before them, because they are the ministers of my wrath and indignation. They joyfully labour for my glory, they rejoice in my highness. The honour they have of being under my command, and of being sent to deliver a people that I love, inspires them with ardour and cheerfulness: Behold! they triumph already in a certain assurance of victory. The prophet, a witness in spirit of the orders that are just given, is astonished at the swiftness with which they are executed by the princes and the people. I hear already, he cries out, The noise of a multitude in the mountains, like as of a great people: a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together.* The Lord of hosts mustereth the host of the battle: They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, where the voice of God, their master and sovereign, has reached their ears. But it is not with the sight of a formidable army, nor of the kings of the earth, that I am now struck; it is God himself that I behold; all the rest are but his retinue, and the ministers of his justice. is even the Lord and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land. It A grievous vision is declared unto me: The impious Belshazzar,§ king of Babylon, continues to act impiously; the treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. To put an end to these excesses, go up, thou prince of Persia; go up, O Elam: And thou prince of the Medes, besiege thou Babylon: Besiege, O Media; all the sighing, which she was the cause of, have I made to cease. That wicked city is taken and pillaged; her power is at an end, and my people is delivered. VI. Circumstances relating to the siege and the taking of Babylon, minutely detailed. There is nothing, methinks, better calculated to raise in us a profound reverence for religion, and to give us a great idea of the Deity, than to observe with what exactness he reveals to his prophets the principal circumstances of the besieging and taking of Babylon, not only many years, but several ages, before it happened. 1. We have already seen that the army by which Babylon will be taken, is to consist of Medes and Persians, and to be commanded by Cyrus. 2. The city shall be attacked after a very extraordinary manner, in a way which she did not at all expect: Therefore shall evil come upon thee: thou shalt not know from whence it riseth. She shall be all on a sudden and in an instant overwhelmed with calamities, which she was not able to foresee: Desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know. In a word she shall be taken, as it were This is the sense * Isa. xiii. 4. of the Hebrew words. ↑ Ibid. ver. 5. Isa. xlvii. 11. Ib. xxi. 2. in a net, before she perceiveth that any snares have been laid for her: I have laid a snare for thee, and thou art also taken, O Babylon, and thou wast not aware.* 3. Babylon reckoned the Euphrates alone was sufficient to render her impregnable, and triumphed in her being so advantageously situated and defended by so deep a river: O thou that dwellest upon many waterst it is God himself who points out Babylon under that description. And yet that very river Euphrates shall be the cause of her ruin. Cyrus, by a stratagem (of which there had never been any example before, nor has there been any thing like it since) shall turn the course of that river, shall lay its channel dry, and by that means open himself a passage into the city: I will dry up her sea, and make her springs dry.‡ A drought is upon her waters, and they shall be dried up. Cyrus shall take possession of the quays of the river; and the waters which rendered Babylon inaccessible, shall be dried up, as if they had been consumed by fire: The passages are stopped, and the reeds they have burnt with fire.§ 4. She shall be taken in the night-time, upon a day of feasting and rejoicing, even whilst her inhabitants are at table, and think upon nothing but eating and drinking: In their heat I will make their feasts, and I will make them drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the Lord. It is remarkable, that it is God who does all this, who lays a snare for Babylon : I have laid a snare for thee; who drieth up the waters of the river; I will dry up her sea; and who brings that drunkenness and drowsiness upon her princes: I will make drunk her princes.** 5. The king shall be seized in an instant with an incredible terror and perturbation of mind: My loins are filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it: I was dismayed at the seeing of it; my heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me: The night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me. This is the condition Belshazzar was in, when in the middle of the entertainment he saw a hand come out of the wall, which wrote such characters upon it as none of his diviners could either explain or read; but more especially when Daniel declared to him, that those characters imported the sentence of his death. Then, says the Scripture, the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another. The terror, astonishment, fainting, and trembling of Belshazzar, are here described and expressed in the same manner by the prophet who was an eye-witness of them, as they were by the prophet who foretold them 200 years before. But Isaiah must have had an extraordinary measure of divine illumination, to be able to add, immediately after the description of Belshazzar's consternation, the following words: Prepare the table,* watch in the watch tower, eat, drink. The prophet foresees, that Belshazzar, though dismayed and confounded at first, shall recover his courage and spirits, through the exhortations of his courtiers; but more particularly through the persuasion of the queen, his mother, who represented to him the unreasonableness of being affected with such unmanly fears, and unnecessary alarms; Let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed. They will exhort him therefore to make himself easy, to satisfy himself with giving proper orders, and with the assurance of being advertised of every thing by the vigilance of the sentinels; to order the rest of the supper to be served, as if nothing had happened; and to recall that gaiety and joy, which his excessive fears had banished from the table: Prepare the table, watch in the watch-tower; eat, drink. 6. But at the same time that men are giving their orders, God on his part is likewise giving his; Arise ye princes,‡ and anoint the shield. It is God himself that commands the princes to advance, to take their arms, and to enter boldly into a city drowned in wine, or buried in sleep. 7. Isaiah acquaints us with two material and important circumstances concerning the taking of Babylon. The first is, that the troops with which it is filled, shall not keep their ground, or stand firm any where, neither at the palace nor the citadel, nor any other public place whatsoever; that they shall desert and leave one another, without thinking of any thing but making their escape; that in running away they shall disperse themselves, and take different roads, just as a flock of deer, or of sheep, is dispersed and scattered, when they are affrighted: And it shall be as a chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up. The second circumstance is, that the greatest part of those troops, though they were in the Babylonian service and pay, were not Babylonians; and that they shall return into the provinces from whence they came, without being pursued by the conquerors; because the divine vengeance was chiefly to fall upon the citizens of Babylon: They shall turn every man to his own people,|| and flee every one into his own land. 8. Lastly, not to mention the dreadful slaughter which is to be made of the inhabitants of Babylon, where no mercy will be shown either to old men, women, or children, or even to the child that is still within its mother's womb, as has been already noticed: the last circumstance, I say, which the prophet foretells, is the death of the king himself, whose body is to have no burial, and the entire extinction of the royal family; both which calamities are described in the Scripture, in a manner equally terrible and instructive to all princes. But thou art cast out of thy grave, like an abominable branch. Thou shalt not be joined with them (thy ancestors) in burial, * Isa. xxi. 5. † Dan. v. 10. Isa. xxi. 5. Isa. xiii. 14. || Ibid. because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people. That king is justly forgotten, who has never remembered, that he ought to be the protector and father of his people. He that has lived only to ruin and destroy his country, is unworthy the common privilege of burial. As he has been an enemy to mankind, he ought to have no place amongst them. He was like unto the wild beasts of the field, and like them he shall be buried; and since he had no sentiments of humanity himself, he deserves to meet with no humanity from others. This is the sentence which God himself pronounceth against Belshazzar: and the malediction extends itself to his children, who were looked upon as his associates in the throne, and as the source of a long posterity and succession of kings, and were entertained with nothing by the flattering courtiers, but the pleasing prospects and ideas of their future grandeur. Prepare slaughter for his children,* for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise nor possess the land. For I will rise up against them saith the Lord of hosts, and cut off from Babylon the name and remnant, and son and nephew, saith the Lord. SECTION II. A description of the taking of Babylon. After having seen the predictions of every thing that was to happen to the impious Babylon, it is now time to come to the accomplishment of those prophecies; and to resume our narrative of the taking of that city. As soon as Cyrus saw that the ditch, which they had long worked upon, was finished, he began to think seriously upon the execution of his vast design, which as yet he had communicated to nobody. Providence soon furnished him with as fit an opportunity for this purpose as he could desire. He was informed that in the city a great festival was to be celebrated; and that the Babylonians, on occasion of that solemnity, were accustomed to pass the whole night in drinking and debauchery. Belshazzar himself was more concerned in this public rejoicing than any other, and gave a magnificent entertainment to the chief officers of the kingdom, and the ladies of the court. When flushed with wine, he ordered the gold and silver vessels, which had been taken from the temple of Jerusalem, to be brought out; and as an insult upon the God of Israel, he, his whole court, and all his concubines, drank out of those sacred vessels. God, who was provoked at such insolence and impiety, at the same instant made him sensible who it was that he affronted, by a sudden apparition of a hand, writing certain characters upon the wall. The king, terribly surprised, and frighted at this vision, immediately sent for all his wise men, his diviners, and astrologers, that they might read the writing to † Dan. v. 1-29. * Isa. xiv. 21, 22. him, and explain the meaning of it. But they all came in vain, not one of them being able to expound the matter, or even to read the characters.* It is probably in relation to this occurrence, that Isaiah, after having foretold to Babylon that she shall be overwhelmed with calamities which she did not expect, adds, Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy sorceries. Let now the astrologers, the star gazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee. Is. xlvii. 12, 13. The queen-mother, (Nitocris, a princess of great merit,) coming upon the noise of this great prodigy into the banqueting-room, endeavoured to compose the mind of the king, her son, advising him to send for Daniel, with whose abilities in such matters she was well acquainted, and whom she had always employed in the government of the state. Daniel was therefore immediately sent for, and spoke to the king with a freedom and liberty becoming a prophet. He put him in mind of the dreadful manner in which God had punished the pride of his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar, and the flagrant abuse he made of his power, when he acknowledged no law but his own will, and thought himself empowered to exalt and to abase, to inflict destruction and death wheresoever he would, only because such was his will and pleasure. And thou his son, says he to the king, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knowest all this, but hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou and thy lords, thy wives and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them: and thou hast praised the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God, in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him, and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written,‡ MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.§ This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE, God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it; TEKEL, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting; PERES, thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians. This interpretation, one would think, should have aggravated the consternation of the company; but they found means to dispel their fears, probably upon a persuasion, that the calamity was not denounced as present or immediate, and that time might furnish them with expedients to avert it. This however is certain, that for fear of disturbing the general joy of the present festival, they put off the discussion of serious matters to another time, and sat down again to their banquet, and continued their revellings to a very late hour. The reason why they could not read this sentence was, that it was written in Hebrew letters, which are now called the Samaritan characters, and which the Babylonians did not understand. ↑ Whom he would he slew, and whom he would he kept alive, and whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down. Dan. v. 19. These three words signify, number, weight, division. Or PERES. |