Beasts and Echoes in Ruined Babylon

…of those in it, because it has been laid utterly waste. It should be known that he calls “Arabs” the Saracen tribes, which reach as far as the land of the Assyrians itself and occupy the innermost desert; for they have the land of the Arabs as their neighbour. And it is likely that the Saracens from Arabia themselves also roam, mingled together, through the deserts of the Assyrians.

“And wild beasts will rest there, and the houses will be filled with echo. And sirens will rest there, and demons will dance there. And donkey-centaurs will dwell there, and hedgehogs will make their nests in their houses. It comes quickly and will not delay” (Isaiah 13:21-22).

Wild animals somehow always like to make deserted places their home, and a city falling into ruin gives them a great many hiding places, wide ones too, roofed over by themselves and makeshift, found, as it were, by chance and of their own accord. In deserts and silent places a faint echo, I do not know how, rises as if out of the very depth of the silence and steals into the ears of those who keep still.

So wild beasts, he says, will rest there, and the houses will be filled with echo; that is, having no one at all living in them, they will come to hold the echo that belongs to desolate places. And demons too, he says, will dance there. For they say that these also especially like to linger in quiet places and to make them a kind of leisurely lodging.

By “sirens” he means, I think, the birds that know how to sing sweetly, or, according to the Hebrew edition, the owl. The wild donkeys he has called “donkey-centaurs”; and by “hedgehogs” he means those mice that bristle, as it were, with sharp spines. All these would fittingly suit cities or houses that are wholly deserted.

To these he adds that “it comes quickly and will not delay” (Isaiah 13:22). He does this either to put a sharper anxiety into the Assyrians, or else to make it no small comfort to those of Israel's blood. For since they were in captivity and were expecting to be set free when Cyrus marched against the land of the Babylonians with the Persians and the Medes, he promises them a swift release from their troubles: what they prayed for would not be put off for long, but would follow, as it were, close on the heels of the word.

“And the Lord will have mercy on Jacob and will yet choose Israel, and they will rest on their own land, and the sojourner will be joined to them and will be joined to the house of Jacob. And nations will take them and bring them into their place; and they will take possession of them, and they will be multiplied on the land of God as male and female slaves. And those who took them captive will be captives, and those who ruled over them will be ruled. And it will be on that day…” (Isaiah 14:1-3).