After this interval of solemn gladness, the storm and fire break out afresh, and rage again through the passage. But their direction is reversed, and whereas they had been shown rolling up the horizon as towards Judah, they are now shown rolling down the horizon in pursuit of the baffled Assyrian. The music of the verses is crashing. _And the LORD shall cause the peal[47] of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down of His arm to be seen in the fury of anger, yea flame of devouring fire--bursting and torrent and hailstones. For from the voice of the LORD shall the Assyrian be scattered when He shall smite with the rod. And every passage of the rod of fate which the LORD bringeth down upon him shall be with tabrets and harps, and in battles of waving shall he be fought against._ The meaning is obscure, but palpable. Probably the verse describes the ritual of the sacrifice to Moloch, to which there is no doubt the next verse alludes. To sympathize with the prophet's figure, we need of course an amount of information about the details of that ritual which we are very far from possessing. But Isaiah's meaning is evidently this. The destruction of the Assyrian host will be liker a holocaust than a battle, like one of those fatal sacrifices to Moloch which are directed by the solemn waving of a staff, and accompanied by the music, not of war, but of festival. _Battles of waving_ is a very obscure phrase, but the word translated _waving_ is the technical term for the waving of the victim before the sacrifice to signify its dedication to the deity; "and these _battles of waving_ may perhaps have taken place in the fashion in which single victims were thrown from one spear to another till death ensued."[48] At all events, it is evident that Isaiah means to suggest that the Assyrian dispersion is a religious act, a solemn holocaust rather than one of this earth's ordinary battles, and directed by Jehovah Himself from heaven. This becomes clear enough in the next verse: _For a Topheth hath been set in order beforehand; yea, for Moloch is it arranged; He hath made it deep and broad; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a torrent of brimstone, shall kindle it_. So the Assyrian power was in the end to go up in flame. [47] So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne. [48] So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah. We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierceness of the Divine righteousness till we reach his even finer expression of it in chap. xxxiii. CHAPTER XIV. _THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD._ ISAIAH xxxi. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).