_BABYLON._
ISAIAH xlvii.
Throughout the extent of Bible history, from Genesis to Revelation,
One City remains, which in fact and symbol is execrated as the enemy
of God and the stronghold of evil. In Genesis we are called to see
its foundation, as of the first city that wandering men established,
and the quick ruin, which fell upon its impious builders. By the
prophets we hear it cursed as the oppressor of God's people, the
temptress of the nations, full of cruelty and wantonness. And in the
Book of Revelation its character and curse are transferred to Rome,
and the New Babylon stands over against the New Jerusalem.
The tradition and infection, which have made the name of Babylon
as abhorred in Scripture as Satan's own, are represented as the
tradition and infection of pride,--the pride, which, in the audacity
of youth, proposes to attempt to be equal with God: _Go to, let us
build us a city and a tower, whose top_ may touch _heaven, and let
us make us a name_; the pride, which, amid the success and wealth
of later years, forgets that there is a God at all: _Thou sayest
in thine heart, I am, and there is none beside me_. Babylon is the
Atheist of the Old Testament, as she is the Antichrist of the New.
That a city should have been originally conceived by Israel as the
arch-enemy of God is due to historical causes, as intelligible
as those which led, in later days, to the reverse conception of
a city as God's stronghold, and the refuge of the weak and the
wandering. God's earliest people were shepherds, plain men dwelling
in tents,--desert nomads, who were never tempted to rear permanent
structures of their own except as altars and shrines, but marched
and rested, waked and slept, between God's bare earth and God's high
heaven; whose spirits were chastened and refined by the hunger and
clear air of the desert, and who walked their wide world without
jostling or stunting one another. With the dear habits of those early
times, the truths of the Bible are therefore, even after Israel has
settled in towns, spelt to the end in the images of shepherd life.
The Lord is the Shepherd, and men are the sheep of His pasture. He
is a Rock and a Strong Tower, such as rise here and there in the
desert's wildness for guidance or defence.[108] He is rivers of water
in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. And
man's peace is to lie beside still waters, and his glory is, not
to have built cities, but to have all these things put under his
feet--sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the
air and the fish of the sea.
Over against that lowly shepherd life, the first cities rose, as we
can imagine, high, terrible and impious. They were the production of
an alien race,[109] a people with no true religion, as it must have
appeared to the Semites, arrogant and coarse. But Babylon had a special
curse. Babylon was not the earliest city,--Akkad and Erekh were famous
long before,--but it is Babylon that the Book of Genesis represents
as overthrown and scattered by the judgement of God. What a contrast
this picture in Genesis,--and let it be remembered that the only other
cities to which that book leads us are Sodom and Gomorrah,--what a
contrast it forms to the passages in which classic poets celebrate the
beginnings of their great cities! There, the favourable omens, the
patronage of the gods, the prophecies of the glories of civil life; the
tracing of the temple and the forum; visions of the city as the school
of industry, the treasury of wealth, the home of freedom. Here, but a
few rapid notes of scorn and doom: man's miserable manufacture, without
Divine impulse or omen; his attempt to rise to heaven upon that alone,
his motive only to make a name for himself; and the result--not, as in
Greek legend, the foundation of a polity, the rise of commerce, the
growth of a great language, by which through the lips of one man the
whole city may be swayed together to high purposes, but only scattering
and confusion of speech. To history, a great city is a multitude of men
within reach of one man's voice. Athens is Demosthenes; Rome is Cicero
persuading the Senate; Florence is Savonarola putting by his word one
conscience within a thousand hearts. But Babylon, from the beginning,
gave its name to Babel, confusion of speech, incapacity for union and
for progress. And all this came, because the builders of the city, the
men who set the temper of its civilisation, did not begin with God,
but in their pride deemed everything possible to unaided and unblessed
human ambition, and had only the desire to make a name upon earth.
The sin and the curse never left the generations, who in turn
succeeded those impious builders. Pride and godlessness infested the
city, and prepared it for doom, as soon as it again gathered strength
to rise to heaven. The early nomads had watched Babylon's fall from
afar; but when their descendants were carried as captives within her
in the time of her second glory,[110] they found that the besetting
sin, which had once reared its head so fatally high, infected the city
to her very heart. We need not again go over the extent and glory of
Nebuchadrezzar's architecture, or the greatness of the traffic, from
the Levant to India, which his policy had concentrated upon his own
wharves and markets.[111] It was stupendous. But neither walls nor
wealth make a city, and no observant man, with the Hebrew's faith
and conscience, could have lived those fifty years in the centre
of Babylon, and especially after Nebuchadrezzar had passed away,
without perceiving, that her life was destitute of every principle
which ensured union or promised progress. Babylon was but a medley
of peoples, without common traditions or a public conscience, and
incapable of acting together. Many of her inhabitants had been brought
to her, like the Jews, against their own will, and were ever turning
from those glorious battlements they were forced to build in their
disgust, to scan the horizon for the advent of a deliverer. And many
others, who moved in freedom through her busy streets, and shared her
riches and her joys, were also foreigners, and bound to her only so
long as she ministered to their pleasure or their profit. Her king
was an usurper, who had insulted her native gods; her priesthood was
against him. And although his army, sheltered by the fortifications of
Nebuchadrezzar, had repulsed Cyrus upon the Persian's first invasion
from the north, conspiracies were now so rife among his oppressed and
insulted subjects, that, on Cyrus' second invasion, Babylon opened
her impregnable gates and suffered herself to be taken without a
blow. Nor, even if the city's religion had been better served by
the king, could it in the long run have availed for her salvation.
For, in spite of the science with which it was connected,--and this
"wisdom of the Chaldeans" was contemptible in neither its methods nor
its results,--the Babylonian religion was not one to inspire either
the common people with those moral principles, which form the true
stability of states, or their rulers with a reasonable and consistent
policy. Babylon's religion was broken up into a multitude of wearisome
and distracting details, whose absurd solemnities, especially when
administered by a priesthood hostile to the executive, must have
hampered every adventure of war, and rendered futile many opportunities
of victory. In fact, Babylon, for all her glory, could not but be
short-lived. There was no moral reason why she should endure. The
masses, who contributed to her building, were slaves who hated her;
the crowds, who fed her business, would stay with her only so long
as she was profitable to themselves; her rulers and her priests had
quarrelled; her religion was a burden, not an inspiration. Yet she sat
proud, and felt herself secure.
It is just these features, which our prophet describes in ch. xlvii.,
in verses more notable for their moral insight and indignation, than
for their beauty as a work of literature. He is certain of Babylon's
immediate fall from power and luxury into slavery and dishonour (vv.
1-3). He speaks of her cruelty to her captives (ver. 6), of her
haughtiness and her secure pride (vv. 7, 8). He touches twice upon her
atheistic self-sufficiency, her "autotheism,"--"_I am, and there is
none beside me_," words which only God can truly use, but words which
man's ignorant, proud self is ever ready to repeat (vv. 8-10). He
speaks of the wearisomeness and futility of her religious magic (vv.
10-14). And he closes with a vivid touch, that dissolves the reality of
that merely commercial grandeur on which she prides herself. Like every
association that arises only from the pecuniary profit of its members,
Babylon shall surely break up, and none of those, who sought her for
their selfish ends, shall wait to help her one moment after she has
ceased to be profitable to them.
Here now are his own words, rendered literally except in the case of
one or two conjunctions and articles,--rendered, too, in the original
order of the words, and, as far as it can be determined, in the
rhythm of the original. The rhythm is largely uncertain, but some
verses--1, 5, 14, 15--are complete in that measure which we found in
the Taunt-song against the king of Babylon in ch. xiii.,[112] and
nearly every line or clause has the same metrical swing upon it.
_Down! and sit in the dust, O virgin,_
_Daughter of Babel!_
_Sit on the ground, with no throne,_
_Daughter of Khasdîm!
For not again shall they call thee_
_Tender and Dainty._
_Take to thee millstones, and grind out the meal,_
_Put back thy veil, strip off the garment,_
_Make bare the leg, wade through the rivers;_
_Bare be thy nakedness, yea, be beholden thy shame!_
_Vengeance I take, and strike treaty with none._
_Our Redeemer! Jehovah of Hosts is His Name,_
_Holy of Israel!_
_Sit thou dumb, and get into darkness,_
_Daughter of Khasdîm!_
_For not again shall they call thee_
_Mistress of Kingdoms._
_I was wroth with My people, profaned Mine inheritance,_
_Gave them to thy hand:_
_Thou didst show them no mercy, on old men thou madest_
_Thy yoke very sore._
_And thou saidst, For ever I shall be mistress,_
_Till thou hast set not these things to thy heart,_
_Nor thought of their issue._
_Therefore now hear this, Voluptuous,_
_Sitting self-confident:_
_Thou, who saith in her heart, "I am: there is none else._
_I shall not sit a widow, nor know want of children."_
_Surely shall come to thee both of these, sudden, the same
day,_
_Childlessness, widowhood!
To their full come upon thee, spite of the mass of thy
spells,_
_Spite of the wealth of thy charms--to the full!_
_And thou wast bold in thine evil; thou saidst,_
_"None doth see me."_
_Thy wisdom and knowledge--they have led thee astray,_
_Till thou hast said in thine heart, "I am: there is none
else."_
_Yet there shall come on thee Evil,_
_Thou know'st not to charm it._
_And there shall fall on thee Havoc,_
_Thou canst not avert it._
_And there shall come on thee suddenly,_
_Unawares, Ruin._
_Stand forth, I pray, with thy charms, with the wealth of thy
spells--_
_With which thou hast wearied thyself from thy youth up--_
_If so thou be able to profit,_
_If so to strike terror!_
_Thou art sick with the mass of thy counsels:_
_Let them stand up and save thee--_
_Mappers of heaven, Planet-observers, Tellers at new moons--_
_From what must befall thee!_
_Behold, they are grown like the straw!_
_Fire hath consumed them;_
_Nay, they save not their life_
_From the hand of the flame!_
_--'Tis no fuel for warmth,_
_Fire to sit down at!--_
_Thus are they grown to thee, they who did weary thee,_
_Traders of thine from thy youth up;_
_Each as he could pass have they fled;_
_None is thy saviour!_
We, who remember Isaiah's elegies on Egypt and Tyre,[113] shall be
most struck here by the absence of all appreciation of greatness or
of beauty about Babylon. Even while prophesying for Tyre as certain a
judgement as our prophet here predicts for Babylon, Isaiah spoke as
if the ruin of so much enterprise and wealth were a desecration, and
he promised that the native strength of Tyre, humbled and purified,
would rise again to become the handmaid of religion. But our prophet
sees no saving virtue whatever in Babylon, and gives her not the
slightest promise of a future. There is pity through his scorn: the
way in which he speaks of the futility of the mass of Babylonian
science; the way in which he speaks of her ignorance, though served
by hosts of counsellors; the way in which, after recalling her
countless partners in traffic, he describes their headlong flight,
and closes with the words, _None is thy saviour_,--all this is most
pathetic. But upon none of his lines is there one touch of awe or
admiration or regret for the fall of what is great. To him Babylon is
wholly false, vain, destitute--as Tyre was not destitute--of native
vigour and saving virtue. Babylon is sheer pretence and futility.
Therefore his scorn and condemnation are thorough; and mocking
laughter breaks from him, now with an almost savage coarseness, as
he pictures the dishonour of the virgin who was no virgin--_Bare thy
nakedness, yea, be beholden thy shame_; and now in roguish glee,
as he interjects about the fire which shall destroy the mass of
Babylon's magicians, astrologers and haruspices: _No coal this to
warm oneself at, fire to sit down before._ But withal we are not
allowed to forget, that it is one of the Tyrant's poor captives, who
thus judges and scorns her. How vividly from the midst of his satire
does the prisoner's sigh break forth to God:--
"_Our Redeemer! Jehovah of Hosts is His Name,_
_Holy of Israel!_"
Not the least interesting feature of this taunt-song is the expression
which it gives to the characteristic Hebrew sense of the wearisomeness
and immorality of that system of divination, which formed the mass of
the Babylonian and many other Gentile religions. The worship of Jehovah
had very much in common with the rest of the Semitic cults. Its ritual,
its temple-furniture, the division of its sacred year, its terminology,
and even many of its titles for the Deity and His relations to men, may
be matched in the worship of Phœnician, Syrian and Babylonian gods,
or in the ruder Arabian cults. But in one thing the "law of Jehovah"
stands by itself, and that is in its intolerance of all augury and
divination. It owed this distinction to the unique moral and practical
sense which inspired it. Augury and divination, such as the Chaldeans
were most proficient in, exerted two most evil influences. They
hampered, sometimes paralysed, the industry and politics of a nation,
and they more or less confounded the moral sense of a people. They
were, therefore, utterly out of harmony with the practical sanity and
Divine morality of the Jewish law, which strenuously forbade them;
while the prophets, who were practical men as well as preachers of
righteousness, constantly exposed the fatigue they laid upon public
life, and the way they distracted attention from the simple moral
issues of conduct. Augury and divination wearied a people's intellect,
stunted their enterprise, distorted their conscience. _Thy spells,--the
mass of thy charms, with which thou hast wearied thyself from thy
youth. Thou art sick with the mass of thy counsels. Thy wisdom and thy
knowledge! they have led thee astray._ When "the Chaldean astrology"
found its way to the New Babylon, Juvenal's strong conscience expressed
the same sense of its wearisomeness and waste of time.[114]
Ashes and ruins, a servile and squalid life, a desolate site
abandoned by commerce,--what the prophet predicted, that did imperial
Babylon become. Not, indeed, at the hand of Cyrus, or of any other
single invader; but gradually by the rivalry of healthier peoples, by
the inevitable working of the poison at her heart, Babylon, though
situated in the most fertile and central part of God's earth, fell
into irredeemable decay. Do not let us, however, choke our interest
in this prophecy, as so many students of prophecy do, in the ruins
and dust, which were its primary fulfilment. The shell of Babylon,
the gorgeous city which rose by Euphrates, has indeed sunk into
heaps; but Babylon herself is not dead. Babylon never dies. To the
conscience of Christ's seer, this _mother of harlots_, though dead
and desert in the East, came to life again in the West. To the city
of Rome, in his day, John transferred word by word the phrases of
our prophet and of the prophet who wrote the fifty-first chapter
of the Book of Jeremiah. Rome was Babylon, in so far as Romans were
filled with cruelty, with arrogance, with trust in riches, with
credulity in divination, with that waste of mental and moral power
which Juvenal exposed in her. _I sit a queen_, John heard Rome say
in her heart, _and am no widow, and shall in no wise see mourning.
Therefore in one day shall her plagues come, death and mourning and
famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire, for strong is
the Lord God which judged her._[115] But we are not to leave the
matter even here: we are to use that freedom with John, which John
uses with our prophet. We are to pass by the particular fulfilment
of his words, in which he and his day were interested, because it
can only have a historical and secondary interest to us in face of
other Babylons in our own day, with which our consciences, if they
are quick, ought to be busy. Why do some honest people continue to
confine the reference of those chapters in the Book of Revelation
to the city and church of Rome? It is quite true, that John meant
the Rome of his day; it is quite true, that many features of his
Babylon may be traced upon the successor of the Roman Empire, the
Roman Church. But what is that to us, with incarnations of the
Babylonian spirit so much nearer ourselves for infection and danger,
than the Church of Rome can ever be. John's description, based upon
our prophet's, suits better a commercial, than an ecclesiastical
state,--though self-worship has been as rife in ecclesiasticism,
Roman or Reformed, as among the votaries of Mammon. For every phrase
of John's, that may be true of the Church of Rome in certain ages,
there are six apt descriptions of the centres of our own British
civilisation, and of the selfish, atheistic tempers that prevail in
them. Let us ask what are the Babylonian tempers and let us touch our
own consciences with them.
Forgetfulness of God, cruelty, vanity of knowledge (which so easily
breeds credulity) and vanity of wealth,--but the parent of them
all is idolatry of self. Isaiah told us about this in the Assyrian
with his war; we see it here in Babylon with her commerce and her
science; it was exposed even in the orthodox Jews,[116] for they
put their own prejudices before their God's revelation; and it is
perhaps as evident in the Christian Church as anywhere else. For
selfishness follows a man like his shadow; and religion, like the
sun, the stronger it shines, only makes the shadow more apparent. But
to worship your shadow is to turn your back on the sun; selfishness
is atheism, says our prophet. Man's self takes God's word about
Himself and says, _I am, and there is none beside me_. And he, who
forgets God, is sure also to forget his brother; thus self-worship
leads to cruelty. A heavy part of the charge against Babylon is her
treatment of the Lord's own people. These were God's convicts, and
she, for the time, God's minister of justice. But she unnecessarily
and cruelly oppressed them. _On the aged thou hast very heavily laid
thy yoke._ God's people were given to her to be reformed, but she
sought to crush the life out of them. God's purpose was upon them,
but she used them for her aggrandisement. She did not feel that she
was responsible to God for her treatment even of the most guilty and
contemptible of her subjects.
In all this Babylon acted in accordance with what was the prevailing
spirit of antiquity; and here we may safely affirm that our Christian
civilisation has at least a superior conscience. The modern world
does recognise, in some measure, its responsibility to God for the
care even of its vilest and most forfeit lives. No Christian state
at the present day would, for instance, allow its felons to be
tortured or outraged against their will in the interests either of
science or of public amusement. We do not vivisect our murderers nor
kill them off by gladiatorial combats. Our statutes do not get rid
of worthless or forfeit lives by condemning them to be used up in
dangerous labours of public necessity. On the contrary, in prisons we
treat our criminals with decency and even with comfort, and outside
prisons we protect and cherish even the most tainted and guilty
lives. In all our discharge of God's justice, we take care that the
inevitable errors of our human fallibility may fall on mercy's side.
Now it is true that in the practice of all this we often fail, and
are inconsistent. The point at present is that we have at least a
conscience about the matter. We do not say, like Babylon, "_I am, and
there is none beside me_. There is no law higher than my own will
and desire. I can, therefore, use whatever through its crime or its
uselessness falls into my power, for the increase of my wealth or
the satisfaction of my passions." We remember God, and that even the
criminal and the useless are His. In wielding the power which His Law
and Providence put into our hands towards many of His creatures, we
remember that we are administering His justice, and not satisfying
our own revenge, or feeding our own desire for sensation, or
experimenting for the sake of our science. They are His convicts, not
our spoil. In our treatment of them we are subject to His laws,--one
of which, that fences even His justice, is the law against cruelty;
and another, for which His justice leaves room, is that to every man
there be granted, with his due penalty, the opportunity of penitence
and reform. There are among us Positivists, who deny that these
opinions and practices of modern civilisation are correct. Carrying
out the essential atheism of their school--_I am_ man, _and there
is none else_: that in the discharge of justice and the discharge
of charity men are responsible only to themselves--they dare to
recommend that the victims of justice should be made the experiments,
however painful, of science, and that charity should be refused to
the corrupt and the useless. But all this is simply reversion to the
Babylonian type, and the Babylonian type is doomed to decay. For
history has writ no surer law upon itself than this--that cruelty is
the infallible precursor of ruin.
But while speaking of the state, we should remember individual
responsibilities as well. Success, even where it is the righteous
success of character, is a most subtle breeder of cruelty. The best of
us need most strongly to guard ourselves against censoriousness. If
God does put the characters of sinful men and women into our keeping,
let us remember that our right of judging them, our right of punishing
them, our right even of talking about them, is strictly limited.
Religious people too easily forget this, and their cruel censoriousness
or selfish gossip warns us that to be a member of the Church of Christ
does not always mean that a man's citizenship is in heaven; he may well
be a Babylonian and carry the freedom of that city upon his face. To
"be hard on those who are down" is Babylonian; to make material out of
our neighbours' faults, for our pride, or for love of gossip, or for
prurience, is Babylonian. There is one very good practical rule to
keep us safe. We may allow ourselves to speak about our erring brothers
to men, just as much as we pray for them to God. But if we pray much
for a man, he will surely become too sacred to be made the amusement of
society or the food of our curiosity or of our pride.
The last curse on Babylon reminds us of the fatal looseness of a
society that is built only upon the interests of trade; of the
loneliness and uselessness that await, in the end, all lives, which
keep themselves alive simply by trafficking with men. If we feed life
only by the news of the markets, by the interest of traffic, by the
excitement of competition, by the fever of speculation, by the passions
of cupidity and pride, we may feel healthy and powerful for a time. But
such a life, which is merely a being kept brisk by the sense of gaining
something or overreaching some one, is the mere semblance of living;
and when the inevitable end comes, when they that have trafficked with
us from our youth depart, then each particle of strength with which
they fed us shall be withdrawn, and we shall fall into decay. There
never was a truer picture of the quick ruin of a merely commercial
community, or of the ultimate loneliness of a mercenary and selfish
life, than the headlong rush of traders, _each as he could find
passage_, from the city that never had other attractions even for her
own citizens than those of gain or of pleasure.
FOOTNOTES:
[108] _Cf._ Doughty, _Arabia Deserta_.
[109] The Turanians, who occupied Mesopotamia before the Semitic
invasion, were the first builders of cities.
[110] Babylon, as far as we can learn, first rose to power about the
time of that Amraphel who fought in the Mesopotamian league against
the neighbours and friends of Abraham. Amraphel is supposed to have
been the father of Hammurabis, who first made Babylon the capital
of Chaldea. It scarcely ever again ceased to be such; but it was
not till the fall of Assyria, about 625 B.C., and the rebuilding
of Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar (604-561), that the city's second and
greatest glory began.
[111] See ch. iv., pp. 53-56.
[112] Vol. i., pp. 409-315.
[113] Vol. i., pp. 275, 286, 294.
[114] See especially _Satires III._ and _VI._, and _cf._ Bagehot's
_Physics and Politics_.
[115] Rev. xvii., xviii.
[116] Ch. xlv.