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The Fall of Babylon (the old, not the new)


Since Babylon was the capitol of the Chaldean Empire, and since the the inhabitants of Jerusalem were resettled near there when they had been taken into exile after the Chaldeans destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, it's not surprising that there were a number of biblical prophecies of its destruction.

Isaiah 13 is a prophecy against Babylon, and Isaiah 14 is a taunt against the king of Babylon. Isaiah 13 says that God is stirring up the Medes against Babylon and says (v. 18):

Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children.

Verse 19 adds that Babylon will be like Sodom and Gomorrah; and v. 20 says that the desolation will be so complete that not shepherds wouldn't even pasture their sheep there. So Isaiah 13 predicts that Babylon will be destroyed and that the agents of its destruction will be the Medes.

Jeremiah 51 also predicts the downfall of Babylon in similar terms (v. 11b):

The LORD has stirred up the spirit of the kings o the Medes, because his purpose concerning Babylon is to destroy it, for that is the vengeance of the LORD, the vengeance for his temple.

The grand finale of all this is the tale in Daniel 5 of the hand writing on the wall. Here we have , as in the story of Sardanapalus, the grand fable of corruption and arrogance followed by retribution and destruction. Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, gives a great feast and orders the vessels of silver and gold looted from the Jerusalem temple to be used to serve his guests.

 No sooner has he committed this sacrilege then the fingers of a man's hand materialize out of thin air and write the words: MENE, MANE, TEKEL and PARSIN on the wall. After all his astrologers and seers are unable to tell the meaning of these words, Belshazzar summons Daniel, who tells him the words mean, "Weighed, wanting, numbered, finished." The prophet then interprets the message as meaning that God has weighed Belshazars kingdom in the balance, found it wanting and has numbered it's days, which are now finished.The end result of all this is (Dan. 5:30, 31):

That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was slain. And Darius the Mede received his kningdom. being about sixty-two years old.

So, when all these verses, from Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel, are taken together, the Bible says that Babylon will be violently destroyed by the Medes.

Added to these prophecies and the somewhat lurid tale in Daniel 5, is the folklore that has grown up around the fall of Babylon. Not surpirsingly, the story is similar to that of Sardanapalus and the fall of Nineveh. In both tales we have the dissolute, drunken king, arrogantly trusing in his city's defenses. In the story of Nineveh, the flooding of the Tigris washes away the foundations of the walls. They collapse, and the invaders pour in.

In the case of Babylon, the popular history also involves a river. This time it's the Euphrates. In stead of flooding, the river is diverted. This is a complimentary tale to that of Nineveh. Cyrus the Great of Persia diverts the Euphrates from where it normally flows through the city of Babylon, under an arch in its walls. This opens the way for his troops to march in dry-shod where the river had just run, right under the city's walls. The Babylonians are too drunk to bother even putting up a decent watch and are cut down utterly unprepared.

Again, like the fable of the fall of Nineveh, this story is a satisfying moral tale or retribution for tyranny, blasphemy and corruption. Also like the story of Sardanapalus and Nineveh, it is utterly untrue.

Leaving aside for the moment that Daniel was actually written well after the fact, ca. 160 BCE, and as well leaving aside that Isaiah 13, 14 might have been inserted by a later author, none of this happened. There was no such person as "Darius the Mede." It was Persians, not the Medes who captured Babylon. The city was not violently taken and destroyed. There was no clever stratagem involved in its fall. Belshazzar, crown prince and regent, rather than king, was not the dissolute playboy of popular legend, nor was he killed following an evening of revelry and debauchery. Instead he fell on the field of battle.

We know that Babylon was taken easily and without violence. The Babylonians, who looked down on the Chaldeans as upstarts, seem to have seen the Persians as liberators Ancient inscriptions tell us that the army of Cyrus, led by his governor Gobyrus, entered the city without a fight. When Cyrus entered Babylon, green twigs were scattered in front of him and he imposed peace on the city (ANET 306 - 307). On what is called the "Cyrus Cylinder" (ANET 315 - 316) Cyrus himself says:

When I entered Babylon as a friend and established the seat of the government in the palace of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk [patron deity of Babylon], the great lord, induced the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon to love me . . . .

This is a far different picture than that portrayed by Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel. Though, following a later revolt, the Persians did tear down the city's walls, Babylon was still an important enough city for Alexander the Great to consider making it his capitol. After that young conqueror died, one of his generals, Seleucus, built his own capitol near Babylon. At that point the city began to decay, finally being utterly ecclipsed when the Abbasid caliphs built the city of Bhagdad in the eighth cenury CE.

Babylon eventually did become a ruin, but that would appear to be the eventual fate of most cities. It certainly did not die the violent death predicted in the Bible.

Tim
2/7/2009, 5:05 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tim Callahan   Send PM to Tim Callahan
 


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