The Nations Enter Court, and Jacob Is Taken by the Hand

“Renew their strength” is exactly the phrase of 40:31, yachalifu koach. There it was the gift to those who wait on the LORD; here the islands are told, with some irony, to muster what strength they can for the hearing. “Judgment” is mishpat, here a trial at law, with both parties summoned before the bench.

The Hebrew speaks of one “whom righteousness calls to its foot”, which the King James turns into “the righteous man”. To be called to someone’s foot is to follow at his heels as a servant does. Cyrus came out of Anshan in Persia, due east of Babylon, and toppled Media, Lydia and Babylon in little more than a decade.

“Passed safely” is beshalom, unscathed, untouched. “By the way that he had not gone with his feet” is either a road no one had trodden before or a speed so great his feet hardly touched it. Cyrus’s campaigns ran from the Aegean coast of Lydia to the Iranian plateau.

“I am he”, ani hu, becomes one of the signatures of these chapters, returning in 43:10, 43:13, 46:4 and 48:12. The claim to be first and with the last is spelled out in 44:6, “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.”

In Hebrew “saw” and “feared” are near twins, vayir’u and vayira’u, so the coastlands’ reaction is a pun: to see him is to fear him. “Drew near, and came” answers the summons of verse 1, but they come to court frightened, and their next move is to find reassurance in each other.

“Be of good courage” is chazaq, be strong. The same root turns up in the next verse, where the idol is “fastened” with nails, vayechazqehu, strengthened. The craftsmen strengthen one another and then strengthen the god, the one thing in the room that cannot strengthen anybody.

“Sodering” is the 1611 spelling of soldering. Two metalworkers are named, the one who beats with a hammer and the one who strikes the anvil. “It is ready” is literally “it is good”, tov, the verdict God pronounced over creation in Genesis 1, now pronounced by a smith over a joint.

“Abraham my friend” is literally “Abraham who loved me”. 2 Chronicles 20:7 calls him God’s friend for ever, and James 2:23 repeats it. Arabic still calls Abraham al-Khalil, the Friend, and the city of Hebron, where he is buried, takes that name. Here, for the first time in this half of the book, Israel is called “my servant”.

Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11:31), the very land where the exiles now sit. “Chief men” is atsilim, which more likely means the far corners or edges. The God who took Abraham from the ends of the earth has not dropped his descendants at the same ends.

“Be not dismayed” is tishta, from a verb meaning to gaze about: to keep glancing around in alarm. Three promises follow, each opened in Hebrew with a strengthening particle: I will strengthen, yea help, yea uphold. The right hand of righteousness is the hand that does what is right by those it holds.

Four words for enemies are used in verses 11 and 12: the incensed, those who strive, those who contend, and those who war. “They that strive with thee” is literally “the men of thy lawsuit”, the courtroom language of the chapter. “Ashamed and confounded” means exposed and brought to nothing, their case lost in public.

The picture is of looking round for your opponents and finding the benches empty. Psalm 37:36 says the same of the wicked: “I sought him, but he could not be found.” The enemies are not described being defeated in battle; they simply cease to be there.

“Hold thy right hand” uses the verb the LORD will use of Cyrus in 45:1, “whose right hand I have holden”. The Persian conqueror and the weak servant are held by the same grip, one to do a task and the other to be kept safe. 42:6 repeats the promise to the servant: “will hold thine hand.”

“Worm” is tola’at, the scarlet worm from which crimson dye was made, the word of Psalm 22:6, “I am a worm, and no man.” “Men of Israel” is metei yisrael, “few men”, the phrase Deuteronomy 26:5 uses of Jacob going down to Egypt “with a few”. Here the LORD is first called Israel’s redeemer, go’el.

The threshing sledge, morag, was a heavy wooden board studded underneath with sharp stones or iron and dragged by oxen over the sheaves. Araunah gave David his sledges for firewood (2 Samuel 24:22), and Amos 1:3 condemns Damascus for threshing Gilead with iron ones. “Having teeth” is literally having mouths, double edged.

Winnowing followed threshing: the crushed grain was tossed into the air with a fork, and the wind blew the chaff away while the heavier kernels fell. The mountains are treated as mere chaff, carried off by the same whirlwind that took the rulers’ stubble in 40:24. What is left on the floor is joy.

Israel’s first water crisis in the wilderness came at Rephidim, where “there was no water for the people to drink” (Exodus 17:1). “Faileth” is nashattah, is parched, dried out. “Will not forsake them” is the promise Moses gave before the Jordan crossing: “he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee” (Deuteronomy 31:6).

“High places” here are shephayim, the bare wind-swept heights where, in Jeremiah 3:21, Israel weeps; water does not run on a hilltop. Psalm 107:35 has almost the same words: “He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings.”

Seven trees are planted, a complete grove. The shittah is the acacia, the one tree on the list that actually grows in the desert, and the wood of the ark (Exodus 25:10). The myrtle is hadas, from which Esther’s Hebrew name Hadassah comes. The “oil tree” may be the wild olive; the “box tree” is probably a cypress.

“Consider” is literally “lay it to heart”. The word “together” comes back, as in 40:5, so the lesson is learned by everyone at once. The verse closes with bara, create, the verb of Genesis 1:1: the new grove in the desert is spoken of as a work of creation.

“King of Jacob” occurs only here in the Bible. “Strong reasons” is atsumotechem, your mighty arguments, possibly your defences. “Produce your cause” is the call to present a case at law. The LORD opens the hearing as both litigant and king.

“The former things” is rishonot, a term that becomes a thread: 42:9, 43:9, 43:18, 46:9 and 48:3. The demand has two parts, to explain the past so its end makes sense, and to predict the future. A god who can do neither has nothing to say about history at all.

“Do good, or do evil” is an idiom meaning do anything at all. Jeremiah uses it of idols in almost the same words: “they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good” (Jeremiah 10:5). “That we may be dismayed” concedes that even a frightening act would count as evidence.

“An abomination” is to’evah, the word Deuteronomy uses for idolatry and forbidden rites. The verdict falls on the chooser, not only on the idol. Psalm 115:8 makes the same point about makers and worshippers: “They that make them are like unto them.”

“Morter” is chomer, wet clay, trampled underfoot by potters and brickmakers to work it soft, the everyday labour of Babylon’s brickyards. Whether Cyrus “shall call upon my name” in a full sense is left open; 45:4 says “thou hast not known me”, and Ezra 1:2 has his decree name “the LORD God of heaven”.

“He is righteous” is tsaddiq in the sense of a verdict: “he is right”, “correct”. The prediction is the test, and whoever foretold it wins the case. Three denials follow, none shows, none declares, none hears, and the last one turns on the rivals: nobody has ever heard them say a thing.

The Hebrew is clipped to the point of obscurity, “First to Zion: behold, behold them”, and the King James supplies words to make a sentence. The bringer of good tidings is now masculine, mevasser, where in 40:9 the herald was a woman; 52:7 will praise the feet of this messenger on the mountains.

“There was no man” comes back twice later in the book, when the LORD looks for someone to act against injustice: “he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor” (59:16; compare 63:5). Here the search is among the idols and their counsellors, and it turns up nobody who can answer a word.

“Vanity” is aven, emptiness or trouble, the word Hosea twists into Beth-aven, “house of nothing”, as a name for Bethel (Hosea 4:15). “Molten images” are nesakhim, poured things, from the same verb as a drink offering poured out. Wind and tohu, air and formlessness, are all they amount to.