1Woe, who inscribe crime’s inscriptions
and writs of wretchedness write,
2to tilt from their cause the poor
and rob justice from My people’s needy,
making widows their booty
and despoiling orphans.
3And what will you do for the day of reckoning,
for disaster that comes from afar?
To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your glory?
4Only, they shall kneel beneath the captive,
and beneath the slain they shall fall.
5Woe, Assyria, rod of My wrath,
in whose hand is a club—My fury.
6Against a tainted nation I will send him,
against the people of My anger I will charge him
to take the booty and to seize the spoils,
and to turn it to trampling like mire in the streets.
7But he shall not imagine so,
and his heart not so shall plot.
For destruction is in his heart,
to cut off nations, not a few.
8For he shall say:
Are not my commanders all of them kings?
9Is not Calno like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad?
Is not Samaria like Damascus?
10As my hand has seized worthless kingdoms,
and their idols more than Jerusalem’s or Samaria’s,
11why, as I have done to Samaria and its ungods,
so I will do to Jerusalem and its icons.
12And it shall happen, when the Master carries out all His acts
against Zion and against Jerusalem,
I will reckon with the fruit of the swollen heart of Assyria’s king
and with the grandeur of his haughty gaze.
13For he has said:
“Through the power of my hand I have done it,
and through my wisdom, for I was discerning.
I have wiped out the borders of peoples
and their riches I plundered
and brought down to the dust those who dwelled there.
14And my hand, as with a nest, has seized
the wealth of peoples,
as one gathers abandoned eggs,
all the earth I have gathered,
and none fluttered a wing,
opened a mouth and peeped.”
15Should the axe boast over its wielder,
the saw vaunt over him who plies it?
As though the rod had swung him who raised it,
a club had raised the one not-wood!
16Therefore shall the Master, LORD of Armies,
send a wasting into his fatness,
and in his glory’s stead a burning shall rage
like the burning of fire.
17And Israel’s Light shall turn to fire
and its Holy One to flame,
and it shall burn and consume his thorns
and his thistles on a single day.
18And the glory of his woods and his farmland
from life-breath to flesh shall be destroyed,
and shall be like a failing sick man.
19And the remnant of his woods’ trees shall be so few
that a lad can write them down.
20And is shall happen on that day, the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob shall no longer lean on him who strikes them but shall lean on the LORD, Israel’s Holy One, in truth. 21A remnant shall come back, a remnant of Jacob, to mighty God. 22For if your people Israel be like the sand of the sea, but a remnant within it shall come back. Decreed destruction sweeps down, vindication. 23For it is irrevocably decreed: the Master, LORD of Armies, is about to do it in the midst of the land. 24Therefore, this said the Master, LORD of Armies: “Do not be afraid, My people dwelling in Zion, of Assyria, who strikes you with the rod, and raises his club against you in the way he did to Egypt. 25For in just a little while, My wrath and fury shall be utterly ended.” 26And the LORD of Armies shall rouse against him a scourge, like the striking down of Midian at the Rock of Oreb, and like His rod over the sea, and bear him off like the way of Egypt. 27And it shall happen on that day,
his burden shall be removed from your shoulder
and his yoke shall be shattered from your neck.
He shall come up from the desert
28come up to Ajath,
pass through Migron
in Michmash place his gear.
29He shall pass over a ford,
Geva his lodging.
Ramah shall tremble,
Saul’s Gibeah flee.
30With your voice give a piercing call, Bath-Gallim,
Listen, O Laish, speak out, Anathoth.
31Madmenah shall decamp,
Gebim’s dwellers take refuge.
32That very day he shall stand at Nob,
wave his hand against the Mount of Zion’s Daughter,
the hill of Jerusalem.
33Look, the Master, LORD of Armies,
hacks away the treetops with an axe,
and the lofty in stature are cut down
and the tall ones brought low.
34And he slashes the wood’s thickets with iron,
and Lebanon trees thunderously fall.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. writs. Revocalizing the Masoretic mekhatvim, “indite,” as mikhtavim.
2. to tilt from their cause the poor. The standard biblical idiom for perversion of justice is to tilt judgment or a case, but in this variation, the poor are the object of the verb, tilted away from their own legitimate cause or case.
3. where will you leave your glory? The interpretation sometimes proposed of the noun kavod as “body” is strained. The malefactors in their desperate flight must leave behind their “glory”—their fine houses and fields, all their accumulated substance.
4. kneel beneath the captive. Although emendations have often been proposed for this phrase, there is a coherent image here, if phrased a bit cryptically: these doomed people will be taken in captivity (presumably, by Assyrian invaders); some will fall under the feet of other captives in a forced march of those taken by the conquerors; others will perish among those killed in battles.
7. But he shall not imagine so. The Assyrians collectively, or their king, do not realize that they are merely God’s instrument for punishing His people; as the lines that follow spell out, they arrogantly assume it is all the consequence of their power.
8. Are not my commanders all of them kings? This is a peerless army of warrior-noblemen, in which every field commander is a king.
9. Calno . . . Carchemish . . . Hamath . . . Arpad. These are all cities to the east that have fallen to the Assyrian onslaught. Aram is the westernmost of them, and if it is conquered, that will surely be the fate of its Israelite ally Samaria.
10. worthless kingdoms. This translation follows the scholarly consensus that ʾelil in the singular here means “without value” or “insignificant,” and not “idol.”
11. ungods. Here we have the plural of ʾelilim, which appears often in the Bible and is probably a polemic antipagan derogatory coinage, playing on ʾel, “god,” and ʾal, “not,” or perhaps rather a mocking diminutive, “godlet.”
13. brought down to the dust. The received text reads ka’bir, of doubtful meaning. The translation supposes instead beʿafar, “into the dust.” Bringing down into the dust is a recurrent biblical idiom and makes good sense here.
15. Should the axe boast over its wielder. These words begin God’s rejoinder to the boast of the Assyrian king. The king is no more than a tool in God’s hand, and the analogies of the axe and saw make the boasting transparently absurd.
the one not-wood. This sounds a little awkward (perhaps even in the Hebrew), but the phrasing is to make a point: the club is inert, insensate wood, not conscious flesh and blood like its wielder.
16. a burning shall rage. This is both metaphor and literal referent: the invading army puts fields and towns to the torch.
17. Israel’s Light. In context, this is an epithet for God.
18. from life-breath to flesh. This phrase, literally representing the Hebrew, seems odd in connection with a forest, but it is in all likelihood an idiomatic expression for the whole thing, through and through (a little like the English “body and soul”), and so perhaps may be extended to inanimate objects.
20. him who strikes them. Here the striker is not God but foreign powers.
21. to mighty God. It should be noted that the Hebrew phrase here, ʾel gibor, is the same one attached to the ideal Davidic king in 9:5, but in this case the referent has to be God. It is possible that the occurrence of the epithet here may have triggered a scribal reversal of gibor ʾel in 9:5.
22. if your people Israel be like the sand of the sea. This is the language of God’s repeated covenantal promise to Abraham in Genesis, but now only a small saving remnant is to survive.
26. like the striking down of Midian at the Rock of Oreb. The story is told in Judges 7:25.
His rod over the sea. The reference is to the parting of the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 14), and the rod is raised by Moses.
bear him off like the way of Egypt. In the account in Exodus, the entire Egyptian army is drowned in the Sea of Reeds.
like the way of Egypt. The Hebrew says merely “the way of Egypt.” The reference appears to be the Assyrian defeat of Egypt in more than one battle, and not on Egyptian soil.
27. He shall come up from the desert. The received text is not intelligible at this point. It reads, literally, “a yoke from oil.” The present translation supposes instead of these three Hebrew words, ʿol mipney-shamen, a text that showed ʿalah miyeshimon. This is necessarily conjectural but more likely than the garbled Masoretic version. These words would then mark the beginning of a new prophecy, the scary description of the advance of the Assyrian invaders through the land. Their itinerary is spelled out in the place-names of the next two verses. The Assyrian army swoops down from the north, arriving at the capital city of Judah in verse 32. There is scholarly debate as to which Assyrian expedition is invoked. Blenkinsopp opts for the one of 713–711 B.C.E., a decade after the destruction of the northern kingdom.
33. treetops . . . the tall ones. The imagery here picks up the theme of bringing down the high and mighty that is prominent in chapter 2. The Lebanon trees of the concluding verse are part of this same pattern.