PS in answer to your question, I would say that it is the Medes and Persians.
Hi Spud,
To get back to Isaiah 13:3 and the identity of ‘my consecrated ones, my mighty men my proudly exulting ones’ whom the Lord has Himself commanded and summoned to execute His anger.
My preferred view is that Isaiah actually had the Assyrian army in mind here. This is a complex issue and I do not have all the historical facts readily available at my fingertips but one or two comments in support.
The Assyrians were the dominant power in Isaiah’s day. During his lifetime they had taken the northern kingdom into exile in 722BC and had also besieged Jerusalem ~700BC during the reign of Hezekiah. But Jerusalem was miraculously delivered in accordance with the word given by the Lord to Isaiah.
Babylon at that time was still in Chaldean hands and even then was marked as a centre of occult and evil practices which were an abomination to the Lord. Also the Assyrians regarded Babylon as territory which belonged to them. In 698BC Babylon finally fell to the Assyrians and the city was sacked with much loss of and destruction. I think this was the initial event in the total fulfilment of the prophecy. Interesting that Babylon was subsequently rebuilt by Sennacherib’s son, while it was under Nebuchadnezzar that it reached its full glory.
We do, of course find the Medes mentioned in verse 17 and there are two possible ways of understanding this. First Isaiah says that the Lord is going to stir up the Medes against
them. By ‘them’ Isaiah might well mean the Assyrians themselves who certainly deserved God’s wrath for their treatment and attacks on His people. And indeed the Assyrian empire was finally destroyed by a Chaldean-Median coalition in 612–609 BC, an event which paved the way for the rise of the Chaldeans.
Second it is also possible that Isaiah had the Chaldeans in mind and their conquest of Babylon in 539 BC when he talks of the ‘them’. In which event this is another of those prophecies where we need to recognise a two stages fulfilment, the first covering verses 1-16 and the second verses 17-22. I have no strong preference either way.
My main problem with associating the whole of Isaiah 13 solely with the Medes and Persians is that the city structure of Babylon was left virtually untouched by the fall to the Medes and Persians, in contrast to the damage wrought by the Assyrians. True there would have been considerable looting and pillaging but there was little damage to the essential structure of the city. As you are probably aware Babylon fell virtually without a ‘shot being fired’ and the Medes simply moved in and established it as their headquarters.
It is worth noting that in verses 17-19 the prophesied events are directly attributed to the Medes as illustrated by terms such as, ‘who will not value silver’ or ‘their bows will mow down’ or again ‘they will have no compassion’. But from verse 19 on when we starting moving into the final demise of Babylon there is no direct reference to the Medes. Babylon simply becomes a wasteland.
Which is exactly what happened. After the Medes and Persians the Greeks moved in. Indeed Alexander the Great died there. After his death the Seleucid kings made it their headquarters. It was only during this period that the Seleucid kings eventually built a new capital, Seleucia, to the east on the Tigris River resulting in a migration of the population away from Babylon. And given the scarcity of building materials in the desert, many of the structures of Babylon were broken down and the cut stone etc. transported to Seleucia for use there. And over time Babylon decayed to a ruin, uninhabited, a place where only desert creatures were to be found, the owl and the ostrich, goats, hyenas and jackals, exactly as prophesied. And to date it has never been rebuilt. Altogether a marvellous prophecy fulfilled in history.
Enjoy your day, Dave
