The Taunt Against the King of Babylon
1 For Yahweh will have compassion on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land. The foreigner will join himself with them, and they will unite with the house of Jacob. 2 The peoples will take them, and bring them to their place. The house of Israel will possess them in Yahweh’s land for servants and for handmaids. They will take as captives those whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors. 3 It will happen in the day that Yahweh will give you rest from your sorrow, from your trouble, and from the hard service in which you were made to serve, 4 that you will take up this parable against the king of Babylon, and say, “How the oppressor has ceased! The golden city has ceased!” 5 Yahweh has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, 6 who struck the peoples in wrath with a continual stroke, who ruled the nations in anger, with a persecution that no one restrained. 7 The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet. They break out in song. 8 Yes, the cypress trees rejoice with you, with the cedars of Lebanon, saying, “Since you are humbled, no lumberjack has come up against us.” 9 Sheol from beneath has moved for you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the departed spirits for you, even all the rulers of the earth. It has raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. 10 They all will answer and ask you, “Have you also become as weak as we are? Have you become like us?” 11 Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, with the sound of your stringed instruments. Maggots are spread out under you, and worms cover you.
A funeral song sung by the earth, the trees and the dead, for a man who never let anyone rest.
For Yahweh will have compassion on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land. The foreigner will join himself with them, and they will unite with the house of Jacob.
The oracle against Babylon opens with a promise to Israel, and the first thing said about the restored nation is that outsiders attach themselves to it.
3 It will happen in the day that Yahweh will give you rest from your sorrow, from your trouble, and from the hard service in which you were made to serve, 4 that you will take up this parable against the king of Babylon, and say, “How the oppressor has ceased! The golden city has ceased!”
The song that follows is dated: it is to be sung after the deliverance, by people who have been slaves. That setting governs everything in it.
that you will take up this parable against the king of Babylon, and say, “How the oppressor has ceased! The golden city has ceased!”
The form is a funeral dirge, and it is being used to celebrate. The genre carries its own irony — the meter of mourning, applied to a death nobody regrets.
5 Yahweh has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, 6 who struck the peoples in wrath with a continual stroke, who ruled the nations in anger, with a persecution that no one restrained.
The charge in one sentence, and its worst word is continual. What made this rule intolerable was not its cruelty at intervals but that it never let up, and that nobody could stop it.
The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet. They break out in song.
The rest promised to Israel in verse three has become the condition of the planet.
Yes, the cypress trees rejoice with you, with the cedars of Lebanon, saying, “Since you are humbled, no lumberjack has come up against us.”
The trees are glad, and the reason is practical: the timber crews have stopped coming. Empires build, and building means logging, and the forests of Lebanon had been felled for two centuries to make Assyrian and Babylonian palaces. The joke is that the cedars have noticed the peace before the nations have.
Sheol from beneath has moved for you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the departed spirits for you, even all the rulers of the earth. It has raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.
The grave is personified as a household roused to receive a guest, and the kings already there get up off their thrones. It is a taunt-song's imagery, in the vocabulary the audience used, and it is doing what a satire does rather than describing the state of the dead — the same book says elsewhere that the dead don't praise Yah Psalms 115:17 and that in the grave there is no knowledge Ecclesiastes 9:5, and the point here is that the tyrant gets the reception he deserves.
They all will answer and ask you, “Have you also become as weak as we are? Have you become like us?”
The question the dead kings ask, and it is the song's whole verdict.
Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, with the sound of your stringed instruments. Maggots are spread out under you, and worms cover you.
The bedding of the man who had a golden city.
settled What this mark means