1A portent concerning the Desert of the Sea.
As storms sweep the Negeb
from the desert he comes, from a fearsome land.
2A harsh vision has been told me:
the traitor betrays, the despoiler despoils.
Go up, Elam, lay siege, Media,
all her groaning I have ended.
3Therefore my loins are filled with shuddering.
Pangs have siezed me, like birth pangs.
I am too contorted to hear,
too dismayed to see.
4My heart has gone astray,
spasms dismay me.
My evening of revels
has turned to terror.
5From “lay the table” to “let the watchman watch,”
from “eat and drink” to “rise, commander, burnish shield with oil.”
6For thus said the Master to me:
who will see and tell.
7And he shall see a rider,
a pair of horsemen,
a rider on a donkey,
a rider on a camel.
And he shall listen intently,
with great intentness.
8And the seer shall call out:
“On the Master’s lookout
I stand perpetually by day
and on my watch I am stationed all through the nights.
9And look, it is coming—
a man riding, a pair of horsemen.”
And He answered and said:
“Babylon surely has fallen
and all its gods’ idols He has dashed to the ground.
10My threshing and what falls on the granary floor!”
What I heard from the LORD of Armies, the God of Israel, I have told you.
11A portent concerning Dumah.
To me someone calls from Seir:
“Watchman, what of the night,
12The watchman said: “The morning comes,
and night as well.
If you would ask, do ask,
turn back, come.”
13A portent in Arabia.
you lodge, Dedonite caravans.
14To meet the thirsty
bring water.
The dwellers of the land of Tema
greet the fugitives with bread.
15For they are fugitives before the sword,
before the drawn sword
and before the bent bow
16For thus did the Master say to me: “In another year, like the year of a hired worker, Kedar’s glory shall be gone. 17And the remnant of the number of Kedar’s warrior bowmen shall dwindle, for the LORD God of Israel has spoken.”
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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1. the Desert of the Sea. This sounds rather like an oxymoron, and attempts to explain it are uncertain. Perhaps the best scholarly guess is that it refers to a Mesopotamian marsh region, which would have been Assyrian territory at the time of Isaiah, or under Babylon later.
from the desert he comes. The one coming would be the invader.
2. go up, Elam, lay siege, Media. The historical reference of this prophecy being unclear, all one can say is that these are two Mesopotamian peoples. Since Media–Persia overwhelmed Babylonia, it could be that the object of attack is Babylonia. Babylon is in fact mocked in the last line of this poem.
all her groaning I have ended. The “her” would logically refer to Elam and Media, though those should have a plural referent (unless they are viewed collectively). Some scholars emend the Hebrew word for “groaning” to “joy,” which would then be attached more neatly to the object of the invasion.
3. Therefore my loins are filled with shuddering. Here and in what follows the speaker of the prophecy appears to identify imaginatively with the kingdom about to be devastated.
5. From “lay the table” to “let the watchmen watch.” The Hebrew lacks both “from” and to.” This translation follows the proposal of the New Jewish Publication Society version.
burnish shield with oil. The shields were leather, sometimes studded with metal. Rubbing the front surface with oil made them slippery and more of an obstacle to the enemy. In any case, the thrust of both lines is a switch from peaceful enjoyment to war.
6. post a watchman. Some interpreters take the watchman as a figure for the prophet, but this could as easily be an actual watchman who sees the mounted attackers approaching.
7. a rider, / a pair of horsemen. These lines pick up the point of view of the lookout, who first sees one rider, then more than one.
8. And the seer shall call out. The received text reads: “And he shall call out: A lion!” This is problematic if the danger is cavalry. The Qumran Isaiah has instead of “lion,” ʾaryeh, “the seer,” haroʾ eh, which is merely a reversal of consonants, and that looks more likely.
10. My threshing and what falls on the granary floor. This line is enigmatic, but because threshing and separating the grain from the chaff are often used in biblical poetry as a metaphor for the destruction of the wicked, that may be the intention here.
What I heard from the LORD. This sentence is not part of the poem and functions as a prose epilogue to it.
11. Dumah . . . Seir. The kingdom referred to lies just to the east of ancient Israel: “Seir” is a poetic synonym for Edom, and “Dumah” could conceivably be a variation of Edom.
watchman, what of the night? The Hebrew has a haunting musicality, shomer mah milaylah / shomer mah mileyl, and, understandably, the phrase would often reappear in later Hebrew poetry. But one must concede that this entire short prophecy is far too fragmentary to allow us to guess what it is about. The enigma is compounded by the last line of the prophecy, “If you would ask, do ask, / turn back, come.” Linguistically, it should be noted that both the word for “ask” and the word for “come” are Aramaicisms, a usage that probably reflects a relatively late date, certainly well after the eighth-century B.C.E. setting of Isaiah.
13. in Arabia. It is puzzling that the chain of prophecies concerning foreign nations should reach as far to the southeast as Arabia (the vocalization of the name is peculiar), but Dedan and Tema, about to be mentioned, are definitely in the Arabian peninsula.
scrubland. The Hebrew yaʿ ar usually means “forest,” but there are no forests in Arabia, and here it seems likely that what is meant is a region where low bushes grow.
15. fugitives before the sword. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to say precisely who these pathetic war refugees are.
the crush of war. The literal sense of the first of these two nouns is “heaviness,” but surely something like “crush,” or “brutal pressure” is meant.
16. another year, like the year of a hired worker. Earlier, it was three years like the years of a hired worker. Either there was an alternative for an indentured servant of a one-year contract, or there was a particular—perhaps, especially rigorous—way of computing the year in such arrangements with laborers.
Kedar’s glory. Roughly, Kedar is a biblical designation for the Arab people.
17. the number of Kedar’s warrior bowmen. The Masoretic Text reads: “The number of bow, warriors of the Kedarites.” This translation supposes a scribal transposition of the original order of words, so that mispar giborey qeshet beney qedar was turned into the syntactically dubious mispar-qeshet giborey beney qedar, a syntactic string for which the present note has provided a literal translation above.