The Stained Garments and the Remembered Mercies

The names carry puns: Edom sounds like adom, red, and Bozrah like batsir, the grape harvest, so the place names already describe the stained clothes. Bozrah was Edom’s chief city, south of the Dead Sea. The exchange has the shape of a sentry’s challenge, and the figure answers with his credentials: “mighty to save”.

“Winefat” is the wine vat, “fat” being the older English spelling. Grapes were trodden barefoot in a basin cut into the rock, and the treaders came out spattered. The word for “red” is adom, the pun on Edom now said aloud. Jacob’s blessing had Judah wash “his clothes in the blood of grapes” (Genesis 49:11).

“Winepress” here is purah, the trough where the grapes were crushed. The word behind “blood” is netsach, literally the juice spurting from the grapes; it comes back as “strength” in verse 6. “Stain” is the rare verb of 59:3, where the people’s hands were “defiled with blood”. The King James sets the verbs in the future; many translations read them as past.

The pairing of a day and a year first appeared in the oracle against Edom: “the day of the LORD’s vengeance, and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion” (34:8). There the year was for paying back; here it belongs to “my redeemed”. “In mine heart” means resolved on and planned, not merely felt.

This is 59:16 retold in the first person, with one noun exchanged: there “his righteousness, it sustained him”, here “my fury, it upheld me”. The anger is not a lapse of control but the thing that holds him steady. “Uphold” is samach, to lean on or prop up, the support a man puts his weight on.

The cup of fury handed to Jerusalem in 51:17 was taken from her and put “into the hand of them that afflict thee” (51:23); now the nations drink it. “Their strength” is netsach again, the grape juice of verse 3, so the image closes where it began, with lifeblood poured on the ground like wine from the press.

“I will mention” is azkir, the verb of the remembrancers set on the walls in 62:6; a voice now takes up that office and begins reminding. The verse opens and closes with the plural “lovingkindnesses”, chasadim, acts of covenant loyalty, counted out one by one rather than summed in a single word.

“Surely” is akh, a word of confident expectation: God took them at their word. “Will not lie” means will not play false, as a son breaks faith with his father. Jeremiah 3:19–20 voices the same hope and the same disappointment: “I said, Thou shalt call me, My father... Surely as a wife treacherously departeth.”

The Hebrew has a famous double reading. The written text has lo spelled with aleph, “not”; the scribes’ marginal reading, which the King James follows, has lo spelled with vav, “to him”, giving “he was afflicted”. The Greek version divides the words differently: “not an envoy nor an angel, but he himself saved them”.

“Holy Spirit” occurs only three times in the Old Testament: here, in the next verse, and in Psalm 51:11. “Vexed” is atsav, to grieve or pain, and Paul takes up the phrase in Ephesians 4:30, “grieve not the holy Spirit of God”. “Rebelled” is marah, the root of Moses’ “Hear now, ye rebels” at the rock (Numbers 20:10).

“He remembered” has no clear subject; it may be God or, as many read it, the people, now asking where God has gone. The Hebrew text has “shepherds”, plural, probably Moses and Aaron, as in Psalm 77:20. The Spirit placed “within him” recalls Numbers 11:17, where God took of the Spirit on Moses and shared it with seventy elders.

The picture is of God’s arm walking at Moses’ right side, keeping pace with him. “Dividing” is baqa, to split, the verb of Exodus 14:16, “stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it”. Nehemiah’s prayer draws on the same memory to the same end: “so didst thou get thee a name” (Nehemiah 9:10).

“The deep” is tehomot, the plural of the deep of Genesis 1:2 and the word of the Song of the Sea: “the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea” (Exodus 15:8). A horse on open ground is sure-footed, a pointed image when Pharaoh’s horses were the ones thrown into that same sea (Exodus 15:1).

The herd going down into the valley is cattle driven from the dry hills to the floor of a wadi, where there is water and grazing. “Caused him to rest” recalls the land as the “rest” of Deuteronomy 12:9. The Greek and Aramaic versions read “guided him” instead, a difference of a single Hebrew letter.

“Restrained” is the verb used of Joseph, who “refrained himself” before his brothers until he could hold back no longer and wept aloud (Genesis 43:31; 45:1). The prayer asks whether God is holding himself in the same way. “Habitation” is zevul, the lofty dwelling Solomon named when he dedicated the temple (1 Kings 8:13).

Addressing God directly as “our father” is rare in the Old Testament; this verse does it twice, and 64:8 and Jeremiah 3:4 and 3:19 are among the few others. The last clause can be read “Our Redeemer from of old is thy name”: redeeming is not only something he does but what he is called.

“Return”, shuv, is the word the prophets use to call Israel back to God; the prayer turns it around and calls God back to Israel. “Hardened” is a rare verb used of the ostrich that “is hardened against her young ones” (Job 39:16). The question recalls the commission of 6:10, “make the heart of this people fat”.

“Trodden down” is bus, the same verb as “I will tread down the people” in verse 6. The prayer sets the two scenes side by side: the warrior tramples the nations, yet the nations have trampled his sanctuary. The first half is hard to construe in Hebrew; the King James takes it to mean the holy people held their land only briefly.

“Called by thy name” is the language of ownership: Joab warns David that unless he comes to take Rabbah, the city will be “called after my name” (2 Samuel 12:28). In Hebrew Bibles the next line, “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens”, is the second half of this verse, so the cry for God to come down follows without a break.