That he may give rest to the land; rather, to the earth. Babylon was one of the great world empires; we can hardly dispense with this convenient Germanism. It was the wont of the Chaldeans, as Habakkuk puts it (Habakkuk 1:6), "to walk through the breadth of the earth, to possess dwelling places that were not theirs."
Observe the striking contrast—"rest" to the world which has been too long deprived of it, and "disquiet" to those who have hitherto spread it far and wide (comp. Isaiah 14:2, Isaiah 14:3).