Comfort Begins with the God Who Has Not Grown Tired

Lamentations 1 says five times of fallen Jerusalem that “she hath none to comfort her” (1:2, 9, 16, 17, 21). This verse is the answer, with the verb doubled. “Comfort ye” is plural, so someone other than the prophet alone is being sent. “Saith” is in a tense that means he keeps on saying it.

“Speak comfortably” is literally “speak to the heart”, the phrase of courtship: Shechem spoke to Dinah’s heart (Genesis 34:3), and in Hosea 2:14 the LORD speaks to Israel’s heart in the wilderness. “Warfare” is tsava, a conscript’s hard term of service. “Pardoned” is a verb of a debt accepted as paid in full.

In the Hebrew the wilderness belongs to the preparing: “A voice crieth, In the wilderness prepare ye the way.” The community at Qumran took that literally and moved to the desert to prepare it, quoting this verse in its rule. The Gospels follow the Greek, which places the voice itself in the wilderness.

Babylon had a Processional Way built for carrying its gods through the city at the new year; the exiles would have seen it. This road is built for the LORD, across the desert and toward Jerusalem. “Rough places” are rugged ridges, to be levelled into a broad valley floor.

The glory had once filled the tabernacle so that Moses could not enter (Exodus 40:34), and Ezekiel saw it leave the temple toward the east (Ezekiel 10-11). “Together” is yachdav, all at once. “The mouth of the LORD hath spoken it” is a closing signature the book uses in 1:20 and again in 58:14.

The Qumran scroll and the Greek read “And I said, What shall I cry?”, a rare moment in these chapters when the prophet speaks in the first person. “Goodliness” is chesed, the word usually translated mercy or loyal love: human constancy fades like a wild flower, as Hosea 6:4 says, “as a morning cloud”.

The “spirit” that blows is ruach, here the hot east wind off the desert, which can scorch a green hillside brown in a day. The great Isaiah scroll from Qumran first omitted the end of this verse and the start of the next, the eye skipping between the repeated words; a later hand wrote them in.

“Stand” is yaqum, to rise and hold firm, the verb of 46:10: “My counsel shall stand.” The word of God opens this half of the book here and closes it in 55:11, “so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void”, a frame around chapters 40 to 55.

“That bringest good tidings” is a feminine participle, mevasseret: the herald is a woman, as women came out singing with the news of victory (compare Psalm 68:11). The verb basar gives the Greek translators their euangelizo, the word from which “gospel” comes. The high mountain lets the voice carry to every city of Judah at once.

“His arm shall rule” begins a thread that runs through the book to 51:9, “awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD”, 52:10, “the LORD hath made bare his holy arm”, and 53:1, “to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?” “His reward is with him” is repeated in 62:11; the reward is the flock he brings home.

“Those that are with young” are nursing ewes, alot, the word Jacob used when he refused to hurry his flocks after Esau: “if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die” (Genesis 33:13). The chapter is addressed to Jacob, and the shepherd keeps Jacob’s pace. The “bosom” is the fold of a robe where a newborn lamb was carried.

Each measure is a household one. The “span” is the stretch from thumb to little finger, about nine inches. “A measure” is shalish, a third of some larger unit, a scoop for grain. The heavens are marked off with a hand and the earth’s dust fits in a kitchen measure. Job 38:4-5 asks the same kind of question.

“Directed” is tikken, to measure or gauge, the same verb as “meted out” in verse 12. The first question was who measured the heavens; the second is who measured the Spirit of the LORD, as though anyone could take the dimensions of the one doing the measuring.

Five verbs of instruction are stacked in one question: counsel, instruct, teach, teach knowledge, show the way. “The path of judgment” is mishpat, the very word of verse 27, where Jacob complains that his judgment is passed over. The one no one ever taught justice is the one accused of neglecting it.

The “isles” are the iyyim, the coastlands and islands of the Mediterranean, a word that becomes a refrain in these chapters: “Keep silence before me, O islands” (41:1), “the isles shall wait for his law” (42:4), “Listen, O isles” (49:1). Nations far across the sea weigh no more than dust nobody wipes off a scale.

Every burnt offering needed wood laid in order on the altar (Leviticus 1:7), and Lebanon held the greatest forests the ancient world knew. Psalm 50:10 has God saying “every beast of the forest is mine”. The whole mountain range with all its game would not make a fitting sacrifice.

“Less than nothing” is me’efes, from efes, the point where something ends; “vanity” is tohu, formless waste. The tohu of Genesis 1:2, the earth “without form”, sits behind the word. The nations, weighed a moment ago, are now said not to register at all.

The question is asked again in verse 25 and in 46:5, “To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal?” Here the word for God is El, the general term every people used for deity, which widens the challenge: find anything in any nation’s pantheon to set beside him.

Two craftsmen are named: the charash casts the image in metal, and the goldsmith hammers gold foil over it, the method used on bronze figurines found at Megiddo and elsewhere. The silver chains either adorn the image or fasten it in place. Isaiah returns to the workshop at length in 44:9-20.

“So impoverished that he hath no oblation” is one reading of a puzzling phrase, hamsukkan terumah. Many now take musukkan as the name of a hardwood, from the Akkadian musukkannu, so that the man chooses sissoo wood as his offering. Either way, rot-proof timber is the first requirement for a god.

Four questions in a row, and all in the past: the lesson was given at the foundations of the earth. The book argues that creation itself had been teaching this since the beginning, and the listeners simply did not attend to it. The same challenge returns word for word in verse 28.

“The circle of the earth” is chug, the ring of the horizon or the vault of the sky, as in Proverbs 8:27, “when he set a compass upon the face of the depth”. The spies saw themselves as grasshoppers beside the giants of Canaan (Numbers 13:33); here every inhabitant of earth is a grasshopper. “Curtain” is doq, a fine gauze.

“Princes” is rozenim, the potentates of Psalm 2:2, where “the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD”. “Judges of the earth” are rulers of every kind, since judging was the main work of a king. The verse moves from the grasshopper crowd of verse 22 to its most powerful members, and they fare no better.

“Stock” is geza, a stump, the word of 11:1: “there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse.” The stump of David’s house will send up a shoot; these rulers’ stumps will not even take root. Three “yea” clauses pile up before the wind blows once and they are gone.

“The Holy One” stands here as a bare title, without the usual “of Israel”. The question of verse 18 is repeated, now in the first person: God himself asks it. “Shall I be equal?” means whom shall I be made to match, as though someone were holding up a comparison.

The stars were gods in Babylon; Marduk, Ishtar and Nabu all had their planets. Here they are mustered like troops, brought out “by number”, and each answers to a name the LORD gives it. Psalm 147:4 says the same: “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”

The pairing of Jacob and Israel runs through the chapters that follow (41:8, 42:24, 43:1, 44:1). “Hid” is the verb Lamentations uses of God covering himself with a cloud so no prayer could pass through (Lamentations 3:44). This is the only speech the people make in the chapter, and the chapter has been answering it all along.

“Fainteth” and “weary” are ya’aph and yaga, and the same two verbs return in verses 30 and 31 applied to people. The LORD has neither; young men have both; those who wait on him are given freedom from both. “No searching of his understanding” matches Psalm 147:5, “his understanding is infinite.”

“Them that have no might” uses on, the word for vigour, virility, the strength of a man in his prime. “Increaseth” is yarbeh, multiplies, the verb of the promise to Abraham to multiply his seed. The giving goes to precisely those who have run out, not to those who have some left.

“Youths” are ne’arim, lads; “young men” are bachurim, literally the chosen, the men of military age picked for the ranks. “Utterly fall” doubles the verb, stumbling they shall stumble. The best soldiers any army has, Babylon’s included, are the example of what gives out.

“Wait upon” is qavah, related to qav, a cord pulled taut, the tension of expectation. “Renew” is chalaph, to exchange, as one changes clothes: they trade their strength for another. The “eagle”, nesher, may be the griffon vulture; Psalm 103:5 draws on the old belief that it renewed its youth after moulting.