Isaiah 14:21

Prepare slaughter for his children,.... These words are directed to the Medes and Persians, to prepare instruments of slaughter, and make use of them; and prepare themselves for the slaughter of the

Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.

Prepare slaughter for his children; O ye Medes and Persians, cut off all the branches of the royal family of Babylon. For the iniquity of their fathers; in the guilt whereof the children are justly involved, partly because of that community of nature and interest which is between parents and children, which makes them for the most part bear a share with them, as in their rewards and advantages, so also in their punishments and miseries; and partly because they justified their sins by their impenitency, and imitation of their wicked example. Do not rise, i.e. not recover their former splendour and power. With cities; erected by them, either as instruments of tyranny, to keep the country round about them in slavery, or as monuments of their power and riches, as Babylon was, .

Isaiah 14:21 Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.Ver. 21. Prepare another slaughter for his children.] For Belshazzar’ s posterity. This is God’ s charge to the Medes and Persians. See on Isaiah 14:20.

(21) Prepare slaughter for his children.—Literally, as in Jeremiah 51:40, a slaughter house. The command may be addressed to the Medes of Isa 13:17, or to any minister of the Divine vengeance. In the judgment of God, as seen in history, that judgment falls necessarily on the last members of an evil and cruel dynasty. In this sense the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, while, in the eternal judgment which lies behind the veil, each single soul stands, as in Ezekiel 18:4, on its own personal responsibility, and may win pardon for itself. Penitent or impenitent (and the latter seems here implied), the children of the evil-doers should cease to be conquerors and rulers. Nor fill the face of the world with cities.—The words describe the boast of the great monarchs, who, like Nimrod, built cities to perpetuate their fame. (Comp. Genesis 10:10-12; Daniel 4:30.) The Babylonian and Assyrian kings record their destructive and constructive work with equal exultation (Records of the Past, v., pp. 80, 119, 123). Various readings have been suggested, giving ruined heaps, or terrible ones, or enemies, or conflicts; but there seems no need for any change.

21. slaughter] a place of slaughter (R.V. marg.). that they do not rise … land] R.V. that they rise not up, and possess the earth. full the face of the world with cities] This could hardly be reckoned a crime, for it would be undoing the wrong that their father had wrought (Isaiah 14:17). Some render “enemies” or gain that sense by an emendation. Others change the word ‘βrξm (cities) into ‘iyyξm (ruined heaps). The easiest correction is simply to omit the word, the sense being complete without it. The elegy ends here.—The passage just considered (Isaiah 14:9-20) bears a close resemblance to Ezekiel’s dirge over the fall of Pharaoh and his host (Ezekiel 32:19 ff.). Many questions of great interest and importance are suggested by both. The most important is how far such representations are to be taken as expressing the fixed belief of the writers or their age with regard to the state after death. Their affinities with Babylonian speculation on that subject, taken in connexion with the fact that such elaborate descriptions of the underworld do not occur before the Exile, may indicate that the imagination of the writers had been influenced by their contact with the religion of their conquerors. In that case it may be reasonable to suppose that they freely availed themselves of the material thus laid to their hand merely as poetic imagery, without meaning to attribute strict objective reality to all the conceptions. At the same time there was a common basis of belief underlying the Hebrew and Babylonian ideas regarding the future state, and all that is essential to the understanding of this passage was probably familiar to the minds of the Israelites before the Exile. In the conception as here presented the following points are to be noted. (1) Sheol, which is figured as a vast subterranean region, is the common gathering-place of all the dead. They exist there as shades, rμphβ’ξm (Isaiah 14:9), a word which is usually explained to mean “feeble ones,”—weak, pithless adumbrations of the living form. These are represented as capable of being roused to a transient interest in human affairs by the arrival amongst them of so distinguished a personage as the king of Babylon; but their ordinary condition is one of utter inactivity, a sort of conscious death rather than life. It is true that the writer speaks only of kings and potentates, and throws little light on the state of the common man after death. Still the Old Testament as a whole knows nothing of separate spheres of existence for the righteous and for the wicked, and that idea is certainly not to be imported into the present passage. (2) We seem to find a clear trace of the antique notion that the lot of the shade in Sheol depends on the fate of the body on earth.

Prepare slaughter for his children - That is, cut them off not only from inheriting the honor of their father, but from life.

21. Prepare slaughter for his children — Such is the impulse of inexorable sentiment with the Oriental to this day; and such, too, the reasons for it as are here given.