1. Bel has knelt, / Nebo has cowered. These are Babylonian deities, and the cowering marks the defeat of Babylonia by Persia.

Their images you bore aloft / become burdens for beasts and animals. In the defeat, the images that once were worshipped are loaded onto the backs of animals to be carried off in order to make use of any precious metals with which the idols may be overlaid.

2. they themselves went into captivity. This is a mocking representation of the Babylonian gods, impotent to save themselves (or their adherents), borne off as captives like a subjugated human population.

3. loaded heavy from birth, / burdened from the womb. These phrases obviously pick up the image of the beasts burdened with plundered idols from the previous verse. However, it is not clear with what the house of Jacob has been burdened from the womb. God’s assertion in the next verse that He will now carry the burden suggests that it is the heavy load of national suffering, most recently manifested in the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of a large part of its inhabitants.

4. till old age. God is with Israel from birth (verse 3) to old age.

5. To whom would you liken Me. These words sound a central theme of this prophet (compare 44:18ff). The verb of likening (tedamyuni) suggests demut, “image” or “likeness,” which leads the poet in the following lines to evoke, as he has done before, the absurdity of manufacturing images that are then worshipped.

8. be shamed. The verb in the received text, hitʾoshashu, appears to be based on a root that suggests strength, hence the New Jewish Publication Society rendering “stand firm.” But that makes no sense in the context of a castigation. This translation adapts an emendation that has been proposed by several scholars, hitboshashu, which involves the changing of one consonant.

take it to heart, O criminals. The denunciation appears to be a new note in these prophecies of Second Isaiah, which are predominantly prophecies of consolation. Joseph Blenkinsopp proposes that the prophet may have encountered resistance to his message and that these words reflect an element of antagonism between him and his audience.

9. For I am God, there is none other. The rejoinder to the doubts of the prophet’s audience is an absolute theological truth: the deity in whose name the prophet speaks is the one and only God; this fundamental fact is what is entailed in “the first things of yore.”

10. Who tells from the beginning the end. As before in these prophecies, the manifest evidence of YHWH’s status as the one and only God is His proven power to predict the future through what is revealed to His true prophets. Thus God provides authorization for the authenticity of the words of His human spokesmen. It seems likely that what the exiled audience has doubted is the grand prediction of the restoration of Zion, which the prophet here goes on to affirm will be implemented through God’s chosen instrument, Cyrus.

11. the bird of prey from the east, / from a distant land, the man of My counsel. Persia is actually to the northeast, but the poem need not be entirely precise about points on the compass. Cyrus is the man of God’s counsel in the sense that he has been designated to carry out God’s counsel or plan.

12. bull-hearted. The sense is “stubborn,” but the strong image of “bull” implicit in the Hebrew ʾabirim is worth retaining. The audience of exiles, refusing to believe they will be returned to their land, are “bull-hearted.” God now assures them through His prophet that the moment of national triumph is imminent and not distant, as the exiles may imagine.