I Am Raising Up the Chaldeans
5 “Look among the nations, watch, and wonder marvelously; for I am working a work in your days which you will not believe though it is told you. 6 For, behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation who march through the width of the earth, to possess dwelling places that are not theirs. 7 They are feared and dreaded. Their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves. 8 Their horses also are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves. Their horsemen press proudly on. Yes, their horsemen come from afar. They fly as an eagle that hurries to devour. 9 All of them come for violence. Their hordes face forward. They gather prisoners like sand. 10 Yes, they scoff at kings, and princes are a derision to them. They laugh at every stronghold, for they build up an earthen ramp and take it. 11 Then they sweep by like the wind and go on. They are indeed guilty, whose strength is their god.”
God answers that he is already acting — and the answer is worse than the silence had been.
Look among the nations, watch, and wonder. God's reply begins by conceding nothing and promising everything: I am working a work in your days which you will not believe though it is told you.
Then the work is named. I am raising up the Chaldeans — Babylon, a rising power rather than an established one — and the description that follows is admiring in the way a report on a predator is admiring. Horses swifter than leopards, fiercer than evening wolves; horsemen flying like an eagle hurrying to devour; prisoners gathered like sand. They scoff at kings, laugh at fortresses, and build ramps to take them.
Two phrases do the theological work. Their judgment and dignity proceed from themselves — a nation that recognizes no standard above its own. And the last line of the speech: they are guilty, whose strength is their god. God announces his instrument and convicts it in the same breath, which is the seed of everything chapter 2 will say.
settled What this mark means