Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Sea Come Up Over Babylon
Jeremiah 51:27-58
27 “Set up a standard in the land! Blow the trumpet among the nations! Prepare the nations against her! Call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz! Appoint a marshal against her! Cause the horses to come up as the swarming locusts! · WEB
The city falls while its couriers are still running to tell the king, and the last word on the whole enterprise is that the nations wore themselves out working for a fire.
The muster is called from kingdoms far outside anything Judah dealt with — Ararat, Minni, Ashkenaz, the kings of the Medes — and the picture of the fall itself is a piece of reporting. One runner will run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken on every quarter. The couriers are colliding on their way in. The place has already fallen at every point while the news is still traveling, and the king learns it in fragments from men who have overtaken one another.
The complaint that justifies it is put in Jerusalem's own mouth, and it is physical: He has made me an empty vessel. He has, like a monster, swallowed me up. He has filled his mouth with my delicacies. The reply takes the image literally — God will bring out of Bel's mouth what he has swallowed — so the restitution is described as a disgorging rather than a compensation. What was taken comes back out.
The end comes at a feast. When they are inflamed, I will make their feast, and I will make them drunk, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake up — princes, wise men, governors, deputies and soldiers, all at one table, going from a banquet into a sleep with no morning. And the water imagery that ran through the oracles against Judah returns as the last thing said about the city: The sea has come up on Babylon. She is covered with the multitude of its waves. An inland capital on a river is drowned.
The closing verse steps back from the whole thing and delivers a verdict on empire-building as such. The wide walls are overthrown and the high gates burned, and then: The peoples will labor for vanity, and the nations for the fire; and they will be weary. Everything the ancient world admired most — the greatest walls, the greatest gates, the accumulated work of subject nations — is described as fuel gathered by exhausted men. It is the same judgment the book passed on a king who built himself cedar rooms with unpaid labor Jeremiah 22:13–14, enlarged to the scale of a civilization.
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