Jeremiah 50:27

These verses belong to the long oracle against Babylon in Jeremiah 50–51, the longest oracle in the book of Jeremiah. It comes after the prophecies against Judah and against the nations around her, and it turns at last to the empire God had used to judge his own people.

Under Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon was the great power of its day. It carried the people of Judah into exile in two great deportations, in 597 and 586 BC, and in 586 BC it destroyed Jerusalem and the temple (2 Kings 25). The city was famous for its wealth, its army, its massive walls and the Euphrates flowing through its heart, and everyone took it to be impregnable. It worshipped many gods, with Marduk at their head. The oracle opens with the word the LORD spoke against Babylon and the land of the Chaldeans (Jeremiah 50:1), and from the next verse it puts Babylon’s idols to shame (Jeremiah 50:2). To a people in exile, a prophecy that this empire would fall was humanly unthinkable, which is why its coming to pass shows that the word came from God.

God had used Babylon. He called Nebuchadnezzar “my servant” (Jeremiah 25:9) and sent him against Judah for her idolatry and disobedience. In the same chapter he promised that once the seventy years were over he would punish the king of Babylon and his land (Jeremiah 25:12–14). Babylon still answered to God for what it did as his instrument. It acted from its own pride and cruelty, and it went far past the punishment God meant for Judah. Zechariah says the same of the nations in his day: “I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction” (Zechariah 1:15). Isaiah says it of Assyria, the rod of God’s anger (Isaiah 10:5–6), which boasted as though its strength were its own and was punished for the stout heart of its king (Isaiah 10:12–15).

The passage names the charges itself. Babylon “hast striven against the LORD” (verse 24), it destroyed his temple (verse 28), and it “hath been proud against the LORD, against the Holy One of Israel” (verse 29), until God addresses it simply as “thou most proud” (verse 31). Behind all of it stands the truth that “the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will” (Daniel 4:32). He “removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (Daniel 2:21), and “he putteth down one, and setteth up another” (Psalm 75:6–7). Jeremiah had already heard this at the potter’s house, where God speaks of plucking up and pulling down a nation as well as building it (Jeremiah 18:7–10).

Verse 21 opens with a command to an army God leaves unnamed here, the Medes and Persians who would come against Babylon: “Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against it, and against the inhabitants of Pekod.” Merathaim means “double bitterness” or “double rebellion”, and Pekod, Pᵉqôwd, comes from a root meaning to visit or to punish, so that it means “visitation” or “punishment”. They may be names of real regions in Babylonia, and some have tried to place them on a map, but they are chosen for what they say. Babylon is the land of double rebellion, and its people are the people of visitation. The visitation the name announces comes back in verse 27 and verse 31.

The two verbs that follow are the strongest words of war in Hebrew. “Waste” is chârab, a word that means to dry up and, from that, to lay waste, destroy or kill. A land laid waste in this sense lies in ruins, so that settled life is no longer possible there. “Utterly destroy” is châram, which Strong’s defines as to seclude, and especially to devote to God for destruction. It is the word used when Jericho was devoted to the LORD (Joshua 6:17). The same verb can describe one nation wiping out another with no word from God at all, so its weight here comes from the one who speaks it. This is “saith the LORD”, nᵉʼum Yᵉhôvâh, a declaration from God himself. “After them” means pursuing the land to its last remnant, and “do according to all that I have commanded thee” puts the army under orders.

Verse 22 is a single line of sound: “A sound of battle is in the land, and of great destruction.” The word for sound, qôwl, is the ordinary word for a voice, a sound or a noise, and here it is the shouting and clash of an invasion. Battle, milchâmâh, is war or warfare. Destruction is sheber, a breaking, an injury or a disaster, and gâdôwl is simply “great”. The land, ʼerets, is Babylon’s own land. The noise of war that Babylon had carried to other countries now fills its own territory, and Paul’s word holds for nations as well as people: “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7).

Verse 23 turns to lament and astonishment: “How is the hammer of the whole earth cut asunder and broken! how is Babylon become a desolation among the nations!” The hammer, paṭṭîysh, is a heavy tool for pounding, from a root meaning to pound. The name fits an empire that had beaten nation after nation into submission. God himself had used it so, in the way the prophets speak of pagan nations as his rod or his axe. Now the hammer is “cut asunder”, gâdaʻ, a word used for felling a tree or hewing something down, and broken.

Babylon becomes a “desolation”, shammâh. The word can mean desolation or horror, and here the KJV gives desolation: the great city becomes a waste. “Among the nations” means that everyone sees it. The same “How” opens Isaiah’s taunt over the king of Babylon, “How hath the oppressor ceased!” (Isaiah 14:4–23), and Isaiah’s own burden of Babylon foretells the same ruin (Isaiah 13).

Verse 26 returns to commands: “Come against her from the utmost border, open her storehouses: cast her up as heaps, and destroy her utterly: let nothing of her be left.” The attackers come from the farthest border, so the assault reaches Babylon from every side. Her storehouses, maʼăbûwç, are granaries, from a root meaning to feed or fatten. Babylon was famous for its riches, and opening its granaries means plundering the wealth it trusted. “Heaps”, ʻârêm, are heaps or mounds of ruins, the kind of mound archaeologists call a tell, built up where a city once stood. “Destroy her utterly” is châram again, the same verb as in verse 21, so the whole city is devoted to destruction.

Verse 27 turns to the people: “Slay all her bullocks; let them go down to the slaughter: woe unto them! for their day is come, the time of their visitation.” “Slay” is chârab, the same verb that was “waste” in verse 21. The bullocks, par, are young bulls, and they picture Babylon’s strong young warriors, or its leading men. They go down to the slaughter, ṭebach, the way cattle are led to be killed, which shows how helpless and how humbled Babylon’s proud forces will be. “Woe”, hôwy, is the prophets’ cry of grief and doom.

“Their day is come, the time of their visitation.” The word for visitation, pᵉquddâh, can mean oversight or a charge, and in judgment it means a reckoning, the time when God comes to inspect and to punish. Babylon’s day is fixed by God. It belongs to the prophets’ “day of the LORD”, which Isaiah announces against Babylon itself (Isaiah 13:6–13) and which Amos warns is darkness for those who expect light (Amos 5:18). In it, “The LORD is known by the judgment which he executeth” (Psalm 9:16).

In the middle of the commands comes a voice from the other side: “The voice of them that flee and escape out of the land of Babylon, to declare in Zion the vengeance of the LORD our God, the vengeance of his temple.” The exiles God set free come home to Jerusalem and tell what he has done. “Declare” is nâgad, to announce or make known, by word of mouth to people who are present, and Zion is where they announce it, before God’s gathered people. This is the return Jeremiah had promised in his letter to the exiles, after seventy years (Jeremiah 29:10–14).

Their message is “the vengeance of the LORD our God”. The word nᵉqâmâh means vengeance, the act or the feeling, and when God takes it, it is his righteous setting right of what has been wronged. Moses heard God say, “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence” (Deuteronomy 32:35), and a psalm calls on the God to whom vengeance belongs to show himself (Psalm 94:1–2). Because vengeance belongs to him, his people can leave their wrongs with him.

“The vengeance of his temple” names the particular wrong God is repaying. The temple, hêykâl, is a palace or temple, any great public building. Strong’s derives it, as “probably”, from a word for capacity, and others take it as a borrowing of a word for “palace”. The Jerusalem temple was the house where God’s presence dwelt among his people and the centre of their covenant life, and its destruction in 586 BC struck at God’s own honour. Babylon’s kings went further, and at Belshazzar’s feast they drank from the vessels taken from that temple (Daniel 5:1–4). God repays it.

Verse 29 calls up the archers: “Call together the archers against Babylon: all ye that bend the bow, camp against it round about; let none thereof escape.” “Bend the bow” is dârak, to tread, because an archer strung his bow by treading on it to bend it, and the word’s participle can mean an archer. The army camps round about, the usual siege of the day, so that the city is surrounded and none slips away.

Then comes the measure of the judgment: “recompense her according to her work; according to all that she hath done, do unto her.” “Recompense” is shâlam, which in this form means to repay or to make good. The punishment matches the crime, measure for measure, as the psalm says of God, “for thou renderest to every man according to his work” (Psalm 62:12). Revelation uses the same words for Babylon the Great, whose sins are repaid to her double (Revelation 18:2–8).

The reason closes the verse: “for she hath been proud against the LORD, against the Holy One of Israel.” The verb is zûwd, to seethe, and from that to act proudly, insolently and presumptuously. Babylon’s pride was aimed at God himself, the Holy One who had bound himself to Israel, so her boasting was an affront to his holiness. Daniel tells how Nebuchadnezzar’s heart was lifted up and his mind hardened in pride until he was driven from among men (Daniel 5:20–21). Every proud kingdom gives way at last to the kingdom the God of heaven sets up, “which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44).

Verse 30 begins with “Therefore”, tying the slaughter to the pride just named: “Therefore shall her young men fall in the streets, and all her men of war shall be cut off in that day, saith the LORD.” The young men, bâchûwr, are youths in their prime, fit for war, and Strong’s derives the word from one meaning “selected”. They “fall”, nâphal, a word that also means to die or be cut down. They fall in the streets, rᵉchôb, the broad squares of the city, so the defeat happens in the heart of Babylon and in public. “Men of war” (ʼĕnôwsh milchâmâh) are the trained fighting force, and they are “cut off”, dâmam, a verb meaning to be silent, to be still or to stop, and so to perish. Babylon’s army is silenced. The oracle gives the reason a few verses earlier: Assyria devoured Israel, then Nebuchadnezzar broke his bones, and God will punish the king of Babylon as he punished the king of Assyria (Jeremiah 50:17–18).

“Saith the LORD” seals the verse. Nᵉʼum is an utterance or declaration, and with Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of the self-existent God, it marks the words as God’s own.

Verse 31 is the heart of the closing lines: “Behold, I am against thee, O thou most proud, saith the Lord GOD of hosts: for thy day is come, the time that I will visit thee.” God sets himself personally against Babylon. “Most proud” is zâdôwn, arrogance or presumption, a noun from the same root as the verb zûwd in verse 29, and here it becomes Babylon’s name. The title “Lord GOD of hosts” comes back from verse 25, ʼĂdônây Yᵉhôvih of tsâbâʼ. “I will visit thee” is pâqad, a verb that means to attend to, visit, inspect, muster, appoint or punish. God can visit in kindness or in judgment, and here he comes to call Babylon to account. Ezekiel spoke in the same way of the day of trouble that was near (Ezekiel 7:7), and Isaiah promised, “I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease” (Isaiah 13:11). James says it in a single line: “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble” (James 4:6).

Verse 32 shows the end of it: “And the most proud shall stumble and fall, and none shall raise him up: and I will kindle a fire in his cities, and it shall devour all round about him.” “Stumble” is kâshal, to totter, waver, stumble or fall, the loss of footing that comes before the fall. The proud one then lies where he fell with nobody to help him up. “Kindle” is yâtsath, to kindle or burn, to set on fire, and God’s “I will” makes the fire his deliberate judgment. It spreads from his cities to everything around them. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Nebuchadnezzar once looked over his city and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built?”, and the word of judgment fell on him while the words were still in his mouth (Daniel 4:30–32).

Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC, and in the centuries that followed it sank into the ruin these verses describe. God had named Cyrus beforehand through Isaiah as his shepherd (Isaiah 44:28) and his anointed (Isaiah 45:1). The historians debate the details of the conquest. Accounts say the city was taken quickly and with little fighting, perhaps after the Euphrates was diverted so that soldiers could enter along the riverbed, and Isaiah speaks of God saying to the deep, “Be dry” (Isaiah 44:27). Babylon’s power was broken at once, and its empire came to a swift end. That fall opened the way for the exiles to go home.

The ruin itself came over time. Later rebellions against Persian rule brought more destruction, the city lost its importance, its buildings fell into disrepair, and its people dwindled until it was an abandoned waste. Ancient Babylon today is largely a field of uninhabited mounds, the “heaps” of verse 26, and the “none shall raise him up” of verse 32 has proved true. The fire and the heaps describe where Babylon’s fall led across the centuries, as well as the night the city was taken.

Scripture takes up Babylon’s name again at its end, in Revelation 17–18. There “Babylon the Great” is written on the forehead of the woman (Revelation 17:5), the name for the whole world order of rebellion, idolatry and oppression that sets itself against God and persecutes his people. Her fall echoes Jeremiah’s words. The angel casts a great millstone into the sea and says, “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all,” and heaven is told to rejoice because God has avenged his people on her (Revelation 18:20–21). As ancient Babylon fell, this Babylon will fall too.

The one who brings it down is Christ. He rides out as Faithful and True, with a sharp sword going out of his mouth to smite the nations and a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:11–16). The devil himself is cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10), and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ (Revelation 11:15). All power in heaven and in earth is given to him (Matthew 28:18), and he will judge the living and the dead at his appearing (2 Timothy 4:1).

He has already struck the decisive blow. On the cross he spoiled principalities and powers and made a show of them openly (Colossians 2:15). Through death he destroyed the one who had the power of death and set free those held in bondage by fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15). He spoke of binding the strong man and spoiling his goods (Matthew 12:29), the way Babylon’s storehouses are opened in verse 26, and the Father has delivered us from the power of darkness into the kingdom of his Son (Colossians 1:13–14).

The same God who poured out his indignation on Babylon has dealt with our sin in Christ. God sent his Son to save the world (John 3:17), and in his flesh condemned sin (Romans 8:3). Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), so that “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Babylon’s day of visitation was a day of judgment, but when Christ came God “visited and redeemed his people” (Luke 1:68). A day of reckoning still lies ahead for all who refuse him. The day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:2), as Joel warned (Joel 2:1–2), the Lord Jesus will be revealed in flaming fire taking vengeance (2 Thessalonians 1:7–9), and all of us must appear before his judgment seat (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Christ is also the answer to Babylon’s pride. Babylon exalted itself and was brought down. He humbled himself to death on a cross, and God has highly exalted him (Philippians 2:7–11), just as he taught: “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (Matthew 23:12). The fugitives who announce God’s deeds in Zion are a picture of everyone who tells of the deliverance Christ has won, and believers have come to the heavenly Mount Zion (Hebrews 12:22–24). God avenged his temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus spoke of the temple of his own body (John 2:19–21). Through him the bodies of believers are now temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

This passage was first given to captives. For a people taken from their land by the strongest empire in the world, it said that God saw what Babylon had done, that he had fixed the day of reckoning, and that their own voices would one day be heard in Zion. God kept every one of those promises. He used Babylon and then held it to account, and he repaid it according to its work. The empire that looked unbreakable was caught in his snare and broken.

The passage shows us a God who is Lord of the hosts of heaven and earth, whose anger at sin is holy, and who opposes pride wherever he finds it, in an empire or in a heart. It also shows us a God whose vengeance is his own and who takes it for the sake of his people and his house. When the powers of this world rage and look as if they have their way, these verses remind God’s people that every hammer is in his hand, and that the last word in Zion belongs to those who declare what the LORD their God has done.