1Woe, Ariel, Ariel,
Add year upon year,
let festivals make their round.
2And I shall cause distress to Ariel,
and it shall turn into keening and crying,
and it shall be to me as Ariel.
3And I shall camp like David against it,
and besiege it with a mound
and lay siege-works against it.
4And you shall be brought down, from the ground you shall speak,
lower than the dust shall your utterance be,
and your voice shall be like a ghost from the ground,
and from the dust your speaking shall chirp.
5And the crowd of your strangers shall be like fine dust
and like chaff blowing past the oppressors’ crowd.
And it shall happen at once, in a moment,
6she shall be singled out by the LORD of Armies
in thunder and earthquake and a great sound,
tempest and whirlwind and tongues of consuming fire.
7And it shall be like a dream, a night-vision—
the crowd of all the nations arrayed against Ariel
and all her foes and the siege-works against her
and those who distressed her.
8And it shall be as the hungry man dreams he is eating,
and wakes with an empty throat,
and as the thirsty man dreams he is drinking
and wakes and is faint and his throat is parched,
so the crowd of all the nations shall be,
arrayed against Mount Zion.
9Be dumbfounded, yes, dumbfounded,
be blinded, yes, be blinded.
They are drunk and not from wine,
stagger, and not from strong drink.
10For the LORD has poured over you
a spirit of deep slumber,
and closed your eyes—the prophets,
and covered your heads—the seers.
11And the vision of all things shall become to you like the words of a sealed book that is given to one who can read, saying, “Pray, read this,” and he says, “I cannot, for it is sealed,” 12and the book is given to one who cannot read, saying, “Pray, read this,” and he says, “I cannot read.”
13And the Master said,
Inasmuch as this people approached with its mouth
and with its lips honored Me
but kept its heart far from Me,
and their reverence for Me
was a commandment of men learned by rote,
14therefore will I continue
to strike this people with wonder upon wonder,
and the wisdom of its wise men shall vanish
and the discernment of its discerners disappear.
15Woe to those who burrow deep from the LORD
to hide their counsel,
and their deeds are done in darkness,
and they say, “Who sees us, who knows of us?”
16You are perverse!
Should the potter be reckoned as his clay,
should the thing he made say of its maker, “He did not make me,”
and the thing fashioned say of its fashioner, “He has no skill”?
17Surely in just a while,
Lebanon shall turn back into farmland
and the farmland be reckoned as forest.
18And the deaf on that day shall hear the book’s words,
and from darkness and gloom the eyes of the blind shall see.
19Once more shall the lowly have joy in the LORD,
and the needy exult in Israel’s Holy One.
20For the oppressor shall vanish,
the mocker shall cease,
and all those devoted to crime be cut off.
21Who led people to offend through a word,
ensnared the arbiter in the gate,
perverted the innocent man’s cause with lies.
22Therefore thus said the LORD Who redeemed Abraham to the house of Jacob:
Not now shall Jacob be shamed,
and not now shall his face turn pale.
23For when he sees his children,
My handiwork, in his midst,
and hallow Jacob’s Holy One,
and the God of Israel they shall hold in awe.
24And those whose spirit strayed shall know discernment,
and the grumblers shall learn their lesson.
CHAPTER 29 NOTES
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1. Ariel. Although the second verset makes it clear that this is an epithet for Jerusalem, wildly disparate proposals have been made for the etymology of the name. Perhaps the least strained is that it means “lion of God,” which is to say, not an ordinary lion but some sort of heraldic lion; and a good candidate for that would be the cherubs carved over the Ark of the Covenant, which are more or less winged lions. By synecdoche, then, this carved beast in the Temple might have become an epithet for the city in which the Temple stood.
2. And it shall be to Me as Ariel. This third verset is a little enigmatic. The possible sense is: Ariel, once My protected sacred city, will now be for Me an Ariel of keening and crying.
3. camp. This sometimes military term is pointedly chosen because the reference is not to David’s residence in the city but to his attack on it when he conquered it for the Jebusites.
4. from the dust your speaking shall chirp. As several biblical texts suggest, there was a popular belief that the spirits of the dead communicated with the living by means of faint chirping sounds that might be interpreted by a necromancer.
5. the crowd of your strangers. These are the foreign armies attacking Jerusalem.
6. she shall be singled out. This verb paqad can mean to be singled out either for recompense, for benign attention, or for punishment. The storm imagery that immediately follows might lead one to apply the negative sense, but then in verse 7 it becomes clear that the people’s enemies are the target of these foreign forces,
7. And it shall be like a dream, a night-vision. The horror of implacable enemies bent on the destruction of Jerusalem will vanish like a nightmare when the sleeper awakens. This image might accord with Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E., which was suddenly withdrawn.
8. the hungry man / . . . the thirsty man. In a rather peculiar move, the dream simile is now reversed: it is not Israel dreaming the nightmare of its destruction but the Assyrians dreaming of consuming the city who now awake and find that their hunger and thirst have not been satisfied.
9. dumbfounded, / . . . blinded. The prophet assumes, in consonance with general ancient belief, that the people needs the guidance of prophets and seers in order to see where it must go. In this case, false prophets have assumed the prophetic role, which is understood as a punishment from God sent against the people, causing general blindness.
11. the words of a sealed book. Some interpreters propose that this is the scroll of Isaiah’s own prophecies. In any case, the book is sealed so that even the literate cannot read it, and how much more so the illiterate.
14. wonder upon wonder. While this word often has a positive sense of God’s miraculous intervention in behalf of the people, here it obviously is used negatively for the perpetuation of a state of hopeless ignorance in the people.
15. Woe. As elsewhere, the introduction of this word, hoy, announces a new prophecy.
Who sees us, who knows of us? These words express the delusion that it is possible to hide from God’s all-seeing eyes.
16. He has no skill. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “He did not understand.” The translation here, which makes the intention clear, is borrowed from Joseph Blenkinsopp.
17. Lebanon shall turn back into farmland. A day soon to come will witness radical transformations: the heavily forested Lebanon will become farmland, and the farmland a forest. These antithetical changes set the stage for what transpires in the human landscape in the verses that follow.
18. the deaf . . . / the blind. Especially because of the reference to hearing the book’s words, which surely harks back to verse 11, the deaf and the blind are probably meant metaphorically: those who could neither hear nor read the words of the true prophet will now understand them.
19. the lowly . . . / the needy. The focus of this prophecy is not an attack by hostile armies but the perversion of social justice, which will now be restored.
21. through a word. Given the reference to courts of justice in the next two versets, the “word” here would be false testimony or perjury that deprives the innocent of his rightful cause.
23. they shall hallow My name. It is noteworthy that the prophet conceives the hallowing of God’s name not as a cultic act but as a restitution of social justice. Jacob’s face no longer turns pale with shame because his society is no longer something to be ashamed of, and this is the true sanctification of God’s name. The arc of this argument is completed in the next verse. The people that had been blind, that lacked the discernment to see the difference between right and wrong, will now come to its senses, again be discerning.