1. The vision of Isaiah. The true beginning of Isaiah’s prophecies is chapter 6, the visionary scene in the Temple where he is first commissioned as a prophet. The prophecy that immediately follows here may have been set at the beginning of the book by its editors because of the invocation of heaven and earth as the formal beginning of a long poem—compare Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses, which begins with similar language.

3. the donkey its master’s stall. This line is a neat illustration of the pattern of focusing or concretization in the movement from the first verset to the second in biblical poetry. The first verset puts forth the general relation of beast to owner; the second verset (with metrical room for an additional word in the parallelism because the verb “knows” does double duty for both halves of the line and need not be repeated) then focuses on the place of nurture connecting beast and master.

4. Woe, offending nation. The Hebrew for this verset has a pounding rhythmic insistence, three words, four syllables, three stresses, reinforced by an internal rhyme at the beginning: hoy goy ḥoteiʾ.

5. beaten. The people has been suffering blows from its enemies as punishment for its evil ways (see verses 7–9), in which, however, it stubbornly persists.

7. upheaval. This word, strongly associated in Genesis with the destruction of Sodom, is the first hint of the equation between Israel and Sodom.

8. like a town besieged. This last verset of the two-line parallelism switches from the agricultural metaphors to the referent of the metaphors—a town encircled by enemies. This verse and the two preceding ones probably refer to the devastation wreaked by the Assyrian invading forces in 701 B.C.E.

10. O leaders of Sodom. This appears to be the beginning of a new prophecy, with the reference to Sodom at the end of the previous passage and at the beginning of this one providing an associative link between the two.

11. Why need I all your sacrifices? This is not a pitch for the abolition of sacrifice but rather an argument against a mechanistic notion of sacrifice, against the idea that sacrifice can put man in good standing with God regardless of human behavior. The point becomes entirely clear at the end of verse 15, when the prophet says that it is hands stained with blood stretched out in payer that are utterly abhorrent to God. Thus, the grain offering is “false” (or “futile”) because it is brought by people who have oppressed the poor and failed to defend widows and orphans.

12. to see My face. As throughout the Masoretic Text, the verb for seeing the face of God—the original conception of the pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple—has been piously revocalized as a passive form, “to be seen.”

13. crime and convocation. The translation emulates the approximate alliteration in the Hebrew of ʾawen weʿatsarah.

14. I utterly despise. The Hebrew uses nafshi in what amounts to an intensive form of the first-person pronoun. This translation tries to suggest this intensity by adding the adverb “utterly.”

15. Your hands are full of blood. This shocking detail is held back until the end of these two lines of poetry: the palms lifted up in prayer are covered with blood, and that is why God averts His eyes, because He can’t bear looking at them. It should be noted that Isaiah’s outrage, as it is spelled out in verse 17, is not chiefly with cultic disloyalty, as it would be for the writers in the school of Deuteronomy, but with social injustice—indifference to the plight of the poor and the helpless, exploitation of the vulnerable, acts represented here as the moral equivalent of murder.

18. scarlet . . . white. Although this appears to be part of a new prophecy, the scarlet picks up the image of bloodstained hands from verse 15, and that could be the reason for the editorial placement of this prophecy here.

pure wool. “Pure” is merely implied in the Hebrew and has been added in the translation to exclude the possibility of dyed wool.

20. by the sword you shall be eaten. Though “devoured” might be more appropriate for the context, the translation preserves the pointed reversal in the Hebrew of eating the bounty of the land and being eaten by the sword. In biblical usage, the cutting edge of the sword is often referred to as a mouth, and thus the sword is said to devour or eat its victims.

21. How has the faithful town / become a whore? This prophecy begins with ʾeikhah, the word that conventionally starts lamentations or dirges. The prophet sees it as a reason to lament that the once just town has become a place where justice is perverted.

and now—murderers. As with the hands full of blood in verse 15, the shocking detail is reserved for the end.

23. Your nobles are knaves. The alliteration in the translation seeks to be an approximate equivalent of the fuller sound-play of the Hebrew, sarayikh sorerim. The point of the sound-play is that something turns into its opposite in a move from one word to an antithetical one that sounds like the first.

illicit payments. The unusual word shalmonim clearly means “illegitimate payments.” “Payoff” in English might be an equivalent, but it is too colloquial for this poem, so the translation adds “illicit.”

24. Therefore, says the Master, LORD of Armies. As is often the case in the poetry of the prophets, the clause for introducing divine speech is extrametrical and not strictly part of the poem.

settle scores. The verb hinahem usually means “to change one’s mind” or “to regret” and can also mean “to be consoled.” It is quite close phonetically to hinaqem, “to be avenged,” which appears in the second verset, and the poet seems to have pushed the term here to mean something close to “vengeance.”

my foes . . . my enemies. These terms commonly refer to the enemies of the people of Israel, but in a sharp polemic reversal, here they are addressed to the Israelites themselves, who through their perversion of justice have made themselves God’s enemies.

26. Then shall you be called town of righteousness, / faithful city. This line obviously loops back to the opening line of this prophecy, verse 21, where the faithful city once filled with righteousness has become a den of murderers.

29. the cult-trees. The botanical genus stipulated by the Hebrew term is “terebinths.” Pagan nature worship centering around sacred trees was widespread in Canaan. This is the first time that Isaiah inveighs against cultic rather than moral trespasses.

the gardens. This word, though it usually refers to gardens in an innocuously horticultural sense, in the present context palpably invokes the sacred gardens that were the site of pagan cults.

30. oak . . . garden. The poem picks up the tree and garden from the preceding line and turns them into metaphors of the dire end to which the miscreants will come.

31. the strong. Even though some interpreters understand this as “the treasure,” the antithesis between strength and flimsy combustible tow makes good poetic sense, and there is philological warrant for construing ḥason as “strong.”

his deeds into a spark. The image is a shrewd one: the reprehensible act of the paganizer is self-destructive, providing the spark that will destroy him.