1. to His anointed one. Some readers may find it startling that a Persian emperor should be designated God’s “anointed one” (mashiah). One should keep in mind that in the first instance this is a political title, not a theological or eschatological one. Cyrus is God’s anointed because he is a king whose legitimacy is confirmed or underwritten by God and as such a ruler who will play a role God has defined for what is to happen in history.

the loins of kings will I loosen. One again can detect the common pattern of biblical poetic parallelism: first the general concept (“hold sway over nations”) and then in the parallel verset a concrete image—loosening the loins would be ungirding the loins that should be girded for battle, which is to say, disabling these royal enemies.

3. treasures of darkness / and hidden stores. The darkness here is pragmatic, not symbolic—the treasures have been hidden or buried in deep dark places, but now they will be brought to light to be appropriated by the conquering Cyrus.

4. For the sake of My servant Jacob. It is, of course, a peculiarly Israel-centered view of the world that Cyrus’s conquests are imagined as coming about strictly to rescue the people of Israel from its exile.

I called you by name. Here this idiom has the sense of “to summon,” as in the previous verse.

when I had not known you. As a foreign ruler, Cyrus would not have had any intimate relationship (the force of “to know” in the Hebrew) with YHWH.

7. Fashioning . . .creating. These are the two terms used for creation at the beginning of Genesis, respectively, in the J version (Genesis 2) and the P version (Genesis 1). The former term, yotser, is more concrete and, indeed, anthropomorphic, its primary reference being to the work of the potter with clay. This is a connotation that this poet repeatedly plays on, as in verse 9 below.

8. O, heavens, drip down from above. In this semiarid region dependent on rainfall, it is usually rain as a source of blessing that comes down from the sky in poetry, but here there is a metaphorical transformation of this primary notion: it is justice that rains down, fructifying human life.

9. Shall the clay say to its Fashioner. This line clearly harks back to Genesis 2, where God fashions the first human from the clay of the earth.

10. Woe, who says to the father. This line relates to the preceding one in a kind of a fortiori logic: just as it would be absurd for a person to deny that his father and mother had begotten him, it is even more preposterous that any human creature should deny that God is his Creator.

11. The signs have inquired of Me. It is unclear what these signs are. The Hebrew is as opaque as this translation and may reflect a defective text.

12. I made the earth. Just as God is the cosmic Creator, bringing into being heaven and earth, He also determines the direction of history, as the next verse will assert.

13. It is I Who roused him in justice. The “him” is Cyrus, who in this version is led to the conquest of Babylonia for the sole purpose of returning Israel from exile. As a matter of historical fact, the return to Zion took place eight decades after the fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians.

14. shall pass over to you and be yours. “You” in this passage is feminine singular and so must refer to Zion, often represented in poetry as a woman.

to you they shall bow, / to you they shall pray. This wording may sound somewhat suspect from a monotheistic point of view. It should probably be taken as an extravagant hyperbole—these peoples of the south will be so abjectly enslaved to the Israelites that they will prostrate themselves before them and worship them as though they were gods.

In you alone is God. These words are best understood as the speech of the captives addressed to Israel and offering an explanation for their bowing down to their captors.

15. Indeed, You are a God Who hides. Many scholars view this verse as an interpolation, unrelated to what precedes or follows. If there is a connection it might be this: it is hard to detect the presence or earthly manifestation of God, but He dwells (or perhaps hides) within the people of Israel, where foreigners now discern Him through His conquering power.

17. victorious . . . / victory. Given the context of the subjugation of foreign peoples, the root y-sh-ʿ—elsewhere, “rescue”—probably has its military sense.

18. Not for nothing. The use of tohu amounts to a pun. Adverbially, it can mean “for nothing,” “futilely,” as it clearly does in the next verse. But as a noun, it designates the primordial chaos (in this translation of tohu wavohu, “welter and waste”) that preceded creation, so what is also being asserted is that God did not create the earth to be mere chaos or void.

20. Those who bear the wood of their idols. The formulation glances back to the representation of idol manufacture in chapter 44, suggesting an image of the pagans carrying the wood out of which they will fashion their idols.

22. all you ends of earth. As elsewhere, ʾafsey ʾarets is a metonymy since the object of the prophet’s address is clearly the inhabitants of the ends of the earth.

23. For to Me every knee shall bend, / every tongue shall vow. This line would be incorporated in the Aleinu prayer at the end of the morning service, which affirms God’s kingship over all things.

24. of Me it was said. There is no need to emend this clause, as has frequently been proposed. Although the verb appears to say “he said,” the third-person singular is often used as the equivalent of a passive form of the verb.

To Him shall they come and not be shamed. Even though “be shamed” is very often used for a condition of being defeated, here there is an image of those who have set themselves up as God’s enemies (“all who were incensed against Him”) obliged to come before God and accept His admonition in shame.

25. victorious. The root ts-d-q is associated with justice because its primary sense is winning a just case in court. But the concept of winning in a conflict also leads to its use to indicate winning in battle, which would appear to be the sense here.