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47. Fall of Babylon

¹ “Go down, sit in the dust,
   Virgin Daughter Babylon;
sit on the ground without a throne,
   queen city of the Babylonians. Or Chaldeans; also in verse 5
No more will you be called
   tender or delicate.
² Take millstones and grind flour;
   take off your veil.
Lift up your skirts, bare your legs,
   and wade through the streams.
³ Your nakedness will be exposed
   and your shame uncovered.
I will take vengeance;
   I will spare no one.”

⁴ Our Redeemer—the LORD Almighty is his name—
is the Holy One of Israel.

    ⁵ “Sit in silence, go into darkness,
   queen city of the Babylonians;
no more will you be called
   queen of kingdoms.
⁶ I was angry with my people
   and desecrated my inheritance;
I gave them into your hand,
   and you showed them no mercy.
Even on the aged
   you laid a very heavy yoke.
⁷ You said, ‘I am forever—
   the eternal queen!’
But you did not consider these things
   or reflect on what might happen.

    ⁸ “Now then, listen, you lover of pleasure,
   lounging in your security
and saying to yourself,
   ‘I am, and there is none besides me.
I will never be a widow
   or suffer the loss of children.’
⁹ Both of these will overtake you
   in a moment, on a single day:
   loss of children and widowhood.
They will come upon you in full measure,
   in spite of your many sorceries
   and all your potent spells.
¹⁰ You have trusted in your wickedness
   and have said, ‘No one sees me.’
Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you
   when you say to yourself,
   ‘I am, and there is none besides me.’
¹¹ Disaster will come upon you,
   and you will not know how to conjure it away.
A calamity will fall upon you
   that you cannot ward off with a ransom;
a catastrophe you cannot foresee
   will suddenly come upon you.

    ¹² “Keep on, then, with your magic spells
   and with your many sorceries,
   which you have labored at since childhood.
Perhaps you will succeed,
   perhaps you will cause terror.
¹³ All the counsel you have received has only worn you out!
   Let your astrologers come forward,
those stargazers who make predictions month by month,
   let them save you from what is coming upon you.
¹⁴ Surely they are like stubble;
   the fire will burn them up.
They cannot even save themselves
   from the power of the flame.
These are not coals for warmth;
   this is not a fire to sit by.
¹⁵ That is all they are to you—
   these you have dealt with
   and labored with since childhood.
All of them go on in their error;
   there is not one that can save you.

9. But those two things shall suddenly come to thee. Because Babylon supposed that she was beyond the reach of all danger, the Prophet threatens against her very sore distress. When she said that she would neither be “a widow” nor “childless,” he declares on the other hand, that both calamities shall come upon her, so that her miserable destitution shall expose her to the utmost contempt.

In their perfection. That is, “completely,” so that in all points, without any exception, she shall be childless. There is also an implied contrast between moderate punishment, some alleviation of which may be expected, and the dreadful vengeance of God, which has no other end than ruin; for, the greater the confidence with which wicked men are elated, the more severely are they punished.

For the multitude of thy divinations. Some render this term diviners; but I think that it denotes the act or the vice rather than the persons. Some explain ב (beth) to mean “on account of,” and understand it to express a cause; and in this sense it frequently occurs in Scripture. Yet it might be suitably interpreted, that the Babylonians shall derive no aid or relief from the deceitful skill in divinations of which they boasted so much; and so it might be translated notwithstanding; ²²⁷²²⁷ “Ewald agrees with the English Version and the Vulgate in explaining it to mean propter, ‘on account of,’ and supposing it to be a new specific charge against the Babylonians, by assigning a new cause for their destruction, namely, their cultivation of the occult arts. Gesenius and the other recent writers follow Calvin and Vitringa in making it mean notwithstanding, as in Isaiah 5:25, and Numbers 14:11. There is then no new charge or reason assigned, but a simple declaration of the insufficiency of superstitious arts to save them. But a better course than either is to give the particle in its proper sense of in or in the, midst of, which suggests both the other ideas, but expresses more, namely, that they should perish in the very act of using these unlawful and unprofitable means of preservation.” — Alexander. as if he had said, “The abundance of divinations or auguries shall not prevent these things from happening to Babylon.” ²²⁸²²⁸ “Nonobstant la multitude des derins et augures.” “Notwithstanding the multitude of divinations and auguries.” He ridicules the confidence which they placed in their useless auguries, by which they thought that they foresaw future events; but, as we shall shortly afterwards dwell more largely on this point, I readily admit that it is here reckoned to be one of the causes of the vengeance inflicted on them, that, in consequence of trusting to such delusions, they dreaded nothing. ²²⁹²²⁹ “Ils ont defie tous dangers.” “They defied all dangers.”