Isaiah34chapter 34

Edom sat in high, broken country of red rock south-east of the Dead Sea, hard to invade and easy to defend, with Bozrah as its main fortress. The Edomites descended from Esau, which made them Israel's cousins, and their long record of turning on Israel in her worst moments is why they become the standing example of the nations under judgment.

The judgment is written as a sacrifice. The LORD has a sword filled with blood, a great slaughter in Edom, and the animals named — lambs, goats, rams, wild oxen, bulls — are the sacrificial list. Anyone who had stood in the temple court knew what a day of mass slaughter smelled and sounded like.

The burning imagery is drawn from the local geology, and travelers to the Dead Sea region reported it for centuries. Bitumen and asphalt seep out of the ground there, and it burns. Isaiah says the streams will be turned to pitch, the dust to brimstone, and the land will become burning pitch that is not quenched night or day, with smoke going up forever.

Then the ruin fills up with creatures, and the list is deliberately unclean: the pelican and the porcupine, the owl and the raven, jackals in the palaces and thorns in the fortresses, wild goats calling to each other and night creatures settling down. Over it God stretches the measuring line of confusion and the plumb line of emptiness — the surveyor's tools used, for once, to lay out a wasteland.

The chapter closes by pointing at a document: seek out of the book of the LORD and read. Whatever else the book is, the hearers are told the record exists and can be checked.