The Futility of Moab's Idols

…For I proclaim your sufferings and make widely known the calamity brought upon you. Like a well-tuned lyre I will cry out; I will strike the strings so, and make the song heard far and wide, as with the wall which you renewed.

At the beginning of the vision the blessed prophet said: “By night the land of Moab will perish; for by night the wall of the land of Moab will perish” (Isaiah 15:1). In explaining the force of these words, we said that when an earthquake struck, the wall of the land of Moab burst apart, and before the enemy's invasion it was all but levered up from its foundations and came crashing down over the land of the Moabites. They renewed it, but spent their labour on it entirely in vain, for the Assyrians and Babylonians took the whole land without effort.

“My inward parts,” he says, “will sound like a harp” over your misfortunes (Isaiah 16:11), and so I will make your suffering known far and wide, just as your wall came down, the wall you renewed, but to no good purpose. For when the wall fell of itself, what had happened escaped no one in the whole land of the Moabites, nor those living in other cities and countries.

“And it will be, when you are put to shame, that Moab has wearied herself at the altars; and she will go into her handmade things to pray, and she will not be able to deliver him” (Isaiah 16:12).

Something more, he says, will happen to you besides, which will bring you shame and disgrace: you will endure labours in vain, filling your altars with blood, making your sacrifices unceasing, and offering prayers to things made by hands. You will obtain nothing that brings help or safety, for they will not be able to free you from the evils hanging over you.

What strength is there in lifeless idols, which are inventions of human skill and have for their makers the very people who worship them? So, as the blessed David says: “Let those who make them become like them, and all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:8).

It should be known that the Moabites were extremely superstitious: readers of bird omens, false prophets, and tellers of wonders, who put very great confidence in the evils of sorcery. For they perhaps supposed that they could prevail over the enemy's power, not so much, I think, by skill in tactics as by the help of their own gods. But they were disappointed in their hope, since they called lifeless matter to their aid with sacrifices and prayer.

“This is the word which the Lord spoke against Moab, when he spoke” (Isaiah 16:13). This, he says, is the vision spoken by God against the land of the Moabites; “when he spoke,” that is, even before the words came through me, he had spoken a great many things about her, and on countless…