1. In the year of the death of King Uzziah. This might be 734 B.C.E., although the reignal chronology is disputed. In any case, the vision in the Temple in which Isaiah is commissioned as prophet is clearly the beginning of his prophetic mission, and this chapter would be the first thing he wrote.

I saw the Master seated on a high and lofty throne. Since it was believed that there was a correspondence between the Temple in Jerusalem and God’s celestial palace, it is understandable that Isaiah should have a vision of God enthroned in the Temple. God apparently is imagined as having gigantic proportions, with the skirts of his robe filling the entire interior of the Temple. The word translated here as “Temple,” heikhal, generally means “palace,” and there appears to be a conflation between the two: the scene features both a throne and an altar. One should note that this episode begins in prose, probably because it is a narrative report rather than the prophetic message proper. When dialogue is introduced, the language switches to verse.

2. Seraphim. It is not entirely clear what these angelic attendants of God look like. Their name shows the verb that means “to burn,” and they might be angels of fire, but then why would they need tongs to hold the burning coal? The root saraf is also associated with the burning venom of serpents, and the Book of Kings registers the fact that at one point there were icons of serpents in the Temple, leaving open the disquieting possibility that these seraphim are winged snakes.

cover its feet. Some think “feet” is a euphemism for the genitals, though that is not a necessary inference.

hover. The piʿel conjugation of the verb for flying, ʿaf, is used here, and this translation understands it to indicate hovering or fluttering without forward motion, since the seraphim are, after all, “stationed,” or “standing over” God. In verse 6, when one of the seraphim swoops down to Isaiah, the primary conjugation (qal) of this verb is used, suggesting a different movement.

5. I am undone. The Hebrew verb could also mean “I am struck dumb,” and a pun is probably intended.

for I am a man of impure lips. As with Moses and Jeremiah, the prophet responds to the call to prophecy by stating his unworthiness for the task. But here, pointedly, his unworthiness is implicated in that of his people: “and in a people of impure lips do I dwell.”

7. he touched my mouth. Remarkably, what is entirely elided here is the excruciating pain of having a burning coal pressed to the mouth. The role of pain in the initiation will be vividly evoked in Pushkin’s “The Prophet,” a poem based on this chapter, in which the seraph rips out the prophet’s heart and replaces it with the burning coal.

8. Here I am, send me. The obvious implication is that, the prophet’s lips having been cleansed, he is now ready to take up the mission. There is a linguistic note as well as a spiritual one in all of this: poetry, purportedly representing divine speech, is the prophet’s vehicle; now, with his lips purified, he is in a condition to utter this elevated and powerful form of speech.

10. Make the heart of this people obtuse / and block its ears and seal its eyes. Since the heart is imagined as the seat of understanding, these are the three channels of perception. This particular message of God to the prophet is notoriously perplexing. Evidently, God does not want the people to understand, so that it will not change its ways and will not escape the dire punishment that it deserves. But if we see all this from Isaiah’s point of view, the entire message is colored by his quite realistic fear that his prophetic mission is doomed to failure from the outset, that all his exhortations will not move the people to turn back from its evil ways. God’s command, then, to make the heart of the people obtuse is a kind of preemptive justification by the prophet for the anticipated failure of prophecy.

11. Till when, O Master? The prophet is unwilling to contemplate the idea that the destruction will be total and final, and so he asks how long it will go on before God relents.

Till towns are laid waste with no dwellers. God answers not by indicating any period of time but by stating that first the land has to be devastated.

13. a tenth part shall be in it and turn back. This is an early articulation of the idea of the saving—perhaps rather “saved”—remnant. This small group of survivors will “turn back” to God, turn back from the disastrous acts of the majority.

And it shall be ravaged. The concluding clauses of this final verse are somewhat obscure. The “it” here would have to refer not to the tenth part that will be saved but to the people as a whole, who are destined to be ravaged.

like a terebinth and an oak / which though felled have a stump within them. Though shalekhet, the word represented here as “felled,” comes to mean “leaf-fall” in modern Hebrew (it derives from a verb meaning “to fling away”), it most likely refers here to the cutting down of the tree: while most of it is chopped down, it can regenerate from the stump that remains, which would be the saving tenth part of the people.

the holy seed. In part because “holy seed,” zeraʿ qodesh, is an exilic expression, many scholars conclude that this last clause, or even the entire final verse, is a later addition, referring to the community of exiles who remain faithful to the covenant and are destined to become the nucleus of the nation’s regeneration.