1Go down and sit in the dust,
Sit on the ground with no throne.
O Daughter of Chaldeans.
For no longer shall they call you
tender and delicate.
2Take up a hand mill and grind flour.
Bare your tresses, strip your train.
Bare your thigh, cross the rivers.
3Your nakedness shall be bared,
your shame shall now be seen.
Vengeance will I take
4Our Redeemer, the LORD of Armies is His name,
Israel’s Holy One.
5Sit mute and come into the darkness,
O Daughter of Chaldeans,
for no longer shall they call you
the mistress of kingdoms.
6I was furious with My people,
I profaned My estate
and gave them into your hand.
You showed them no mercy,
on the elder you made your yoke very heavy.
7And you thought, “Forever shall I be the mistress.”
You did not take these things to heart
nor remember its outcome.
8And now, hear this, pampered woman,
dwelling secure,
who says in her heart,
“It is I and none besides me.
I will not dwell a widow
and will not know bereavement.”
9These two shall come upon you,
in a flash, on a single day—
bereavement and widowhood
shall come upon you in full measure
despite your many incantations
and the great power of your spells.
10But you trusted in your evil,
you said, “No one sees me.”
Your wisdom and your lore,
it was this that made you stray.
And you said in your heart,
“It is I and none besides me.”
11And evil shall come upon you,
and disaster shall fall upon you,
you shall not know how to ward it off,
and ruin shall suddenly come upon you,
with you unwitting.
12Stay, pray, with your spells
and with your many incantations
with which you toiled from your youth.
Perhaps you may avail,
perhaps still tyrannize.
13You are disabled despite all your counsels.
Let the sky scanners, pray, stand and rescue you,
those who see visions in the stars,
announcing them month after month,
what is to come upon you.
14Look, they have become like straw,
fire burns them up,
they cannot save themselves from the flame.
This is no coal to warm oneself,
no hearth by which to sit.
15This have they become for you, with which you toiled,
your traders since your youth:
each man wanders on his own way,
there is no none to save you.
CHAPTER 47 NOTES
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1. Virgin Daughter of Babylon. Others render this as “maid of Babylon.” The personification of a people or a city as a woman is widespread in the Bible, especially in poetry. The term denoting virginity is worth retaining in translation because humiliating sexual exposure will follow.
Sit on the ground with no throne. Not only is she to be forced to sit in the dust, but now we are reminded that she was formerly seated on a throne as “mistress of kingdoms” (verse 5). This dire evocation of the crushing and stripping of Babylon is integral to this prophet’s vision of the hated Babylonian empire falling to Persia.
2. Take up a hand mill. The once splendid queen is now to perform menial tasks.
Bare your tresses. Many interpreters insist that tsamah here and in the Song of Songs 4 means “veil,” but Chana and Ariel Bloch have persuasively argued in their commentary on the Song that the verb used for “bare,” gali, applies only to body parts, not to items of apparel, and tsamah in Song of Songs 4:1, 3 is part of a catalogue of body parts.
strip your train. Here a different verb is used, ḥasaf, which in fact applies to things worn.
Bare your thigh, cross the rivers. Blenkinsopp observes that she would have to hitch up her robes, thus exposing her thighs, in order to wade across rivers. The implied image is of a woman driven into exile.
3. Your nakedness shall be bared. This is an explicitly sexual term, referring to the pudenda.
no man shall intercede. The Masoretic Text has “I will intercede,” but the appropriate third-person form of the verb with the negative is reflected in the Septuagint.
4. Our Redeemer. This verse may be out of place.
6. I was furious with My people / . . . You showed them no mercy. This verse performs a theological balancing act. God was furious with Israel and punished them by allowing the Babylonians to defeat them, but the Babylonians enacted this historical role mercilessly, tormenting Israel with a heavy yoke, treating even the aged savagely. For this, Babylonia will now suffer severe retribution.
8. bereavement. The Hebrew word has the special sense of being bereaved of children. If Babylonia is personified as a woman, her people are her children.
9. despite your many incantations / and the great power of your spells. The Babylonians were famous for their expertise in soothsaying and divination, which is attested by the many texts of divination and spell casting that have been discovered.
10. But you trusted in your evil. “Evil” here is probably a denigrating summarizing term for all the skills of sorcery and divination (“Your wisdom and your lore”) in which Babylonia placed its trust.
11. You shall never know dawn. The Hebrew says “its dawn,” a feminine suffix with no clear referent. This is best taken as a follow-up to “come into the darkness” (verse 5)—the disaster about to overtake Babylonia is one long night of darkness without a dawn.
12. Stay, pray, with your spells. This is obviously sarcastic, with the introduction of the polite particle naʾ, “pray,” heightening the sarcasm.
13. the sky scanners. This translation adopts the solution for hovrey shamayim proposed by both the New Jewish Publication Society version and Blenkinsopp. It should be noted that the Babylonians were not only astrological diviners but also rather sophisticated astronomers.
14. they have become like straw. “They” here would have to refer either to the astrologers or to the lore they deploy.
This is no coal to warm oneself, / no hearth by which to sit. There is no longer any question of domesticated fire for human benefit; instead, raging flames will consume everything.