NOTES for Isa 46:1-13
Today's reading is devoted entirely to Babylon and its fate. The mention of the fall of Bel and Nebo (v. 1) refers to events connected with the siege and capture of Babylon by the Persian army. Bel, or Bel-Marduk, was Babylon's patron god, while Nebo was regarded as the patron of the dynasty then ruling there. It should be noted that the Persians took Babylon much faster than might have been expected, and this episode probably involved betrayal: there were people in the city who literally opened the gates to the enemy. For the prophet, however, the event was above all evidence of the powerlessness of pagan gods and the bankruptcy of paganism. He calls on certain apostates to turn back (vv. 3–9), which at first sounds rather strange: Babylon's Jewish community was already a community of Judaism; indeed, the Synagogue and Judaism themselves originated during the exile. It is virtually impossible to imagine a Jew as a pagan either then or later: such a Jew would simply have become an outcast, and his descendants would probably soon have assimilated. Yet it is possible that apostates really did appear in the Jewish community shortly before Babylon's fall, if we suppose that persecution of the community began at that time in connection with the religious reform undertaken in the country by Babylonia's last ruler, Bel-Tezer, the biblical Belshazzar. Echoes of this persecution can be found not only in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Esther, but also in the second part of the Book of Isaiah, while ancient Babylonian archives have preserved Bel-Tezer's decree instituting the reform. It is possible that this reform, which brought the authorities into conflict with the priestly corporations, hastened Babylon's fall by making the city easier for the Persians to take. Meanwhile, the prophet reproaches the apostates for their lack of faith, telling them that everything will change very soon: God will free His faithful by sending them a deliverer from the East whom they had not expected at all (vv. 10–13). This deliverer's triumph will also be the triumph of God's righteousness. Such an understanding of God's righteousness might seem to narrow it somewhat, reducing it to a specific, immediate situation. Yet for a human being, sin and righteousness, being right and being wrong, are always bound up with a concrete situation unfolding here and now. God, too, when intervening in the life of an individual or an entire people, acts quite concretely within a particular situation, bringing each person to a choice they must make for themselves. To Babylonia's ruler, Cyrus advancing from the East with his army became a conqueror; to the Jewish community, he became a liberator. God's plan includes everyone. But what a person becomes in God's eyes depends only on that person.
