Isaiah47chapter 47

The opening image is a demotion measured in household work. Grinding grain on a hand mill was the daily labor of the lowest servant in a house — kneeling, pushing a stone back and forth for hours to make one day's flour. Isaiah tells the queen city to come down from the throne, sit in the dust, take the millstones and grind meal. Then: uncover your locks, lift your skirt, uncover the leg, pass over the rivers. That is a deportee's march, wading a ford with skirts hitched up in front of everyone. In that culture, the shame of it was the worst part.

The charge against her is not conquest but cruelty in it. God says he was angry with his people and gave them into her hand, and she showed them no mercy — and on the aged she laid her yoke very heavily. She was the rod, and she enjoyed it.

Her defense is astrology, and the description is exact. Babylon kept enormous archives of celestial omens; professional star-watchers reported what the moon and planets meant, and royal decisions were made on their reports. Isaiah names them as they were classified: the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators who forecast by the new moon. He tells her to stand up with her many enchantments and see whether they can help, and adds the driest line in the book — they cannot deliver themselves from the flame.

The two losses she thought impossible arrive together and on one day: the loss of children and widowhood. She had said in her heart, I am, and there is none besides me; I shall not sit as a widow, nor know the loss of children. When Babylon fell to Cyrus it was in a single night and largely without a fight, and the slow emptying of the city took centuries. Many readers take the total desolation described here, as in chapter 13, to reach past that historic night to a final Babylon at the end of the age.