GM4: The Biblical Passages (Isaiah 13:15-18)

This post is part of the series; God: Merciful? Maniac? Mass-Murderer? (GM4) and belongs to the subthread GM4′s treatment of the Biblical materials

Isaiah 13:15-18

In response to “the idea God is all forgiving” GM4 offers a brief excerpt from the Book of Isaiah 13—a chapter in which the destruction of Babylon, or more precisely the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is prophesied. This prophesy certainly contains some nasty elements, but there’s at least two major issues we need to take into account before trying to draw any conclusions from the text.

First, we want to look at the back-story—a commonly overlooked factor in accounts such as these. It’s all well and good to speak as though the Babylonians were the innocent victims of a divine dummy-spit, but I want to suggest that they had engaged in some pretty despicable behaviour of their own and that this should be taken into account in our assessment of the passage. Second, I want to look at how this prophecy actually unfolded. Very often the Biblical writers indulge in a fair degree of hyperbole (i.e. exaggerated language) and the only way to determine whether this is the case here is to compare the Biblical description with the real-life events they actually portray. I conclude with asking just what we are supposed to do with divine threats (as opposed to divine actions) and how this answers, to some extent, GM4’s appeal; “in what context are such threats justified?”

First, let’s look at the passage GM4 finds problematic;

Everyone who is caught will be stabbed;
everyone who is seized will die by the sword.
Their children will be smashed to pieces before their very eyes;
their houses will be looted
and their wives raped.
Look, I am stirring up the Medes to attack them;
they are not concerned about silver,
nor are they interested in gold
(Isaiah 13:15-18, NET)

I’ll start by mentioning that this is found in “the burden against Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw” (Isa. 13:1) which immediately begs the observation that there is, as always, a back-story to the issue at hand. Here the back-story is the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC which utterly devastated the Kingdom of Judah and her people. The brutality involved was significant, as shown by the narratives in 2 Kings 25:1-21 and 2 Chronicles 36:11-20 and it had deep, abiding impact on the Jewish people. Without understanding either this back-story or the sort of regime that the Neo-Babylonian Empire actually was, it’s hardly possible to give a fair assessment of Isaiah’s prophecy. GM4 is so focused on the fate of the perpetrators of violent injustice, that the victims are passed over altogether. If you happen to be one of those victims, however, the question of whether divine justice is compatible with divine love is one you process entirely differently. I’d urge people to read the two passages cited above and just let the behaviour of the Babylonians sit with you a while before making hasty conclusions about just how justified God may have been in condemning the Neo-Babylonians.

*****

Next, we want to look at the actual behaviour of the Medes in overthrowing the Neo-Babylonian Empire so we can get some feel for just how we are to understand the language in Isaiah 13:15-18. As a broad background, let’s note that the Neo-Babylonian Empire arose after the death of the Assyrian ruler Assurbanipal in 627 BC. Just what happened between this date and the disappearance of the Assyrian empire is uncertain, but we do know that the Babylonians under Nabopolassar asserted independence and, together with the Medes, conquered the Assyrian capital Nineveh in 612 BC. This date marks the effective start of the Neo-Babylonian Empire which lasted until Cyrus II (“Cyrus the Great”) rose in rebellion against his Median overlord Astages in 550 BC so establishing the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire. Cyrus took the title “King of the Medes” (amongst others) and attacked and defeated the Neo-Babylonians in 539 BC. The Neo-Babylonians had lasted a mere 70 years.

What’s particularly significant for our purposes is that Cyrus couldn’t have been more different from the Assyrians or the Neo-Babylonians. He simply wasn’t a sacker of cities and his policies were tolerant in the extreme—even if they did have a decidedly pragmatic edge. Here there are two very important points to be made;

First, there are no—repeat NO—accounts of Cyrus and his army engaging in anything like the atrocities laid down in by Isaiah. Actually, if one compares history with almost any Biblical account of marauding armies, it turns out that the Biblical language is almost always over-blown. Rather than genocide and rape, looting and pillaging, it appears that Cyrus’ army made its entry into Babylon without even an exercise of force. True, they had earlier defeated the Babylonian army in open battle, but when it came to seizing Babylon itself his army made its entrance by blocking the Euphrates and marching through the gap in the city wall through which the river flowed (Herodotus, Histories 1.189-199). The subsequent treatment of Babylon was quite unlike the treatment ordinarily meted out to cities which refused to surrender to attacking armies.[1]

Gardascia, in his article on “Babylon” in the Encyclopaedia Iranica offers an interesting observation;

[Babylon’s] citizens welcomed the first Achaemenids as liberators. Having been deeply offended by the sacrilegious innovations of Nabonidus, they opened its gates in 538 B.C. to Cyrus…With the god Marduk’s blessing, the Persian king sent the foreign gods imported by the fallen ruler back to their home towns.

Which leads us to our second point. Cyrus was popular amongst both Jews and Babylonians because he gave them both something of great importance: religious purity. By returning the Jews to their ancestral land he craftily killed two birds with one stone: foreign religious practices were removed from Babylon—to the great appreciation of the Babylonian people—and the Jews were re-established in their ancestral practices in their homeland—which brought a like level of appreciation.

Here the point in respects of Isaiah 13:15-18 can be made clear—“the burden against Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw” may contain some pretty stark imagery, but if we’re going to deal with events as they actually unfolded, then we actually have here good evidence for divine mercy of precisely the sort GM4 is trying to bring into question.

*****

With all this in mind, let’s turn to directly addressing one of GM4’s specific questions;

Perhaps in your response to this you might like to explain how in any context threatening things like the violent death of children and babies, let alone men and women, how in any context this is congruent with love, and mercy, and perfect morality.

Well, I can suggest three contextual factors one might want to take into account:

First, if the language of the threat is laden with hyperbole (i.e. exaggerated language) intended to create an effect, then that alters the context of the threat significantly. GM4’s problem is that it actually fails to contextualise divine threats in the same way as we would routinely contextualise any threat. The classic “I’ll kill him” is virtually never taken as a serious threat of homicide but rather an expression of anger or frustration depending upon, you guessed it, the context. So it really depends upon what paradigm one wants to work with here: either one takes the threat literally and concludes that God is not loving; or one takes it that God is loving and therefore the threat is not literal. Given events as they actually transpired historically, I think the second has a great deal going for it.

Second, if the persons against whom you make the threat have been engaging in behaviour as bad, or worse, than that contained in the threat, they you have an additional pretty strong contextual element. It’s not as if God simply woke up one morning and decided to engage in wholesale genocide on the Babylonians for the hell of it. I have to say that the practice of ignoring why God might act as he does in the Old Testament is one of the most questionable practices of critics of the Old Testament God. I’m not, let me make clear, saying this dissolves the problem of divine judgment in the Old Testament, but it should be clear that the contextual factors are significant.

Third, remember we’re dealing only with the issue of threats here. Not actions, but threats. And you have to ask what threats are intended to achieve and how they need to be phrases in order to achieve that end? In the Biblical literature a “burden” is directed toward a certain group with the intent that they mediate their behaviour. That being the case, the passage in question really puts the ball in the Babylonian’s court. They could either take the divine threat seriously and remedy their behaviour as per the people of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah;

The people of Nineveh believed God’s message, and from the greatest to the least, they declared a fast and put on burlap to show their sorrow… When God saw what they had done and how they had put a stop to their evil ways, he changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction he had threatened. (Jonah 3:5,10, NLT)

Or they could take their chances. In which case, their situation is analogous to that of the person who is repeatedly warned of the dangers of smoking, drug abuse, drink-driving, unprotected sex, etc. If such a person continues with such actions and falls victim to the predicted outcomes, then it’s tempting but ultimately futile to try to pass the buck to others.

Of course, in cases such as those just described we regard mentions of possible outcomes as “warnings” rather than “threats” but that shouldn’t cloud the basic point that the ultimate purpose is to move people to modify their behavior. For that reason we certainly don’t emphasize the chances of escaping negative outcomes. Which brings me to my final remark on threats: they are unlikely to achieve the desired end if they don’t in some sense shock those to whom they are directed. That, after all, is the point: to shock people into changing their behavior. Here it’s amusing to think of how the Babylonians might have reacted if the threat had reflected the actual events which transpired: “Repent, or else I’ll enact a largely peaceable regime change, who will deport foreign religious elements and purify your ancestral religion.”

One could, I suppose, offer the obvious rejoinder—that if the threatened events didn’t transpire then God actually lied. To which one can only observe that such a response depends upon precisely the sort of simplistic readings which give rise to the “problem” of divine judgment in the first place.

Summary:

We’ve seen that regardless of what is actually stated in Isaiah 13:15-18 the historical events surrounding the fall of Babylon involved none of the events described in the passage! It appears that, as so often happens in literature of the period (not just the Bible!) the language of conquest in Isaiah 13:15-18 is overblown for dramatic effect. We see this if we focus on events as they actually transpired rather than the rhetoric. As it turns out the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire is far from evidence of divine “mania” or “mass-murder” and can even be taken as evidence of precisely the opposite. We also looked at the one factor that critics of the God of the Old Testament routinely ignore: that the “victims” of divine wrath have often acted in ways which themselves involve precisely the practices which critics claim to deplore. By failing to acknowledge that the “victims” were first perpetrators, they manage to evade the critical point, that divine wrath against perpetrators of injustice is also an expression of divine love toward the victims. We also looked at the implications of taking seriously the fact that the Isaiah passage in question is a threat rather than a description of divine judgment.

Footnotes:

[1] For an overview of the issues involved in siege warfare in this period see chapter 8, “Mesopotamian Siegecraft” in William James Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC: Holy Warriors at the Dawn of History. Warfare and history. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005).

Bibliography:

• Bright, John. A History of Israel. 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1981).
• Cardascia, G., “Babylon,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, Originally Published: December 15, 1988. Last Updated: December 15, 1988. <http://www.iranica.com/articles/babylon-under-the-achaemenids >

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