Catholic Commentary
The Medes Named as Yahweh's Instrument
17Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will not value silver, and as for gold, they will not delight in it.18Their bows will dash the young men in pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes will not spare children.
Isaiah 13:17–18 describes God stirring up the Medes to destroy Babylon with absolute military force, unmotivated by plunder and showing no mercy to any age group. The passage emphasizes that Babylon's wealth cannot protect it, and that judgment extends to young men, the unborn, and children alike.
God raises pagan empires to execute justice on nations that forgot mercy—and no amount of wealth can negotiate with instruments of divine judgment.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: The Church Fathers consistently read Babylon as a figure (typos) of the world-order opposed to God — pride, self-sufficiency, and the seduction of material wealth. The Medes, conversely, become instruments of eschatological judgment, prefiguring the final overthrow of all that is arrayed against God's kingdom. The detail of their indifference to gold and silver anticipates the theme developed in Revelation 18, where the merchants of the earth weep over Babylon's fall, but the instrument of her judgment is utterly unmoved by her treasures. The three-fold progression of victims — young men, the unborn, children — also functions as a tragic reversal: Babylon, who destroyed life without mercy, is herself undone without mercy. This mirrors the lex talionis not as petty revenge but as the moral structure of a universe governed by a just God.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to these verses. First, the theology of divine instrumentality: the Catechism teaches that God's providence governs all things, and that He can draw good out of evil and direct even sinful human actions toward His purposes, without thereby being the author of sin (CCC §§303–304). The Medes are neither holy nor consciously serving Yahweh — yet they are stirred by God. This reflects what the scholastic tradition calls God's permissive will operating through secondary causes. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, Q. 22, a. 2) taught that divine providence extends to particulars, including the rise and fall of kingdoms.
Second, this passage illuminates Catholic social teaching on the judgment of nations. Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (§17) observed that the prophetic tradition consistently warns that societies built on injustice, exploitation, and idolatry carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Babylon is the archetype of the culture of power and wealth divorced from God.
Third, and most sobering, is the phrase "no pity on the fruit of the womb." While this describes the enemy's atrocity, the Church Fathers read it as a dark inversion of the sacredness of life. Tertullian and later Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones VI) appealed to the prophetic tradition's horror at violence against the unborn and children as evidence of the moral order written into creation. The very reason Isaiah foregrounds this detail is because it is presented as monstrous — an absolute breach of the natural law. The passage thus functions, within Catholic moral theology, as a testimony to the inherent dignity of human life at every stage, a dignity whose violation marks the nadir of civilizational evil.
For the contemporary Catholic reader, these verses issue a challenge on two levels. The first is personal: we are called to examine what "Babylon" we have built within ourselves — what structures of pride, comfort, or material security we imagine will protect us from reckoning. The Medes' indifference to silver and gold is a rebuke to any confidence that wealth can insulate us from God's call to conversion. St. John Chrysostom repeatedly warned that attachment to riches is the very thing that makes the soul impervious to grace.
The second level is cultural. Living in societies that are in many ways heirs to Babylon's logic — economies driven by consumption, cultures that marginalize the vulnerable — Catholics are called to read Isaiah's oracle as a living warning, not a piece of ancient history. The Church's consistent defense of the unborn, the elderly, and the most vulnerable ("the fruit of the womb," "children") finds prophetic grounding here: the measure of a civilization's justice is precisely how it treats those who cannot protect themselves. When that measure fails, history has its own terrible accounting.
Commentary
Isaiah 13:17 — "Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will not value silver, and as for gold, they will not delight in it."
The oracle opens with the divine first person: I will stir up (Hebrew: mē'îr, "awaken," "rouse"). The verb is pivotal. It is not the Medes who initiate this campaign through their own ambitions; they are stirred — awakened like a sleeping instrument in the hand of God. This verb recurs throughout Isaiah's oracles of judgment (cf. 41:2, 45:13) and belongs to the broader Isaianic theology of history: Yahweh is the unseen Director behind the movements of empires. The Medes (Māday) were an ancient Iranian people inhabiting the territory of modern northwestern Iran. Historically, it was the Medo-Persian alliance under Cyrus the Great that overthrew Babylon in 539 BC, fulfilling this prophecy with striking precision. The detail that the Medes would not "value silver" or "delight in gold" is not a general moral commendation of their virtue — it means rather that their assault will be pitiless and commercially unmotivated. They cannot be bribed, bought off, or deflected by ransom. Unlike mercenary warfare driven by plunder, their campaign is one of sheer annihilating force. The phrase dramatically underscores the totality of Babylon's vulnerability: the city famous for its treasuries and mercantile wealth (cf. Rev 18:11–17) will find that its riches offer no protection whatsoever.
Isaiah 13:18 — "Their bows will dash the young men in pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes will not spare children."
The violence escalates in three descending images of age: young men of fighting age (baḥûrîm), the fruit of the womb (the unborn or newly born), and children (yĕlādîm). The bow is the quintessential weapon of the Medes and Persians, noted throughout the ancient Near East for their skilled archery. To "dash in pieces" (rāṭash) evokes not merely killing but pulverizing, shattering — the language of absolute military destruction. What is theologically striking is the phrase "no pity on the fruit of the womb." This is the language of the complete annulment of the normal instinct for mercy — what the prophetic tradition elsewhere calls raḥamîm (compassion, rooted in the word reḥem, womb). The very tenderness that belongs to motherhood and human solidarity is extinguished. This is presented not as a morally neutral fact but as a measure of the depth of judgment falling upon Babylon. The city that showed no mercy to the nations it crushed (cf. Isa 47:6, "you showed them no mercy") will in turn receive none.