1. On that day this song will be sung. The designation of the prophecy enunciated here as “song” signals from the beginning its celebratory, triumphalist character.

A strong city is ours. The nation, previously assaulted and overwhelmed, now possesses an impregnable city.

Victory will be set—walls and ramparts. The translation reproduces the rather crabbed formulation of the Hebrew. The verb appears to read “he will set,” but third-person singular active verbs with no clear antecedent often serve in lieu of passives in biblical Hebrew. The general sense, despite the obscure wording, is clearly that the restored city will have strong ramparts that no enemy can conquer.

2. Open the gates / and let a righteous nation enter. This image looks as if it refers to the return to their city of a people who has been banished. In their righteousness, they are now worthy of this vindication and renewal.

4. an everlasting Rock. This metaphor, a stock image in Psalms, represents God as a stronghold and thus jibes with the references to powerful ramparts.

5. brought low the dwellers on high, / the lofty city. The lofty city that has been brought low is an obvious counterpoint to the strong city with its bristling ramparts.

6. the needy, / the poor man’s. The rhetoric of prophecy in behalf of social justice is here intermingled with the prophecy of national renewal. Given the context, the “poor man” in this verse would appear to be a symbol of the people of Israel, weak and helpless in the face of powerful nations but now triumphing over them.

8. For Your name and repute / are our utmost desire. The practice of substituting God’s “name” for the unmediated presence of the deity becomes especially pronounced in the Late Biblical period, but there are abundant precedents earlier. “Our” is added in the translation before “desire” for clarity.

10. Should the wicked be spared, he does not learn righteousness. What begins to emerge here is an eschatological differentiation between the wicked, who are beyond saving, and the righteous, who in a time to come will be singled out for renewal.

11. when Your hand is raised. Presumably, the divine hand is raised to punish the miscreants, but they pay no heed.

14. The dead shall not live. Although this is a standard biblical view, the emphasis here is on the dead who never heeded God in their lifetime: they have no hope of rising from the dust.

16. A whispered prayer of anguish was Your chastisement to them. This whole verset is opaque in the Hebrew, and hence any translation is no more than a guess. Tsaqun laḥash, rendered here as “a whispered prayer of anguish,” is especially obscure, although in later Hebrew it becomes a frequently invoked idiom with the sense of “heartfelt whispered prayer.”

17. As a woman with child draws near to give birth, / she shudders, she shakes in her pangs. These two versets vividly illustrate the tendency in many lines of biblical poetry to produce a miniature narrative from one verset to the next: first, the pregnant woman is nearing term; then, she is in the midst of violent labor. The third verset, as is often the case in triadic lines, strikes out in a new direction instead of continuing the parallelism—here, spelling out the referent of the simile. The next line then further develops the applicability of the simile to its referent.

18. and the world’s dwellers did not fall before us. The Hebrew merely says, rather enigmatically, “did not fall.” “Before us” has been added in the translation as an interpretive guess.

19. Your dead shall live. The entire line of poetry flatly contradicts the declaration in verse 14 that the dead shall not live. The operative term of distinction is “Your.” Is the prophet introducing a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which is generally not thought to emerge until the Book of Daniel? This is at least a possibility, and this is certainly the way this verse was later understood by communities of believers. But given the theme of national renewal that informs this entire prophecy, it may be more likely that what the poet has in mind is a rebirth of the nation, like Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.

their corpses. The Masoretic Text has “my corpse,” but two ancient versions show the more likely “their corpses.”

For Your dew is a dew of brightness. Dew is a component of the natural “irrigation” system in the land of Israel and hence an apt image for revivification.

the netherworld. In the context of “shades,” ʾarets has its occasional sense of the realm of the dead, even though it usually means “earth” or “land.”

releases. The Hebrew verb means “to drop” and is the second odd use of that verb in this chapter.

20. come into your chambers. The sometimes proposed notion that this refers to the chambers of death is far-fetched. God’s people are urged to take shelter within the shut doors of their houses until the divine wrath finishes its work of destruction.

21. to punish the crime of the dwellers on earth. The perspective looks global and hence eschatological. All who are guilty of murderous acts will now feel the fierce force of divine justice.

lay bare its bloodguilt / . . . no longer cover its slain. The language reflects the biblical notion that wrongfully shed blood pollutes the earth and needs to be “redeemed” by an act of retributive justice.