Isaiah3chapter 3

The list of who gets removed is a list of who holds a city together: the soldier, the judge, the prophet, the elder, the officer, the skilled craftsman, and the man who knows how to speak. That was not a poetic list. Assyrian policy in a conquered land was to deport exactly those people — the officers, the scribes, the smiths, the artisans — because a population without its leadership and its metalworkers cannot organize a revolt or make a weapon.

Then comes the picture of what is left: children in charge, neighbors bullying neighbors, and a man grabbed by his relatives and pushed into leadership because he still owns a cloak. In a famine-struck town a coat really was a mark of remaining wealth, since the outer cloak was a poor man's whole estate and his blanket at night.

The jewelry inventory is an excavated wardrobe. Ankle chains that jingled, headbands, crescent-shaped moon amulets, ear pendants, bracelets, veils, headdresses, ankle chains, sashes, perfume bottles, charms, signet rings, nose rings, festival robes, capes, purses, hand mirrors of polished bronze, fine linen shifts, turbans, and shawls. Nearly every item on that list has turned up in Iron Age digs in the land, including the bronze mirrors and the crescent amulets, which were worn partly for luck.

The reversals at the end are the marks of a deportee. Perfume replaced by the stench of a march, a sash replaced by a rope, styled hair replaced by a shaved head — captives were routinely shorn — and a fine robe replaced by sackcloth, the coarse dark goat-hair cloth of mourners.