Isaiah 14

Isaiah saw far beyond the immediate danger to his people. He also saw the much bigger threat coming down the road.

The Assyrians were Public Enemy no. 1 in his time. But they were never able to conquer his homeland of Judah. That task fell to the Babylonians a century later. They sacked Jerusalem, destroyed The Temple, and exiled the survivors for another 70 years.

Babylon has been the ultimate boogeyman in the Jewish imagination ever since. The city became the symbol for everything evil in the world, a representation of the Kingdom of Man that stands in opposition to the Kingdom of God. There’s a reason the Book of Revelations features a character called “The Whore of Babylon”.

Isaiah doesn’t hold back when talking about the King of Babylon in Chapter 14:

The realm of the dead below is all astir to meet you at your coming; it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you — all those who were leaders in the world; it makes them rise from their thrones — all those who were kings over nations.  

They will all respond, they will say to you, “You also have become weak, as we are; you have become like us.”

All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noises of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you.  

- Isaiah 14:9-11 

Nebuchadnezzar II was one of the most powerful kings of all-time. Judah was barely a bump in the road for someone who ruled almost the entire known world. This is a man who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in the middle of a desert in 600 BC:

In his time, Nebuchadnezzar was as famous and accomplished a man as had ever lived. He created a legacy that should have lasted forever.

Yet who has heard of him now? His bones are rotting in some long forgotten tomb, just as Isaiah said. He might as well have never existed for as little as people these days care about him.

Not much lasts after 2,600+ years. The sheer scale of human history is hard for Americans, whose country has been around for less than 250, to fully appreciate.

Take our Presidents. We spend so much time worrying about their legacy and what the judgment of history will be on their time in office. Will they one day be on Mount Rushmore?

The reality is that it won’t take that long for people to forget every face on that mountain. Our Presidents will mean about as much to future generations as the faces on Easter Island statues mean to us.

Most of human history has already disappeared in the sands of time. The Jews were in Egypt for longer than the U.S. has been a country. The Pharaohs were in power for longer (3,100 years) than the entire span of Western Civilization. All that is left of them is a bunch of giant tombs in the desert. Who were the greatest Pharaohs in Egyptian history? Who cares?

The same thing will happen to the U.S. There might be something we recognize as America in 2500. By 3000? No chance. We will be lucky if people have even heard of this country when we are as far into the future (4800) as Nebuchadnezzar is from us.

Most people reading this would probably say there won't even be a world we will recognize at that point. Either because of global warming or a nuclear winter or The Singularity or the second coming or some other apocalypse.

That might be right. But people have always believed the world was coming to an end. Europeans in the 9th century AD thought the coming of the new millennium meant the end times were here. The Apostle Paul thought it was right around the corner a thousand years before.

Jesus constantly talked about the coming apocalypse, although he admitted that was the one thing that he didn't actually know about:

But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  

- Mark 13:32

The key distinction for all of them is that just because their world was ending didn’t mean the world was. The world that Jesus grew up and lived in around Galilee and Jerusalem ended when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD. The ancient Jewish world that Isaiah knew ended when Babylon destroyed the original in 587 BC. The same thing will happen to the one that you and I know.

The good news is that the fate of mankind doesn’t hinge on the fate of the U.S. The days of nations mattering in the kingdom of God ended with Jesus. There was a plan in the Old Testament for a Jewish society to last long enough for the Messiah to be born into it. The Gospels told his story and the Book of Acts showed how his disciples founded the Christian church. Everything after is just an intermission until Revelations. Then end is already written.

The impact that even Pharaohs and Presidents have on the course of human history is miniscule. All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. We have our exits and our entrances. The music cuts, the lights come down, and you get ushered off so that someone else can take your spot.

Your entire career becomes a one-minute TV ad. That’s how quickly it all goes by:



Jay-Z has a song called “Forever Young” about how he wants his music to live forever. It won’t. People won’t remember Beethoven or Mozart. They won’t remember him.

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.  

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.  

Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! There is something new?" It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 

No one remembers the former generations, even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 

- Ecclesiastes 1:3-4, 9-11

Every human being wants to leave a mark on this world that lasts beyond our death. But none of us will be able to do. Even the greatest kings end up being eaten by maggots and worms in their own tombs.

There’s only one man whose name will live forever. And that’s because he didn't stay in his.

This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?  

- Isaiah 14:26-27

Isaiah 13

Isaiah got so many things right about the future that most scholars think he was cheating. It's not just his prophecies about Jesus. He was three steps ahead of everyone else when it came to politics, too. The Book of Isaiah contains unbelievably accurate information about things that happened hundreds of years after it was written.

That, at least, is what the Bible tells you. Modern scholarship has a different answer. Read about "Isaiah" in a history book and you will find that he was actually a composite character created by multiple authors over a huge span of time.

It all comes down to belief. Isaiah makes Nostradamus look like a blind man reading a Ouija board. There only two possible explanations for how:

1. He was a genuine prophet who heard the voice of God.
2. He was cheating.

Believing Christians, Muslims, and Jews have no trouble with #1. But people who don't believe in God aren't going to believe in prophets, either.

The most popular theory about the Book of Isaiah is that it has three authors: the Original Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 1-39 around 700 BC), Deutero-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 40-55 during the Exile) and Trito-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 56-66 during the restoration of Judah after the Exile). So instead of Original Isaiah eerily predicting the future, Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just describing what they saw around them.

Those predictions or descriptions, depending on how you want to look at it, begin in Chapter 13. That's when the Book of Isaiah moves from talking about the Messiah and the fate of all mankind to focusing on its corner of the world. The first clue that something is off is the way that it describes Babylon:

Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

 - Isaiah 13:19

Babylon was not the "jewel of kingdoms" during Isaiah's lifetime. Like the rest of the ancient Middle East, it existed in the shadow of Assyria. The Babylonians didn't gain their independence until well after his death.

Then, after breaking free in 626 BC, they created an even more dominant empire of their own. They eventually finished what the Assyrians started, sacking Jerusalem in 597 BC and deporting the survivors as part of what became known as the Babylonian Exile.

Not only did Isaiah predict their rise, he also predicted their fall:

See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. 

- Isaiah 13:17

The Medes were an obscure group of tribes in modern-day Iran on the very fringes of the Assyrian Empire in his lifetime:

You can already guess what happened next. The people in that area coalesced into a group whom we now know as the Persians, who then conquered Babylon in 539 BC.

Predicting all that 200 years in advance is insane enough. But where the Book of Isaiah really loses scholars comes in Chapter 45, when it specifically gives the name of the Persian king who frees the Jews and lets them return to Jerusalem:

"I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty." 

- Isaiah 45:13

The general scholarly consensus with this prediction can be summed up in six words: "Get the f*** out of here". Non-religious scholars who study the Bible for a living tend to be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. But this is too much. There had to be someone giving messages from the future to the past to get a name right.

No one actually knows. The beauty of that type of theory is that it's impossible to prove a negative. How can you prove in 2020 that someone didn't add chapters in 500 BC to something that was written in 700 BC?

The only proof that could exist is a copy of the complete version of the Book of Isaiah that can be dated to a specific point of time. The closes thing we have to that is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient manuscripts that were preserved in the Israeli desert around 200 BC and then discovered in the 1940s. That's the point where we know the Book was "finished". Everything before that is just speculation.

You can raise doubt about the available evidence in either direction.

People who believe in a unitary Isaiah will point to phrases that exist throughout every section of the Book (most notably "the Holy One of Israel") and appear nowhere else in the Bible, as well as descriptions of things like plants and animals native to ancient Israel and the lack of the same descriptions of things from ancient Babylon, where Deutero-Isaiah was supposed to exist. But the proponents of the multiple Isaiah theory respond by saying that Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just covering their tracks.

Beyond the eerily precise predictions, they also point out that the subject matter changes between the three sections, as does the style of writing. But that doesn't prove anything, either. Writers change topics and write in different styles all the time. Just because I normally write about basketball doesn't mean this blog was written by someone else.

There's a thin line between historical speculation and conspiracy theory. You can use computer analysis to "prove" that multiple people wrote the Book of Isaiah, but you can also use it to "prove" that Barack Obama didn't actually write his memoir.

Nor is there an obvious place to stop once you start dividing a book into sections. There are some scholars who believe there were at least seven different authors -- 1-12, 13-23, 24-35, 36-39, 40-48, 49-57, and 58-66. There are others who think there are dozens, if not hundreds. Maybe the Book of Isaiah was just the first Wikipedia page?

The lack of concrete proof means that both sides are building their arguments on faith. It's obvious enough to see that with the unitary Isaiah people. But the same thing holds true for their counterparts.

The book "A History of The Bible" by John Barton, a liberal Christian theologian, is a perfect example. His section on Isaiah is a well-written review of what everyone "knows" that seems convincing at first glance.

You will notice something interesting if you read through his book as closely as he reads through the Bible. In eight pages about Isaiah, Barton uses the word "probably" six times and "may" (as in "we may assume" or "whom we may guess") four. That doesn't even count phrases like "we must assume" and "seems likely".

He's guessing, just like everyone else.

It all comes back to first principles. If your worldview doesn't allow for supernatural explanations, than cheating is the only possible explanation for Isaiah's predictions and "you must assume" certain things about how it was written. If you do believe in God, than believing that Isaiah could see into the future is nothing. The seraphim that he describes seeing in the throne room of God are way crazier than his predictions.

There are two sets of prophecies in the Book of Isaiah that we can all agree are real, regardless of worldview. The first are the ones about the Messiah. Even if there was an eighth or ninth or tenth or thirteenth Isaiah sneaking in prophecies in 210 BC, right before the Dead Sea Scrolls were frozen in time, it's still incredible to see how much he anticipated about Jesus.

The second are the ones about things that are still happening:

[Babylon] will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks.

But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about.

Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious places. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.

- Isaiah 13:20-23 

Human civilization began in Babylon. It was New York City, London, and Beijing all rolled up into one. Historians believe that it had two stretches separated by over 1,000 years (1770-1670 BC and 600-300 BC) where it was the most populated city in the world. Jerusalem, where Isaiah lived, was a shabby collection of huts in comparison.

Here's what Babylon looks like now:

It has not been inhabited in thousands of years. Some people in the region believe there was a curse put on Babylon, and that anyone who tries to rebuild it will be destroyed. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

So how did Isaiah know that would happen?

Isaiah 12

Isaiah knew hard times. He's famous for his prophecies about Jesus, but what often gets missed is the context that he made them in.

He lived in a war zone. Assyria came this close to exterminating the Jewish people in his lifetime. Their armies were camped outside Jerusalem before being miraculously destroyed in a way that still baffles historians.

It would have been easy for Isaiah to despair and give up hope. Yet he never did, no matter how bad things got.

After prophesying about the Messiah in Chapters 9-11, he moves into a song of praise in Chapter 12:

In that day you will say:

“I will praise you, Lord. Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me. 

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation.” 

- Isaiah 12:1-2 

Being a Christian is like walking over a bridge. You know in your head that God will catch you if it collapses. But you would still rather not find out.

Then one day you look down and the bridge is gone. Then you have to decide if you are really going to believe any of this stuff.

That point has come for a lot of people in the last few months.

As a Christian, the best thing you can do in these moments is remember the times that God has come through in the past.

I always go back to when I first became a believer. I was 26. I was an editor and a writer at SB Nation while making money on the side writing about basketball for a few other websites.

My job was more than a paycheck. It was my life. I had spent the four years since college scratching and clawing to establish myself in the industry. I didn't have much else going for me. I didn't have any money. I lived in a run down one bedroom apartment. I hadn't dated anyone in years. The only thing I had to hang my hat on was that I had a cool job.

Then, all of a sudden, I didn't.

It was my own fault. The college basketball editor job at SBN came open, and I assumed that I would get it. After all, I was the best.

When I didn't, I began calling around to see what other jobs were out there for me. I even told my bosses what I was doing because obviously they would realize their mistake in passing over me.

You can already guess what happened. They fired me like it was nothing. No severance. Nothing. And all those other jobs that I had been talking too? None of them came through.

I ended up getting a part-time job stocking shelves on weekends. We would drive around to grocery stores in the morning, count the beer that had been sold the day before, and then go to the back of the store and replace it.

The funny part is that working in online media paid so little that I could make more money doing that in 20-25 hours a week than I could blogging and editing for 40.

The hard part was swallowing my pride. I went to a private high school with the sons of CEOs and politicians. They used to always tell us about how we were the future leaders of society. Do you remember in The Facebook Movie when Mark Zuckerberg is mad about not getting into one of the Finals clubs at Harvard? I knew kids in those. And here I was punching a clock with people who never went to college.

I prayed and prayed about what to do next. I felt like He told me to start a blog. It was an odd thing to do in 2014. Blogs had already died. Everyone was on social media. He might as well have told me to start a newspaper. Or a beeper company.

Nothing happened for a long, long time. My days were spent writing, stocking shelves, and going to church. I guess you could say it was my own version of Paul's time in Arabia after his encounter on the road to Damascus. There aren't many stories about those years in the Bible.

About nine months after I was fired, I was praying for a friend who had just broken up with the girl he thought he would marry. I could tell what was wrong. He was mourning not just the loss of the relationship but the pieces of his identity that he had put into it.

So I just kept telling him that she didn't define who he was. That his identity came from his relationship with God and not this girl.

And then I realized that I was really praying for myself. I had spent my whole life thinking that I had to be "successful". I had worked so hard to be somebody. But none of that stuff actually mattered. None of it would make me happy. I could be happy because God loved me. That was enough.

I was free.

Fast forward two years. I got an email from an editor about working for a start-up. The first thing he said was that he read my blog every day.


via GIPHY

I wish I could say that was the end of my story. That I learned an important lesson about identity and never putting too much of myself into my job. But that's not how life works. I've had to learn that lesson again and again over the last four years.

God has always been good to me, even as I kept making the same mistakes. He has always answered my prayers.

I was praying about getting into online dating right about the same time that I joined The Ringer. I felt like God told me not to do anything until a church-wide community service project that happened a few weeks later.

The project came and went without much happening. After it was over, a couple of us went to an outdoor patio. There was a pretty girl there who wanted to play sand volleyball with us.

Fast forward four years. Now we have a son.

Jackson Dean Tjarks was born on Friday. He’s in the 98th percentile for height and he’s incredibly cute! pic.twitter.com/GEflnApYAZ

— Jonathan Tjarks (@JonathanTjarks) March 23, 2020

In that day you will say: 

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. 

Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.” 

- Isaiah 12:4-5