Isaiah15chapter 15

Isaiah 15:1-3

Because in the night Ar of Moab is laid waste opens the Moab burden with two capitals named together, Ar on the Arnon and Kir, both struck by surprise in a single night rather than by a prolonged siege. Moab's flight to Bajith and Dibon, the high places, is a flight toward the very shrines where Moab's god Chemosh was worshipped, weeping carried to the places that were supposed to protect the nation. Baldness, cut beards and sackcloth on every housetop and street are the standard Near Eastern gestures of mourning, the whole nation performing grief in public at once.

Isaiah 15:4-6

Heshbon shall cry, and Elealeh traces the wailing across a real map, cities named in sequence as the sound of Moab's ruin travels from town to town until it reaches Jahaz. Verse 5 turns the voice of the oracle itself: my heart shall cry out for Moab, the prophet or the Lord grieving the very judgment being pronounced, fugitives fleeing south to Zoar along the ascent of Luhith with weeping. The bench draws the same strange compassion forward to Jeremiah 48, which borrows this chapter's language nearly word for word and adds mine heart shall sound for Moab like pipes, a rare case in the prophets of judgment and grief spoken in the same breath.

Isaiah 15:7-9

The abundance they have gotten describes refugees carrying what wealth they can to the brook of the willows, traditionally placed at the boundary stream between Moab and Edom, real geography marking the edge of escape. The cry of ruin is heard at both ends of Moab's territory, Eglaim and Beer-elim, naming the whole land rather than one city. Dimon's waters running full of blood, with more judgment and lions still promised on the remnant that escapes, closes the burden on an intensifying note, the wordplay between Dimon and the Hebrew word for blood noted by the philological commentators.