Biblical Hebrew Forum

["George Athas" <gathas AT mail.usyd.edu.au>]

> I suspect scholars are in error here. Isaiah is not railing against a
> "Chaldean" king of Babylon, he is speaking of the "Assyrian" king of
> Babylon. Isaiah 14:22 speaks of the Lord's future destruction of Babylon,
> but a following verse, 14:25, states God will destroy "the Assyrian,"  -not
> Chaldean-  in Judah, while Isaiah 14:28 speaks of the death of Ahaz of Judah
> who reigned 735-715 BCE.

If you take that line, then you'd probably have to say that the Assyrian king 
is also the
king of Philistia since it talks of Philistines only a few verses further 
down. The oracle
to do with Assyria is different from that referring to Babylon. It's highly 
unlikely that
a prophet in Palestine would have referred to the Assyrian king as "the king 
of Babylon".
This makes no sense and has little relevance to the people of Palestine who 
were being
afflicted by Assyria.

If Isa 13-14 dates from the 8th century BCE, then the King of Babylon is 
likely to have
been Marduk-apal-iddina (Merodach-baladan) who defied Sargon V for a while 
until he was
beaten back to the marshlands at the head of the Gulf. Yet, we must ask what 
the Medes
have to do with things here. It's more likely that either the statement about 
the Medes is
a later addition from after 540 BCE, or the whole thing dates from after 540 
BCE.

Best regards,
George Athas
 Dept of Semitic Studies,
 University of Sydney
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< gathas@ mail.usyd.edu.au >