Today, I am reading and commenting on Isaiah 13-16.

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I’m not sure if I have a spiritual lesson from today’s passage, but I have some thoughts about the history that relates to it.  So, for a long time I wondered why the writer wrote about the fall of the Babylonian Empire and then about the fall of the Assyrian Empire which preceded the Babylonian Empire.  Or so I thought.  Over the last few years I have learned that the Babylonian Empire which is spoken about in biblical prophecy was a continuation of the Assyrian Empire where the capital of the Empire moved from Nineveh to Babylon.  A simple overview is that a member of the royal house of Assyria had been appointed governor of Babylon under the authority of the king of Assyria.  After the death of one of the kings of Assyria, the throne of Assyria became disputed, weakening the power of eventual successor.  The Assyrian governor of Babylon rebelled against the king, defeated him and began to rule over the Assyrian Empire from Babylon.  For various reasons the King of Babylon had to reconquer many of the subordinate lands, leading to the Bible generally presenting this as a new Empire.  Nevertheless this Babylonian Empire was really a continuation of the Assyrian Empire in much the same way that the Byzantine Empire was a continuation of the Roman Empire.  Which brings me back to today’s passage.  When Isaiah speaks of God breaking Assyria after he speaks of the fall of Babylon, he is doing so because Assyria did not completely fall until Babylon fell.

Now I come to the second interesting historical fact contained in today’s passage.  In his prophecy concerning Philistia, Isaiah tells them not to rejoice at the fall of Assyria because “from the serpent’s root will come forth an adder…”   This seems to me to be a reference to what I mentioned in the previous paragraph: Babylon was a successor state of, or continuation of, Assyria.  Babylon destroyed Philistia, and removed Philistia from history a few years before sacking Jerusalem and taking the people of Judah into Exile.  After its conquest, Philistia and the Philistines disappeared from history, but, just as Isaiah prophesied here, Israel and the Israelites remained and was rebuilt.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.