For thou hast made of a city an heap; of a defenced city a ruin: a palace of strangers to be no city; it shall never be built.
Thou hast made of a city an heap - Babylon, "the city of confusion" (Isaiah 24:10; Isaiah 24:12); type of the seat of Antichrist, to be destroyed in the last days, (cf. Jeremiah 51:37 with Revelation 18:1-24 respecting the final overthrow of spiritual Babylon, the apostate church, followed, as here, by the song of the saints' thanksgiving in Revelation 19:1-21.) 'Heaps' is a graphic picture of Babylon and Nineveh as they now are.
Palace - Babylon regarded, on account of its splendour, as a vast palace; or else a citadel.
Of strangers - foreigners, whose capital pre-eminently Babylon was: the metropolis of the pagan world. So the spiritual Babylon has as its citizens, "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise" (Isaiah 29:5; Ephesians 2:12: see in contrast Joel 3:17).
Never be built - (Isaiah 13:19-20, etc.)