1. Virgin Daughter of Babylon. Others render this as “maid of Babylon.” The personification of a people or a city as a woman is widespread in the Bible, especially in poetry. The term denoting virginity is worth retaining in translation because humiliating sexual exposure will follow.

Sit on the ground with no throne. Not only is she to be forced to sit in the dust, but now we are reminded that she was formerly seated on a throne as “mistress of kingdoms” (verse 5). This dire evocation of the crushing and stripping of Babylon is integral to this prophet’s vision of the hated Babylonian empire falling to Persia.

2. Take up a hand mill. The once splendid queen is now to perform menial tasks.

Bare your tresses. Many interpreters insist that tsamah here and in the Song of Songs 4 means “veil,” but Chana and Ariel Bloch have persuasively argued in their commentary on the Song that the verb used for “bare,” gali, applies only to body parts, not to items of apparel, and tsamah in Song of Songs 4:1, 3 is part of a catalogue of body parts.

strip your train. Here a different verb is used, ḥasaf, which in fact applies to things worn.

Bare your thigh, cross the rivers. Blenkinsopp observes that she would have to hitch up her robes, thus exposing her thighs, in order to wade across rivers. The implied image is of a woman driven into exile.

3. Your nakedness shall be bared. This is an explicitly sexual term, referring to the pudenda.

no man shall intercede. The Masoretic Text has “I will intercede,” but the appropriate third-person form of the verb with the negative is reflected in the Septuagint.

4. Our Redeemer. This verse may be out of place.

6. I was furious with My people / . . . You showed them no mercy. This verse performs a theological balancing act. God was furious with Israel and punished them by allowing the Babylonians to defeat them, but the Babylonians enacted this historical role mercilessly, tormenting Israel with a heavy yoke, treating even the aged savagely. For this, Babylonia will now suffer severe retribution.

8. bereavement. The Hebrew word has the special sense of being bereaved of children. If Babylonia is personified as a woman, her people are her children.

9. despite your many incantations / and the great power of your spells. The Babylonians were famous for their expertise in soothsaying and divination, which is attested by the many texts of divination and spell casting that have been discovered.

10. But you trusted in your evil. “Evil” here is probably a denigrating summarizing term for all the skills of sorcery and divination (“Your wisdom and your lore”) in which Babylonia placed its trust.

11. You shall never know dawn. The Hebrew says “its dawn,” a feminine suffix with no clear referent. This is best taken as a follow-up to “come into the darkness” (verse 5)—the disaster about to overtake Babylonia is one long night of darkness without a dawn.

12. Stay, pray, with your spells. This is obviously sarcastic, with the introduction of the polite particle naʾ, “pray,” heightening the sarcasm.

13. the sky scanners. This translation adopts the solution for hovrey shamayim proposed by both the New Jewish Publication Society version and Blenkinsopp. It should be noted that the Babylonians were not only astrological diviners but also rather sophisticated astronomers.

14. they have become like straw. “They” here would have to refer either to the astrologers or to the lore they deploy.

This is no coal to warm oneself, / no hearth by which to sit. There is no longer any question of domesticated fire for human benefit; instead, raging flames will consume everything.