Isaiah34chapter 34

Isaiah 34:1-4

The chapter opens beyond Edom's own borders: come near, ye nations, to hear, for the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies. The scope reaches into cosmic imagery before it narrows to one land, the heavens rolled together as a scroll and all their host falling down as a leaf off the vine, language John takes up almost word for word at Revelation 6:14 for the sixth seal. Barnes and Delitzsch both read the universal opening as establishing the principle the Edom oracle then illustrates, a particular judgment argued from a general one.

Isaiah 34:5-8

The oracle narrows to Edom by name: my sword shall be bathed in heaven and shall come down upon Idumea, the people of my curse, and the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, Edom's chief city, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea. The sacrificial language is deliberate, the sword filled with blood as a priest's knife is filled, and the day of the Lord's vengeance is named as the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion, tying Edom's judgment to Edom's old hostility toward Judah. Gill and Henry both note the ferocity of the imagery, unicorns and bullocks and rams among the slain, as fitting a nation whose violence against its brother Jacob is remembered in Obadiah and Amos.

Isaiah 34:9-11

Edom's ruin is described as unending: the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and it shall not be quenched night nor day, the smoke going up for ever from generation to generation. Where a kingdom stood, only wild creatures remain, the cormorant and the bittern, the owl and the raven, and the Lord himself stretches over it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness, a surveyor's measuring line turned to mark out desolation rather than a city. Delitzsch reads the surveying image as a deliberate reversal, the same line that lays out a kingdom's borders now laying out its emptiness.

Isaiah 34:12-15

The kingdom's ruling class is gone: they shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing, thorns and nettles standing where palaces stood. The wild beasts of the desert meet the wild beasts of the island there, the satyr cries to his fellow, and the screech owl and the great owl make their nests and hatch their young undisturbed, every creature finding its mate in a land no man contests. Clarke and Wesley both take the catalogue of unclean birds and beasts as the covenant curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy landing on the ground once occupied by Israel's oldest rival.

Isaiah 34:16-17

The oracle closes by pointing to its own record: seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read, no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate, for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them. Isaiah appeals to a written word already trusted enough to be checked, the text testifying to its own accuracy rather than asking to be taken on the prophet's word alone. He hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it unto them by line, so that the wild creatures possess the land for ever, the same surveying language of verse 11 now settling an inheritance rather than marking an emptiness. Henry and Barnes both single out verse 16 as a rare moment where the prophet directs the reader back to Scripture itself as the standing proof of what he has spoken.