Fifth Column,
What an irony! You are quoting the exact same passages from the pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches" that alerted me to the fact that the people who had come to my house represented a FALSE, manipulative and deceitful religion.
I had no focus on Babylon's or Jerusalem's destruction. But I sensed a disconnect from what history actually told. And the more I looked at what these parties of Elders were saying, the more I knew how deceitful it was.
First of all, even in your rote recitation, it is clear that Cyrus did not destroy Babylon. It simply changed management like it had before and continued MORE prosperously than it had. Alexander liked it so much he made it his capital. Herodotus certainly wasn't mourning it either. And Xenophone's mercenaries were headed for conflict there with a later Darius in a Persian civil war.
Sennacherib was the one who actually destroyed it. Not 200 years after Isaiah, but in his lifetime. The quotes from the verses stop short of how Isaiah actually tells how. Sennacherib flooded the city and carried off its people into slavery in 689 BC. He wrote about in stone.
Even the notion of a 70-year desolation is borrowed from the Assyrians. That is what Sennacherib had condemned Babylon too, but Esarhaddon his son rescinded it and that too is described in stone. He restored it because he thought it a religious desecration. True religion: Yours or his?
There is another problem with this prognostication. Jeremiah 25:12 claims that Babylon's desolation in punishment for Jerusalem's destruction (acting as an instrument of God's justice - go figure?) would be immediate and forever. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah contradict this. E.g., Ezra 8:1. The prophecy did not come to pass just as those against the King of Tyre and Egypt did not. They make me wonder about a great deal. In the case of Ezekiel, does prophet mean a spokesperson for God before power or a propagandist for Nebuchadnezzar in his war-making efforts against other mid east powers? At any rate, the Elders visiting my house have alerted me to what I had not known about before: OT roosters claiming that they were about to cause the sun to rise with their crowing and they often seemed to select completely overcast days.
I'll save some of my other fact checking expeditions for another day. Or you can just dig around here on the forum. But beside being wrong, that pamphlet is DELIBERATE in its approach. At some level in the editing and writing process, the authors know that Cyrus didn't do what was claimed and that the inclusion of Isaiah's full quote would blow the cover. They also know that Isaiah from chapter 40 on is a fully different author. If Isaiah predicted all of what was to happen to Babylon, then why didn't Daniel cite him when questioned by Babylonian kings instead of concocting still another story?
As I read more and more of this pamphlet and studied the claims, watched the coercion and experienced some myself, I began to see a multi-level marketing operation dressed in a very peculiar garb, more like the Emperor's clothes. There a pathological fascination with senseless slaughters past and an avid anticipation of them in the future could get you far.
