The Throne Above the Stars Ends Below the Ground

“Yet choose” means choose again, as at the beginning. “Joined” is the verb Leah used naming Levi, “now will my husband be joined unto me” (Genesis 29:34). The strangers are gerim, foreigners who come to live among Israel; the book returns to them in 56:6, “the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD”.

The Hebrew makes a jingle of the reversal, shovim leshovehem, “captors of their captors”. The land is called “the land of the LORD”, which is how Leviticus 25:23 frames all Israel’s holding of it: “the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” Israel is itself a tenant there.

“Hard bondage” is the exact phrase of Exodus 1:14, where the Egyptians “made their lives bitter with hard bondage”. The return from Babylon is spoken of as a second exodus. The rest promised is threefold, from sorrow, from fear and from forced service, the inner life and the outer both released.

“Proverb” is mashal, which covers a taunt as well as a saying. “How” opens the Hebrew lament, eikh, the word that begins Lamentations, and the poem runs in the limping rhythm of a funeral dirge. “Golden city” renders an unknown word; the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran reads marhebah, “raging” or “onslaught”.

The staff is shevet, the same rod that lay across Israel’s shoulder in 9:4 and that Assyria was in 10:5. Now it is the oppressor’s own rod that lies broken. Staff and sceptre were one object in the ancient world: the stick a king held was the sign and the tool of his rule.

The King James makes the king himself the one persecuted, but the Hebrew more likely says that he ruled the nations “with unrelenting persecution”, a persecution that no one could restrain. On that reading the whole verse describes what he did, and his fall comes in the next line as its answer.

“Break forth into singing” is a phrase that belongs almost wholly to this book, returning in 44:23, 49:13, 52:9, 54:1 and 55:12. Its first appearance is here, when the whole earth goes quiet at a tyrant’s death and then starts to sing. The quiet comes before the song.

Mesopotamian kings boasted of logging Lebanon for their palaces, and Nebuchadnezzar left inscriptions in Lebanese valleys recording the cedars he felled and the roads he cut to haul them. A “feller” is a woodcutter. The trees speak of the king’s death as the day the axes stopped climbing the slopes.

“Hell” is Sheol, the grave and the realm of all the dead, not the later place of torment. The dead are repha’im, the shades. “Chief ones” is literally “he-goats”, the rams that lead a flock, a word used for leaders in Zechariah 10:3. Even in Sheol the kings still sit on thrones.

The shades, repha’im, were thought of as weak and faded, and the question plays on that: “art thou also become weak as we?” Death has one rank. Most readers take the quotation of the dead kings to stop at the end of this verse, with the taunt resuming in the next.

“Viols” renders nevel, a harp or lyre; the viol was the bowed string instrument of the King James translators’ own day. The worms make a bed for him: the first word is maggot, spread as a mattress, and the second is worm, pulled over him as a blanket. The royal couch is made up again.

“Lucifer” is Latin, the Vulgate’s word for the morning star, meaning light-bearer. “Son of the morning” is ben shachar, son of Dawn; Shachar was a god in Canaanite texts from Ugarit. “Which didst weaken the nations” uses a verb for laying low, as if the king had once felled nations the way Lebanon was felled.

The “mount of the congregation” is the mountain of assembly, where in Canaanite belief the gods met in council, and “the sides of the north” is Zaphon, Baal’s holy mountain north of Ugarit. Psalm 48:2 claims the same phrase for Zion: “mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King.”

“The most High” is Elyon, the title Melchizedek used of God, “possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19). The clouds are God’s chariot in the Psalms and in 19:1, where the LORD “rideth upon a swift cloud”. Across verses 13 and 14 the king says “I will” five times, and this is the last.

“The sides of the pit” repeats the exact phrase that described the sides of the north in verse 13, yarkete, the far recesses. He wanted the farthest reaches of the divine mountain and gets the farthest reaches of the grave. The word order is a single turn: yet, down, Sheol.

“Narrowly look” means to peer and squint, the stare of people trying to recognise a face. “Made the earth to tremble” uses the verb of 13:13, where it is the LORD who shakes the earth; the man who claimed that power is examined like a stranger’s corpse.

“Opened not the house of his prisoners” is literally “did not let his prisoners go home”. Babylon’s deportees stayed deported: Jehoiachin of Judah sat in a Babylonian prison thirty seven years until a new king released him (2 Kings 25:27). Wilderness and ruined cities are the map he left.

“His own house” means his tomb, the “long home” of Ecclesiastes 12:5. Kings built their tombs in their lifetimes and were laid in them with honour. The book gives a Jerusalem example in 22:16, where the steward Shebna is rebuked for hewing himself a sepulchre in the rock.

“Branch” is netser, the very word used of the shoot from Jesse’s roots in 11:1. That branch grows from a stump into a king; this one is flung out as a thing detested. “The stones of the pit” are the rocky bottom of a battlefield trench, where the slain are thrown and the dead king’s body is tossed on top of them.

“The seed of evildoers” is the charge Isaiah laid against Judah in the book’s first chapter (1:4), now pinned on Babylon’s line. “Never be renowned” is literally “shall not be named for ever”, the removal of the one survival an ancient king most wanted, his name spoken after him.

“The iniquity of their fathers” takes up the language of Exodus 20:5. Conquerors founded cities and named them after themselves, as Sargon did with Dur-Sharrukin, “Fort Sargon”. Some read the Hebrew “cities” as “ruins” or “enemies”, the words being close, but the King James sense fits the royal habit.

The Hebrew makes two rhyming pairs: shem u-she’ar, name and remnant, and nin va-neked, offspring and posterity. The second pair appears in Genesis 21:23, where Abimelech asks Abraham to swear faith to “my son, nor with my son’s son”. Israel is promised a remnant in 10:20-22; Babylon is promised none.

The bittern is qippod, perhaps a marsh bird, perhaps a hedgehog; it reappears in the ruins of Edom (34:11) and of Nineveh (Zephaniah 2:14). Babylon lived on its canals, and a city left unkept goes back to marsh. The besom is a bundle of twigs, and the Hebrew word for it is found only here.

God swears, which in Scripture is rare and makes the words final. “As I have thought” uses the verb of 10:7, where the Assyrian’s heart “doth not think so”, damah, to picture or intend. Assyria had its own intentions; this verse sets the LORD’s intention against them, and it is the one that will “stand”.

The breaking is to happen not in Assyria but “in my land” and “upon my mountains”, in Judah’s own hills. The book records it in 37:36, outside Jerusalem. The oracle has turned from Babylon, the empire of a later age, back to the Assyrian who was the power of Isaiah’s own lifetime, with no bridge between.

“Purpose” is from the root ya’ats, to counsel, the same root as “Counsellor” in 9:6. The plan and the child’s title are one family of words. The outstretched hand, which was a refrain of judgment on Israel in 9:12 to 10:4, now reaches over “all the nations”.

“Disannul” is 1611 English for cancel, and the King James uses it again in 28:18, “your covenant with death shall be disannulled”. The two questions expect the answer no one. The book puts the same question in God’s mouth in 43:13: “I will work, and who shall let it?”

The heading mirrors 6:1, “In the year that king Uzziah died”, dating an oracle by a king’s death. Ahaz’s death is placed either around 727 or 715 BC, depending on how the reigns of Hezekiah and Ahaz are reckoned; the dispute affects which Assyrian king could be meant in the next verse.

“Fiery flying serpent” is saraph, the word for the seraphim of 6:2 and for the “fiery serpents” of the wilderness (Numbers 21:6). The rod of Philistia’s smiter might be an Assyrian king or a king of Judah. Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son, struck the Philistines “even unto Gaza” (2 Kings 18:8).

“The firstborn of the poor” is a Hebrew idiom for the poorest of the poor, as Job 18:13 calls the deadliest disease “the firstborn of death”. The weakest in Judah graze safely while Philistia’s root, the root that was about to put out a serpent in verse 29, withers from hunger.

The city gate, where councils sat and defenders stood, is told to howl. The smoke from the north is the burning of towns along an army’s route. “None shall be alone in his appointed times” is obscure, but most take it to mean that no man straggles from the ranks: the army comes in close order.

Philistine envoys came to Jerusalem more than once seeking allies against Assyria, most famously around Ashdod’s revolt of 713-711 BC (chapter 20). The answer given them is theological, not diplomatic. The book returns to the foundation in 28:16: “I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone.”