Isaiah 47 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
Prophecy set in the Babylonian exile, roughly 550 to 539 BC, anticipating the city's defeat
Location
Babylon, the largest and wealthiest city of its day, defended by massive double walls and the Euphrates river
Audience
Judean exiles living under Babylonian rule, hearing that their captor's power has an expiry date
Situation
Babylon is addressed as a pampered queen ordered down from her throne to sit in the dust, grinding grain like a slave woman. She is told that her astrologers and monthly star readers cannot save her from a disaster that will land in a single day.
Key Background
The taunt song, a poem mocking a doomed enemy, was a standard form in the ancient Near East, and this one uses the image of a proud woman stripped of status to describe a captured city. Babylon was the world centre of celestial divination, with trained scribes keeping night by night records of planets and omens to advise the king, so calling those experts useless struck at the empire's prized science. Grinding grain at a hand mill and going barefoot were the marks of the lowest household servant, the exact reversal of a queen's life.
Come down and sit in the dust, virgin of Babylon. Sit on the ground — no throne for you, daughter of the Chaldeans. No one will ever call you soft and again.
Take the and grind flour. Remove your veil, strip off your trailing skirts, bare your legs, wade through rivers.
Your will be exposed, your shame will be uncovered. I will take vengeance, and no one will stand in my way.
Our Yahweh, of is his name, the No Other in
Sit in silence and slip into the darkness, daughter of the Chaldeans. No one will ever call you queen of again.
I was angry with my people; I let my be degraded. I handed them over to you, but you showed them no mercy. Even on the elderly you laid your with crushing weight.
You said, 'I will be forever' — and never any of this to heart, never considered how it would end.
So now hear this, you of luxury, you who sit secure and tell yourself, 'I am the only — there is no like me. I will never sit as a widow or know the loss of children' —
both of these will hit you in a single moment, in one day: loss of children and widowhood. They will come down on you in full force, despite your many sorceries and all your
You felt secure in your wickedness. You said, 'No one sees me.' Your so-called and knowledge led you astray, and you told yourself, 'I am the only one — there is no one like me.'
But disaster will fall on you, and you won't know how to it away. Catastrophe will crash down on you, and you won't be able to it off. Ruin will rush at you suddenly — before you even see it coming.
Go ahead — keep at it with your spells and your many sorceries that you've worked at you were young. Maybe you can still pull it off. Maybe you can scare something away.
You've exhausted yourself with all your consultants. Let them stand up now and save you — those who the heavens, who at the stars, who predict month by month what is about to happen to you.
Look — they are like straw. Fire burns them up. They cannot even save themselves from the power of the flame. This is no to by, no hearth to sit beside.
That's what they are to you — those you've with since your youth. Each one in his own direction. No one can save you.