2. Naked and barefoot.** Those are said to be naked in the Scripture phrase who go without their upper garment, or have put off the habit proper to their station or quality. Going barefoot was a sign of mourning. Waterland.

3. Isaiah received this commission in the same year in which this siege commenced. The duration of the siege is not stated, but it is supposed to have been three years, so that Isaiah’s walking naked and barefoot continued to be a sign and wonder until his prediction was fulfilled in the capture of the city by Sargon and in his treatment of his Egyptian and Ethiopian prisoners. H. C.

5. The meaning of the verse is, that they who had relied on Egypt and its ally Ethiopia for aid against Assyria, whether Jews or Philistines or both, should be confounded at beholding Egypt and Ethiopia themselves subdued.

6. And how shall we (ourselves) escape? The disappointment described in the foregoing verse is now expressed by those who felt it. If the protectors were subdued, what must become of the protected? A.

21 : 1 THE burden of the wilderness of the sea.

As whirlwinds in the South sweep through, it cometh from the wilderness, from a terrible land. A grievous vision is declared unto me; the treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Go up, O Elam; besiege, O Media; all the sighing thereof have I made to cease. Therefore are my loins filled with anguish; pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman in travail: I am pained so that I cannot hear; I am dismayed so that I cannot see. My heart panteth, horror hath affrighted me: the twilight that I desired hath been turned into trembling unto me. They prepare the table, they set the watch, they eat, they drink: rise up, ye princes, anoint the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman; let him declare what he seeth: and when he seeth a troop, horsemen in pairs, a troop of asses, a troop of camels, he shall hearken diligently with much heed. And he cried as a lion: O Lord, I stand continually upon the watch-tower in the day-time, and am set in my ward whole nights: and, behold, here cometh a troop of men, horsemen in pairs. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods are broken unto the ground. O thou my threshing, and the corn of my floor: that which I have heard from the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you.

11. The burden of Dumah.

One calleth unto me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, the morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will inquire, inquire ye: turn ye, come.

13. The burden upon Arabia.

14. In the forest in Arabia shall ye lodge, O ye travelling companies of Dedanites. Unto him that was thirsty they brought water; the inhabitants of the land of Tema did meet the fugitives with their bread. For they fled away from the swords, from the drawn sword, and from the bent bow, and from the grievousness of war. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Within a year, according to the years of an hireling, and all the glory of Kedar shall fail: and the residue of the number of the archers, the mighty men of the children of Kedar, shall be few; for the LORD, the God of Israel, hath spoken it.

22:1 The burden of the valley of vision.

2. What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops? O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous town; thy slain are not slain with the sword, 3 neither are they dead in battle. All thy rulers fled away together, they were bound by the 4 archers: all that were found of thee were bound together, they fled afar off. Therefore said I, Look away from me, I will weep bitterly; labour not to comfort me, for the spoiling 5 of the daughter of my people. For it is a day of discomfiture, and of treading down, and of perplexity, from the Lord, the LORD of hosts, in the valley of vision; a breaking down of the 6 walls, and a crying to the mountains. And Elam bare the quiver, with chariots of men and 7 horsemen; and Kir uncovered the shield. And it came to pass, that thy choicest valleys 8 were full of chariots, and the horsemen set themselves in array at the gate. And he took away the covering of Judah; and thou didst look in that day to the armour in the house of 9 the forest. And ye saw the breaches of the city of David, that they were many: and ye 10 gathered together the waters of the lower pool. And ye numbered the houses of Jerusalem, 11 and ye brake down the houses to fortify the wall. Ye made also a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool: but ye looked not unto him that had done this, neither 12 had ye respect unto him that fashioned it long ago. And in that day did the Lord, the LORD of hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: 13 and behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: 14 let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die. And the LORD of hosts revealed himself in mine ears, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, the LORD of hosts.

15. Thus saith the Lord, the LORD of hosts, Go, get thee unto this treasurer, even unto Shebna, 16 which is over the house, and say, What doest thou here? and whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out here a sepulchre? hewing him out a sepulchre on high, graving an habi- 17 tation for himself in the rock! Behold, the LORD will hurl thee away violently as a strong 18 man; yea, he will wrap thee up closely. He will surely turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country; there shalt thou die, and there shall be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame 19 of thy lord’s house. And I will thrust thee from thine office, and from thy station shall he 20 pull thee down. And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will call my servant Eliakim 21 the son of Hilkiah: and I will clothe him with thy robe, and strengthen him with thy girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand: and he shall be a father to the inhabitants 22 of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. 23 And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for a throne of glory to his 24 father’s house. And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father’s house, the offspring and the issue, every small vessel, from the vessels of cups even to all the vessels of 25 flagons. In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, shall the nail that was fastened in a sure place give way; and it shall be hewn down, and fall, and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off; for the LORD hath spoken it.

Chap. 21. As three of the verses of this chapter begin with the word burden (verses 1, 11, 13), it is now commonly supposed to consist of three distinct prophecies. It is also agreed that the first of these (verses 1-10) relates to the conquest of Babylon by the Medes and Persians; the second (verses 11, 12) either to Edom or the Arabian tribe Dumah, and the third (verses 13-17) to another Arabian tribe or to Arabia in general. The second and third of these divisions are admitted by the recent German writers to be composed by Isaiah himself, while the first is with almost equal unanimity declared to be the product of a later age. This critical judgment, as in other cases, is founded partly on alleged diversities of phraseology, but chiefly on the wonderful coincidences with history both sacred and profane, which could not be ascribed to Isaiah or to any contemporary writer, without conceding the reality of prophetic inspiration. There is nothing in the reasoning of such writers to shake the faith of any who do not hold their fundamental principle of unbelief. In the next place, this hypothesis entirely fails to account for the minute agreement of the prophecy with history in circumstantial, which must therefore be explained away by forced constructions and interpretations. Taking the language in its obvious meaning and excluding all gratuitous assumptions, we shall be constrained to look upon this passage as one of the most striking instances of strict agreement between prophecy and history. A.

Verses 1-10.

As the whirlwinds rush up from the desert, so a mysterious terror seizes upon the prophet’s spirit. A grievous vision passes before him; an awful voice is heard, summoning his attention to the metropolis of the world, the vast and populous stronghold of Babylon, on the distant Mesopotamian plains. Nay, the air grows full of voices, the darkness of mysterious shapes which come and go, so that he can see nothing clearly, nor hear any distinct and sequent utterance. At last the darkness opens, the curtains of the night are drawn aside, and through the rift he beholds a stately palace blazing with lights and ringing with the sounds of revelry. ‘Tis the palace of Belshazzar, the despot of Babylon, who gives a banquet to a thousand of his lords. As he gazes on this strange scene, the prophet reports what he sees: “They cover the table. They set the watch,” that they may revel on undisturbed. “They eat. They drink.” The orgie is at its height when, lo, a voice quick with alarm peals through the hall, uttering the familiar battle-cry, “Arise, O ye princes! Anoint the shield!” Gazing more eagerly than ever to discover the cause and issue of this appalling cry, the whole scene melts from the prophet’s view, the lights are extinguished, the palace with its flushed revellers disappear, and he is left on his windy watch-tower, racked with terror and suspense. Still he gazes—how can he but gaze?—into the darkness that enshrouds the city. And, as he gazes, he detects shadows moving swiftly through the darkness. The starlight faintly gleams from spear and shield. He becomes aware that a mighty host is advancing, under cover of night, against the city in which the king was banqueting with his lords. He can make out the splendid Median cavalry, riding “in pairs,” and the Persians with their long array of camels. And now he knows that the Medes and Persians of Cyrus have plunged down from their mountain fastnesses, and are about to assault the mighty city of the plains, which has gathered into itself the wealth of the world. But once more the thick darkness closes over the scene, a darkness in which there is no voice or sound. The suspense grows intolerable to him, when, once more, the darkness lifts, and the air trembles with a shout of victory. He looks, and sees the Median cavalry riding out of the city which they have captured, clashing their shields and brandishing their spears. He listens, and, behold, they cry, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all their gods are dashed to the ground!” This is our first picture from Isaiah; and surely it conveys to us, as no mere history could do, the blended astonishment, terror, joy, with which the ancient world heard of the fall of that mighty Babylonian empire, which seemed founded forever, before the assault of the rude and almost unknown hill-tribes of Persia. It was this overwhelming and incredible event by which the captivity of Zion was turned and the exiles of Israel were set free to return to their native and beloved land.

1. Wilderness of the sea.** As Babylon was a large and most fertile inland plain, no name could at first seem more inappropriate to it; it was not “a sea,” or near the sea; it was not a wilderness, for of all lands it was the most prolific of grain. That the name was nevertheless appropriate we may infer from the fact that Herodotus (i. 184) speaks of this vast fertile plain in similar terms. The plain on which Babylon stood ran at the south into the Arabian desert, and owed its amazing fertility to the innumerable fountains and springs which rose up in it, and to the great rivers which flowed through it. Of these the mighty Euphrates, fed by the mountain snows and rains which poured into it through a thousand affluents, used annually to overflow the whole land, transforming it into a sea, until the great Assyrian despots cut their canals and constructed the massive dams which held the river within its bounds. “Wilderness of the sea,” therefore, was probably an ancient name, and was certainly no inappropriate name, for the Babylonian plain. Cor.

2. “Go up, Elam,” for the Lord of hosts commissions thee to this work of conquest and spoil: “besiege, O Media;” and let the proud city fall. All the sighing which that most oppressive power has caused to the nations she conquered, and especially to My people, the Jews, shall now cease. Elam is another name for Persia, being its largest province. The naming of these very nations that were to conquer Babylon, nearly two centuries before the event, is one of the undeniable attestations of real prophecy. H. C.

3,4. The prophet’s fine humanity, sensitive to all human woe, carries him for the time beyond the range of merely personal or national feeling. Among the captives whose sighs have entered into the heart of the Almighty King are thousands of Isaiah’s own race; the Jews are in bondage to Babylon, a bondage most bitter and degrading. They therefore will be delivered, their bonds will be broken, their sighs will be changed to mirthful songs, when Babylon, the mistress and despot of the world, is smitten down. And yet the Hebrew prophet, rejoicing in the joy of his people, is convulsed with anguish as he anticipates the judgment which is to set them free. Cox.

5. The Hebrew tense is different in the two clauses, but the imperative in English alone gives the true emphasis of both. The table of the royal banquet is prepared. “Belshazzar the king made a great feast for a thousand of his nobles, and drank wine before the thousand.” The guests are ready to sit down, when the watch, after the custom, is set at the gates of the city. The feast begins, they eat, they drink, in unsuspecting revelry. Birks.

6-9. The structure of the passage is highly dramatic. In the sixth verse, the prophet is commanded to set a watch. In the seventh, the sentinel is ordered to look out for an army of men, mounted on horses, camels and asses. In the eighth, he reports himself as being at his post. In the ninth, he sees the very army which had been described approaching. Answer is used, both in Greek and Hebrew, for the resumption of discourse by the same speaker, especially after an interval. It is here equivalent to spoke again. During the interval implied, the city is supposed to have been taken, so that when the watchman speaks again, it is to say that Babylon is fallen. The omission of all the intermediate details, for the purpose of bringing the extremes together, is a masterly stroke of poetical description, which would never have occurred to an inferior writer. A.

7. The fulfilment of this prophecy is wonderfully definite. Xenophon represents the Persians as advancing two by two in pairs as here said; and although no other people are known to have used camels and asses for cavalry service, yet both Herodotus and Xenophon testify that the Persians used them, partly or wholly, to frighten the horses of their enemies. H. C.

9. This then is the issue of that mysterious conflict, the dim apprehension of which shook the prophet’s soul with an intolerable dread; this is the light that arose upon him out of that great darkness—the great empire of wrong dedestroyed, her captives set free, their sighs exchanged for rapturous songs.

10. Oh my threshing and the son of my threshing-floor! What I have heard from Jehovah of hosts, the God of Israel, I have told you. This part of the prophecy closes with an apostrophe, showing at once by whose power and for whose sake the downfall of Babylon was to be brought about. Though the terms here used are scarcely intelligible when literally rendered into English, it is clear that they mean, oh my oppressed and afflicted people, and must therefore be addressed to the Jews, to whom the fall of Babylon would bring deliverance, and for whose consolation this prediction was originally uttered. The last clause assures them that their own God had sent this message to them. A.

And now what lesson are we to learn from this ode? It should perhaps be lesson enough that we have found a Scripture before dark grow full of light. But if other lessons be desired, let us take these two, and think them out and apply them for ourselves. 1. If the ode teaches anything, it teaches that however sorry and reluctant God may be to afflict the children of men, He will not spare a single stroke so long as they cling to the evils which degrade and destroy them. 2. If it teaches anything, it teaches that His design in judging and afflicting us is always most merciful; that He has no pleasure in our sufferings; that He simply intends them to separate the evil in us from the good, to make us perfect, and to fit us for an eternal blessedness. If we love evil in any form, if we habitually do that which is wrong, we may hide our evil habit from men, but we cannot hide it from God; nor can we evade the searching judgments by which He seeks to free us from our bonds. And when the doom falls, when the Divine judgment searches us through and through, we are to remember that God is not so much angry with us as with the evil that is in us; we are to remember that He loves us, and because He loves us, will make us quit our evil; we are to remember that He can only lift His judgments from us as we renounce our sins. Cox.

Verses 11, 12.

These verses are deeply enigmatic—probably with design. The name “Dumah” probably is a slight modification of the word Edom, or Idumea. Seir is but another name for Edom. The man who calls to the prophet to learn the fate of his people accosts the prophet as a watchman foreseeing the future of nations, and asks, “What of the night?” to be construed either thus: What can you tell us about this terrible night of calamity now pressing upon us? or perhaps in this way, reaching the same ultimate sense: How far along are we in this awful night, and when may we look for day? To this the watchman responds, “Morning comes and night too: if you wish to inquire, ask on; come and ask again.” All this is at least very indefinite. Yet we can scarcely put any other construction upon it than this: Morning will come to the people of God; but no morning comes to you; nothing but the dark night of death. H. C.

Why has the watchman no better answer for the inquiry from Dumah? Simply because it comes from a race which has no habitual dealings with God. If Edom wants an answer from God in its hour of anxiety or of distress, it must begin by coming over to God’s side, and incorporating itself with the people of His choice and of His adoption.

How often, in these times, do we find persons utterly irreligious and worldly, entering into questions concerning God and His truth, concerning revelation, inspiration, miracle and prophecy, as though they had a right to all the enlightenment and comfort and assurance which the saints of God have for their guidance and upholding. The cry comes from Dumah, it echoes across the ridge of Seir, it sounds in the ear of the solitary watchman on the afflicted heights of Zion, “Watchman, what of the night? watchman, what of the night?” Tell me, thou man of God, how stands the matter between faith and scepticism? Give me on the instant, give me in brief compass, in terms concise and conclusive, a reason for the hope that is in thee and for the faith once delivered to the saints! Assure me of the eternal verities brought to earth by One who had seen them and even framed them in heaven, and then send me back—for I am in haste—into the world which I love, or into the sin which I cherish, a firm believer, a hopeful, happy Christian, as safe for eternity as tranquil for time! What saith the answer of God to the demand thus addressed to Him? “The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.” To the careless questioner all truth is an enigma. Yes, day comes, and then night again. “Ye will inquire?” Inquire ye! Yes, ask all your questions; go, and come again; spend your day in slumber, your night in pleasure; and yet put in between times your half-meant, half-jesting questions, “What is truth?

and evidence what? and what the Bible?” if ye will inquire, inquire ye; but the response must at last be a riddle to him who so questions! Not in the tone of ridicule—God forbid—and not in the spirit of arrogance, as though the watchman cared not for the miseries of Edom; but rather for the sake of Edom—because such questioning cannot profit—because an answer to such questioning could be only for evil—because it is not well for man that he should combine God and the world, a frivolous life with a calm assurance of salvation—are the words here written, and do we seek so to use them, as if a prepared mind were a first condition of religious knowledge, an earnest resolution after God, a necessary prerequisite for the study of His truth and the reception of His salvation. C. J. Vaughan.

Verses 13-17.

13-17. Arabia lay eastward and southward of the land of Canaan; much of it was possessed by the posterity of Abraham. The Dedanim here mentioned (verse 13) descended from Dedan, Abraham’s son by Keturah; the inhabitants of Tema and Kedar descended from Ishmael (Gen. 25:3, 13, 15). The Arabians generally lived in tents and kept cattle, were a hardy people, inured to labor; probably the Jews depended upon them as a sort of a wall between them and the more war-like eastern nations, and therefore, to alarm them, they shall hear “the burden of Arabia,” and see it sinking under its own burden. H.

Arabia was a lodging-place rather than a home for its wandering tribes. The caravans of Dedanites are the companies of trading Arabs, descended from Dedan, son of Midian, whose route lay from Damascus to the south of Arabia. Birks.

13. The country was to be in such a state that the caravans which usually travelled undisturbed would be obliged to leave the public road and pass the night among the bushes or thickets, which seems to be here (and perhaps originally) the meaning. Forests properly so called do not exist in the Arabian desert. The Dedanim are mentioned elsewhere in connection with Edom and Teman (Jer. 49:8; Ezek. 25:13), to whom they were probably contiguous. Their precise situation is the less important as they are not the subjects of the prophecy, but spoken of as strangers passing through, the interruption of whose journey is mentioned as a proof of the condition of the country. A.