Scripture Daily

Context No. 242 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 14:18-23: in context

18All the kings of the nations sleep in glory, everyone in his own house. 19But you are cast away from your tomb like an abominable branch, clothed with the slain who are thrust through with the sword, who go down to the stones of the pit; like a dead body trodden under foot. 20You will not join them in burial, because you have destroyed your land. You have killed your people. The offspring of evildoers will not be named forever. 21Prepare for slaughter of his children because of the iniquity of their fathers, that they not rise up and possess the earth, and fill the surface of the world with cities. 22“I will rise up against them,” says the LORD of Armies, “and cut off from Babylon name and remnant, and son and son’s son,” says the LORD. 23“I will also make it a possession for the porcupine, and pools of water. I will sweep it with the broom of destruction,” says the LORD of Armies.

This is part of a taunt-song, a mocking funeral poem, sung over the king of Babylon. Isaiah pictures the death of the tyrant and takes from him the one thing every king of that world was sure of. All the other kings, the poem says, lie in glory, each one asleep in his own tomb.

Not this one. He is flung out of his grave like a rejected branch, thrown among the bodies of men killed by the sword, trampled underfoot like a corpse in the street, denied even a burial. The reason is stated flatly: because you destroyed your land and killed your people. The man who spent lives without counting them is refused a place among the honored dead, and his name is to be cut off so that no son or grandson of his ever rises again. The line about slaughtering his children for their fathers' guilt is the poem's hard logic of ending a dynasty for good, and it is difficult to hear. Then the city itself is handed over to wild animals and standing water, swept away, the text says, with the broom of destruction.

The whole taunt turns on one irony. The king built to be remembered forever, to carve his name into the world, and the sentence against him is namelessness, an unmarked body and a swamp where his capital stood. What name am I trying to make permanent, at a cost to other people that I have stopped adding up?

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