Read Isaiah 21 here (text coming …) or at Bible Gateway.
The Hebrew paragraphs:
21:1-5 {s} The storm of Elam and Media is coming
21:6:10 {p} The watchman sees the fall of Babylon with her carved images and idols
21:11-12 {p} Out of Seir he inquires of the watchman: the morning comes, and the night
21:13-15 {s} The Dedanites will flee to Tema in Arabia from the ravages of war
21:16-17 {s} Within a year the glory, archers, mighty men of Kedar will be diminished
The Strong theme:
21:1-10 {s+p} The storm of Elam and Media is coming: Babylon’s fall
The Chiastic structure:
Everything in the structure made sense to me (the Persians, Medes and Elamites did bring about Babylon’s fall in 539 BC, even the detail about the table laid for feasting was precisely fulfilled, see Dan 5:1-30), except the comment about the threshed one. So I did some digging:
To Thresh is Strong’s H1758 דוש duwsh, a primitive verb meaning “to thresh.” The ancient pictographs are dalet, vav, shin.
dalet ד = door (enter, move, hang, to and fro)
vav ו = tent peg (add, secure, hook)
shin ש = two front teeth (sharp, press, eat, two, again)
The parable being told by the Hebrew Root Word is of the back and forth (dalet) treading out, because the chaff is hooked (vav) to the wheat kernel, needed again and again (shin) to separate them.
And what was hooked into Judah, was idolatry, but the threshing floor of Babylonian captivity separated her chaff from her wheat. When Judah was returned to her land, idolatry had been so purged from her, that she risked the wrath of both Greeks and Romans to stand up against it.
If there are questions, this is a good resource:
Babylon, fallen to the ground – Christine Miller
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