I Am, and There Is No One Besides Me
13 He will stretch out his hand against the north, destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, as dry as the wilderness. 14 Herds will lie down in the middle of her, all kinds of animals. Both the pelican and the porcupine will lodge in its capitals. Their calls will echo through the windows. Desolation will be in the thresholds, for he has laid bare the cedar beams. 15 This is the joyous city that lived carelessly, that said in her heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me.” How she has become a desolation, a place for animals to lie down in! Everyone who passes by her will hiss and shake their fists.
The empire that terrified the world is reduced to a ruin where animals bed down, and its epitaph is the sentence it said in its heart.
God stretches out his hand against the north and makes Nineveh dry as the wilderness. The city sat on the Tigris; drought is the least likely ruin imaginable for it, which is the point of choosing that image.
Verse 14 furnishes the ruin. Herds lie down in the middle of her, birds lodge in the column capitals, calls echo through the windows, and the cedar beams lie bare. Nothing here is violent. It is a slow catalogue of a palace becoming habitat, and the detail about the cedar — imported, expensive, the mark of a great building — is left exposed to the weather.
Verse 15 quotes what the city said in her heart: I am, and there is no one besides me. The identical Hebrew is put in Babylon's mouth by another prophet Isaiah 47:8, and it lays claim to the kind of statement only God makes truthfully about himself Isaiah 45:5. The answer is not an argument. It is passers-by hissing and shaking their fists at a field.
settled What this mark means