Isaiah Chapter 13 verse 19 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 19. - Babylon, the glory of kingdoms. The "glory" of Babylon consisted: 1. In her antiquity. She had been the head of a great empire long before Assyria rose to power. 2. In her origination of literature, architecture, and the other arts, which all passed from her to Assyria, and thence to the other nations of Asia. 3. In her magnificence and the magnificence of her kings, which provoked the admiration of the Assyrians themselves ('Records of the Past,' vol. 9. p. 15). As time went on, she grew in wealth and splendor. Perhaps it was granted to Isaiah to see her in ecstatic vision, not merely such as she was in the time of Sargon under Merodach-Baladan, but such as she became under Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest of her kings, who raised her to the highest pitch or glory and eminence. The beauty of the Chaldees' excellency. The Kaldi appear to have been originally one of the many tribes by which Babylonia was peopled at an early date, From the expression, "Ur of the Chaldees," which occurs more than once in Genesis (Genesis 11:28, 31), we may gather that they were inhabitants of the more southern part of the country, near the coast. The same conclusion may be drawn from the Assyrian inscriptions, especially those of Shalmaneser II. - the Black Obelisk king. The term never became a general name for the Babylonian people among themselves or among the Assyrians; but, somehow-or other, it was accepted in that sense by the Jews, and is so used, not only by Isaiah, but also by the writers of Kings and Chronicles, by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Habakkuk. As when God overthrew Sodom. Equally sudden and complete as that destruction.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(19) And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms.--The words paint the impression which the great city, even in Isaiah's time, made upon all who saw it. So Nebuchadnezzar, though his work was mainly that of a restorer, exulted in his pride in the greatness of the city of which he claimed to be the builder (Daniel 4:30). So Herodotus (i. 178) describes it as the most famous and the strongest of all the cities of Assyria, adorned beyond any other city on which his eyes had ever looked. (Compare the descriptive notices in Jeremiah 51:41, and the constantly recurring epithet of "gold-abounding Babylon" in the Persians of ?schylus.)As when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.--The phrase had clearly become proverbial, as in Isaiah 1:9; Jeremiah 50:40; Deuteronomy 29:23, carrying the picture of desolation to its highest point. The present state of the site of Babylon corresponds literally to the prediction. It is "a naked and hideous waste" (Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 484). The work was, however, accomplished by slow degrees, and was not, like the destruction of Nineveh, the result of a single overthrow. Darius dismantled its walls, Xerxes pulled down the Temple of Belus. Alexander contemplated its restoration, but his designs were frustrated by his early death. Susa and Ecbatana, Seleucia and Antioch, Ctesiphon and Bagdad, became successively the centres of commerce and of government. By the time of Strabo (B.C. 20) the work was accomplished, and "the vast city" had become a "vast desolation" (Strabo, xvi. 15). At no time within the range of Old Testament literature did such a consummation come within the range of the forecast which judges of the future by an induction from the past. . . .