2. in future days. Older translations represent this Hebrew phrase as “in the end of days,” giving it an emphatically eschatological meaning it does not have. The Hebrew ʾaḥarit, derived from the word that means “after,” refers to an indefinite time after the present.

the mount of the LORD’s house. Mount Zion in Jerusalem is here imagined as a kind of second Sinai, from which God’s teaching will go out.

all the nations. The universalist note struck here is new. It will be elaborated and expanded in the visions of the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile whose writing is appended to the Book of Isaiah, beginning with chapter 40. Some interpreters detect sixth-century B.C.E. themes throughout this prophecy.

4. Nation shall not raise sword against nation. God’s teaching from Zion, then, is to have the effect of inaugurating a reign of universal peace. There is an imaginative boldness, or perhaps rather the courage of desperation, in this vision because Isaiah articulated it at a historical moment of continual warfare among imperial powers when the land of Israel itself, as 1:7–9 shows, was threatened with destruction by invading armies.

learn war. Fighting was a skill that required training, as noted in Psalms and elsewhere.

6. For you have abandoned your people. These words clearly signal the beginning of a new prophecy, one of castigation, after the utopian vision of verses 2–5. Abandoning the people means something like abandoning its own vital interests or precious values.

For they are full of eastern things. More literally, “they are full of the east.” There is no reason to emend this, as some have proposed, to “full of sorcerers [qosmim] from the east” because poetry can surely deploy ellipsis.

and they abound in children of strangers. This clause is unclear, and the meaning of the verb is especially uncertain. Some notion of adopting foreign ways (the eastern things, the Philistines) would appear to be implied.

7. silver and gold. From divining and magic, the poet moves on to the accumulation of wealth and luxury items, which he sees as the royal road to idolatry (verse 8).

9. shall bow low. Although the sense is to be humbled, the Hebrew makes a point of using the same verb that expressed idolatry in the previous verse. This relatively long poem, running to the end of the chapter, is elaborately structured through a series of images of high things brought low and God’s commanding height over all the earth. The poem makes use not only of repeated images but also of refrainlike devices.

10. Come into the crag / and hide in the dust. The landscape envisaged is harsh and pitiless: no forests or gardens or towns but dust and rocks, which offer terrified man inhospitable and inadequate shelter against God’s wrath.

12. lifted up. This emends the Masoretic “lowly,” which doesn’t seem plausible. This whole clause is repeated as a refrain in verse 17, underscoring the high-low theme of the entire poem.

13. the Lebanon cedars. Throughout biblical poetry, the great cedars of Lebanon are iconic images of loftiness.

over all. The anaphora of “over all,” ‘al kol, becomes a terrific drum-beat, making a crescendo that begins in verse 12 and runs on through verse 16, all a single sentence.

15. fortress wall. More literally, “fortified wall.”

16. Tarshish ships. Tarshish is an undetermined port on the Mediterranean far to the west. But the mention in the Book of Kings of Tarshish ships plying the Red Sea suggests that it may also be a term for a kind of craft constructed for long voyages.

lovely crafts. The translation follows a scholarly proposal for the noun sekhiyot, but its meaning is obscure, and the conclusion about what it might be is dictated chiefly by the poetic parallelism.

18. And the ungods shall utterly vanish. This brief sentence looks like an orphan—a verset without a paired second verset, which might have somehow been dropped in scribal transmission. Nevertheless, it contains a nice poetic effect in the internal rhyme of ʾelilim, “ungods,” immediately followed by kalil, “utterly.”

19. caves in the crags . . . hollows in the dust. The crag/dust parallelism as places of hiding in verse 10 is further concretized here by the addition of caves and hollows, helping us imagine the pitiful plight of the people who attempt to flee, crawling into crevices in rocks and in the ground. This miserable effort at hiding somewhere down below is the culmination of the bringing-low of man that defines the entire prophecy.

to wreak havoc. The Hebrew verb used here, and again in the refrain at the end of verse 21, is strong and violent. It suggests terrorizing and it is related phonetically to a verbal stem that means “to smash.”

20. to the hedgehogs and the bats. The idolators themselves have fled to the bleak wilderness. Now they throw away their precious idols to creatures of the wilderness, though the precise identity of the first of these is uncertain.

22. Leave off from man, / who has breath in his nostrils. One might have expected, given the previous emphasis of this prophecy something like: leave off from your idols, / for they are insensate things. The point, however, is that idolatry, worshipping what man makes with his own hands, is itself an expression of human arrogance, man’s assuming he can lift himself high, like his towers and battlements, through his own acts and artifacts. (One wonders whether the Tower of Babel may stand in the background of this poem.) The mention of the breath in the nostrils invokes the intrinsic fragility of human life: man is a vulnerable, ephemeral creature, his life-breath easily stopped in a moment, so how could one put trust in him?