“There is nothing we forget as eagerly, as quickly, as the wickedness of man. The earth holds such a terrifying secret. Ruins are removed, the dead are buried, and the crimes forgotten. Bland complacency, splendid mansions, fortresses of cruel oblivion, top the graves. The dead have no voice, but God will disclose the secret of the earth.
Human power is not the stuff of which history is made. For history is not what is displayed at the moment, but what is concealed in the mind of God.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
Heschel’s words echo this morning as Isaiah looks at history and we, today, do the same. Whatever it may mean to guess what is ‘concealed in the mind of God” - we know enough from history to agree with Heschel that we so often prefer to forget the cruelty of nations but that also, eventually, the trauma will surface, and perhaps the healing will be enabled too.
For instance, Babylon. What is its enduring legacy and what do we learn from it, today?
By the Rivers of Babylon is Nelson DeMille's 1978 novel depicting the current fight between Israelis and Palestinians, war and peace - in a remote desert called Babylon, as the mythic meets the political and, surprise, there’s still no happy end. This odd text is also echoed in today’s chapter.
Few cities in the ancient world were as vast, wealthy, famous and proud as Babylon. At its heyday in the 7th century BCE, the capital city of the empire, named for Bab-El - the Gate of Heaven, with a ziggurat temple in its center believed to be the center of the earth, spanned 10 square kilometers. Just for reference - Jerusalem’s entire old city spans just 1 square kilometer today, a bit bigger than the Vatican. But for Isaiah who watched the city conquered by the Persians with no battle, Babylon was not a proud metropolis to emulate or envy - but a warning sign: He dedicates this chapter to its pitiful fate, how its decline was brought upon by violence, hubris and greed.
The chapter reads like rage and feels like fury, and it is worse because he speaks to Babylon in the feminine - as though the city is a she — and like a lady in decline - brought down low, a bride turned widow, a mother mourning her children, shamed, despised and lost.
Isaiah ben Amotz who lived in 8th century BCE Jerusalem was often guilty of sexist attitudes. He refers to Jerusalem as a maiden, or a mother, and did not spare this wrath from the proud wealthy women of Jerusalem who looked away from justice as they walked the highways on high heels.
But this Second-Isaiah takes the metaphor to a new low, with a prophetic poem that begins by addressing ‘The virgin daughter of Babylon, who will be humbled in the dust, sitting in the darkness.’
What did she do so wrong, this ‘whore of Babylon’? Well, clearly there was the destruction of Judea, and the exile of its people, this Isaiah presumably among them, still quite mad. But this is not the main transgression that he mentions again and again. The big deal that cost this proud empire its crown was pride and arrogance, oblivion to the needs of others and the way the rest of the world works. Babylon First - Isaiah claims - is cause enough for calamity:
וְעַתָּ֞ה שִׁמְעִי־זֹ֤את עֲדִינָה֙ הַיּוֹשֶׁ֣בֶת לָבֶ֔טַח הָאֹֽמְרָה֙ בִּלְבָבָ֔הּ אֲנִ֖י וְאַפְסִ֣י ע֑וֹד לֹ֤א אֵשֵׁב֙ אַלְמָנָ֔ה וְלֹ֥א אֵדַ֖ע שְׁכֽוֹל׃
“And now hear this, She who is the pampered one—
Who dwells in security,
Who thinks to herself,
“I am, and there is none but me;
I shall not become a widow
Or know loss of children.”
Isaiah 47:8
The idiom ‘I am, and none but me’ appears twice in this chapter. Babylon did not count any other nation as its’ equal or worth paying attention to. The actual word for ‘none’ is ‘Efes’ - the same word for ‘zero’.
It’s impossible to read this harsh condemnation on this day, at this time on the Jewish calendar, and with the political reality in Israel becoming more painful with every news cycle — without hearing the biblical words of another famous text of lamentation. In this other sacred text the guilty and downtrodden city is again defined as feminine - f but it’s not Babylon but Jerusalem. The Scroll of Lamentations, Eycha, will be chanted this week as the Jewish world observes the fast of Tisha B’av, the date on which both first and second Jerusalem temples toppled. and were no more.
In that haunting text Jerusalem is also depicted as a lonely widow, lowest on the food chain, weeping its gone glory and its awful fate.
It’s impossible to not hear the warning that Isaiah gives us, now, as he did then. Babylon first is shortsighted strategy, and it’s wrong.
The hubris and the pride, the overconfidence in military might and self-reliance, the 'ethnocentric focus at the expense of ecosystem sensitivity: Babylon did not heed the warning and was taken over by Persia. The same Jerusalem that fell before can fall again — and awful, dreadful is the day on which the prophecies are still ignored and warnings unheeded.
This is the last of Isaiah’s visions that discuss the days in which Babylon fell and Persia took over. From now on he’ll turn his eye back to the Judeans and to their choices and options - will they return to Jerusalem? Will they repeat the stiff-necked patterns of their ancestors? Can we turn away from the traumas of yesterday, from the cruelty, from the sexism and arrogance and turn the page on prophecies to begin a new chapter, better for all?
Time will tell. For now we leave Babylon in the shadows, forever remembered, with more shame than fame.
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