Foreword: Isaiah 21
Isaiah envisions final fall of Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar.
Though Assyria was centred in Nineveh it used Babylon to house its captured prisoners. It took the captive Jews from Samaria to Babylon when General Tiglath-Pileser captured Israel and placed Judah under tribute. This was in the time of Judah’s wicked King Ahaz.
One hundred and twenty years later the Chaldean King, Nebuchadnezzar would destroy all trace of the southern Kingdom of Judah, sacking Jerusalem in the process and taking captives to Babylon too, the jewel of the East.
He would abduct its citizenry in stages, Daniel being among those of the first captivity, whilst Jerusalem still stood. About a decade later the prophet Ezekiel would be in another batch of captives sent to Babylon. The prophet Jeremiah, who succeeded Isaiah, would remain in Jerusalem to the end, and was treated favourably by Nebuchadnezzar’s General and allowed to stay in the devastated ruins of the city. Both these prophets predicted the fall of Babylon:-
1. to the Assyrians at first;
2. to the Chaldean Empire later;
3. to the Medo-Persian army led by Darius for Cyrus the Great;
4. and finally to Alexander the Great, of the rising Greek Empire who would leave Babylon in ruins fifty miles south of current day Baghdad, where it can still be viewed today.
Of interest also are Isaiah’s allusions and predictions of the First Advent of Christ when Jerusalem was under the reign of the Roman Empire that succeeded the Greek Empire’s control of Palestine.
It is important that the reader acquaints himself with the historical sequence of four empires to understand the eighteen Books of the Prophets:
1. Syria,
2. Assyria,
3. Chaldea,
4. Medo-Persian.
It is also helpful to remember the two empires that succeeded these four:
5. The Greek Empire under Alexander the Great (favourable to Jews)
6. The Roman Empire under the Caesars.
7. In grasping these six historic eras and their protagonists one can appreciate more the prophets’ predictions of Christ’s First Advent during Roman times and better fathom the rather indirect poetic references and allusions to different regions and countries under the merciless:-
a. attack upon the two Jewish kingdoms;
b. attack upon one or another anti-Semitic hostile nation chosen by God to humble the Jews into repentance;
c. attack upon Syria by Assyria;
d. attacks upon Israel of Samaria by Assyria;
e. attacks upon Jerusalem (Judah) by one or other of the empires, including other nearby neighbouring peoples:
i. Moab
ii. Egypt,
iii. Ethiopia,
iv. Idumea (Mt. Seir/Seir)-Esau’s descendants;
v. Samaria;
Yet there are two more dimensions to be necessarily understood within the writings of the Prophets:-
8. The prophesied return to the Land of scattered Jews (Diaspora):
a. led by Nehemiah and Ezra by permission of Persian Kings;
b. encouraged by the Greeks who also ordered preservation of the Hebrew Old Testament into the Greek Septuagint (LXX) by appointment of 72 Hebrew translators of the literati;
c. led by a trickle of European Jews to migrate to Palestine early in the 19th C;
d. encouraged by the British between 1917 and 1944 after General Allenby took Jerusalem and Palestine away from Turkish Muslim control;
e. encouraged by the USA (5/1948 onwards) who arranged massive global air armadas of returning Jewish refugees from anti-Semitic states after the 1948 State of Israel’s Independence;
(* a considerable number settled in New York)
f. to be drawn back to the Land after the great apocalyptic battle of the northern alliance (Gog and Magog) for control of Jerusalem, when Christ will descend to the Mount of Olives to rule and reign over the nations at the end of the end times in which we live.
All of the above is paramount to understand the messages of the sixteen Prophets in relation to the rise and fall of the Israelite divided kingdoms after the death of Solomon.
Judah in the south had its capital Jerusalem, and Israel to the north had Samaria, but merely a place where the royal seat was situated. Jeroboam in the past had at first rejected Shechem as unfortified chose Tirzah instead.
Later King Omri built a fortress in Samaria, and Ahab had his palace there. Though only forty miles square Samaria was occupied by all ten rebel tribes of Israel. Jeroboam had set up Dan in the north and Bethel in the south as the two religious centres for the worship of his golden calf. Bethel, however, was only twelve miles north of Jerusalem.
Ancient Babylon successively came under the control of Assyria, Chaldea, Persia, and Greece before being razed to the ground by the latter. Awareness of the above information on the one hand; and on the other hand grasping the timeline of both Israel and Judah’s demise, the reader will then be able to comprehend the gist of the three Major Prophets, and the thirteen Minor Prophets.
The fall of Babylon in Isaiah can either mean the defeat of the Assyrians, or the Chaldeans depending upon the context. In Isaiah the context usually points to Israel’s nemesis: Assyria.
This twenty first chapter offers certain geographic clues that point to the imminent defeat of the Assyrians whose capital was Nineveh, but they used a puppet king to rule Babylon where captives from many nations were held
