Isaiah 21

The title is a mystery. It’s more literally translated “Burden of the desert of the sea.” Huh? That’s pretty much the response. Some translate it “From the Desert.” The first part of the chapter is about the fall of Babylon (21:9), which was a small kingdom in Isaiah’s day. It was a city surrounded by deserts but was located on fertile land between two large rivers, the Euphrates about 10 miles (16 km) west and the Tigris, 35 miles (55 km) to the east. This was part of the Fertile Crescent, where civilization began in that part of the world.

The Negev is a mostly dry area in southwestern Israel. A lot of it is desert wasteland with some of it resembling the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

This appears to be a prophecy about the fall of Babylon. In Isaiah’s day, Assyrians ran the Babylon king out of town and into exile in 710 BC and 703 BC. See the note for 21:2. A century and a half later, Persians and Medes and others from what are now Iran and parts of Iraq will sweep in from the deserts surrounding the riverside capital city of Babylon. Babylon surrendered without a fight in 539 BC to what scholars call the Achaemenid Empire. It’s more commonly known as the Persian Empire. The formal name comes from Achaemenes, a ruler in what is now southwestern Iran in the 600s BC.

Elam and Media were kingdoms in what is now northern Iran. They were allies with Babylon, fighting side by side with them in the 600s BC. But here, a century earlier, they may have helped Assyrians fight against Babylon and crush the attempt of Babylon and other coalition rebels to overthrow the Assyrian Empire. Babylon got a beat-down in 710 BC and 703 BC. In 710, Assyrians ran off the Babylonian king, Merodach-Baladin II. He came back and took the throne again for nine months in 703 BC and got run off again. He died in exile.

It’s unclear who is frightened. This could reflect Babylonians. But it could also represent the Israelite nation of Judah. There’s no telling what an angry Assyrian king might do after crushing a widespread revolt.

Some carried lightweight leather shields. Dry shields became brittle and were easier to pierce with an arrow. People put olive oil on their shields, much like baseball players oil their gloves with lanolin, Vaseline, saddle soap, or some other product to soften the leather.

The name in Hebrew is Dumah. Dumah, perhaps like Seir, is an alternate name for Edom. The ancient kingdom of Edom was south of the Dead Sea, in what is now the Arab country of Jordan. This was the homeland of Esau, brother of Jacob.

Scholars called this short message an obscure oracle. If the “night” represents enemy attacks and “dawn” represent peace, this could sound like a metaphorical prediction about the defeat of Edom. But reading it more than 2,500 years after the fact, some might have preferred a poem that makes more sense. This one is vexing enough that it might take a fiction writer to fix it. Not that it’s fictional, but that at the moment, it takes a creative guess to explain it.

This prophecy may point to Assyria’s defeat of Arabian tribes that joined Babylon and others in what became a failed revolt.

Nomadic desert tribes in northern Arabia.

The land of Tema is in what is now northern Saudi Arabia. It’s where one of Ishmael’s sons settled. Ishmael was Abraham’s first son.

Kedar was another nomadic tribe, descended from another son of Ishmael. They lived in the far north of Arabia. They traded with people of Edom and others east of the Jordan River and west of the Euphrates in Iraq.