17, 18. (a) In what way was there “a devastation upon [Babylon’s] waters”? (b) Why did Babylon’s ‘mighty men cease to fight’?

¹⁷ The Greek historian Herodotus describes how Cyrus handled the problem: “He placed a portion of his army at the point where the river enters the city, and another body at the back of the place where it issues forth, with orders to march into the town by the bed of the stream, as soon as the water became shallow enough . . . He turned the Euphrates by a canal into the basin [an artificial lake dug by a previous ruler of Babylon], which was then a marsh, on which the river sank to such an extent that the natural bed of the stream became fordable. Hereupon the Persians who had been left for the purpose at Babylon by the river-side, entered the stream, which had now sunk so as to reach about midway up a man’s thigh, and thus got into the town.”​⁴

The Bible​—as well as the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon—​records that the Babylonians were actually feasting when the Persian assault occurred.​⁵