The Creator Gathers Worshippers and Judges Rebellion

“The place of my rest” answers Psalm 132:14, sung over the ark’s arrival in Zion: “This is my rest for ever: here will I dwell.” Solomon said the same as this verse when he dedicated the temple: “the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house” (1 Kings 8:27). Matthew 5:34–35 draws on the throne and footstool.

“Contrite” is nekeh, stricken or crippled, the word used of Jonathan’s son who was “lame on his feet” (2 Samuel 9:3). “Trembleth” is chared; Ezra gathered “every one that trembled at the words of the God of Israel” (Ezra 9:4), and from this verse strictly observant Jews are called Haredim today. The Greek reads “all these things are mine”.

“Cut off a dog’s neck” uses araf, the verb for breaking the neck of an unredeemed firstborn donkey (Exodus 13:13), a legal killing that was never a sacrifice. “An idol” is aven, trouble or nothingness, the word Hosea used to rename Bethel as Beth-aven, “house of nothing” (Hosea 4:15). “Oblation” is the grain offering.

“Delusions” is taalulim, a rare word for caprice or mockery; it appears in 3:4, where “babes shall rule over them”, rulers who toy with the people. Their choosing is answered by God’s choosing: the verb bachar sits in both halves of the verse. “Their fears” are the very things they dread, as in Proverbs 10:24, “The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him.”

“Cast you out” is nadah, the root from which later Hebrew formed niddui, the formal ban from the synagogue. The brothers’ words can be read as a taunt that runs on: “Let the LORD be glorified, that we may see your joy”, mockery of the tremblers’ hope. The King James instead makes the joy God’s answer to them.

The Hebrew says “voice” three times in a row: a noise, then its source, then its owner, as if a listener were tracking a sound to the temple. “Noise” is shaon, the roar of a crowd or a battle. Amos 1:2 has the same picture: “The LORD will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem.”

Genesis 3:16 tied childbirth to pain; this birth outruns the pain altogether. “A man child” translates zakhar, male, and Revelation 12:5 borrows the phrase for the woman who “brought forth a man child”. The mother is Zion, as the next verse says, so the child stands for a whole people delivered at once.

“Who hath heard... who hath seen” answers 64:4, where the prayer said no ear had heard and no eye had seen a God who acts like this. The child of verse 7 becomes “children” here, plural: one birth, a whole people. “The earth” can be read “a land”, so the question asks whether a country can be born in a day.

“Shut the womb” is atsar, the verb Sarai used when she said “the LORD hath restrained me from bearing” (Genesis 16:2), and the verb for the wombs closed in Abimelech’s house (Genesis 20:18). The God who opened Sarah’s womb in old age asks whether he would stop halfway. Each question ends with its own signature: “saith the LORD”, “saith thy God”.

The mourners summoned here are the ones the anointed speaker was sent to comfort in 61:2–3, “all that mourn... that mourn in Zion”. “All ye that love her” echoes Psalm 122:6, “they shall prosper that love thee”. “Rejoice for joy” doubles the idea in Hebrew, a rejoicing made of rejoicing.

“Milk out” renders a verb found only here, to drain by sucking. “Abundance” is ziz, another rare word that some connect with an Akkadian term for a teat, which would make the whole line a single picture of a nursing breast. Consolation, tanchumim, is what the milk is made of; the child is fed on comfort.

“Then had thy peace been as a river” was God’s lament in 48:18 for what obedience would have brought; the wished-for river now arrives anyway. “Flowing stream” is nachal shotef, an overflowing torrent, the word for Assyria sweeping into Judah in 8:8 and the “overflowing scourge” of 28:15. The same kind of flood now carries the nations’ wealth in.

The Hebrew says “as a man whom his mother comforteth”: ish, a grown man, not an infant. The picture moves from the nursing child of verses 11 and 12 to an adult son who comes home to his mother in trouble. “Comfort” is said three times, nacham, the verb of 40:1, now in God’s own voice.

“Herb” is deshe, the new grass of Genesis 1:11. In 40:6–7 grass was the book’s picture of mortality, “All flesh is grass... The grass withereth”; here it becomes a picture of bones springing back to life. Bones were the seat of vigour, as in Proverbs 17:22, where “a broken spirit drieth the bones”.

God’s chariots belong to the old poetry of storm and battle: “The chariots of God are twenty thousand” (Psalm 68:17), and Habakkuk 3:8 speaks of “thy chariots of salvation”. “Render” is literally to bring back, returning anger on those who earned it. “Rebuke” is the word of 50:2, “at my rebuke I dry up the sea”.

“The slain of the LORD” is taken up by Jeremiah: “the slain of the LORD shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end” (Jeremiah 25:33). The sword is the LORD’s own, the one “bathed in heaven” and “filled with blood” in the oracle against Edom (34:5–6). “All flesh” appears here for the first of three times in the chapter.

The mouse, akhbar, is named among the unclean creeping things in Leviticus 11:29, and golden images of mice made up part of the Philistines’ guilt offering in 1 Samuel 6:4. “The abomination” is sheqets, the Law’s technical word for creatures not to be eaten. The menu repeats 65:4, swine’s flesh and all, so the same group is in view.

The Hebrew opens abruptly, “And I, their works and their thoughts”, with no verb; the King James supplies “know”. “Nations and tongues” reaches back to Babel, where languages were confused and the peoples scattered (Genesis 11:9). Here the scattered tongues are gathered, and the first thing they do is see.

The names come from the table of nations: Tubal and Javan are sons of Japheth in Genesis 10:2, Javan being the Ionian Greeks. “Pul” is probably Put in Libya, as the Greek reads, and Lud may be Lydia in Asia Minor; Jeremiah 46:9 also has “the Lydians, that handle and bend the bow”. The list runs west to the edge of the known world.

“Litters” is tsav, the covered wagon; the tribal princes brought “six covered wagons” for the tabernacle in Numbers 7:3. “Swift beasts” translates a word found only here, probably dromedaries. Comparing this to a grain offering carried “in a clean vessel” makes the returning exiles the offering itself, and the nations the ones who carry it in.

The claim is startling against the Law’s rule that “the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death” (Numbers 3:10). After the return, men who could not find their names in the priestly registers were “as polluted, put from the priesthood” (Ezra 2:62). Here God himself does the choosing, whatever the register says.

Jeremiah makes the same comparison with the created order: only if sun, moon and sea “depart from before me” will “the seed of Israel also cease from being a nation” (Jeremiah 31:35–36). “Remain” is literally “stand”, as a servant stands before a master. The eunuchs of 56:5 were promised the same, “an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off”.

The book opened with God refusing Israel’s festivals: “the new moons and sabbaths... I cannot away with; it is iniquity” (1:13). It closes with the same new moons and Sabbaths kept by “all flesh”. The Hebrew idiom is “as often as new moon upon its new moon”, a rhythm repeated without end.

“Abhorring” is deraon, found only here and in Daniel 12:2, where some awake “to shame and everlasting contempt”. The bodies lie outside the city, where those going out from worship pass them. When this chapter is read in the synagogue, verse 23 is read again after verse 24, so that the reading does not end on this line.