The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in.
The city of confusion - what apostate Jerusalem and the world-city, spiritual Babylon, apostate Christendom, would be: by anticipation it is called so. Babel means confusion: the apostate Church, which is spiritual Babylon, is therefore rightly called "The city of confusion," or "emptiness," as the Hebrew, tohu, means. Of the literal Babylon, Isaiah, Isaiah 34:11, saith, the Lord "shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness:" and of the spiritual Babylon, the city of the world, the Lord (Jeremiah 4:23) pronounces the doom, "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form (confusion or emptiness) and void." Hebrew, tohu vabohu (the same words as in Genesis 1:2): reduced to its primitive chaos.
Every house is shut up - through fear; or rather, choked up by ruins.