1Hear me, O coastlands,
and listen, faraway nations.
The LORD called me forth from the womb,
from my mother’s belly He invoked my name.
2And He made my mouth a sharp sword,
in the shadow of His hand He hid me,
and He made me a well-honed arrow,
in His quiver He sheltered me.
3And he said to me, “You are My servant,
Israel, in whom I glory.”
4And I had thought, “In vain have I toiled,
for naught, for mere breath, my strength have I sapped.
Yet my cause is with the LORD
and my wages with my God.”
5And now the LORD has said,
my Fashioner from the womb as a servant to Him,
to bring back Jacob to him,
and Israel shall be gathered to Him,
and I shall be honored in the eyes of the LORD
and my God shall be my strength.
6And He said, “It is too little a thing that you are My servant,
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and bring back Israel’s survivors.
I shall make you a light for the nations,
that My rescue reach the end of the earth.”
7Thus said the LORD,
Israel’s Redeemer, its Holy One,
to the despised one, reviled by nations,
to the slave of rulers.
Kings shall see and rise,
princes, and bow down,
for the sake of the LORD, Who is faithful,
Israel’s Holy One Who has chosen you.
8Thus said the LORD:
In an hour of favor I answered you
and on a day of rescue I aided you.
And I fashioned you and made you a people’s covenant
to raise up the land,
to inherit desolate estates.
9Saying to the captives, Go out!
to those in darkness, Come into the open!
Along the roads they shall feed
and on all the heights—their pasture.
10They shall not hunger and shall not thirst,
and hot wind and sun shall not strike them
for He Who shows mercy to them shall lead them
and by springs of water guide them.
11And I will make all My mountains a road,
and My highways shall rise.
12Look, these shall come from afar,
and, look, these from the north and the west,
and these from the land of Sinim.
13Sing gladly, heavens,
and rejoice O earth,
shout out, O mountains, gladly.
For the LORD has comforted His people
and shown mercy to His afflicted.
14Yet Zion says, “The LORD has forsaken me,
and the Master has forgotten me.”
15Does a woman forget her babe,
have no mercy on the child of her womb?
Though she forget,
I will not forget you.
16Why, on My palms I have inscribed you,
your walls are before Me always.
17Your children hasten.
Those who ravaged you, destroyed you,
shall leave you.
18Lift up your eyes all around and see—
they all have gathered, have come to you.
As I live, says the LORD,
all of them like a jewel you shall wear
and tie them on like a bride.
19As to your ruins and your desolate places
and your ravaged land—
now you shall scarcely have room for dwellers,
and your destroyer shall go far away.
20Yet shall they say in your hearing,
the children of whom you were bereaved:
“The place is too crowded for me,
make me room that I may dwell.”
21And you shall say in your heart:
“Who gave birth for me to these,
when I was bereaved and barren,
exiled and cast aside,
and these, why, who has raised?
Why, I was left alone,
these, from where have they come?”
22Thus said the LORD:
Look, I will raise My hand to the nations,
and to the peoples I will lift My banner,
and they shall bring your sons in their laps,
and your daughters shall be borne on their shoulders.
23And kings shall be your attendants
and princesses your wet nurses.
Face to the ground they shall bow to you
and lick the dust of your feet.
And you shall know that I am the LORD,
all who hope for Me shall not be shamed.
24Shall prey be taken from a warrior
or captives of a tyrant be freed?
25For thus said the LORD:
even a warrior’s captive shall be taken away
and a tyrant’s prey freed.
And with your contender will I contend,
and your children I Myself will rescue.
26And I will feed your oppressors their own flesh,
and as with wine they shall be drunk on their blood.
that I am the LORD, your Rescuer,
and your Redeemer, the strong one of Jacob.
CHAPTER 49 NOTES
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2. And He made my mouth a sharp sword. The assertion in this line and the next that the prophet’s discourse is a potent weapon may be a little surprising because the chief burden of his prophesies is a message of consolation. Perhaps, speaking in a situation of painful political powerlessness, he wants to assert that his poetry has power, even the power to devastate those who would resist it. One should note that there is a counterpoint between the first and second verset in each of these two lines: the first verset expresses the weaponlike power of the prophet’s discourse, the second, his enjoyment of shelter provided by God, with the image of the quiver neatly combining shelter and weapon.
3. You are My servant, / Israel. The poem segues from the prophet to the people whose conscience and representative he is.
6. I shall make you a light for the nations, / that My rescue reach the end of the earth. The unheard-of act of bringing the exiled people of Israel back to its land is imagined as taking place in a cosmic arena: this spectacular intervention on behalf of the defeated people will be seen throughout the earth.
9. Along the roads they shall feed. This is a reprise of Second Isaiah’s central vision of a grand journey through the wilderness back to Zion. Although in verse 11 it picks up the theme from chapter 40 of the rough terrain transformed into a level highway, the special emphasis here is on providing food and water for the returning exiles—something that would have been a practical concern for those anticipating a trek through desert-land over hundreds of miles.
12. the land of Sinim. Some read this as “the land Syene” (Aswan?), but the identification remains uncertain.
14. Yet Zion says. Zion is imagined as a woman (the verb is feminine), a common convention in biblical poetry for representing cities and countries. The poet, as we shall see, develops this feminine figure in an original way.
The LORD has forsaken me. This verb is one that would be used for a wife abandoned by her husband. The metaphor of God as husband and Israel as beloved wife is vividly articulated in Jeremiah 1; the poet here taps into this conventional trope.
15. Does a woman forget her babe. God assures Zion, who feels she has been rejected by Him, that His feelings for her are even stronger than those of a mother for her child. The elaboration of the simile leaves it ambiguous as to whether Zion is God’s daughter or His bride. At the same time, the invocation of a mother’s attachment to her baby lays the ground for the vision of restored children in verses 17–21.
17. Your children hasten. / Those who ravaged you . . . / shall leave you. This is a panorama of two-way traffic. The conquerors of Zion flee as Zion’s children rush back.
18. all of them like a jewel you shall wear. The somewhat unusual image of children worn like a jewel may be motivated by a literary allusion. Benjamin Sommer has proposed that Second Isaiah explicitly has in mind Jeremiah 2:32: “Does a virgin forget her jewels, / a bride her knotted sash?” In our text, the forgetting is transferred from jewels to children, and “jewel”—the same Hebrew word, ʿadi—becomes a metaphorical representation of the children. Since producing children was imagined in this culture as a woman’s greatest fulfillment, it logically follows that they are her chief ornament, what she can glory in before the eyes of the world.
20. the children of whom you were bereaved. This is an eloquent poetic paradox: as in a fairy-tale happy ending, the children who Zion had thought were lost forever now appear before her and announce that because there are so many of them, there is scarcely room for them all to dwell in the land to which they have returned.
21. Who gave birth for me to these. The poignant force of Second Isaiah’s poetry of consolation is beautifully felt here. Zion had thought herself bereaved of all her children and hopelessly barren, never to replace them. Now she finds them swarming around her, and she expresses her amazement in simple, almost naïve exclamation: did some mysterious surrogate mother give birth to all of these for me, “these, from where have they come?” The last sentence is still more pared down in the Hebrew: “these, where are they?” One should note that the Hebrew verb for “gave birth” is, against biology, masculine. Either the final feminine heh was dropped in scribal transmission, or this is an instance in which the masculine singular verb serves as a passive (“by whom were these given birth”).
22. I will raise My hand to the nations. In Isaiah 5:26, God raises a banner to marshal the armies from the ends of the earth that will attack Judah. In the reversal here, the military signal inaugurates the return from exile, which is wholly pacific, with the sons and daughters of Zion carried in the laps and on the shoulders of the rulers of nations.
23. attendants. The Hebrew ʾomen suggests “tutor,” or perhaps even a kind of glorified babysitter.
Face to the ground they shall bow to you. After the humiliation of the subjugation in exile, the prophet puts forth a grand reversal in which kings and noblewomen lick the dust at the feet of the people of Israel.
24. tyrant. The Masoretic Text reads tsadiq, “righteous man” (or according to some, “victor”), but the Qumran Isaiah as well as two ancient versions have ʿarits, “tyrant,” and this reading is supported by the fact that the terms “warrior” and “tyrant” recur in the next line of poetry in a pointed repetition.
25. even a warrior’s captive shall be taken away. The terms of comparison are now made to refer directly to the condition of the people of Israel: though experience tells us that no one can snatch captives from a fierce warrior or prey from a tyrant, you, who have been captives and the prey of tyrants, will be freed.
I Myself will rescue. For both verbs here (“contend” and “rescue”), the Hebrew introduces the personal pronoun “I,” usually not needed for conjugated verbs, as a gesture of emphasis.
26. And I will feed your oppressors their own flesh. In the immediately preceding prophecy, the kings and princes of nations were reduced to nursemaids and attendants. Here, in an angrier turn of vengeful thinking, they are condemned to hideous starvation leading to cannibalism.
all flesh shall know. In a move characteristic of both biblical poetry and biblical narrative prose, a word that has just been used in one sense—“flesh” as what constitutes together with “blood” the human body—is repeated in a very different sense: “all flesh” as a designation of all humankind.