Isaiah 13:17

"Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who shall not regard silver, and as for gold, they shall not delight in it. And their bows shall dash the young men in pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; and their eyes shall not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans' pride, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah."

This is the first specific mention of Babylon since the head of the chapter; and the mention of the Medes as the destined destroyers of Babylon must have come as a shock to that generation in which Isaiah wrote, because they were, at that time, probably the last people on earth that any human student of the current era would have chosen for such a task. Assyria was the big power when Isaiah wrote this. Babylon, which would later overthrow Assyria and take Israel captive, was, when Isaiah's prophecy was given by the Lord, no threat at all to Assyria. Here indeed is a sensational leap in predictive prophecy.

The statement in Isaiah 13:17 that the destroyers of Babylon would not regard silver or gold, "does not mean that they were a rude or barbaric people, but that they could not be bought off"[12] from their purpose of destroying Babylon.

The mention of "bows" (Isaiah 13:18) designates the chief weapon of the Medo-Persian conquest. This weapon continued to dominate ancient warfare until the deployment of the Macedonian phalanx by Alexander the Great, the chief weapon of which was the spear.