Isaiah 47:1–15

¹“GO DOWN, SIT in the dust,

Virgin Daughter of Babylon;

sit on the ground without a throne,

Daughter of the Babylonians.

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,

Daughter of the Babylonians;

no more will you be called

queen of kingdoms.

⁶I 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 will continue forever—

the eternal queen!’

But you did not consider these things

or reflect on what might happen.

⁸ “Now then, listen, you wanton creature,

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.’

⁹Both 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.

Here are no coals to warm anyone;

here is no fire to sit by.

¹⁵ That is all they can do for you—

these you have labored with

and trafficked with since childhood.

Each of them goes on in his error;

there is not one that can save you.

Babylon’s Humiliation (47:1–4)

BABYLON WAS THE queen of the world, the mightiest of the mighty, but she will soon meet one mightier than she, who says that she must leave her “throne” and “sit on the ground” (47:1). Although she is beautiful and “delicate,” like a “virgin daughter” of kings, she will be forced to do menial labor (47:2). More than that, she will be sexually humiliated. This language is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe being taken into exile (cf. 20:4) and to refer to nations who have allied themselves with other nations being failed or mistreated by those allies.5

Babylon had been on the mistreating end of that relationship for a long time, but the time is coming when she will experience what she has meted out to others. This introductory stanza is brought to a conclusion with an ejaculation of praise to the One who is bringing all this to pass, “the Holy One of Israel.” He may not have seemed much to great Babylon, but he is “Yahweh of Heaven’s Armies” (NIV “LORD Almighty”), and in any contest for greatness with him, Babylon does not have a chance.

Babylon’s False Pride (47:5–11)

THE BABYLONIANS THOUGHT that they could do whatever they wanted to captive nations (47:6), because there was no one greater than they. They made the fatal error of thinking that they were self-existent and self-perpetuating: “I am, and there is none besides me” (47:8, 10). It never occurred to them that they might be the agents of One infinitely greater than they who will hold them to account for their actions (47:7). But there is such a Person (cf. 43:10; 44:6; 45:5, 21; 46:8), and for Babylon to have tried to usurp his prerogatives was a deadly mistake.

Part of the deadliness of that mistake is complacency. Queen Babylon is so convinced of her ascendancy that she cannot imagine herself as a widow bereft of children (47:8–9). Her complacency robs her of that beneficial self-criticism that asks whether what we are doing may reap bad consequences. Babylon has none of that, so that “wickedness” runs rampant (47:10). Part of that wickedness is the attempt to control the spirit world through magic “spells” and “sorceries” (47:9–11). The Babylonians were intelligent and devoted that intelligence to mastering magical arts, so they are sure that they can ward off any “calamity” that threatens them. They do not reckon with a God who is beyond all magical manipulation, who is complete in himself, and who knows nothing of fate or destiny (cf. 65:11).

Babylon’s Helplessness (47:12–15)

THIS FINAL STANZA expands on the last thought of the previous one. On a sarcastic note, the prophet tells Babylon to go ahead with her magic. Maybe it will work out after all (47:12)! But of course, it is futile. All the energy expended to divine the future and control its events has been wasted (47:13). What the sorcerers have set in motion is like a fire that does no one any good; it will only burn up those who started it (47:14). Babylon has done business with these sorcerers and magicians for years. But in the final crisis, they will abandon the city to go their own way.6

Bridging Contexts

THE BUSINESS OF MAGIC and divination was big business in Babylon. There were classes of priests Contexts whose business was to read the significance for the future of the shape of a sacrificial animal’s entrails. These omens were carefully cataloged and recorded; their official listing ran to more than seventy tablets. When we think of the tremendous effort that went into compiling and categorizing these, we get some idea of what Isaiah is talking about. But along with that work we can only imagine what effort was required to get proficient in the interpretation of the omens and in remembering where in the tablets a given phenomenon was discussed. By comparison, it makes the acquisition of a Ph.D. degree today look a little less daunting. At the same time, one would have to gain great skill in obfuscation and nuancing in order to cover the 51 percent of the time when one’s prognostications would be wrong.

The same kind of incredible effort went into the study of the horoscope. How much time must have been spent staring into the night sky in order to find some coordination between the placement of the stars and current events. Along with that went the effort of cataloging and categorizing all those observations so that they would have some utility for those who would try to make use of them to tell the kings and rulers whether to undertake certain activities. In some ways, they would have been better off if they had not had so much intelligence. They would not have been able to find all the spurious connections that gave them the illusion of being able to control the fates that ruled their lives.

The amazing fact is that the horoscope still is functional today. People who deny that Jesus ever did a miracle will open the newspaper to the horoscope every day. This is nothing other than a continuation of that failed Babylonian wisdom. The organization of the sky is according to the Babylonian system, and the names of the signs of the zodiac are Greek versions of the Babylonian names. How much effort goes into saying something each day that gives the illusion of meaning while being so vague and general that it can cover anything that happens!

What is its attraction? The same attraction that it has had for five thousand years. I can get control of my life by getting a glimpse of what is fated to occur today. God asks me to surrender my life and my future into his hands for his direction, multiplication, and blessing, but we humans would rather not surrender. We would rather apply our formidable intelligence to getting control of the world for ourselves.

Contemporary significance

THE STATEMENT THAT Babylon’s wisdom and knowledge misled them has haunting applications to the present. We can think of Germany and Japan, two of the most brilliant and energetic peoples on the earth. Where had their wisdom and knowledge led them in 1945? Into ruin. Think of how much of the world’s resources were consumed in destruction between 1914 and 1945. Think of how many brilliant minds were consumed in finding more efficient ways to kill people. And think of how many brilliant and creative minds were destroyed by the engines of war.

But even in peace, intelligence not surrendered to God can be a terrible curse for the human race. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s maxim “rich in things and poor in soul” continues to define us all too well. Our tremendous intelligence is, as it was for the Babylonians, aimed at making ourselves selfexistent and self-perpetuating. What will cloning mean in a world where researchers have long ago denied any overarching ethical accountability that is incumbent on all people?

In an interview on National Public Radio persons advocating fetal-tissue research admitted that there are ethical issues but focused completely on the political tactics that would be necessary to get federal funding for the research. Not once did they discuss the ethics of killing the weak in order to indefinitely preserve the life of the strong.7 Their argument was simply that since we now have the technology do this sort of thing, we must. Our wisdom and knowledge have misled us. How long will it be before the Redeemer, whose name is Yahweh of Heaven’s Armies, the Holy One of Israel, tells us to get off our throne and to take our place in the dust?

1. In agreement with Motyer, Prophecy of Isaiah, 371, and differing from my earlier proposal in Isaiah 40–66, 17, 190, where I saw ch. 47 as the conclusion of the unit beginning at 44:23.

2. See, e.g., Westermann, Isaiah 40–66, 188–89.

3. The NIV essentially agrees with this structure, although it has divided vv. 5–11 into vv. 5–7 and vv. 8–11. Motyer, Prophecy of Isaiah, 371, argues for vv. 1–7, 8–11, 12–15. Childs, Isaiah, 365–66, noting considerable variation among scholars, cautiously decides for the structure advocated here.

4. For a study of the similarities and dissimilarities between chs. 14 and 47, see Chris Franke, “The Function of the Oracles against Babylon in Isaiah 14 and 47” (SBLSP 32; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 250–59.

5. Isa. 57:8; Lam. 1:8; Ezek. 16:37; Mic. 1:11; Nah. 3:5.

6. Lit., “stray off to his own region”—probably the equivalent of the modern “every man for himself.”

7. The interview occurred on Morning Edition, June 22, 2001.