1. The people walking in darkness / have seen a great light. This is one of the most arresting instances of antithetical parallelism in biblical poetry. The line is starkly simple yet haunting. Second Isaiah would pick up this contrast between light and darkness and develop it in a variety of elaborate ways. The line following here continues the light-darkness antithesis in an interlinear parallelism.

3. as on the day of Midian. The probable reference is to Gideon’s defeat of the Midianite oppressors reported in Judges 6–8.

4. every boot. The Hebrew seʾon appears only here. A possible Akkadian cognate means “boot,” and the parallelism with “cloak” argues for some item of apparel. Pounding boots and bloodied cloaks aptly serve as metonymies for a violently advancing army.

5. a child has been born to us. The child who is born with wondrous qualities and who is to assume leadership is the ideal king who will be a stay against all enemies and establish an enduring reign of peace.

and leadership is on his shoulders. This expression reverses the rod of the oppressor on the shoulders in verse 3.

wondrous councillor / divine warrior, eternal father, prince of peace. This string of epithets has been associated by many generations of Christian commentators and readers with Christ. What the prophet has in mind, however, is not “messianic” except in the strictly political sense: he envisages an ideal king from the line of David who will sit on the throne of Judah and oversee a rule of justice and peace. The most challenging epithet in this sequence is ʾel gibor, which appears to say “warrior-god.” The prophet would be violating all biblical usage if he called the Davidic king “God,” and that term is best construed here as some sort of intensifier. In fact, the two words could conceivably be a scribal reversal of gibor ʾel, in which case the second word would clearly function as a suffix of intensification as it occasionally does elsewhere in the Bible.

6. The zeal of the LORD of Armies shall do this. This sentence is a kind of prose coda to the poetic prophecy. It underscores an important theological point: such an ideal ruler can come into being and sit on the throne of David only through God’s zealous intervention.

8. Ephraim and the dwellers of Samaria. These are, of course, the inhabitants of the northern kingdom, who have allied themselves with Aram, as the mention of the Aramean king Rezin in verse 10 reminds us.

9. Bricks have fallen, and we shall build with hewn stone. There is probably an allusion to the Tower of Babel here. Babel was a byword for overweening human pride, as the story in Genesis 11 shows. These Israelites go beyond the builders of the Tower in their “pride and . . . swelling heart” by resuming their task of building after the brick structure has been razed and imagining that they can build it bigger and better with hewn stone (the building material of Canaan as against Mesopotamia).

cedars. These are the tallest trees known in the region; they are used elsewhere as a symbol of arrogance (see chapter 15).

12. And the people has not turned back. The verb plays against the use of the same verb in a different sense in the previous verse: divine wrath “has not turned back” means that it has not relented, has not been withdrawn, whereas here “turned back” means “to repent,” “to turn back to God.”

14. Elder and honored. Some scholars view this whole verse as a gloss, though it could be original to the prophecy.

prophet and false teacher. As the second phrase makes clear, the prophet referred to is a false prophet. This provides a bridge to the misleading leaders of the next line.

16. the Master shall not rejoice over its young men. The verb here should not be emended, as some have proposed. In biblical poetry, young men (and virgins) often appear as the apt object of rejoicing, just as orphans and widows are the proverbial object of merciful concern (second verset).

17. went up. The Hebrew verb used appears only here. Abraham ibn Ezra and others construe it as going up in a column or spume. The term translated as “surge,” geʾut, supports this construction because when applied to water it means rising tide.

18. grew dark. This is still another term that occurs nowhere else, and so the meaning, proposed by many scholars, is necessarily conjectural.

the people became like consuming fire. In this time of national catastrophe, social order breaks down and every man turns against his fellow.

19. the flesh of their fellow man they ate. The Masoretic Text reads “each man eats the flesh of his own arm.” This is possible as a hyperbolic expression but looks rather strange. The Septuagint and one Targum read reʿo, “his fellow man,” instead of zeroʿo, “his arm,” which sounds more likely and is also more in keeping with the previous verse. Cannibalism in times of siege is frequently mentioned in other biblical texts.

20. Manasseh does it to Ephraim. The Hebrew has no verb, only the accusative particle ʾet. But what is clearly indicated is that in this landscape of mutual savagery, such cannibalistic assault is what Manasseh does to Ephraim and vice versa. The reference is to civil strife within the northern kingdom and then to the war of the north on the south.