Jeremiah 51
Babylon sentenced to death
God’s assassin targets Babylon
1The LORD says:Look, I’m going to wake up the spirit of a killer. [1]
He’ll target Babylon’s people and land.
Like farmers separate grain from useless chaff. [2]
Invaders will come at her from all sides
And cut her out of the world.
3Launch a surprise attack on Babylon.
Don’t give their archers time to string their bows
Or put on their armor.
Kill them all. Don’t let any of their men live.
4Let them fall in the Babylonian dirt,
Dead and dying in the streets.
God’s advice to Jews: Run
5So, let’s be clear.
I haven’t abandoned Israel and Judah,
Though they’re nations are smothered in guilt
As they stand before the Holy One of Israel.
Run for your lives. Don’t die because of Babylon’s guilt.
This is the day they get what they deserve.
And the LORD is going to give it to them.
7Babylon was my fancy gold cup. [3]
Babylon made all the nations drink her wine.
It made them drunk
And they lost their minds.
Captives try to help Babylon
8Babylon is down.
Cry for her.
Bring some salves to treat her.
Maybe we can fix her.
It’s time for us to get out of here
And go back to our own countries.
Babylon’s Judgment Day
Is on heaven’s calendar.
10The LORD has cleared our name [4]
By punishing Babylon.
Let’s go tell everyone in Jerusalem
What the LORD has done.
God: Wipe out Babylon
11Sharpen your arrowheads.
Get your shields.
The LORD nudged the Mede king
To wipe out Babylon in revenge
For Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple.
Post a strong guard.
Put plenty of soldiers on guard duty.
Prepare ambushes.
The LORD knows what he wants
When it comes to Babylon’s people.
13You live by a big river
And your rich in many other ways.
But it’s over now.
Time to die.
14The LORD of everyone swears by his own name,
“I’ll fill Babylon with so many troops
It’ll feel like a swarm of locusts.
They’ll cheer their victory.”
Praise God, the song
15He used his powers to make the earth.
He used his wisdom to fill the sky.
A word can call in clouds
from the ends of the earth.
His lightning breaks the rhythm of the rain.
He stocks wind in a warehouse.
17Face it. People are stupid.
They have a bad education, if any.
Goldsmiths should be ashamed of idols they made.
Their gods are fake.
They don’t even breathe.
18They are works of fiction.
When the time is right,
The LORD will destroy them.
19None of this will happen to God’s people of Israel.
Israel belongs to God, who made everything
And who is the God of everyone.
God’s hit list
20You’re [5] the club I’ll use to kill people. I’ll destroy:
- Nations,
- Kingdoms,
And my people get to watch.
I’m punishing the people of Babylon
For what their nation did to Jerusalem.
25You’re a mountain-load of destruction.
But I’m God. And I’m on the other side.
With a stretch of my hand
Your city could look flat in a flash.
And scorched by the process.
26No one will ever pick your rock as a cornerstone.
No one will build anything from your rock.
Your land will be good for nothing.
I am the LORD.
Nations unite against Babylon
27Raise your battle banners.
Send a call-to-arms to your allies.
Train the soldiers how to fight.
Call on the kingdoms for help.
Call armies of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz. [6]
Pick a commander to lead the campaign.
Bring a locust swarm of horses.
That includes the king of the Medes
With governors and associates from every territory he controls.
29The earth shakes in terror
Because of what the LORD is going to do.
He’s making Babylon a badlands,
A wasted plug of ground with no people.
30Babylon’s warriors stopped fighting.
They’re hiding like cowards
In their fortified safe room.
Buildings are burning
And bars locking city gates are broken.
31Battlefield runners [7] in relay with each other
deliver the news to Babylon’s king:
The city has fallen.
32Invaders have captured fords across the river.
They’ve burned the marshes.
And Babylon’s army is in full-blown panic. [8]
33I’m the LORD of everyone
And the God of Israel.
Babylon is like a threshing floor [9] for grain.
Harvest time is coming soon.
And this threshing floor is about to get stomped.
Judah’s charge against Babylon
34Like a monster, Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar
Crushed me,
Squeezed the life out of me,
And gobbled me down.
He filled his gut with all there was of me.
What he didn’t like, he spit out.
And I want Jerusalem to say,
“May our blood find justice
When God stops the beating hearts of Babylon.”
God takes Judah’s case
36The LORD said,
“I’m going to take your case and defend you.
I’ll get your revenge.
I’ll squeeze the life out of Babylon,
Drying up their lakes and fountain.
A nice home for jackals.
People will be horrified
when they see what I did to Babylon.
38Babylon is like lions roaring for a meal,
And lion cubs growling.
39When they’re most excited about the meal,
I’ll bring them wine and get them drunk.
They’ll fall asleep and never wake up.
40I’ll drag their sleeping bodies to the slaughter,
Like dragging lambs, rams, and goats.
Babylon’s doom
41Proud Babylon, boss of her world, is captured.
Nations are horrified at what has become of her.
And swallowed her whole.
43Her cities look wretched,
Engulfed by drought and desert.
No one lives here anymore.
No one even walks by.
44I’ll punish Babylon’s god Bel [10]
And make it choke up what it swallowed.
The walls of Babylon have fallen
Nations don’t come here anymore.
Jews urged to leave Babylon
45Get out of there, my people,
Before the invaders I’m sending arrive.
Run for your lives.
And don't take rumors seriously.
One year you get one rumor, the next another.
You're always going to hear rumors of violence,
With one ruler arguing with another.
47Without a doubt the days are coming
when I will destroy Babylon’s idols.
The dead will lie in the streets
And the living will be ashamed.
48When Babylon falls
Heaven and earth and everyone in them
Will cheer and scream with joy.
Babylon's killers will come from the north.
49Babylon has to die for the people they killed,
For the dead of Israel
And for the dead throughout the nations.
50Though you have survived the sword so far,
It's time to get out of there now.
Remember the LORD where you are, far away.
And keep Jerusalem on your mind.
51Babylon made us feel ashamed of ourselves.
They insulted us
And they walked into holy places
Inside the LORD's Temple.
52He's coming when I will punish Babylon’s idols.
And I will leave wounded people groaning all over the land.
53Babylon can build into the sky [11]
And think their high fortress is unbeatable.
But I am sending her destroyers.
54Listen. Can you hear it? Screaming from Babylon.
There is a lot of mourning going on in that land.
55The LORD is killing Babylon.
He Is silencing the clamor of that town.
Wave upon wave of enemy soldiers
Pound against their defenses
The clamor echoes throughout the land.
56Babylon's killers have arrived.
Babylon's army is captured, bows broken.
The LORD is a God of justice.
He demands payment for damages.
57I will get Babylon’s officials drunk.
Along with her sages, governors, officers, and warriors.
I'll get them so drunk they’ll pass out.
But they’ll never wake up.
58Babylon's thick gates will get ripped to the ground. [12]
Her high gates will get burned.
All the work these people did in building Babylon
Just fell to the ground or rose in flames.
Jeremiah sends prophecy to Babylon
59Jeremiah gave this collection of prophecies to a man going to Babylon with Judah’s King Zedekiah. The man was Seraiah son of Neriah and grandson of Mahseiah. He was the king's quartermaster, in charge of housing during trips. This took place in the fourth year of Zedekiah’s reign. [13]60Jeremiah wrote onto the scroll all the disasters that would strike Babylon. 61Jeremiah told Seraiah, “When you get to Babylon I want you to read all these words to the people. 62And I want you to say, ‘LORD, You warned that you were going to destroy this place so badly that even animals couldn’t live there anymore. You said it would lie in ruins forever.’ [14]
63When you finish reading the scroll, tie a stone to it and throw it all into the middle of the Euphrates River. 64Then say, this is what will happen to Babylon. She will sink and never rise again because of the disasters that the LORD is bringing to her’”
This is the end of what Jeremiah has written.
Footnotes
There are three key words in this line. And they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Ur can mean to arouse, to wake up, or to motivate someone to do something. Ruah can mean breath, wind, spirit, heart, or mind. Mashit can mean destroyer, destruction, corruption. Scholars take into consideration the context of the entire passage when they make their best guess at how to translate the line. Some say God is sending a destructive wind, such as a cyclone. And some would say that wind is simply a metaphor about the coming invasion force blowing in from the north.
The farming process mentioned here is known as winnowing. Chaff covers the grain kernels like blankets. Harvesters throw the grain and kernels in the air on a windy day and let the wind blow the chaff away. The kernels fall back to the ground.
The gold cup seems to represent the wealth of Babylon. Beyond that, we would have to stretch to make a guess about what wine, drunkenness, and insanity represent.
This phrase is implied by the Hebrew text that says only, “the LORD has vindicated us.”
Who’s doing the killing for God? Is it Babylon, in a flashback Bible chapter. It might refer to Cyrus, who led coalition armies into battle with Babylon? Who knows. Scholars are left guessing.
Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz were all in what is now Armenia, north of Iraq and Iran. The Ashkenaz and the Minni fought side-by-side in a revolt against the Assyrians in the 500s BC. The Medes later conquered them, and they contributed soldiers for the Mede-Persian attack that overran Babylon in 538 BC.
It was common for runners to keep updating the king on the status of the battle. Some scholars interpret this verse to mean that runners came from all directions at the same time to tell the king the city had fallen. That guess is as good as the other.
The soldiers are panicked because they know that soldiers on the losing side are often executed at the first opportunity. And if any of them had read Jeremiah’s prophecy about them, all the more reason to go berserk.
The threshing floor was usually an area of flat ground, flat rock, or inside an empty wine press. That’s where harvesters beat or stomped grain loose from the stalks.
Bel was originally a storm god in a dry part of the world. But it later became blended into Marduk, and in Jeremiah 50:2 likely refers to Marduk, many scholars say. So, it may have been just another name for Marduk.
Possibly a reference to ziggurat towers. They’re also known as stepped towers because they look like stair-step pyramids. The ancient city of Babylon, now in ruins, had a ziggurat called Etemenanki, built several centuries before Jeremiah. An ancient source, a tablet call Esagila, said the tower was 91 meters tall (300 feet). Scholars estimate from the size of the base that it was closer to 54 meters high (177 feet). That’s about the size of a 17-story building today.
Scholars don’t agree about how Babylon fell. Some ancient sources, including the Babylonian Chronicles and the Cyrus Cylinder, say Babylon fell without a battle. But Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon both report that the Persian army lay siege to Babylon. In either case the city fell in 539 BC. The Persian Empire annexed Babylon’s territory. And over the centuries that followed people lost interest in Babylon, which had once been the largest city in the world, some scholars say. It’s population is estimated at above 200,000. Stones and baked bricks used to build the walls and structures inside the city were likely recycled into other buildings in other locations.
The trip took place in about 593 BC, roughly a couple decades before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and most walled cities in Judah.
The ancient city of Babylon remains a ruin today, and a popular tourist attraction. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering about 2,500 acres. The city walls protected less than half that, 1,100 acres, which is equal to about 833 American football fields with endzones. That’s also about the size of the historic island town of Mackinac Island, Michigan. By today’s standards, Babylon would have been an exotic tiny town.
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