Isaiah13chapter 13

In Isaiah's lifetime Babylon was not an empire. It was an ancient, proud city under Assyrian control, forever revolting and being put down. That is exactly why critics argue this oracle was written much later, after Babylon actually ruled; the traditional view, held here, is that naming a future destroyer generations in advance is the entire point of a prophecy — and Isaiah's God will make that argument himself in chapter 41.

The mustering scene is an army being raised the ordinary way: a banner lifted on a bare hill so units could see where to gather, a shout, a hand waved to bring them through the gates. The Medes named as the attackers were a highland people north-east of Babylon, and in 539 BC it was a Medo-Persian force under Cyrus that took the city.

The end of Babylon in history was slow, not sudden. Cyrus took it largely intact, and it stayed a working city for centuries before silting up and emptying out. Travelers in later ages found a field of broken brick with jackals in it — which is what the closing verses describe: no Arab pitching a tent there, no shepherd folding a flock, only desert creatures and screech owls in the rubble.

The middle of the chapter is bigger than one city. Stars withholding their light, the sun dark at its rising, the heavens shaken and the earth moved out of its place — that language reaches past any siege. Read in a premillennial frame, the oracle telescopes: the historical fall of a real city stands in the foreground, and behind it the day of the LORD that ends the age.