The Earth Staggers, and Distant Voices Begin to Sing

Chapters 24 to 27 name almost no nation and are often called the Isaiah Apocalypse. “Turneth it upside down” is literally “twists its face”, distorts the surface of the land. The first two verbs sound alike in Hebrew, boqeq and bolqah, emptying and laying waste, like the sound of something poured out.

Hosea 4:9 used the first pair as a threat: “there shall be, like people, like priest.” Here there are six pairs. In the last two the Hebrew uses one root for both partners, lender and borrower from the verb lavah, taker and giver of interest from nashah, so the words themselves cannot be told apart.

Each verb is doubled in Hebrew, “emptied, emptied” and “spoiled, spoiled”, the strongest way the language has of saying utterly. The closing formula, “the LORD hath spoken”, is the one that ends Isaiah’s first great appeal in 1:20, “for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.”

“Mourneth and fadeth” is avelah navelah, a rhyming pair. Hosea 4:3 had joined the land’s mourning to human wrongdoing: “Therefore shall the land mourn.” “The haughty people” is literally “the height of the people of the earth”, the upper class, who wither along with the vines.

“Defiled” is chanaph, the pollution of land by what is done on it. Numbers 35:33 uses it of bloodshed: “blood it defileth the land.” The three verbs climb: laws passed over, statute altered, covenant snapped. The land is pictured as the one who suffers, lying “under” its inhabitants.

“The curse” is alah, the oath-curse sworn when a covenant was made, called down on anyone who broke it; Deuteronomy 29:20-21 speaks of “all the curses of the covenant”. “Burned” may instead mean “dwindled”, the Hebrew verb being uncertain, and the verse ends with a remnant, “few men left”.

The new wine is tirosh, the fresh juice of the pressing. Joel 1:10 has the same picture of a harvest in mourning, “the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth”. The drink, the plant and the drinker all droop in one line: wine, vine and the merry heart.

The tabret was the hand drum Miriam played at the Red Sea (Exodus 15:20). Tabret and harp had been the soundtrack of the drinking parties condemned in 5:12. “Ceaseth” is shavat, the verb of the sabbath rest, used twice here; the music takes a sabbath that does not end.

“Strong drink” is shekhar, beer brewed from barley or dates, the drink of the morning revellers of 5:11 “that they may follow strong drink”. Now it turns bitter in the mouth. The line assumes that drinking in Israel normally went with singing.

“The city of confusion” is qiryat tohu, the city of tohu, the word for the formless waste of Genesis 1:2, “without form, and void”. The city returns to the state before creation. Doors are barred, either against looters or because there is nobody inside to answer.

“All joy is darkened” is literally “all joy has come to evening”, set like the sun. The crowd crying for wine in the streets outlives the supply, the appetite still there when the vats are empty. Verses 7 to 12 never name a city or a king.

The gate was the city’s court, market and meeting place, where elders sat and deals were witnessed (Ruth 4:1-11). “Destruction” is a word found only here, and it chimes with “desolation” earlier in the line, shammah and she’iyyah, the gate hammered into rubble.

Micah 7:1 uses the same harvest image of a man who finds nothing left: “as the grapegleanings of the vintage: there is no cluster to eat”. Here the gleanings are people, the few left in the land. The picture that measured Israel’s remnant in 17:6 now measures humanity’s.

“They” are most naturally the gleanings of verse 13, the survivors, who begin to sing. “From the sea” means from the west, the Mediterranean being the western horizon for Israel. The next verse answers with the east, so the song comes from both ends of the world.

“In the fires” is be’urim, from the word for light, and most take it to mean “in the regions of light”, the east where the sun rises. Paired with “the isles of the sea”, the western coasts, it covers the horizon. The singers are told to glorify the name as far as the land goes.

“My leanness” is razi, a word found only here. The Latin read it as the Aramaic raz, “secret”, giving the old rendering “my secret is mine”. The song from far off may be “glory to the Righteous One”, a title for God. Isaiah’s voice cuts across it with five words from one root for betrayal.

Fear, pit and snare are pachad, pachat and pach, three words that sound almost alike, as though each trap were a variation of the one before. Jeremiah 48:43-44 applies the same line, word for word, to Moab. Hunters dug pits and set snares at their edges.

“The windows from on high are open” is the phrase of the flood, when “the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). Amos 5:19 has the same escape into danger: a man flees a lion and meets a bear, leans on a wall at home and a serpent bites him.

Each of the three clauses doubles its verb in Hebrew, and the verbs are chosen for sound: ro’ah hitro’a’ah, por hitporerah, mot hitmotetah, the earth shatters, splits and totters. The line itself shakes. “Clean dissolved” means crumbled completely, as clods break apart.

The “cottage” is melunah, the watchman’s hut in a melon field, the flimsy shelter of 1:8, “as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers”. It sways in the wind on its poles. “Fall, and not rise again” recalls Amos 5:2, “The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise.”

“Punish” is paqad, the same verb as “visit” in the next verse and in 23:17. The host on high are paired with kings below, the two levels of rule; the Book of Daniel later speaks of heavenly princes standing behind nations, “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” (Daniel 10:13).

The pit is bor, a dry cistern used as a dungeon, as with Joseph (Genesis 37:24) and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 38:6). Prisoners of rank were held for years before being dealt with. Revelation 20:1-3 later shuts Satan in the abyss for a thousand years, with a release to follow.

The words for moon and sun are poetic ones, levanah, “the white one”, and chammah, “the hot one”, rather than the ordinary names. “Before his ancients” recalls the seventy elders on Sinai who “saw the God of Israel” and ate and drank before him (Exodus 24:9-11). The elders are there again as witnesses.