2. For fury has the LORD against all nations. Although a specific national target of divine wrath will emerge in verse 5, the initial perspective is global and, in effect, apocalyptic: all the earth is summoned to listen to the dire prophecy (verse 1), and God’s devastating judgment sweeps across the whole world.

3. and mountains shall melt from their blood. Other translations render the verb as “be drenched” or “flow,” but it is worth retaining the literal sense of the Hebrew, which constitutes a strong hyperbole: the tide of blood, vast and corrosive, will melt the mountains.

4. All the heavens’ array shall molder. The apocalyptic scope of the poetry is strikingly evident here: the swath of divine fury will encompass the very heavens, withering the stars, which as the army or host of the heavens correspond to the armies subjected to God’s wrath in verse 2.

as the leaf withers. The agricultural simile brings the distant and seemingly unassailable stars down to the familiar reality of transient things on earth, where a leaf or a date can wither overnight.

5. Edom. The appearance of Edom as the hated archenemy to be devastated by divine wrath suggests a relatively late date for this prophecy. Edom notoriously collaborated with the Babylonian invaders of Judah in 586 B.C.E., as Psalm 137 bitterly recalls.

the people I doomed to destruction. The Hebrew noun rendered as “destruction” has a homonym that means “net,” so the phrase might conceivably mean “the people caught in My net for judgment.”

6. For a sacrifice the LORD has. In the poetic equivalent of a cinematic faux raccord, the verse that appears to begin with the sacrifice of sheep and he-goats now converts them into a metaphor for the slaughter of the Edomites.

sacrifice . . . slaughter. As Blenkinsopp notes, the poet plays on the phonetic closeness between the two Hebrew terms, zevaḥ and tevaḥ.

Bozrah. This is a prominent Edomite city.

7. And wild oxen shall come down with them. While the general sense of a massacre is clear, the formulation of this whole verse is rather opaque: the verb “come down” sounds odd; the reference of “with them” (the Edomites?) is uncertain; and given that the prophet has moved on from slaughtered animals to slaughtered Edomites, it is puzzling that he should revert here to animals.

9. its rivers. The land referred to here is clearly Edom.

11. The hawk and the hedgehog. In this verse and in verses 13–15 the only animals that can be identified confidently are the jackals and ostriches of verse 13. In any case, all these are beasts whose habitat is the desolate wilderness.

the line of welter, the weight-stones of waste. The invocation of the “welter and waste” (tohu wabohu) of Genesis 1:2 is pointed: an activity of building will be undertaken but with the aim of irreversible destruction, restoring this land to the condition of primordial chaos.

12. Its nobles shall call out, “There is no kingship.” Some scholars conclude that there is a missing clause here. This translation seeks to rescue the received text, deleting an initial “and” before “there.”

13. a courtyard of ostriches. This translation reads ḥatseir, “courtyard,” for the Masoretic ḥatsir, “grass.” In this sense, it becomes an effective irony: a palace would have a courtyard; now, with the Edomite palaces in ruins, ostriches make these places their courtyard.

14. the satyr . . . / Lilith. As happens not infrequently in biblical poetry, there is an overlap between zoological and mythological entities: in the midst of the hyenas and jackals, goat-demons and a demonic goddess of the night make an appearance.

16. Inquire of the LORD’s book. The most plausible reference, given the context of this prophecy, is to neither a celestial book nor a canonical text but the prophecy itself, which, after all, is presented to its audience as the word of God.

not one of these is absent, / not one has missed its mate. “These” must be the noxious beasts listed in the preceding catastrophe. Every one of them will appear on the site of desolation where Edom once stood; every one will have its feral mate. The absolute fulfillment of the prophecy of the beasts in turn implies that every item in the prophecy of destruction set down in God’s book will surely come about.

17. And He has cast for them a lot, / His hand shared it out to them by measuring line. The effect of the imagery is literally sarcastic: dividing up an inheritance by lot (as in the Book of Joshua), measuring out plots of land with a line, are actions appropriate to carefully assigning property for human possession. Here, however, these actions are meant to give everlasting “property rights” in what once was Edom to all these wild beasts.