BABYLON DESOLATE.

179

price he would employ, shall become more precious than gold, because gold can no longer buy it. Babylon is defenceless, all her foreign auxiliaries are fled, or if anywhere they have made a stand against the enemy, they have been put to the sword. The Medes care not for gold,* but for blood, though it be the blood of boys and infants and if they want gold, they need not take it as ransom, for it is already theirs as plunder: they shall kill and spoil to the uttermost. Babylon shall be as Sodom and Gomorrah (comp. i. 9 ; iii. 9) : it shall be wasted and without inhabitant. The desolation shall be complete. Jehovah had once declared of his own vineyard that he would break down its wall, and lay it waste, and that strange sheep should feed there; but Babylon shall not be even a pasture-ground; the Arab wandering through Mesopotamia and seeking pasture for his flocks and plunder for himself, shall not stay nor let them stay here, but shall leave the palaces and the pavilions to the dances of the satyrs, and the cries of the owls and the hyenas. It is said that at this very day the Bedouin or wandering Arab, has a superstitious fear of passing a single night on the site of Babylon, and that the natives of the country believe it to be inhabited by demons in the form of goats. There seems,

indeed, to have been an ancient belief among the Jews themselves that demons took the form of goats-appeared as satyrs in fact.

The word which most versions and commentators agree with the LXX. in rendering 'demons' or 'satyrs' is used in Leviticus xvii. 7, and 2 Chronicles xi. 15, for demons which the Jews worshipped. It is the ordinary name for the domestic goat, the wild goat being by, but the former cannot be intended here, as it is said that no shepherds shall make their folds there. Some commentators suppose it to mean some kind of monkey in this place. The Egyptians worshipped both goats and mon

* Ye Medes and others who now hear me, I well know that you have not accompanied me in this expedition with a view of acquiring wealth.'-Speech of Cyrus to his Army, Xenoph. Cyrop. v.

† And in their palaces

Where luxury late reign'd, sea-monsters whelp'd,

And stabled.

Paradise Lost, ix. 750.

180 ISAIAH XIV. 1—: -23. THE SONG OF TRIUMPH.

keys, and both would have been naturally supposed to be dancing satyrs. 'Constellations,' p, in verse 10, is the plural of the word by which the Hebrews are believed to have meant the group of stars called 'Orion' by the Greeks, and 'the Giant' by the Arabs. is so used in Job ix. 9; xxxviii. 31; Amos v. 8. Elsewhere it means ‘a fool,' often involving the notion of impiety; and the constellation so named is supposed to have been conceived under the figure of an impious giant, probably Nimrod, bound upon the sky (comp. Job xxxviii. 31). The use of the plural-the Orions—in the passage before us to express 'the greater constellations like Orion,' corresponds with the like idiom in English in such cases.

Out of the destruction of Babylon shall come the deliverance of Israel: the whole captive people shall be called, as by a new election and choice of Jehovah, and restored to their own land, from their hard bondage; and they shall bring their former masters back with them, to be in turn their servants (comp. x. 20; xi. 10—16). The prophet then puts into the mouth of the restored nation a song (comp. xii. 1) of which Lowth is generally thought not to speak with exaggeration when he calls it the finest of its kind extant in any language; and as to which, those who distinguish the styles of different ages of Hebrew literature should explain, upon what known principles the strongly marked and gradual decline of literary power and taste between the times of Isaiah and Ezra could have exhibited such a revival as this ode shows. It is a song

of triumph in the form of a dirge, and therefore involves an under-current of sarcasm or irony. The oppressor and his proud rage have ceased, Jehovah has broken the staff of the tyrant (comp. x. 24-27; xiv. 25), and the whole earth, even to the very fir-trees, is at rest, and breaks into singing. Hell-the unseen world of gloom

THE MOUNT OF ASSEMBLY.

181

to which the grave is the gate--is stirred to receive the new-comer with his pomp and the noise of his viols (comp. v. 12, 14), and the shadowy and giant forms of once famous kings rise from their thrones below to meet their brother, now become weak as they. Israel then

seems to resume the speech, though the transition is indistinctly marked, and contrasts the ambition of him who would have ascended into heaven and to the heights of the heavenly hill, with his actual fate, brought down to hell and to the depths of its pit. The old explanation of the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north,' was, that it referred to Mount Sion and the Temple, and that the cloud (the original is in the singular) was the white cloud of God's presence; the impious boast thus corresponding to that in chapter x. 11, 'Shall I not, as I have done to Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her images?' The Hebrew word is that used habitually for the assembly' or 'congregation' of Israel, while the phrase sides of the north' is that which is employed in reference to Mount Sion in Psalm xlviii. 2; and though I am aware of another explanation of the latter passage, I cannot but think it more probably a known expression descriptive of Sion, and so used, both there and here. I see no anti-climax in such a reading; nor that there is any impropriety in the blending of the heathenish and the Jewish belief on the subject into one image. The modern interpretation, that the reference is to the assembly of the gods in some Meru-mountain in the northern, and therefore highest, realms of an eastern mythology, seems to me far-fetched and foreign to the Hebrew habits of thought: and I conclude that it must have been adopted by great authorities on the supposition that the local traditions which place Sion on the south of Jerusalem, must be preferred to those of the Talmud, which declare it to have been on the north :*-as to which question, see below, on Isaiah xxii. One poetical image suggests or thrusts out another in rapid succession. The king of Babylon-who made the earth to tremble (comp.

'Upon Mount Zion . . . for Zion was in the north of Jerusalem.'-Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Isaiah, xiv. 13, English Translation, p. 71.

182

THE DESTROYER DESTROYED.

He

ii. 21) who destroyed kingdoms and cities, and carried the inhabitants away (compare the description of the king of Assyria and his fall in chapter v. 5—27)—shall not share what just now seemed the low condition of the other monarchs but now presents itself as a glorious repose, when contrasted with his lot-falling by the sword, his body not embalmed but the food of worms, refused a royal sepulchre, and fortunate if he can get so much burial as to be thrown into a pit with the common slain, (comp. x. 4), which shall cover his carcase trodden under foot (comp. v. 25), and be his only grave-clothes. shall be cut off from the main stem of his family and race like a worthless, nay, abominable branch (comp. x. 33). The word branch' is used here as elsewhere in a genealogical sense, and the words are a vehement anticipation of the thought below, the seed of evildoers (comp. i. 4) shall not be named for ever;' where the word 'named' or 'renowned' is the same as in the passage, 'in Isaac shall thy name be called,' and as in Ruth iv. 14, which latter compare with its context. Jehovah himself will take care to cut off the name and the remnant,' the direct heir and the collateral remainder-man, and the city, like its royal family, shall be exterminated. The thought is the converse of that in chapter iv. 2-6, and the correspondence may be noticed in the argument for authorship from style. The appropriateness of the image of pools of water is evident when we remember that Babylon lay in a low situation, where the land was only kept from the periodical inundations of the Euphrates by constant attention to the canals and ditches. If it were deserted by its inhabitants, it would inevitably become 'pools of water' in a short time :-as is now the case. The expression, 'besom of destruction,' finds a counterpart in the annals of Sargon, where he calls himself the sweeper away of Samaria and of the whole of Beth-Omri.'

But the invasion of Judæa, not the subsequent deportation of its inhabitants (like that which had already begun in the northern tribes of the kingdom of Samaria), might seem the more pressing danger to Isaiah's own countrymen at the time he wrote; therefore he winds up this far

THE PURPOSE OF JEHOVAH.

183

seeing denunciation of the ultimate fates of Babylon and Israel, with a declaration of Jehovah's purpose,-confirmed with an oath, and not to be disannulled,-to break the power of the Assyrians while they were still in his land, on the confines of which they were now hovering, if they had not already entered it; and to free his people from the yoke of tribute and oppression, which they were already feeling the weight of. This is the purpose whieh Jehovah has purposed upon the whole earth, and which he will execute with a hand that none shall turn back. As these last four verses are held to be from the hand of Isaiah by those who deny to him, the authorship of the previous part of the prophecy, it is worth while to notice their connection both with those passages (xiii. 1-13) which describe the destruction of the whole earth in this day of Jehovah, and with those (xiv. 3-6) which predict the deliverance of Israel from their hard bondage in which they work under the continual stroke of the oppressor.