The Locusts Fly Away
14 Draw water for the siege. Strengthen your fortresses. Go into the clay, and tread the mortar. Make the brick kiln strong. 15 There the fire will devour you. The sword will cut you off. It will devour you like the grasshopper. Multiply like grasshoppers. Multiply like the locust. 16 You have increased your merchants more than the stars of the skies. The grasshopper strips and flees away. 17 Your guards are like the locusts, and your officials like the swarms of locusts, which settle on the walls on a cold day, but when the sun appears, they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. 18 Your shepherds slumber, king of Assyria. Your nobles lie down. Your people are scattered on the mountains, and there is no one to gather them. 19 There is no healing your wound, for your injury is fatal. All who hear the report of you clap their hands over you, for who hasn’t felt your endless cruelty?
The last taunt tells Nineveh to prepare thoroughly for a siege she will lose, and ends on the one thing an empire cannot survive: universal relief at its death.
The closing orders are sarcastic and entirely practical. Draw water for the siege, tread the mortar, make the brick kiln strong. It is a competent list, and verse 15 answers it in a sentence: there the fire will devour you.
Then the locusts take the poem, and the image turns on Assyria twice. Her merchants had multiplied beyond the stars, but the grasshopper strips a field and flies — wealth with no loyalty to the place it fed on. Her guards settle on the walls like locusts on a cold day, and when the sun rises they are gone — an administration described as a swarm, impressive while cold and absent by noon. Verse 18 finds the shepherds asleep and the people scattered. The book ends on a wound that will not heal and a sound — everyone who hears the news claps — and the last line asks why, then answers itself: who has not felt your endless cruelty?
settled What this mark means