The Isaiah Project: Chapter 47, or, Chaldea in the Dust

Hello again,

It's a pleasure to bring you this (ostensibly quite bleak but actually very beautiful) chapter. As always, an essay follows.

1. Get down in the dust and sit there. Maiden, daughter of Babylon: sit on the earth. No more throne for you; daughter of the Chaldeans, they won’t call you dainty and tender anymore.

2. Get millstones and grind out meal. Take off your veil; strip your thighs naked; lift your skirts, cross over the rivers.

3. Your nudity will be laid bare. Even your indecency will be visible — I will have my revenge. I'll let no human intercede.

4. Our redeemer — God of Legions is his name, Israel’s Sacred One:

5. Sit silent and go into the pitch darkness, daughter of the Chaldeans: they won’t call you the royal conqueress anymore.

6. I seethed with anger at my people, my inheritance — I degraded it and gave it into your hand. You showed them no mercy — you loaded the mighty weight of a massive yoke onto their old age.

7. You said, ‘for all time, I will be conqueress.’ You didn’t take these things to heart, didn’t remember what comes after.

8. So now hear this, you hedonist — you who sit in self-assurance, and say in your heart, ‘it’s me, and nobody else — I won’t sit in widowhood or know grief.’

9. These two things will come to you in one instant, on the same day: grief and widowhood. They’ll come to you complete, in their entirety, for the enormity of your witchcraft and the multitude of your spells.

10. You were self-assured in your evil; you said, ‘there’s no one around to see me.’ Your wisdom and your knowledge turned you backwards: you said in your heart, ‘it’s me, and nobody else.’

11. Now evil comes to you, and you won't know how to fend it off with magic. Trouble will fall on you, and you won’t be able to slough it off. Obliteration will come over you in an instant, before you realise.

12. Get up then, with those spells of yours, and with the enormity of your witchcraft. You’ve laboured over them since you were young — maybe you can get something out of them! Maybe you’ll win!

13. You’re sick and tired from all your scheming. Let’s see all those stargazers save you, those astronomers and visionaries, those knowledgeable in the monthly cycles — let’s see them save you from what’s coming to you.

14. Look: they’re like straw — fire immolates them; they won’t rescue their own selves from the grasp of the flame. No embers to keep warm for you; no light to sit beside.

15. So will it be with you for those who laboured alongside you — those who did business with you since you were young: each of them will wander off to his own private quarters, and you’ll have no one to save you.

'Among mortals, good fortune is never secure.' So sings the chorus in Euripides' tragedy Orestes (line 340), performed in ancient Athens as the spring of 408 BC prepared to bloom. Athens was a doomed city then, a magnificent but fractious cultural epicentre whose brief efflorescence would soon be needlessly smothered as a result of over-ambitious imperial posturing and the consequently disastrous Peloponnesian War. Euripides knew what he was talking about: at the dizzy height of its sudden ascent to world prominence, Athens seemed unbeatable -- eternal. But in fact its flourishing lasted less than 100 years.

'In a moment of prosperity I said, "I shall never be moved"' (Psalm 30:6). The authors of the Hebrew Bible, too, were familiar with that moment in the flush of success when a man says to himself, 'I've made it now for good.' What Christians call the Old Testament is in fact a compendiously vast account of empires rising and falling, God's people no less than the rest: the ancient Jews were granted a mighty kingdom by God, and for a time they felt sure that the line of David would never fall from Jerusalem.

The prophecy of Isaiah is the story of how the Israelites lost sight of that birthright and became cocky, how they forgot the God who gave them everything and were driven from Jerusalem by Babylonian conquerors. Now, in this chapter, Isaiah looks at Babylon itself (and its subsidiary, Chaldea) in its moment of triumph over the Jews. Ruefully, Isaiah warns: Babylon, too, will fall.

'Get down in the dust and sit there' is an extraordinary thing for a conquered people to say to the mighty leaders of its captor nation (verse 1). But Isaiah is confident that the 'scheming' and 'witchcraft' of the Babylonian clerisy will come to nothing: 'obliteration will come over you in an instant,' he says (verse 11).

This chapter rings with the hard-won wisdom of a people that has learned a terrible truth: no human contrivance is enough to stave off the death of a person or a nation. It's easy for Babylon and Chaldea to convince themselves that their system is different, their gods will accept their spells and their offerings and grant them prosperity forever. But Isaiah knows better: he has seen what comes of geopolitical intrigues and the worship of idols. Soon Babylon will meet its match in the upstart kingdom of Persia and the conquering king known as Cyrus.

Persia itself, though the Bible doesn't say so, would go on to be shockingly rebuffed at the height of its power by a tiny coalition of Greek city-states. Foremost among those city-states was Athens, whose victory over the Persians would catalyze the spectacular moment of improbable brilliance which burned brightly until its devastating end in the Peloponnesian War. 'Among mortals, good fortune is never secure.' Indeed not.

What are we to make of this roiling morass of decay and impermanence? Those who have been with the Isaiah Project from the beginning will recall that Isaiah issued much the same warning to Jerusalem in Chapter 3 as he does now to Babylon in Chapter 47. But there is this one difference, to which Isaiah hints elsewhere: when Babylon falls, it will find in its very midst a people who knows what it is to be conquered and lose all hope. The exiled Jews learned how true it is that every city, even the city of God, can fall.

This could have taught them to despair. Instead it taught them that God does not depend on the illusory permanence of human institutions. He goes with the vanquished into exile, stands among the homeless vagabonds after they have gone from riches to rags and says, 'now you are ready to meet me.' When everything Babylon trusts in fails at last, then perhaps they will be ready to meet the God who has carried the Jews to the edge of all human despair and past it, who does not die when a city falls but lives when a nation has lost all other hope. 'Get down in the dust and sit there': it is from dust that God makes life.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer