1Yes, a king shall reign in righteousness,
and princes shall govern in justice.
2Each shall be like a refuge from wind
and a shelter from the torrent,
like freshets of water on parched earth,
like the shade of a great rock
in an arid land.
3And the eyes of those who see shall not be sealed,
and the ears of those who hear shall listen,
4and the heart of the rash shall come to understand,
and the tongue of the stammerers speak eloquence.
5The scurrilous man shall no longer be called noble,
nor the villain named high-born.
6For the scurrilous man speaks scurrility,
and his heart performs misdeeds,
to carry out foul acts
and speak wrongly of the LORD,
to leave the hungry man’s throat empty
and withhold drink from the thirsty.
7The villain, his vessels are vile,
he devises infamous things,
to do harm to the poor with lying speech,
when the needy speak in court.
8But the nobleman plans noble acts,
and on noble acts he stands.
9Women at ease, stand up,
hear my voice.
Complacent young women,
to my words give ear.
10For within but a year,
the complacent shall quake,
no harvest shall come.
11Tremble, you women at ease,
quake, complacent ones.
put a cloth round your loins,
12Beating on breasts
over lovely fields,
over fruitful vines.
13On My people’s soil
thorn and thistle shall spring up,
for on all the houses of revelry,
the merrymaking town,
14the villa is abandoned,
the town’s hubbub left behind.
The citadel and the tower
become bare places for all time,
wild asses’ revelry,
pasture for the flocks.
15Till a spirit is poured on us from above,
and the desert turns to farmland
and farmland is reckoned as forest,
16And justice abides in the desert,
and righteousness dwells in the farmland.
17And the doing of righteousness shall be peace,
and the work of righteousness, safe and quiet forever.
18And My people shall dwell in abodes of peace,
in safe dwellings and tranquil places of rest.
19And it shall come down as the forest comes down,
and in the lowland the town shall come low.
20Happy, you who sow near all waters,
who let loose the ox and the donkey.
CHAPTER 32 NOTES
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1. a king shall reign in righteousness. The theme of the just king instituting a reign of perfect harmony is picked up from chapter 11, whether by Isaiah himself or, as some scholars prefer to think, by a later prophet in the “Isaian tradition.”
and princes shall govern in justice. The prophet envisages not only a righteous king but an entire royal bureaucracy of noblemen enacting justice.
3. And the eyes of those who see shall not be sealed. This whole line is an obvious reversal of the situation delineated in God’s words to Isaiah in his dedication to the prophetic mission (6:9–10), when the prophet is enjoined to seal the eyes and stop up the ears of the people.
5. The scurrilous man. It is not entirely certain whether the Hebrew naval refers to turpitude or stupidity, or perhaps rather to a combination of the two. Blenkinsopp neatly describes this condition as “moral imbecility.”
7. The villain, his vessels are vile. The translation emulates the wordplay in the Hebrew: kelay kelaw raʿim. More strictly, the initial noun means “miser.”
to do harm to the poor with lying speech. Although the thematic unity of this entire prophecy looks loosely associative, the connective logic is as follows: the just princes and monarch are to bring about a just judicial order that is very much lacking in a society where villains pervert justice; thus the nobleman with his noble acts invoked in the next verse has a crucially necessary role to play.
9. Women at ease . . . / Complacent young women. A female audience is addressed both because it is these women of Jerusalem who egregiously have been leading a self-satisfied life of luxury (compare chapter 3) and because it is the role of women to take up public keening in a time of disaster, which is about to come. The first of the two terms here is nashim, the second banot, and while banot (literally, “daughters”) are definitely young women, there is no persuasive basis for the scholarly claim that nashim means “married women.”
10. the vintage is done with, / no harvest shall come. Blenkinsopp suggests that this may refer to the devastation of the countryside of Judah by Sennacherib’s invading army in 701 B.C.E.
11. Strip yourselves bare, / put a cloth round your loins. As the second verset clarifies, what the prophet has in mind is not a state of complete nakedness but the putting aside of fine clothing (again, see chapter 3) and binding sackcloth round the loins as a sign of mourning.
12. Beating on breasts. This is of course a gesture of mourning. The Hebrew participle is a masculine plural where it should be feminine. This may be a scribal error influenced by the word for “breasts,” which is a masculine plural.
13. for on all the houses. The preposition here does not seem right for “houses” but may have been pulled into the discourse by its use with “soil” in the previous verse. It also might be an ellipsis for something like “curse.”
15. Till a spirit is poured on us from above. This is the pivotal point of the prophecy: after the catastrophe in which the land is laid waste, God’s spirit will envelop the people, instituting an era of justice and fructifying the devastated countryside.
farmland is reckoned as forest. Though the forest does not produce crops, it is a place of dense verdant growth, and so it becomes hyperbolic of the efflorescence of the farmland. Throughout these lines, the prophet imagines a fusion of justice with the flourishing renewal of the land.
19. And it shall come down as the forest comes down. This entire verse appears to be damaged beyond repair. The first word in the received text is barad, “hail” (though the vowel-points make it look like a verb), which makes no sense; it has been emended here in accordance with one Hebrew manuscript and two ancient versions to yarad, “shall come down,” which at least yields semantic parallelism in the line. Even so, it is unclear what is being said, and attempts to explain the line or recover an original version that lies behind it have been unavailing.
20. who let loose the ox and the donkey. This is in keeping with the idea of planting alongside streams that provide abundant irrigation: there will be green pastures all around over which the oxen and donkeys may roam.