Isaiah18chapter 18

Isaiah 18:1-3

The tenth burden addresses a land shadowing with wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, a description the older commentators read variously toward the winged insects of the Nile region or toward the shape of the land itself, debating the identity without the text naming a king or a battle as the Damascus and Moab oracles do. Ambassadors go out from it by sea in vessels of bulrushes, papyrus boats built for the Nile and its cataracts, carrying word to a nation scattered and peeled, terrible from its beginning, meted out and trodden down by its own rivers. Verse 3 turns from the nation addressed to every inhabitant of the world, called to watch when an ensign is lifted on the mountains and a trumpet blown, a summons whose occasion the chapter itself does not specify.

Isaiah 18:4-7

The Lord answers the alarm of the ensign with a picture of undisturbed watching, taking his rest and considering from his dwelling place like clear heat upon herbs or a cloud of dew in harvest heat, waiting rather than rushing to intervene. Before harvest, while the bud still forms and the grape only begins to ripen, he cuts off the sprigs and takes away the branches himself, leaving them to mountain birds and beasts through summer and winter, judgment pictured as a vinedresser's own pruning rather than an enemy's invasion. The oracle ends where these burdens increasingly point, a present brought to the Lord of hosts from this same scattered and peeled people to the place of his name, mount Zion, which Matthew Henry and Franz Delitzsch both read toward a future ingathering of nations without pressing the identification onto any single people of their own day.