6 Wail! God's Day of Judgment is near - an avalanche crashing down from the Strong God! 7 Everyone paralyzed in the panic, 8 and unstrung, Doubled up in pain like a woman giving birth to a baby. Horrified - everyone they see is like a face out of a nightmare. 9 "Watch now. God's Judgment Day comes. Cruel it is, a day of wrath and anger, A day to waste the earth and clean out all the sinners. 10 The stars in the sky, the great parade of constellations, will be nothing but black holes. The sun will come up as a black disk, and the moon a blank nothing. 11 I'll put a full stop to the evil on earth, terminate the dark acts of the wicked. I'll gag all braggarts and boasters - not a peep anymore from them - and trip strutting tyrants, leave them flat on their faces. 12 Proud humanity will disappear from the earth. I'll make mortals rarer than hens' teeth. 13 And yes, I'll even make the sky shake, and the earth quake to its roots Under the wrath of God-of-the-Angel-Armies, the Judgment Day of his raging anger. 14 Like a hunted white-tailed deer, like lost sheep with no shepherd, People will huddle with a few of their own kind, run off to some makeshift shelter. 15 But tough luck to stragglers - they'll be killed on the spot, throats cut, bellies ripped open, 16 Babies smashed on the rocks while mothers and fathers watch, Houses looted, wives raped. 17 "And now watch this: Against Babylon, I'm inciting the Medes, A ruthless bunch indifferent to bribes, the kind of brutality that no one can blunt. 18 They massacre the young, wantonly kick and kill even babies.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Isaiah 13:6-18
Commentary on Isaiah 13:6-18
(Read Isaiah 13:6-18)
We have here the terrible desolation of Babylon by the Medes and Persians. Those who in the day of their peace were proud, and haughty, and terrible, are quite dispirited when trouble comes. Their faces shall be scorched with the flame. All comfort and hope shall fail. The stars of heaven shall not give their light, the sun shall be darkened. Such expressions are often employed by the prophets, to describe the convulsions of governments. God will visit them for their iniquity, particularly the sin of pride, which brings men low. There shall be a general scene of horror. Those who join themselves to Babylon, must expect to share her plagues, Revelation 18:4. All that men have, they would give for their lives, but no man's riches shall be the ransom of his life. Pause here and wonder that men should be thus cruel and inhuman, and see how corrupt the nature of man is become. And that little infants thus suffer, which shows that there is an original guilt, by which life is forfeited as soon as it is begun. The day of the Lord will, indeed, be terrible with wrath and fierce anger, far beyond all here stated. Nor will there be any place for the sinner to flee to, or attempt an escape. But few act as though they believed these things.