2. And He made my mouth a sharp sword. The assertion in this line and the next that the prophet’s discourse is a potent weapon may be a little surprising because the chief burden of his prophesies is a message of consolation. Perhaps, speaking in a situation of painful political powerlessness, he wants to assert that his poetry has power, even the power to devastate those who would resist it. One should note that there is a counterpoint between the first and second verset in each of these two lines: the first verset expresses the weaponlike power of the prophet’s discourse, the second, his enjoyment of shelter provided by God, with the image of the quiver neatly combining shelter and weapon.

3. You are My servant, / Israel. The poem segues from the prophet to the people whose conscience and representative he is.

6. I shall make you a light for the nations, / that My rescue reach the end of the earth. The unheard-of act of bringing the exiled people of Israel back to its land is imagined as taking place in a cosmic arena: this spectacular intervention on behalf of the defeated people will be seen throughout the earth.

9. Along the roads they shall feed. This is a reprise of Second Isaiah’s central vision of a grand journey through the wilderness back to Zion. Although in verse 11 it picks up the theme from chapter 40 of the rough terrain transformed into a level highway, the special emphasis here is on providing food and water for the returning exiles—something that would have been a practical concern for those anticipating a trek through desert-land over hundreds of miles.

12. the land of Sinim. Some read this as “the land Syene” (Aswan?), but the identification remains uncertain.

14. Yet Zion says. Zion is imagined as a woman (the verb is feminine), a common convention in biblical poetry for representing cities and countries. The poet, as we shall see, develops this feminine figure in an original way.

The LORD has forsaken me. This verb is one that would be used for a wife abandoned by her husband. The metaphor of God as husband and Israel as beloved wife is vividly articulated in Jeremiah 1; the poet here taps into this conventional trope.

15. Does a woman forget her babe. God assures Zion, who feels she has been rejected by Him, that His feelings for her are even stronger than those of a mother for her child. The elaboration of the simile leaves it ambiguous as to whether Zion is God’s daughter or His bride. At the same time, the invocation of a mother’s attachment to her baby lays the ground for the vision of restored children in verses 17–21.

17. Your children hasten. / Those who ravaged you . . . / shall leave you. This is a panorama of two-way traffic. The conquerors of Zion flee as Zion’s children rush back.

18. all of them like a jewel you shall wear. The somewhat unusual image of children worn like a jewel may be motivated by a literary allusion. Benjamin Sommer has proposed that Second Isaiah explicitly has in mind Jeremiah 2:32: “Does a virgin forget her jewels, / a bride her knotted sash?” In our text, the forgetting is transferred from jewels to children, and “jewel”—the same Hebrew word, ʿadi—becomes a metaphorical representation of the children. Since producing children was imagined in this culture as a woman’s greatest fulfillment, it logically follows that they are her chief ornament, what she can glory in before the eyes of the world.

20. the children of whom you were bereaved. This is an eloquent poetic paradox: as in a fairy-tale happy ending, the children who Zion had thought were lost forever now appear before her and announce that because there are so many of them, there is scarcely room for them all to dwell in the land to which they have returned.

21. Who gave birth for me to these. The poignant force of Second Isaiah’s poetry of consolation is beautifully felt here. Zion had thought herself bereaved of all her children and hopelessly barren, never to replace them. Now she finds them swarming around her, and she expresses her amazement in simple, almost naïve exclamation: did some mysterious surrogate mother give birth to all of these for me, “these, from where have they come?” The last sentence is still more pared down in the Hebrew: “these, where are they?” One should note that the Hebrew verb for “gave birth” is, against biology, masculine. Either the final feminine heh was dropped in scribal transmission, or this is an instance in which the masculine singular verb serves as a passive (“by whom were these given birth”).

22. I will raise My hand to the nations. In Isaiah 5:26, God raises a banner to marshal the armies from the ends of the earth that will attack Judah. In the reversal here, the military signal inaugurates the return from exile, which is wholly pacific, with the sons and daughters of Zion carried in the laps and on the shoulders of the rulers of nations.

23. attendants. The Hebrew ʾomen suggests “tutor,” or perhaps even a kind of glorified babysitter.

Face to the ground they shall bow to you. After the humiliation of the subjugation in exile, the prophet puts forth a grand reversal in which kings and noblewomen lick the dust at the feet of the people of Israel.

24. tyrant. The Masoretic Text reads tsadiq, “righteous man” (or according to some, “victor”), but the Qumran Isaiah as well as two ancient versions have ʿarits, “tyrant,” and this reading is supported by the fact that the terms “warrior” and “tyrant” recur in the next line of poetry in a pointed repetition.

25. even a warrior’s captive shall be taken away. The terms of comparison are now made to refer directly to the condition of the people of Israel: though experience tells us that no one can snatch captives from a fierce warrior or prey from a tyrant, you, who have been captives and the prey of tyrants, will be freed.

I Myself will rescue. For both verbs here (“contend” and “rescue”), the Hebrew introduces the personal pronoun “I,” usually not needed for conjugated verbs, as a gesture of emphasis.

26. And I will feed your oppressors their own flesh. In the immediately preceding prophecy, the kings and princes of nations were reduced to nursemaids and attendants. Here, in an angrier turn of vengeful thinking, they are condemned to hideous starvation leading to cannibalism.

all flesh shall know. In a move characteristic of both biblical poetry and biblical narrative prose, a word that has just been used in one sense—“flesh” as what constitutes together with “blood” the human body—is repeated in a very different sense: “all flesh” as a designation of all humankind.