Though Babylon should mount up to heaven - Though it were fortified even to the skies, it shall fall by the enemies that I will send against it.

Though Babylon should mount up to heaven,.... Could the walls of it, which were very high, two hundred cubits high, as Herodotus (p) says, be carried up as high as heaven; or the towers of it, which were exceeding high, ten foot higher than the walls, as Curtius (q) says, likewise be raised to the same height:

and though she should fortify the height of her strength: make her walls and towers as strong as they were high; unless this is to be understood particularly of the temple of Bel, in which was a solid tower, in length and thickness about six hundred and sixty feet; and upon this tower another; and so on to the number of eight, towers; and in the last of them a large temple, as the above historian (r) relates: but if these towers could have been piled up in a greater number, even so as to reach to heaven, it would have availed nothing against the God of heaven, to secure from his vengeance. The Targum is,

"if Babylon should be built with buildings as high as heaven, and should fortify the strong holds on high:''

yet from me shall spoilers come, saith the Lord; the Medes and Persians, sent and commissioned by him, who would pull down and destroy her walls and towers, be they ever so high and strong.

(p) L. 1. sive Clio, c. 178. (q) Hist. l. 5. c. 1.((r) Herodot. l. 1. c. 181.

Babylon shall by no means escape punishment. Even though it mounted up to heaven (cf. Job 20:6; there may, at the same time, be an allusion to Isaiah 14:12, and possibly also to the tower at Babylon), and תּבצּר, "cut off (i.e., made inaccessible) the height of its strength," i.e., the height in which its strength consists, its lofty wall of defence (probably an allusion to the lofty walls of Babylon; see on Jeremiah 51:58), yet destroyers are to come against it from Jahveh.

Though Babylon should mount up to {g} heaven, and though she should fortify the height of her strength, yet from me shall spoilers come to her, saith the LORD.

(g) For the walls were two hundred feet high.

53. We are not to measure God's power by what seems to our perceptions natural or probable. Compare Ob 4 as to Edom (Am 9:2).

51:1-58 The particulars of this prophecy are dispersed and interwoven, and the same things left and returned to again. Babylon is abundant in treasures, yet neither her waters nor her wealth shall secure her. Destruction comes when they did not think of it. Wherever we are, in the greatest depths, at the greatest distances, we are to remember the Lord our God; and in the times of the greatest fears and hopes, it is most needful to remember the Lord. The feeling excited by Babylon's fall is the same with the New Testament Babylon, Re 18:9,19. The ruin of all who support idolatry, infidelity, and superstition, is needful for the revival of true godliness; and the threatening prophecies of Scripture yield comfort in this view. The great seat of antichristian tyranny, idolatry, and superstition, the persecutor of true Christians, is as certainly doomed to destruction as ancient Babylon. Then will vast multitudes mourn for sin, and seek the Lord. Then will the lost sheep of the house of Israel be brought back to the fold of the good Shepherd, and stray no more. And the exact fulfilment of these ancient prophecies encourages us to faith in all the promises and prophecies of the sacred Scriptures.