Isaiah 49:12

Behold, these shall come from far,.... This is a prophecy of the conversion of the Jews, or of the Gentiles, or of both, in the latter day, in the several parts of the world; who shall come to

Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim. Behold, these shall come from far ... and these from the land of Sinim.

These shall come from far; my people shall be called and gathered even from the most remote parts of the earth. He speaks here, and in many other places, of the conversion of the Gentiles, with allusion to that work of gathering and bringing back the Jews from all parts where they were dispersed into their own land. From the north and from the west; from the several parts of the world; which are here synecdochically expressed, as they are in many other places. From the land of Sinim; either of the Sinites, as they are called, , who dwelt about the wilderness of Sin, which was southward from Judea; or of Sin, a famous city of Egypt, called the strength of Egypt, which may be synecdochically put for all Egypt, and that for all southern parts. And so he here mentions the several quarters of the world, where the generality of the Jews were dispersed; the north, which is every where named as the chief place of their banishment and dispersion, as 31:8, and elsewhere; the west, the western countries and islands; and the south.

Isaiah 49:12 Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.Ver. 12. Behold, these shall come from far.] The Jews from all parts, whither they have been dispersed, the elect from all quarters of the earth. And these from the land of Sinim.] Or, Of the Sinites - that is, of the Chinese, saith Junius and others, whom the Greek geographers call Sinois, a very populous nation. Botterus saith that there are reckoned seventy millions of men, which are more than are to be found in all Europe; and who knows but many of those of the ten tribes of Israel are there? Arias Mont., Osorius, A Lapide, Mr Cotton.

(12) From the west.—Literally, from the sea, which commonly has this meaning. In Psalms 107:3, however, it clearly stands for the south, and is probably used in that sense here. In this case “from far” stands for the south, probably for the distant Ethiopia, where Jewish exiles had already found their way (Zephaniah 3:10). From the land of Sinim.—The region thus named is clearly the ultima Thule of the prophet’s horizon, and this excludes the “Sinites” of Canaan (Genesis 10:17), and the Sin (Pelusium) of Egypt. Modern scholars are almost unanimous in making it refer to the Chinese. Phœnician or Babylonian commerce may have made that people known, at least by name, to the prophet. Recent Chinese researches have brought to light traditions that in B.C. 2353 (and again in B.C. 1110) a people came from a strange western land, bringing with them a tortoise, on the shell of which was a history of the world, in strange characters “like tadpoles.” It is inferred that this was a cuneiform inscription, and the theory has been recently maintained that this was the origin of the present Chinese mode of writing. (See Cheyne’s “Excursus,” 2 p. 20, and an elaborate article on “China and Assyria” in the Quarterly Review for October, 1882.) Porcelain with Chinese characters has been found, it may be added, in the ruins of the Egyptian Thebes (Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, 1st ser., iii. 106-109). All recent discoveries tend to the conclusion that the commerce of the great ancient monarchies was wider than scholars of the sixteenth century imagined. The actual immigration of Jews into China is believed to have taken place about B.C. 200 (Delitzsch in loc).

Verse 12. Behold, these shall come from far] "Babylon was far and east, ממזרח mimmizrach, (non sic Vett.,) Sinim, Pelusians, to the south."-SECKER. The land of Sinim.] Prof. Doederlein thought of Syene, the southern limit of Egypt, but does not abide by it. Michaelis thinks it is right, and promises to give his reasons for so thinking in the second part of his Spicilegium Geographiae Hebraeorum Exterae. See Biblioth. Oriental. Part xi. p. 176. סין sin signifies a bush, and סינים sinim, bushes, woods, &c. Probably this means that the land where several of the lost Jews dwell is a woodland. The ten tribes are gone, no one knows whither. On the slave coast in Africa, some Jewish rites appear among the people, and all the males are circumcised. The whole of this land, as it appears from the coast, may be emphatically called ארץ שינים erets sinim, the land of bushes, as it is all covered with woods as far as the eye can reach. Many of the Indians in North America, which is also a woodland, have a great profusion of rites, apparently in their basis Jewish. Is it not possible that the descendants of the ten lost tribes are among those in America, or among those in Africa, whom European nations think they have a right to enslave? It is of those lost tribes that the twenty-first verse speaks: "And these, where had they been?"

12. The return of exiles from the most distant parts of the earth. these from the land of Sinim (the Sinites)] The last word is a hopeless enigma. As the only proper name in the verse the writer must have had some special reason for mentioning it; and the only reason that can be plausibly imagined is that Sinim lay on the utmost limit of his geographical horizon. This would exclude two suggested identifications: (1) the Canaanite Sinites of Gen 10:17, and (2) Sin (Pelusium) on the nearest border of Egypt. Again, from the fact that “north” and “west” have been already mentioned we may reasonably infer that the Sinim must be looked for either in the far East or the far South. The former is the view of most commentators, who find in Sinim the name China (properly “the Chinese”). If the prophecy had been written four or five centuries later this hypothesis would be more plausible than it is. The word might be the same as the Arabic and Syriac name for China (φιο), although there is a difference in the first consonant which would excite misgivings. But it is generally considered that this name is derived from that of the Tsin-dynasty, which dates from 255 b.c.; it could not therefore have reached the West in the time of the Exile. The numerous attempts to find an older Chinese origin of the word are merely wasted ingenuity. Moreover, it is inconceivable that Jewish captives had been transported to China at so early a period; and speculations about the possibility of intercourse between the Chinese and Western Asia hardly touch the question. The Sinim are located in the South by the Targ. and Vulg., which render “a Southern land”; also by Cheyne, who, in his latest work, revives a suggestion of J. D. Michaelis that Syene is meant (reading ρְ ?εֵ ?πִ ?ιν for ριπιν).

Behold, these shall come from far - That is, one part shall come from a distant land, and another from the north and west.

12. From far — He brings them from every quarter on their way to the heavenly Jerusalem.