Isaiah 34
Call to Witness Universal Judgment 1–4
Judgment Focused on Edom (Idumea) 5–8
The Eternal Desolation of the Land 9–15
The Certainty of God's Word 16–17
Bible text: King James Version (1769 Blayney text) · Public domain
Study Notes for Isaiah 34
Verse 1
Come near, ye nations — The summons uses two words for the nations, goyim and leom, and widens to ‘the earth’ and ‘the world’ (tebel, the inhabited earth), as in Isa 1:2, ‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth’. They are called to hear a verdict on ‘all nations’ (v.2) that falls in particular on Edom (v.5). ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof’ (1 Cor 10:26).
Verse 2
utterly destroyed them — Charam is to put under the ban, to devote wholly to destruction, the verb used of Jericho, where everything in the city was ‘utterly destroyed’ (Josh 6:21). ‘Indignation’ (qetseph) and ‘fury’ (chemah) are the LORD’s, and ‘slaughter’ is tebach, the word for an animal killed for the table or the altar, which prepares the sacrifice of v.6.
Verse 4
rolled together as a scroll — ‘Dissolved’ is maqaq, to melt or rot away, and ‘rolled together’ is galal, the rolling up of a sepher, a scroll. Revelation takes the figure whole: ‘the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together’ (Rev 6:14), with stars falling ‘as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs’ (6:13), as the leaf and fig fall here.
Verse 5
my sword shall be bathed in heaven — Ravah is to drink one’s fill: the sword is satisfied in heaven before it comes down. ‘Idumea’, the Greek form of Edom, is in the KJV only here, in v.6, in Ezek 35:15; 36:5 and in Mark 3:8. ‘The people of my curse’ is literally the people of my cherem, the ban of v.2. Mal 1:4 calls Edom the people against whom the LORD has ‘indignation for ever’.
Verse 6
a sacrifice in Bozrah — The vocabulary is the altar’s: zebach, sacrifice, with lambs, goats and rams, and ‘the fat of the kidneys’ (Lev 3:4). The offering is a people in Bozrah, a city of Edom (Jer 49:13). Isa 63:1 shows the one who comes ‘from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah’.
Verse 8
the day of the LORD’S vengeance — Naqam is vengeance and shillum repayment. The ‘controversy of Zion’ (riv) is Zion’s legal cause: Edom said of Jerusalem ‘Rase it, rase it’ (Ps 137:7). Isa 61:2 pairs ‘the acceptable year of the LORD’ with ‘the day of vengeance’, and Christ, reading it in Nazareth, stopped at ‘the acceptable year’ (Luke 4:19).
Verse 9
the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch — Zepheth, pitch (asphalt), and gophrith, brimstone, make the land a burning waste. The picture is Sodom’s: ‘the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning’ (Deut 29:23), and the cities of the plain ‘are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire’ (Jude 7).
Verse 11
the line of confusion — Tohu and bohu, ‘confusion’ and ‘emptiness’, are the pair of Gen 1:2, ‘without form, and void’, found together elsewhere only in Jer 4:23. The ‘line’ (qav) and ‘stones’ recall the builder’s tools of 2 Kgs 21:13, ‘the line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab’. Four birds possess the land.
Verse 14
the satyr shall cry to his fellow — Sair is a shaggy he-goat, the word rendered ‘devils’ in Lev 17:7. Tsiyyim, desert beasts, and iyyim, howlers (KJV ‘of the island’), are creatures of waste places, as in Isa 13:21–22. Lilith, ‘screech owl’, a night creature, occurs only here in Scripture, and it finds ‘a place of rest’ (manoach) in the ruins.
Verse 16
Seek ye out of the book of the LORD — Sepher, ‘book’, is the same word as the ‘scroll’ of v.4: the heavens roll up, but this writing stands. ‘Seek’ (darash) is the verb of inquiring of God. Nothing named will lack ‘her mate’: ‘my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them’, and Mal 1:3 records Esau’s mountains laid waste.