Isaiah: Chapters 13 to 19

Here is the previous chunk.  Now for this chunk:

CHAPTER 13

This is a prophecy of Babylon.  My Bible’s handy footnotes tell me that this is a red flag.  Around the time that Isaiah was stomping around, Babylon wasn’t any kind of power.  This is likely a prophecy from someone later on working in the Isaiah mold (part of the “Isaiah school” as Biblical scholars sometimes call it) and then postdated back to Isaiah when all the various prophecies were assembled into one.  Later in the prophecy, he mentions Medes instead of Persia, so the story likely comes from before 550 BC.

Anyhow, it’s a clear prophecy of doom, doom, and more doom.  For a while I thought it was a prophecy of the doom of the Hebrew with Babylon acting as God’s instrument.  (The prophecy is more about a general sense than a clear explanation of who is doing it).  But near the end, it becomes clear that the prophecy is OF the doom of Babylon, not doom BY Babylon.  The people of Medes will achieve it and destroy the Babylonians.  Babylon will become the new Sodom and Gomorrah. 

CHAPTER 14

And once Babylon has been destroyed, then it will be time for the Jews to restore Israel.  That’s the sunny side – the restoration after the purification. 

While it’s an upbeat chapter as far as it goes for the Jews, it’s a different kind of upbeat chapter.  The heart of it is the “Taunt-song” against Babylon. Yes, a taunt song.  It’s basically a conga line over the grave of Babylon.  It wasn’t nearly as harsh as I was expecting when I saw the Bible call it a “taunt-song” but it isn’t very sympathetic.

Then we get a bit on Assyria, which is really out of place given that Assyria is before Babylon.  God says for Assyria – and I really need to go in poetry format for this, because it sounds like song lyric:

As I have resolved

So shall it be

As I have planned

So shall it stand.

It’s rather basic, but I just love how it sounds.  It comes off like the beginning of a boastful rap song or something, doesn’t it? 

We get God tells Assyria to watch it, and then a bit telling the Philistines to watch it.  This is weird – it’s going back in time.  Most of the Bible goes chronologically, but that’s done when you get to the prophets.

CHAPTER 15

This is a prophecy of the destruction of Moab.  It’s well written as these things go, but it suffers from a fatal flaw.  It is full of all these proper nouns of places and peoples that are entirely unfamiliar to the modern ear.  So you don’t really know what the hell is going on.

CHAPTER 16

This is more about why Moab is doomed.  I’m not sure why it’s been broken up into two chapters. Chapter 15 is nine verses long, and this one is just 14 verses long.  Does it really need to be two chapters?

There is some nice imagery at times, most notably: “Send them forth, hugging the earth like reptiles.”  Yeah, those people of Moab are so doomed.

CHAPTER 17

Well, now that we’ve gone over the dooming of Moab, time for some new peoples to curse.  This chapter is about the doom of Damascus.  Isaiah says, “See, Damascus shall cease to be a city, and become a pile of ruins.”  2,500-plus years later, that still hasn’t happened.  To be fair, there is no time stamp on these things.  It could still happen any century now.

CHAPTER 18

Time to curse Ethiopia.  Wait – Ethiopia?  These guys barely appear in the Bible at all.  Why do they merit a cursing?  That’s never made clear, we’re just told that they are, “a people dreaded near and far.”  That’s said about them at the outset and noted again at the end, so I guess it matters.

As near as I can tell, this related to international diplomacy around the time, with Ethiopia siding with Egypt in some dispute that no longer matters.  So the issue here is anything but timeless.  We don’t even get much of a curse.  Not only is the chapter a mere seven verses long, but the first five verses are prologue.  It’s like Isaiah is more interested in describing what the weather will be like when they’re cursed than anything.  The curse itself is just one verse long: “They shall all be left to the mountain vultures and to the beasts of the earth.”  As curses go, that’s mild stuff.  Then again, the Hebrew have virtually no contact with them, so it’s hard to work up any scorn.  They are cursed by proxy because of who they’ve allowed to.

CHAPTER 19

As long as we’re cursing everyone, may as well curse Egypt, that most traditional enemy of the Hebrew.  The most interesting part is this: “The Lord has prepare among them a spirit of dizziness.  And they have made Egypt stagger in whatever she does, as a drunkard staggers in his vomit.” 

That’s more a prank than a curse.  This is the Lord who inflicted 10 plagues and parted the seas – and did that to the Egyptians.  Now he’ll make them dizzy?  That’s more a pants-ing than a good old-fashioned curse.

But then we get an unexpected conclusion, as Isaiah tells us, “Although the Lord shall smite Egypt severely, he shall heal them, they shall turn to the Lord and he shall be moved by their entreaty and heal them.”  Huh.  Egypt and Israel will come together under the Lord.  Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming at all.

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