Jeremiah 51:43

Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(43) Her cities are a desolation . . .—The word for “wilderness” is Arabah, commonly used of the sandy desert south of the Dead Sea. The prophet seems to dwell with a stern delight on the seeming paradox that the sea with which Babylon is to be oversowed, the floods of invaders and destroyers, shall leave her cities and her plains drier and more sandy than before.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

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.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

A wilderness - Or, a desert of sand.

A land wherein - Rather, "a land - no man shall dwell in them (i. e., its cities), and no human being shall pass through them."

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

43. Her cities—the cities, her dependencies. So, "Jerusalem and the cities thereof" (Jer 34:1). Or, the "cities" are the inner and outer cities, the two parts into which Babylon was divided by the Euphrates [Grotius].

Matthew Poole's Commentary

See Jeremiah 2:6 9:12: the words are all of them descriptive of an utter desolation, that should not only be the fate of Babylon the head city, but of all the inferior cities, that were as daughters to that mother city.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness,.... Which some understand of Babylon itself, divided into two parts by the river Euphrates running in the midst of it, called by Berosus (f) the inward and outward cities; though rather these design the rest of the cities in Chaldea, of which Babylon was the metropolis, the mother city, and the other her daughters, which should share the same fate with herself; be demolished, and the ground on which they stood become a dry, barren, uncultivated, and desert land:

a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby; having neither inhabitant nor traveller; see Jeremiah 50:12.

(f) Apud Joseph. contr. Apion, l. 1. c. 19.

Geneva Study Bible

Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

43. a desert] Cp. Jeremiah 50:12; Jeremiah 50:40.

Jeremiah 51:43

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

Description of the fall. The sea that has come over Babylon and covered it with its waves, was taken figuratively, even by the Chaldee paraphrasts, and understood as meaning the hostile army that overwhelms the land with its hosts. Only J. D. Michaelis was inclined to take the words in their proper meaning, and understood them as referring to the inundation of Babylon by the Euphrates in August and in winter. But however true it may be, that, in consequence of the destruction or decay of the great river-walls built by Nebuchadnezzar, the Euphrates may inundate the city of Babylon when it wells into a flood, yet the literal acceptation of the words is unwarranted, for the simple reason that they do not speak of any momentary or temporary inundation, and that, because Babylon is to be covered with water, the cities of Babylonia are to become an arid steppe. The sea is therefore the sea of nations, cf. Jeremiah 46:7; the description reminds us of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea. On Jeremiah 51:43, cf. Jeremiah 48:9; Jeremiah 49:18, Jeremiah 49:33., Jeremiah 50:12. The suffix in בּהן refers to "her cities;" but the repetition of ארץ is not for that reason wrong, as Graf thinks, but is to be explained on the ground that the cities of Babylonia are compared to a barren land; and the idea is properly this: The cities become an arid country of steppes, a land in whose cities nobody can dwell.