King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Isaiah 62
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For ’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for ’s sake I will not rest, until the thereof go forth as brightness, and the thereof as a lamp that burneth. And the shall see thy , and all kings thy : and thou shalt be called by a new name, which shall name. Thou shalt also be a of in the hand of , and a royal in the hand of thy . Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzi–bah, and thy land Beulah: for delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the rejoiceth over the , so shall thy rejoice over thee. I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O , which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of , keep not silence, And give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make a in the earth. hath by his , and by the arm of his strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine ; and the sons of the shall not drink thy , for the which thou hast laboured: But they that have gathered it shall eat it, and ; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of my . Go through, go through the ; prepare ye of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people. Behold, hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say ye to the daughter of , Behold, thy cometh; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. And they shall call them, The people, The of : and thou shalt be called, Sought out, A city not forsaken.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
All of Isaiah