Set up a standard. — Better, lift up a signal. The noun is the same as in Jeremiah 4:6; Jeremiah 4:21. Here, however, its use is not that of furnishing a rallying point for an army, but that of a means of rapid communication, like the succession of beacon-fires in the opening of the Agamemnon of Æschylus (Agam., 272-307). The tidings of the fall of Babylon are to be proclaimed as quickly as may be throughout the world.
Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken in pieces. — Strictly speaking these, as found in the inscriptions, were names of the same deity (see Note on Isaiah 46:1). The name of Bel appears in the names of the two great walls of Babylon, Imgur-Bel and Nimetti-Bel (Records of the Past, v. 125). The latter name, sometimes in the form of Marduk, appears as lord of heaven and earth, and Nebo is subordinate to him. Nebuchadnezzar’s devotion to him is indicated by the name he gave his son, Evil-merodach (Jeremiah 52:31), and by describing himself in his inscriptions as “worshipper of Marduk” (Records of the Past, v. 113). So we have among Chaldæan names Merodach-baladan (2 Kings 20:12; Isaiah 39:1), Kurdur-Marduk, and others. The inscriptions at Borsippa speak of him as “the great lord, the most ancient of the gods, the lord of the gates of heaven,” and so on (Rawlinson’s Herodotus, i. 627-631).
Idols... images. — The words had better be inverted. The former word denotes sculptured pillars, the latter blocks or columns. (See Note on Leviticus 26:30.)