A dire vision has been shown to me: The traitor betrays, the looter takes loot. Elam, attack! Media, lay siege! I will bring to an end all the groaning she caused. – Isaiah 21:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 12, 2017): Isaiah 21

In 539 B.C.E., Cyrus captured Babylon for the Persian Empire. It is likely that the battle had been raging for a while as the outlying towns surrendered to Cyrus and his army. By 540 B.C.E., all of the great statues that had been residing in the distant towns and villages of the Empire had already been brought into the city of Babylon. But, finally, it was time for Cyrus to enter the city. The Babylonians had long believed that their city was impregnable – the walls were simply too strong to be overcome by any opposing army.

We really don’t know what exactly happened in those final days of the Babylonian Empire. We suspect that Cyrus had already been negotiating with Babylon. But we also know that the Persians had found a weakness in the defenses of the city. Water flowed into the city through the Euphrates River. The river was barred, but if the water of the river could be reduced, the city could be entered via the riverbed.

And that is exactly what Cyrus decides to do. While the city celebrates, and likely while negotiations proceeded, Cyrus diverts the water of the Euphrates and the Persian army enters through the river gate of the city. The outskirts of the area fell first, and the city was already under Persian control long before the leaders even realized that the Persian army had breached the city’s defenses.

According to Cyrus, in the final days of the Babylon Empire, Babylon was be repaid with treachery. Isaiah summed up the last days of the Babylonian Empire by saying that the traitor betrays and the looter loots. Through Cyrus, Elam and Media, both ancient names for Persia, rose up and destroyed the Babylonian Empire. And that destruction of the Babylonians opened the door for the Jews to return home. Because while the Babylonian tactic was to remove people groups replacing them with other people and shaking up the ethnic makeup of the Empire, Cyrus and the Persians tactic was to send the captives back to their native lands, ensuring their loyalty and trust by giving them exactly what they wanted – home.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 22

I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them,” declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. – Isaiah 19:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 11, 2017): Isaiah 19 & 20

When Psamtik I first took the throne in Egypt, he was just one of twelve co-rulers who ruled over Egypt. But Psamtik had no desire to rule over a divided nation. So Psamtik enlisted the help of a mercenary army from Greece and proceeded to unify the country. Once Egypt was united, Psamtik was able to throw off Egypt’s Assyrian masters. Because of his successes, Psamtik is remembered as a great pharaoh - and as the founder of the nation’s 26^th dynasty. But the reality is that to accomplish all that Psamtik achieved in Egypt; he would have to have been a fierce king – and maybe even a cruel one.

But another story from the reign of Psamtik may highlight the fierceness, and cruelty, of the Pharaoh. Apparently, Psamtik believed that language was innate and did not have to be learned. Well, at least one language was natural, and Psamtik wanted to know which one. So he took two babies and placed them in the care of a local shepherd. The instruction that he gave to the shepherd was that no one, including the shepherd, was to speak in the presence of the children. The shepherd was instructed to listen and see which language the children began to speak first spontaneously. So the children existed in silence as the shepherd listened to the noises that the children started to make. Eventually one of the children spoke what sounded like “bekos.” The Shepherd decided that the child was using the Phrygian word for bread and that it was asking for food. And with this satisfactory conclusion to the experiment, Psamtik declared that Phrygian was the natural or first language of humankind.

It is likely that it was Psamtik that Isaiah was referring to in this prophecy. He fits well with the picture that Isaiah is trying to paint. A divided nation where neighbor fought against neighbor that is united by a fierce king – and cruel king – even though history may not remember him as either. He was merely a king that was able to accomplish exactly what it was that he set out to do – and he did it less than a hundred years after the words of Isaiah were spoken.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 21

At that time gifts will be brought to the LORD Almighty – from a people tall and smooth-skinned, from a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers—the gifts will be brought to Mount Zion, the place of the Name of the LORD Almighty. – Isaiah 18:7

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 10, 2017): Isaiah 18

Cush is the name of the region that is dominated today by Ethiopia. It has always been militarily strong, and it has derived some prestige by being the only African nation to defeat a European power and maintain sovereignty over its land and culture during the 19^th century “Scramble for Africa” which prompted various European nations to attempt to stake a claim to the countries of Africa. It is an area of firsts. For my Starbucks and Tim Horton’s readers, this is the area that first developed and harvested the coffee bean. It is widely considered to be the place where human life first emerged – however you may interpret that phenomenon. The land of Cush often interacted with Judah and Israel in the Middle East.

What they were not was worshippers of the God of Israel. Ethiopia had its own religions and its belief systems, as all of the people outside (and sometimes inside) of Judah and Israel possessed. The worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was provincial in nature. Every nation worshiped the gods of their country or area. In this, Israel was no different from the rest of the world - which is why the words spoken by Isaiah would have originally been very shocking in nature. The people of Ethiopia were going to leave the worship of their gods and come to worship the God of Jerusalem – and in Jerusalem. They would bring their gifts to Jerusalem and worship him in that city.

It is likely that Isaiah had some local phenomenon in mind as he spoke his prophecy, but there was to be an even greater fulfillment of his words. In Acts 8, we are told of the baptism into the Christian Church of the Ethiopian eunuch – most likely a prominent Ethiopian official. But the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, through his son Jesus Christ, did not stop there. It spread through the region. While Ethiopia has traditionally maintained close ties with all three of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), The Kingdom of Aksum in northern Ethiopia was the first nation to accept Christianity and become a Christian nation.

Today, almost 63% of Ethiopians claim to be Christian while 34% of Ethiopians are Muslim. The prophecy of Isaiah remains shockingly correct as the people of the nation continue to worship the God of Israel in one form or another. And Ethiopians continue to make their pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship God in that Holy City.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 19 & 20