2On that day the LORD’s shoot shall become
beauty and glory,
and the fruit of the land
pride and splendor
for the remnant of Israel.
3And who remains in Zion
and who is left in Jerusalem,
“holy” shall be said of him
each who is written for life in Jerusalem.
4The Master shall surely wash the filth of the daughters of Zion,
and Jerusalem’s bloodguilt He shall cleanse from its midst
with a wind of justice and a wind of rooting-out.
5And the LORD shall create over all the sanctuary of Mount Zion
and over its solemn assemblies
and an effulgence of flaming fire by night,
for over all the glory there shall be a canopy.
6And a shelter it shall be
as a shade by day from heat
and a covert and refuge from pelting rain.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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2. On that day the LORD’s shoot shall become / beauty and glory. Most translators and textual critics read this whole short chapter as prose, but the diction is manifestly poetic (nogah, “effulgence,” for example, occurs elsewhere only in poetry), and it is possible to scan it as poetry, even though it is somewhat looser metrically than other Prophetic poems. “The LORD’s shoot” would be the people of Israel to be redeemed after a period of devastation and tribulation that will leave a saving remnant (“who remains in Zion”).
4. the filth of the daughters of Zion. The filth indicated by the Hebrew term is excremental. If this line does not directly refer to the prophecy about the daughters of Jerusalem that immediately precedes, it is at least an editorial warrant for placing this prophecy here.
bloodguilt. The plural form of the word for “blood,” which is used here, refers to bloodguilt, though it retains the concrete image of blood staining the hands of the killer (compare 1:15).
justice . . . rooting-out. God will bring justice to the city, but the second term suggests that the implementation of justice involves purging the miscreants. The violence, as Joseph Blenkinsopp argues, suggests that the term ruaḥ here is to be understood as a sweeping wind rather than as “spirit.”
5. a cloud by day / and . . . fire by night. This is an obvious invocation of the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that went before the Israelites in the wilderness: that miraculous divine protection is now to be re-created in the restored Jerusalem. The pillar of fire from Exodus here undergoes poetic elaboration as the writer adds both nogah, “effulgence,” and lehavah, “flame.”
for over all the glory. This phrase is somewhat obscure. The least strained construction is that “glory” refers to the Temple and its solemn assemblies. The canopy that is over all the glory, providing shade and shelter, as the next verse spells out, is clearly an image of divine protection.
6. from pelting rain. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from stream and from rain,” but since there is no river in Jerusalem that could threaten it with a flood, this is probably a hendiadys meaning: rain that pounds down like a stream of water.