1Listen to me, pursuers of justice,
seekers of the LORD.
Look to the rock you were hewn from
and to the quarry from which you were cut.
2Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah who spawned you.
For he was the one whom I summoned,
and I blessed him and made him many.
3For the LORD has comforted Zion,
brought comfort to all her ruins
and made her desert like Eden,
her wasteland like the garden of the LORD.
Gladness and joy are within her.
thanksgiving and the sound of song.
4Hearken to Me, My people,
and My nation, give ear to Me.
For teaching from Me shall go out
and My justice as a light to the peoples.
5In an instant My triumph draws near,
My rescue comes forth,
and my arm shall rule over peoples.
The coastland shall wait for Me
and count on My strong arm.
6Lift up your eyes to the heavens,
and look on the earth below.
Though the heavens be scattered like smoke,
and the earth worn out like a garment,
and its dwellers like gnats die out,
My rescue shall be forever,
and My triumph shall not be shattered.
7Listen to Me, knowers of justice,
a people with My teaching in its heart.
Do not be afraid of the insults of men,
and from their mockery do not quail.
8For like a garment the moth shall consume them,
and like wool the grub shall consume them.
But My triumph shall be forever
and My rescue for ages to come.
9Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the LORD.
Awake as in days of yore,
ages long past.
Was it not You who hacked apart Rahab,
who pierced the Beast of the Sea?
10Was it not You who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep,
Who turned the sea’s depths into a road
for the redeemed to go over?
11And the LORD’s ransomed shall return
and come to Zion with glad song,
everlasting joy upon their heads,
gladness and joy they shall attain,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee.
12I, I am He Who comforts you.
What troubles you that you should fear man who dies
and the son of man who is no more than grass,
13and you forget the LORD your Maker,
Who stretches out the heavens and founds the earth,
and you are in constant fear, all day long,
of the oppressor’s wrath, as he aims to destroy?
But where is the oppressor’s wrath?
14He who crouches shall quickly be freed,
and shall not die in the Pit,
and his bread shall not lack.
15As for Me, the LORD your God,
Who treads the sea and its waves roar,
the LORD of Armies is His name.
16I have put My word in your mouth
and in the shadow of My hand have covered you,
stretching out the heavens and founding the earth
and saying to Zion, “You are My people.”
17Awake, awake,
rise up, Jerusalem,
you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD
the cup of His wrath,
you drank to the dregs.
18There is none to guide her
of all the sons she bore,
and none to hold her hand
of all the sons she raised.
19Two did I call down upon you—
who will grieve for you?—
wrack and ruin, famine and sword
how can I comfort you?
20Your children have fainted, are lying
at the head of every street
filled with the wrath of the LORD,
the rebuke of your God.
21Therefore, pray hear this, afflicted woman,
drunk but not from wine.
22Thus said your Master the LORD
and your God Who contends for His people:
Look, I have taken from your hand
the chalice of My wrath.
You shall no longer drink from it,
23and I will put it in the hand of your oppressors
who said to you, “Bow, that we may walk over you.”
and you made your back like the ground,
like a street for passersby.
CHAPTER 51 NOTES
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1. Look to the rock you were hewn from. Although “rock” (tsur) in biblical poetry is often an epithet for God, the reference to Abraham and Sarah in the next verse suggests that the poet has in mind here the human forefather and foremother of the people of Israel. “Quarry” is never an epithet for God, and the fact that a rock juts up (and is a masculine Hebrew noun) while a quarry is a cavity in the ground (and a feminine Hebrew noun) further aligns the two metaphors with Abraham and Sarah respectively.
3. like Eden. The references of this prophecy of national restoration keep moving back in time—first to the couple who were the founders of the nation and now to the lushness of the primordial garden.
5. In an instant. This phrase reflects in English the Hebrew verb ʾargiʿa, which can mean to do something in an instant (regaʿ). In the Masoretic Text, this verb appears at the end of the previous verse, but it almost certainly serves here as part of a sequence of two successive verbs, the first in effect adverbially modifying the second—that is, ʾargiʿa ʾaqriv, “I will [do] in an instant, I will draw near.”
my arm shall rule over peoples. The arm in biblical idiom is repeatedly a metaphor for power, although the use of the plural here is unusual. The Hebrew here uses a plural, but the translation avoids “arms” in order not to suggest the sense of “weapons.” At the end of this verse, “arm” occurs in the singular, and the translation has added “strong” in order to convey the idiomatic sense of the Hebrew.
6. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, / and look on the earth below. The poem now pushes its movement back in time from the Garden of Eden to the heavens and the earth that emerged at the very beginning of creation. Through all these eons, from Abraham and Sarah to Eden to the first moment of creation and forward to the imagined end of creation, God’s beneficent power remains steadfast.
like gnats. The Hebrew kemo-khen appears to say “also thus,” a dubious phrase before “die out” and after two strong similes (“like smoke,” “like a garment”) in the two preceding versets. This translation assumes a scribal error for kemo kinim, “like gnats.”
7. Do not be afraid of the insults of men. These words attributed to God, spoken through the prophet, appear to assume a situation in which an embattled minority listen to the prophet and embrace his vision of a return to Zion. Others whom he may address either cynically dismiss his message as mere illusion or perhaps even show themselves ready to discard their national identity and deity and assimilate to the surrounding culture.
9. Awake, awake. As the feminine second-person verbs make clear, this new discourse is an apostrophe to the arm of the LORD, which, as we have seen, means His militant power.
Rahab, / . . . the Beast of the Sea. These names locate the “days of yore” in the primordial era before creation came about. The Creation myth invoked, at least for the expressive purposes of poetry, is Canaanite, although this prophet of the sixth century B.C.E. would have been several centuries removed from its active circulation. In the Canaanite myth, the weather god Baal, replaced in Hebrew poetry by YHWH, subdues a ferocious sea monster, variously called Rahab, Leviathan, Yamm, or Tanin (rendered here as “the Beast of the Sea”) in order for creation to take place.
10. Was it not You who dried up the sea. This verse ostensibly continues the archaic Creation story (and “the sea” could also be understood as Yamm, one of the names of the Beast of the Sea). That impression is reinforced by the use of “the great deep,” a designation that refers to the primordial abyss. But in the next line of poetry, that Creation myth merges, in an effect like cinematic faux raccord, with the drying up of the Sea of Reeds—“Who turned the sea’s depths into a road / for the redeemed to go over.”
11. And the LORD’s ransomed shall return. In a second doubling of imagery with a leap forward in time, the “LORD’s ransomed” at the Sea of Reeds are turned into a precursor for the people of the prophet’s own time who are about to be ransomed from captivity and led not between walls of water but over desert terrain in the return to Zion.
13. the oppressor’s wrath. While many scholarly attempts have been made to identify a specific historical oppressor, it is prudent to read this as a generalized reference to the oppression of the Babylonian exile.
14. He who crouches shall quickly be freed. The translation of this verse is somewhat conjectural, and the meaning of the initial verb is especially doubtful. The general sense, however, of someone—surely the people of Israel—suffering subjugation who is now to be liberated seems clear.
15. Who treads the sea. The Masoretic Text has as the verb here rogaʿ, but despite the contention of some scholars that this means “stir up,” it actually means the opposite, “to quiet” or “to be subdued,” (compare the occurrence of precisely this phrase in Job 25:12). The present translation reads instead roqaʿ, “to tread or stomp.”
16. stretching out the heavens. The received text shows lintoʿa, “to plant,” but this is surely a mistake for lintot, “to stretch out.”
17. the chalice of poison. The usual translation of the term tarʿeilah is “reeling” or “staggering” but it is more plausibly related to raʿal, which definitely means “poison” in postbiblical Hebrew, as it may also do in Zechariah 12:2. This understanding is supported by the fact that the word for “wrath” in “the cup of His wrath” also means “venom.” The Hebrew for “chalice” is two words, literally, “the cup of the chalice,” and some think “cup” is a gloss on the rare word for chalice, qubaʿat, but joining two synonyms in a construct form is elsewhere a means to intensify or heighten the sense of the noun, and that may be the case here.
20. like an antelope in a net. The identity of the beast is uncertain.
22. the cup of poison, / the chalice of My wrath. In an elegant reversal of terms, “cup” is now linked with “poison” and “chalice” with “My wrath,” whereas in verse 17 it is the other way around.
23. and you made your back like the ground, / like a street for passersby. The second and third verset of this line vividly illustrate the impulse in biblical poetry to concretize semantic material introduced in the first verset as the line unfolds: first the oppressors command their victors to prostrate themselves so that they can step on them; then we get the concrete—and painful—image of the backs of the victims turned into a roadway upon which passersby tread.