In the Old Testament, some of God’s more memorable threats to various insubordinates, various enemies of his people, involve ruined cities as the terrain of roosting birds. In the Book of Jeremiah, He declares that the city of Hazor, in the wake of its destruction by Babylon, will become “a haunt for jackals, a desolation forever.” And then there is the great blood-fevered edict of Isaiah 34, where it is foretold that the Lord’s righteous sword will descend on the city of Edom—her streams turned into pitch, her dust to blazing sulfur, her land lying desolate from generation to generation—and
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