What is the meaning of Isaiah 47:5? Sit in silence “Sit in silence…” • God commands Babylon to stop boasting and simply sit, wordless, under His judgment, just as Job “sat on the ground seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him” (Job 2:13). • Silence marks submission: “The LORD is in His holy temple; let all the earth be silent before Him” (Habakkuk 2:20). • It is also the posture of stunned sorrow seen when Israel “sat down and wept” by Babylon’s rivers (Psalm 137:1). Babylon will taste the same speechless grief it once imposed on others. and go into darkness “…and go into darkness…” • Darkness pictures loss of enlightenment, influence, and security; compare Egypt’s plague when “there was thick darkness in all the land” (Exodus 10:22). • Proverbs 2:13 warns of those “who leave the straight paths to walk in the ways of darkness.” Babylon voluntarily walked that path; now God enforces it. • Isaiah earlier promised light to Zion (Isaiah 60:1–2); the inverse fate—deep night—now falls on Babylon. O Daughter of the Chaldeans “…O Daughter of the Chaldeans.” • “Daughter” expresses both closeness and vulnerability; Babylon is personified as a pampered yet doomed princess (cf. Isaiah 47:1). • The Chaldeans, famed for astrology (Daniel 2:2), trusted human wisdom. Jeremiah 50:35–38 declared a sword “against the Chaldeans” for that very pride. • Though Babylon had oppressed Judah (2 Kings 25), God shows He alone decides a nation’s rise or fall (Daniel 4:17). For you will no longer be called the queen of kingdoms “For you will no longer be called the queen of kingdoms.” • Babylon liked the title “queen,” ruling an empire that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean (Isaiah 14:4). • In one night that crown was lost when “Belshazzar the Chaldean king was slain” and Darius the Mede received the kingdom (Daniel 5:30–31). • Revelation 18:7 echoes this verdict on end-times Babylon: “She says in her heart, ‘I sit as queen…’ yet in one day her plagues will overtake her.” God’s pattern of humbling arrogant powers remains consistent. summary Isaiah 47:5 pictures mighty Babylon as a dethroned princess forced into silent, humiliating darkness. The Lord who once permitted her ascendancy now strips every title and lamp, proving that no empire, however dazzling, can outshine or outlast His sovereign rule. |
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