to dividing the heavens—might be talking about astrology or some other aspect of astral worship which, I admit, is my weak spot in my Babylonian studies.
And we see another reference to bo here, talking about the failure of the prognosticators to predict what is going to happen to them. Only Yahweh predicts the future because He actually makes the future, and He shares it with His prophets. No other god or their prophets have ever done such a thing.
14 Behold, they are like stubble; the fire consumes them; they cannot deliver themselves from the power of the flame. No coal for warming oneself is this, no fire to sit before!
Here is the last reference to sitting. And those who are laboring in the magic arts in an attempt to control and manipulate the universe as though they were gods, they are stubble—which, as we know from elsewhere, means that their works are meaningless and worthless. When disaster strikes, they are swallowed up and revealed to be irrelevant. They can’t escape that sort of humiliation, being revealed as powerless and without knowledge—this isn’t going to be the sort of fire they can get comfortable in front of because all their works will be shown for what they are and destroyed.
As an aside, and this is funny. How did the priests of Marduk retain their standing after the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus? They claimed to be collaborating secretly with Marduk in order to put his chosen new king into power because their old king, Nabonidus, the father of Belshazzar who is named in Daniel and who was running the kingdom in his father’s self-imposed exile—well, he preferred the god Sin and was neglecting Marduk. A god’s gotta do what a god’s gotta do and he went and got himself a new king and the priests gave themselves credit for it.
15 Such to you are those with whom you have labored, who have done business with you from your youth; they wander about, each in his own direction; there is no one to save you.
Last line of a very short chapter here. And here we make reference to Babylonia’s merchants who are responsible for the easy lifestyle enjoyed by the inhabitants of the Empire, Jews included. Babylon can’t trust in her magic, nor can she trust in her wealth and leisure. Babylonia is powerless before the will of Yahweh.
I’ll finish this up with a quote from Jon Oswalt’s Isaiah 40-66 NICOT Commentary:
“In the hour of disaster, all Babylon’s “traders” can do is abandon their posts. In common parlance, the situation is “every man for himself.” The years of long association are meaningless in the crisis. Instead of looking out for the greater concerns of city and country, these who have led the city astray (vs 10) now themselves stray off into their own region(s). This is the picture of the dissolution of an army: as defeat overtakes it, discipline begins to break down, and what was once a great force simply dissipates. It does not as much collapse as dissolve. As each person wanders off to seek his own survival.
The end result is that there is no savior to whom Babylon can turn. Her pride and glory? Dust and ashes. Her gods? She must carry them. Her ancient wisdom? A vapor. By contrast, there is Jerusalem, ignominiously defeated, her god nothing but a box (the ark of the covenant), her wisdom nothing but laws and stories. Ah, but what a difference! When the crisis comes to Babylon, she has nowhere to turn to but herself, and that is not enough. When the crisis comes to Jerusalem, she has Someone outside herself. Someone who is not simply herself projected against the backdrop of eternity. He is the Creator, the Holy One of Israel, the Savior.”
