1. the Desert of the Sea. This sounds rather like an oxymoron, and attempts to explain it are uncertain. Perhaps the best scholarly guess is that it refers to a Mesopotamian marsh region, which would have been Assyrian territory at the time of Isaiah, or under Babylon later.

from the desert he comes. The one coming would be the invader.

2. go up, Elam, lay siege, Media. The historical reference of this prophecy being unclear, all one can say is that these are two Mesopotamian peoples. Since Media–Persia overwhelmed Babylonia, it could be that the object of attack is Babylonia. Babylon is in fact mocked in the last line of this poem.

all her groaning I have ended. The “her” would logically refer to Elam and Media, though those should have a plural referent (unless they are viewed collectively). Some scholars emend the Hebrew word for “groaning” to “joy,” which would then be attached more neatly to the object of the invasion.

3. Therefore my loins are filled with shuddering. Here and in what follows the speaker of the prophecy appears to identify imaginatively with the kingdom about to be devastated.

5. From “lay the table” to “let the watchmen watch.” The Hebrew lacks both “from” and to.” This translation follows the proposal of the New Jewish Publication Society version.

burnish shield with oil. The shields were leather, sometimes studded with metal. Rubbing the front surface with oil made them slippery and more of an obstacle to the enemy. In any case, the thrust of both lines is a switch from peaceful enjoyment to war.

6. post a watchman. Some interpreters take the watchman as a figure for the prophet, but this could as easily be an actual watchman who sees the mounted attackers approaching.

7. a rider, / a pair of horsemen. These lines pick up the point of view of the lookout, who first sees one rider, then more than one.

8. And the seer shall call out. The received text reads: “And he shall call out: A lion!” This is problematic if the danger is cavalry. The Qumran Isaiah has instead of “lion,” ʾaryeh, “the seer,” haroʾ eh, which is merely a reversal of consonants, and that looks more likely.

10. My threshing and what falls on the granary floor. This line is enigmatic, but because threshing and separating the grain from the chaff are often used in biblical poetry as a metaphor for the destruction of the wicked, that may be the intention here.

What I heard from the LORD. This sentence is not part of the poem and functions as a prose epilogue to it.

11. Dumah . . . Seir. The kingdom referred to lies just to the east of ancient Israel: “Seir” is a poetic synonym for Edom, and “Dumah” could conceivably be a variation of Edom.

watchman, what of the night? The Hebrew has a haunting musicality, shomer mah milaylah / shomer mah mileyl, and, understandably, the phrase would often reappear in later Hebrew poetry. But one must concede that this entire short prophecy is far too fragmentary to allow us to guess what it is about. The enigma is compounded by the last line of the prophecy, “If you would ask, do ask, / turn back, come.” Linguistically, it should be noted that both the word for “ask” and the word for “come” are Aramaicisms, a usage that probably reflects a relatively late date, certainly well after the eighth-century B.C.E. setting of Isaiah.

13. in Arabia. It is puzzling that the chain of prophecies concerning foreign nations should reach as far to the southeast as Arabia (the vocalization of the name is peculiar), but Dedan and Tema, about to be mentioned, are definitely in the Arabian peninsula.

scrubland. The Hebrew yaʿ ar usually means “forest,” but there are no forests in Arabia, and here it seems likely that what is meant is a region where low bushes grow.

15. fugitives before the sword. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to say precisely who these pathetic war refugees are.

the crush of war. The literal sense of the first of these two nouns is “heaviness,” but surely something like “crush,” or “brutal pressure” is meant.

16. another year, like the year of a hired worker. Earlier, it was three years like the years of a hired worker. Either there was an alternative for an indentured servant of a one-year contract, or there was a particular—perhaps, especially rigorous—way of computing the year in such arrangements with laborers.

Kedar’s glory. Roughly, Kedar is a biblical designation for the Arab people.

17. the number of Kedar’s warrior bowmen. The Masoretic Text reads: “The number of bow, warriors of the Kedarites.” This translation supposes a scribal transposition of the original order of words, so that mispar giborey qeshet beney qedar was turned into the syntactically dubious mispar-qeshet giborey beney qedar, a syntactic string for which the present note has provided a literal translation above.