September 13

OT == Isaiah 12:1-14:32
"Wail for the day of the Lord is near;
it will come like destruction from the Almighty". 13:6

Wail.

Now that is an adjective that you normally hear associated with toddlers and New Orleans mourners.

I ask you, if the destruction that happened to the Northern Kingdom was ANYTHING at all like our Civil War burn to the sea (and I suspect it was much, much worse), who has time to wail? Wouldn't you be fleeing for your lives?

I have a good friend who is writing her doctoral thesis on Southern women's Civil War diaries. She told me what is astounding about these works is what ISN'T in them. Sometimes, you have no idea that the women were pregnant until they write of their child dying hours after birth. And then they will describe in excruciating detail how they ran through a Yankee with a stake and then buried their bodies.
That is sort of how I think Isaiah's Northern Kingdom must have been. The Assyrians had chariots. They had coats of armor. They had trained soldiers and lots of them.
And when they march through a land, they left it devastated.
Isaiah is right. Wail.