Isaiah 14:7

The song opens with a promise before it says a word about the king. “In the day that the LORD shall give thee rest” looks ahead to a time God has fixed. The word for day, yôwm, means a day or a span of time, and here it names the season of deliverance. Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century before Christ, about two centuries before Babylon carried Judah into exile, so God’s people were told how their captivity would end long before it began. The verses just before this one say that the LORD will have mercy on Jacob, choose Israel again and set them in their own land (Isaiah 14:1–2). Verse 3 says what that mercy will be like for the people who receive it.

The giver is the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of the God of Israel, and the gift is rest. The verb nûwach means to settle down and be quiet. Rest was a weighty word in Israel. God rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2), he promised his people rest from their enemies in the land (Deuteronomy 12:10), and he spoke of “my rest” as something a hard-hearted generation could lose (Psalm 95:11). Moses had described exile as a life of restlessness and fear (Deuteronomy 28:65). So the promise of rest means that the curse of exile will be lifted, and Jeremiah gives the same promise to Jacob (Jeremiah 30:10). Isaiah later pictures God’s people living in peaceful homes (Isaiah 32:18) and ties their future to an everlasting covenant (Isaiah 55:3).

Three burdens are named. Sorrow, ʻôtseb, is pain and grief, and elsewhere the same word names an idol. Fear, rôgez, is the dread of living under a brutal power. The “hard bondage” joins qâsheh, severe or hard, to ʻăbôdâh, work or service, and the verse closes with the verb that noun comes from, ʻâbad, to work or serve: “wherein thou wast made to serve”. Israel had known such service before, when the Egyptians “made their lives bitter with hard bondage” (Exodus 1:11–14). The exile in Babylon lasted seventy years, with forced labour and the grief of being torn from home. The rest God promises covers heart and body together, so that grief, fear and forced labour all end on the same day.

Verse 4 hands the freed people a song: “thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon”. The word is mâshâl, which covers a saying, a proverb, a byword and a parable. Here it is a taunt song, a mock funeral lament sung over a defeated enemy, the kind of song Habakkuk calls a “taunting proverb”. To take it up is to sing it aloud and in public. The slaves are now the singers, and their master is the subject of the song.

The song runs to verse 23. It belongs to the burden of Babylon, which fills Isaiah 13 and most of Isaiah 14. The chapter before foretells the overthrow of the city, and the song turns from the city to its king.

Its first line is a cry of astonished relief: “How hath the oppressor ceased!” The oppressor is nâgas, from a root meaning to drive, the word for a taskmaster or one who exacts tribute. “Ceased” is shâbath, to desist, and it is said twice in the verse, once of the man and once of his city. God had done this kind of thing before. He brought Israel out from under Pharaoh and through the sea (Exodus 14), and the song celebrates the same God delivering his people again. Scripture raises the cry once more over the last Babylon: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen” (Revelation 18:2–8).

Verse 5 gives the reason for everything else in the song. Babylon’s fall is the LORD’s doing. “The LORD hath broken” is spoken as a thing already done, so sure is the decree, and shâbar means to break or shatter. What he shatters is the staff, maṭṭeh, and the sceptre, shêbeṭ, a word for a stick or rod of any kind, whether for walking, striking or ruling. In a king’s hand both were emblems of his rule and were carved on royal monuments, so a broken sceptre is a reign that is over. The staff belongs to “the wicked”, râshâʻ, the guilty and ungodly, and the sceptre to “the rulers”, from mâshal, to rule. The plural takes in the whole regime along with the one man.

Scripture says this of God everywhere. “God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another” (Psalm 75:7). He removes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21), he cuts off the spirit of princes (Psalm 76:12), and he set his prophet “over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down” (Jeremiah 1:10). He told Israel in Egypt, “I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:6). Through Isaiah he promises to deal with those who oppress his people, so that all flesh shall know that he is their Saviour and Redeemer (Isaiah 49:26).

Verse 6 describes the reign that has ended. The king “smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke”. The stroke is makkâh, a blow or wound, and “continual” means a stroke without pause. He “ruled the nations”, the gôwy, in anger, so his cruelty reached people after people. Then the verse turns on one word: he “is persecuted”. Murdâph is a passive form, so the one who pursued is now pursued, “and none hindereth”. Nobody restrains his pursuers, as nobody once restrained him. The LORD had said of Babylon, “Behold, I am against thee, O destroying mountain” (Jeremiah 51:25), and the proverb holds: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

History went as the song said. Babylon conquered Judah and carried its people away (2 Kings 24–25), and in 539 BC it fell to the Medes and Persians under Cyrus, the man Isaiah names as the LORD’s shepherd who would have Jerusalem rebuilt (Isaiah 44:28).

With the tyrant gone, “the whole earth is at rest, and is quiet”. The rest is nûwach again, the word of verse 3, so the rest promised to Israel spreads to the earth, ʼerets, and to all the lands he troubled. “Is quiet” is shâqaṭ, the stillness that comes when a long disturbance stops. Then the quiet breaks: “they break forth into singing”. Pâtsach is to burst out, and rinnâh, from rânan, is a raised voice, a ringing shout of joy. Empires such as Assyria and Babylon ruled by invasion, deportation and heavy tribute, and whole peoples lived in dread of them, which is why their end is met with a shout.

In verse 8 the trees join in. The fir trees, bᵉrôwsh, and the cedars, ʼerez, of Lebanon, Lᵉbânôwn, rejoice (sâmach, to be glad) and speak: “Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us.” Lebanon’s cedars were prized timber, and conquering kings cut them for their great buildings, so the forests had felt the empire’s axe as the nations had felt its rod. “Laid down” is shâkab, to lie down, used here of lying down in death. The “feller” is the one who cuts, from kârath, and “come up” is ʻâlâh, to go up. Both verbs return later in the song, when the king boasts that he will ascend and when the LORD cuts off Babylon’s name.

The psalmist calls on the heavens, the earth, the sea and the field to be glad before the LORD, and adds, “then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice” (Psalm 96:11–12). The trees stand for all that the empire used up, and Paul teaches that the creation itself waits to be “delivered from the bondage of corruption” (Romans 8:19–22).

The scene now moves below. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.” The word translated hell is shᵉʼôwl, Sheol, the realm of the dead, and the song pictures it as a host stirring to receive a guest. “Is moved” is râgaz, to quiver or be agitated, and “stirreth up” is ʻûwr, to wake. Sheol wakes the dead, “all the chief ones of the earth”. The Hebrew says he-goats, ʻattûwd, a figure for leaders. Kings rise from their thrones, as if the ranks of earth were still kept below, and that makes their greeting sting.

They answer him with one voice. The verb ʻânâh means to respond, and what they say is “Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us?” “Weak” is châlâh, to be weak or sick. “Also”, gam, carries their surprise, and “become like” is mâshal, to be likened or compared. The man who thought himself beyond compare is now exactly like every other dead king. Their questions ask for no information. They voice the astonishment, and the satisfaction, of rulers he once outshone or crushed.

Verse 11 completes the reception. “Thy pomp”, gâʼôwn, is his majesty and his arrogance together, and it is “brought down”, yârad, to Sheol along with “the noise of thy viols”, the nebel or lyre whose music filled his court. A bed is made for him: “the worm is spread under thee”, where the worm is rimmâh, a maggot, and “spread” is yatsaʻ, to lay out as a bed. A covering is given him too: “the worms cover thee”. This second worm is tôwlâʻ, the grub from which crimson dye was made, and the covering is mᵉkaççeh. The king who wore scarlet may be dressed, in the end, in the creature the scarlet came from.

Death levels every rank, and Scripture says so often. The wise man and the fool alike die and leave their wealth to others, and the rich man “shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him” (Psalm 49:10–17). “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20). All flesh is grass, “but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:6–8). Mary sang of the God who “hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52), and John writes that “the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever” (1 John 2:17).

The song now reaches its best-known lines. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” The Hebrew name is hêylêl, the shining one, from a root for brightness, and it means the morning star, the brilliant star seen at dawn. In Babylon the lights of heaven were linked with gods and with kings who claimed a place among them, so the title suits a king at the height of his splendour. To fall from heaven is to lose the highest power and honour a man can hold. “Fallen” is nâphal, the common verb for falling, used of those who are overthrown or die.

A second picture follows, “cut down to the ground”, the language of a felled tree, and it answers the cedars of verse 8. Then the charge is given: he “didst weaken the nations”. Châlash is to lay prostrate. The king who laid the nations low is laid low himself.

The scene returns to the earth and to the living. People who see the body “narrowly look” upon it. Shâgach is to gaze closely, and “consider”, bîyn, is to think a thing through. They are trying to match the corpse in front of them with the name they feared. “Is this the man”, they ask, and the word is ʼîysh, a man, one mortal person. He “made the earth to tremble”, râgaz, the verb used in verse 9 of Sheol stirring at his arrival. He “did shake kingdoms”, râʻash and mamlâkâh, the realms he overran one after another.

Verse 17 finishes their question with three charges. He “made the world as a wilderness”. Têbêl is the inhabited world, and his armies left farmed and peopled land empty. He “destroyed the cities thereof”, where hâraç is to tear down. And he “opened not the house of his prisoners”. A prisoner, ʼâçîyr, is one who is bound, and the house is bayith. Babylon razed cities and deported whole populations, and its captives were held with little hope of release. That would be Judah’s own case in the exile.

The LORD is the opposite of this king. He “bringeth out those which are bound with chains” (Psalm 68:6). His Servant is sent “to bring out the prisoners from the prison” (Isaiah 42:7). And of Israel and Judah, held fast by captors who “refused to let them go”, Jeremiah says, “Their Redeemer is strong; the LORD of hosts is his name” (Jeremiah 50:33–34).

Verse 18 sets the standard the king will fall below. “All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.” A king is melek. “Glory”, kâbôwd, is honour and splendour, here the honour of a royal funeral. The “house” is the tomb, the same word bayith as the prison-house of the verse before. Kings were buried with ceremony in great tombs, often with their treasures, and such a tomb kept a king’s name before his people. Burial mattered deeply in Israel and among the nations, and to be left unburied was the last disgrace, a sign that a man was wholly rejected and his memory wiped out.

“But thou art cast out of thy grave”. Shâlak is to throw or hurl away, and the grave here is qeber, a tomb or burying place. Three comparisons follow. He is “like an abominable branch”. Nêtser is a shoot, and figuratively a descendant, and taʻâb means loathed, so the picture is of a shoot pruned off and thrown on the heap. Isaiah uses the same word, nêtser, for the Branch that grows from the roots of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1). That is the king God plants, and this is a king God discards.

He is also “as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword”, which takes us to a battlefield. The raiment is lᵉbûwsh, clothing, the slain are from hârag, to kill, “thrust through” is ṭâʻan, to stab, and the sword is chereb. Such dead “go down to the stones of the pit”, ʼeben and bôwr, a common hole among the stones that is the opposite of a royal tomb. And he is “as a carcase trodden under feet”, peger, a corpse, and bûwç, to trample. Jeremiah foretold a like end for Jehoiakim, king of Judah (Jeremiah 22:19).

Verse 20 gives the reason: “because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people”. Shâchath is to ruin. The land is ‘erets and the people ‘am, and both are called his own, for his rule wasted Babylon itself and spent the lives of his own subjects. So he will have no place with the other kings. “Joined”, yâchad, is to be united, and he lies alone. The verse ends with a rule: “the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned.” Seed, zera, means offspring, and “renowned” is qârâ, to call or name, so his line will go unnamed among the honoured. Solomon says the same: “The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rot” (Proverbs 10:7), and “When pride cometh, then cometh shame” (Proverbs 11:2). Asaph, troubled by the ease of the wicked, saw their end in the sanctuary: “Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction” (Psalm 73:18–20).

The last three verses pass from the king to his house and his city, and in verses 22 and 23 the LORD speaks in his own person. The oracle that opened with “The burden of Babylon” (Isaiah 13:1) ends with God’s own “I will”.

“Prepare slaughter for his children”. Kûwn is to make ready or establish, which marks a settled decree. Maṭbêach is slaughter, and the children are bên, sons. The reason is “the iniquity of their fathers”, ʻâvôn, guilt, from a root meaning to bend or twist. The purpose is stated three ways: “that they do not rise”, qûwm, “nor possess the land”, yârash, to take possession or inherit, “nor fill the face of the world with cities”, where fill is mâlêʼ, face is pânîym, world is têbêl and cities is ʻîyr. Conquerors of that age commonly ended a defeated royal house so that it could make no return, and God decrees that this house will build no second empire. Nahum says the same of Nineveh: “affliction shall not rise up the second time” (Nahum 1:9).

“For I will rise up against them, saith the LORD of hosts.” The sons are kept from rising, and the LORD rises. His title is Yᵉhôvâh Sabaoth, the LORD of armies, who commands the hosts of heaven and earth. It is the title of the psalm’s refrain, “The LORD of hosts is with us” (Psalm 46:7). He will “cut off”, kârath, the verb behind the feller of verse 8, “the name, and remnant, and son, and nephew”. The four words cover everything a people has: its name and memory, its survivors, its sons, and its neked, which means offspring or a son’s son, the older sense of the English “nephew”. “Saith the LORD” stands twice in verse 22 and seals the sentence at both ends.

Jeremiah had a scroll of Babylon’s doom read aloud and sunk in the Euphrates with the words “Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise” (Jeremiah 51:62–64). John sees a mighty angel throw a great millstone into the sea and say, “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all” (Revelation 18:21–23). “God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day” (Psalm 7:11), and even human fury ends by serving him: “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee” (Psalm 76:10).

Verse 23 turns to the place itself. “I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water”. The land the dynasty was forbidden to possess is handed to a wild creature. Qippôwd is an animal of waste places. The KJV makes it the bittern, a marsh bird, and other lexicons give the hedgehog or porcupine. Babylon’s plain was farmed by canals, and an abandoned city there turns to stagnant marsh. “And I will sweep it with the besom of destruction”. A besom is a broom, maṭʼăṭêʼ, and “sweep” is ṭûwʼ. The picture is homely and complete, a city swept out like dust from a floor.

Jeremiah fills in the picture. “Babylon shall become heaps, a dwellingplace for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant” (Jeremiah 51:37). Its stones will lie unused, with none taken “for a corner” (Jeremiah 51:26). “Because of the wrath of the LORD it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate” (Jeremiah 50:13), and the command goes out, “destroy her utterly: let nothing of her be left” (Jeremiah 50:26). Zephaniah says the same of Nineveh, where the KJV again has the bittern lodging in the ruins (Zephaniah 2:13–14). “The LORD bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought”, and “The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever” (Psalm 33:10–11).

Babylon stands first in Isaiah’s long series of oracles against the nations (Isaiah 13–23), and its sentence is heavy for a reason. God had used Babylon to chasten Judah for its sin, and Babylon went on in pride, idolatry and cruelty far past that purpose, under a king who set himself against God.

The song shows us a king who climbed and was thrown down. The gospel shows us the King who came down and was raised. Paul’s words stand over against the five boasts. Christ Jesus, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Therefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow (Philippians 2:5–11). The king of Babylon said “I will be like the most High” and was brought down to the pit. The Son, who is equal with God, went down of his own will, and now says, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).

His burial and the tyrant’s are opposites as well. In life the Son of man had “not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). On the cross his side was pierced with a spear (John 19:34), and he was laid in another man’s tomb (Matthew 27:57–60). The tyrant was cast out of his grave in shame. Christ walked out of his alive and was taken up into heaven (Acts 1:9–11). He who “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9) is seated “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21). He holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18), and “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54–57).

Isaiah’s own book sets the two kings side by side. There is the abominable branch, and there is the Branch from Jesse. There is the king who “opened not the house of his prisoners”, and there is the Anointed One sent “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound” (Isaiah 61:1), words Jesus read in Nazareth as fulfilled in himself (Luke 4:18–19). The title the king wore for a morning belongs to Jesus for ever: “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” (Revelation 22:16). And his is the sceptre that stands: “a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom” (Hebrews 1:8).

The oppressor of the song is also a picture of a deeper tyranny. Our hardest bondage is to sin (Romans 6:6), and behind every cruel throne stands the devil. At the cross Christ “spoiled principalities and powers” and “made a shew of them openly” (Colossians 2:15). He was manifested “that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), and he died so that “through death he might destroy him that had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). As he went to the cross he said, “now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31). He is the seed of the woman promised at the beginning (Genesis 3:15) and the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

So the rest of verse 3 is offered now: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He gives his own peace (John 14:27), a peace that passes understanding (Philippians 4:7), and a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9–10).

Babylon returns at the end of the Bible as the name for the whole proud world set against God (Revelation 17–18). The Lamb overcomes its kings, “for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings” (Revelation 17:14). He rides out to judge and to rule the nations with a rod of iron (Revelation 19:11–21), and all evil meets its end before his throne (Revelation 20). Then the shout of verse 7 is heard in full: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15). His is the kingdom that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). It is “not of this world” (John 18:36), it “cannot be moved” (Hebrews 12:28), and his dominion is everlasting (Daniel 7:14). In the new heaven and the new earth God wipes away all tears (Revelation 21:1–5).

God gave this song to his people before the oppressor had risen. They carried it into exile knowing how the story would end, and that is the first thing it gives us. The LORD has already spoken about every power that crushes his people, and the sentence closes with “saith the LORD of hosts”. The oracle ends on the same note: “For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it?” (Isaiah 14:27). When cruel rulers prosper for a while, the song turns our eyes to the grave, where pomp and music stop, and to the hand that broke the sceptre.

It shows us who God is toward the bound and toward the proud. He hears those who are made to serve, and he brings down those who make them serve. The king’s ruin began long before his armies failed. It began as a sentence said in the heart, and the same sentence can be said in a home or a workplace as easily as on a throne. God answers it the same way wherever it is said, and he gives grace to the humble.

And the song gives us something to sing. Israel was told to take this proverb up on the day of its rest, and the earth’s quiet in verse 7 is a foretaste of the day when Christ’s reign fills it. If you are held under something hard, the promise of verse 3 was written for people in that place, and Christ has made it as wide as his own invitation to come to him and rest.