Isa 47:12-14 | JFB | STEP | 12. Stand —forth: a scornful challenge to Babylon's magicians to show whether they can defend their city. laboured —The devil's service is a laborious yet fruitless one ( ).

Isaiah 47:12-14

12. Stand—forth: a scornful challenge to Babylon's magicians to show whether they can defend their city.

laboured—The devil's service is a laborious yet fruitless one (Isa 55:2).

13. wearied—(compare Isa 57:10; Eze 24:12).

astrologers—literally, those who form combinations of the heavens; who watch conjunctions and oppositions of the stars. "Casters of the configurations of the sky" [HORSLEY]. GESENIUS explains it: the dividers of the heavens. In casting a nativity they observed four signs:—the horoscope, or sign which arose at the time one was born; the mid-heaven; the sign opposite the horoscope towards the west; and the hypogee.

monthly prognosticators—those who at each new moon profess to tell thereby what is about to happen. Join, not as English Version, "save . . . from those things," &c.; but, "They that at new moons make known from (by means of) them the things that shall come upon thee" [MAURER].

14. (Isa 29:6; 30:30).

not . . . a coal—Like stubble, they shall burn to a dead ash, without leaving a live coal or cinder (compare Isa 30:14), so utterly shall they be destroyed.