Thus saith the LORD, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; For your sake I have sent to Babylon, and have brought down all their nobles, and the Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships.
For your sake I have sent to Babylon - namely, the Medes and Persians, my messengers and instruments (Isaiah 10:5-6; Isaiah 13:3).
And ... brought down - made to go down to the sea (Isaiah 42:10), in order to escape the impending destruction of Babylon.
All their nobles - rather, with the Septuagint, Arabic, and Syriac, fugitives ( baariychiym (H1281), from baarach (H1272), to break away or flee: so the Hebrew means in Isaiah 15:5) - namely, the foreigners who sojourned in populous Babylon (Isaiah 13:14), distinct from the Chaldeans. The Vulgate translates 'bars,' as the Hebrew means in Psalms 147:13. The English version takes bars figuratively for the nobles, who are as it were the bars that strengthen the gates of the people regarded as a city.
And the Chaldeans, whose cry (is) in the ships - the Chaldeans, exulting in their ships with the joyous sailors, cry, boastingly. Their joy heretofore in their ships contrasts sadly with their present panic in fleeing to them (Isaiah 22:2; Zephaniah 2:15). Babylon was on the Euphrates, which was joined to the Tigris by a canal, and flowed into the Persian Gulf. Thus, it was famed for ships and commerce, until the Persian monarchs, to prevent revolt or invasion, obstructed navigation by dams across the Tigris and Euphrates.