Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Isaiah 13:21

Copyright Ó 2013 J. Neely
Isaiah 13:21ues

21 But wild beasts of the desert [tsiyiy] shall lie [rabats] there; and their houses [bayith] shall be full [male'] of doleful creatures ['oach]; and owls [bath] [ya`anah] shall dwell [shakan] there, and satyrs [sa`iyr] shall dance [raqad] there. KJV-Interlinear

21 But desert creatures will lie down there, And their houses will be full of owls, Ostriches also will live there, and shaggy goats will frolic there.  NASB

The key to this verse is found in the opening words, the wild beasts of the desert, and that is found in the word for desert, ‘tsiyiy,’ which refers to animals that live in dry and desolate places.

That is how Babylon has been described, as a desolate place supporting no human life, and no preference for anyone to even want to live there.

Doleful creatures, is a reference to the sounds of night animals. It’s their scurrying, their clamors, their howlings, their screeches and yells and night howls.

Satyrs, is a term that was typically used in mythology referring to deities in the form of monsters or half man half animal type creatures and was generally used to describe a half man half goat hairy type of beast, and thus describes wild and certainly not domestic types of creatures.

The phrase, shall dance there, is an idiom that refers to free and discrete interaction between these animals, under cover of darkness, because they are all typically night animals and scurry about and chattering during the night, and therefore out of the sight of anyone that might be trying to observe them.

This verse further describes the dramatic change of what was once a great and prosperous city and region, that will become a dark and desolate area that will be populated only by hideous wild animals who pretty much keep to themselves.  A place where man once thrived, and now no one wants to even visit, leaving it to the critters of the night.