Isaiah 13: The Burden of Babylon

"The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see. Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain… The Lord of hosts mustereth the host of the battle. They come from a far country, from the end of heaven" (13:1–5).

"Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand… For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine… I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place" (vv. 6–13).

"Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it" (v. 17). "And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited… But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there… and satyrs shall dance there" (vv. 19–21).

Babylon's actual fate

Babylon was taken by Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC. The Nabonidus Chronicle reports that his army entered the city "without battle"; the Cyrus Cylinder presents him as welcomed. Babylon remained a great city under the Persians and Alexander the Great, who died there in 323 BC. It declined after the Seleucid kings built Seleucia on the Tigris (c. 305 BC); by the 1st and 2nd centuries AD it was largely deserted. The Medes had joined Babylon to destroy Nineveh in 612 BC and were absorbed into Cyrus's empire by about 550 BC; Jeremiah 51:11, 28 also names the Medes against Babylon. The oracle's picture of sudden total ruin fits the long decline only in its end result.

Which Babylon, and when?

In Isaiah's own time Babylon was Assyria's rebellious subject, led by Merodach-baladan; Sennacherib sacked it in 689 BC. Some scholars read chapter 13 (with 21:1–10) against those 8th–7th-century events; most date it to the mid-6th century, when the Medes and Persians threatened the Neo-Babylonian empire, and see it as a later oracle placed under Isaiah's heading. Traditional readers take it as Isaiah's prediction of 539 BC. The heading claims Isaiah; the content fits a Babylonian-era enemy. See "One Isaiah or Several?"

The day of the LORD and cosmic darkness

Prophets describe the day of the LORD with the sun and stars darkened (Amos 5:18–20; Joel 2:10, 31; 3:15; Zephaniah 1:15). In Isaiah 13 it is the day of one city's fall described as world judgment: "I will punish the world (tevel)" (v. 11). Jesus' words in Mark 13:24–25 and Matthew 24:29 echo 13:10 and 34:4 ("the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall"), in Mark's and Matthew's reports, each with its own wording. Whether the imagery is meant literally or as the traditional language for the collapse of a political order is debated for both Isaiah and the Gospels.

Desert creatures and demons

Verses 21–22 list animals of ruins: tsiyyim (desert creatures), ochim (howling creatures, perhaps owls), benot ya'anah (ostriches or eagle-owls), se'irim (goats; the same word means goat-demons in Leviticus 17:7), iyyim and tannim (jackals). The library's Greek renders se'irim as "demons" (Giguet: "les démons y danseront") and tannim as "dragons"; the Vulgate has pilosi ("hairy ones") and dracones. The translations show how ancient readers heard the haunted ruin.

The children of verse 16

"Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes" (13:16) and Psalm 137:9 describe the same atrocity, which Assyrian and other ancient sources also record as a practice of conquest (compare 2 Kings 8:12; Hosea 13:16; Nahum 3:10). In Isaiah 13 the Medes do it to Babylon, as Babylon had done to others. The text presents it as the horror of judgment, not as a commanded act. Readers have long struggled with God being described as the one who stirs up such an army.