Jeremiah51chapter 51

The peoples called up against Babylon are real and identifiable: the kings of the Medes, and the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz — that is Urartu around Lake Van, the Mannaeans of north-western Iran, and the Scythian horsemen, all of them named in Assyrian records of the same centuries. A marshal is appointed and horses are brought up like bristling locusts.

Several lines describe a fall by water and drink. Her broad walls will be levelled and her high gates burned; a drought is called on her waters; the warriors are drunk and sleeping a perpetual sleep; the passages are seized, the marshes burned, and the runners meet each other to tell the king his city is taken from end to end. Herodotus reports that Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC by diverting the Euphrates and marching troops up the drained riverbed while the city was at a festival — a version some historians question, since a Babylonian account has the city surrendering with little fighting, but the drying of the river and a night of drinking are both in this chapter first.

The same idol-workshop argument from chapter 10 is repeated here nearly word for word: images are false and have no breath, while the God who made the earth by his power and stretched out the heavens by his understanding is the portion of Jacob.

The chapter ends with an act. Jeremiah writes all these words in a single scroll and gives it to Seraiah son of Neriah, Baruch's brother, a staff officer travelling to Babylon with King Zedekiah. He is to read it aloud there, tie a stone to it, throw it into the Euphrates, and say: thus shall Babylon sink, to rise no more.