1. Look to the rock you were hewn from. Although “rock” (tsur) in biblical poetry is often an epithet for God, the reference to Abraham and Sarah in the next verse suggests that the poet has in mind here the human forefather and foremother of the people of Israel. “Quarry” is never an epithet for God, and the fact that a rock juts up (and is a masculine Hebrew noun) while a quarry is a cavity in the ground (and a feminine Hebrew noun) further aligns the two metaphors with Abraham and Sarah respectively.

3. like Eden. The references of this prophecy of national restoration keep moving back in time—first to the couple who were the founders of the nation and now to the lushness of the primordial garden.

5. In an instant. This phrase reflects in English the Hebrew verb ʾargiʿa, which can mean to do something in an instant (regaʿ). In the Masoretic Text, this verb appears at the end of the previous verse, but it almost certainly serves here as part of a sequence of two successive verbs, the first in effect adverbially modifying the second—that is, ʾargiʿa ʾaqriv, “I will [do] in an instant, I will draw near.”

my arm shall rule over peoples. The arm in biblical idiom is repeatedly a metaphor for power, although the use of the plural here is unusual. The Hebrew here uses a plural, but the translation avoids “arms” in order not to suggest the sense of “weapons.” At the end of this verse, “arm” occurs in the singular, and the translation has added “strong” in order to convey the idiomatic sense of the Hebrew.

6. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, / and look on the earth below. The poem now pushes its movement back in time from the Garden of Eden to the heavens and the earth that emerged at the very beginning of creation. Through all these eons, from Abraham and Sarah to Eden to the first moment of creation and forward to the imagined end of creation, God’s beneficent power remains steadfast.

like gnats. The Hebrew kemo-khen appears to say “also thus,” a dubious phrase before “die out” and after two strong similes (“like smoke,” “like a garment”) in the two preceding versets. This translation assumes a scribal error for kemo kinim, “like gnats.”

7. Do not be afraid of the insults of men. These words attributed to God, spoken through the prophet, appear to assume a situation in which an embattled minority listen to the prophet and embrace his vision of a return to Zion. Others whom he may address either cynically dismiss his message as mere illusion or perhaps even show themselves ready to discard their national identity and deity and assimilate to the surrounding culture.

9. Awake, awake. As the feminine second-person verbs make clear, this new discourse is an apostrophe to the arm of the LORD, which, as we have seen, means His militant power.

Rahab, / . . . the Beast of the Sea. These names locate the “days of yore” in the primordial era before creation came about. The Creation myth invoked, at least for the expressive purposes of poetry, is Canaanite, although this prophet of the sixth century B.C.E. would have been several centuries removed from its active circulation. In the Canaanite myth, the weather god Baal, replaced in Hebrew poetry by YHWH, subdues a ferocious sea monster, variously called Rahab, Leviathan, Yamm, or Tanin (rendered here as “the Beast of the Sea”) in order for creation to take place.

10. Was it not You who dried up the sea. This verse ostensibly continues the archaic Creation story (and “the sea” could also be understood as Yamm, one of the names of the Beast of the Sea). That impression is reinforced by the use of “the great deep,” a designation that refers to the primordial abyss. But in the next line of poetry, that Creation myth merges, in an effect like cinematic faux raccord, with the drying up of the Sea of Reeds—“Who turned the sea’s depths into a road / for the redeemed to go over.”

11. And the LORD’s ransomed shall return. In a second doubling of imagery with a leap forward in time, the “LORD’s ransomed” at the Sea of Reeds are turned into a precursor for the people of the prophet’s own time who are about to be ransomed from captivity and led not between walls of water but over desert terrain in the return to Zion.

13. the oppressor’s wrath. While many scholarly attempts have been made to identify a specific historical oppressor, it is prudent to read this as a generalized reference to the oppression of the Babylonian exile.

14. He who crouches shall quickly be freed. The translation of this verse is somewhat conjectural, and the meaning of the initial verb is especially doubtful. The general sense, however, of someone—surely the people of Israel—suffering subjugation who is now to be liberated seems clear.

15. Who treads the sea. The Masoretic Text has as the verb here rogaʿ, but despite the contention of some scholars that this means “stir up,” it actually means the opposite, “to quiet” or “to be subdued,” (compare the occurrence of precisely this phrase in Job 25:12). The present translation reads instead roqaʿ, “to tread or stomp.”

16. stretching out the heavens. The received text shows lintoʿa, “to plant,” but this is surely a mistake for lintot, “to stretch out.”

17. the chalice of poison. The usual translation of the term tarʿeilah is “reeling” or “staggering” but it is more plausibly related to raʿal, which definitely means “poison” in postbiblical Hebrew, as it may also do in Zechariah 12:2. This understanding is supported by the fact that the word for “wrath” in “the cup of His wrath” also means “venom.” The Hebrew for “chalice” is two words, literally, “the cup of the chalice,” and some think “cup” is a gloss on the rare word for chalice, qubaʿat, but joining two synonyms in a construct form is elsewhere a means to intensify or heighten the sense of the noun, and that may be the case here.

20. like an antelope in a net. The identity of the beast is uncertain.

22. the cup of poison, / the chalice of My wrath. In an elegant reversal of terms, “cup” is now linked with “poison” and “chalice” with “My wrath,” whereas in verse 17 it is the other way around.

23. and you made your back like the ground, / like a street for passersby. The second and third verset of this line vividly illustrate the impulse in biblical poetry to concretize semantic material introduced in the first verset as the line unfolds: first the oppressors command their victors to prostrate themselves so that they can step on them; then we get the concrete—and painful—image of the backs of the victims turned into a roadway upon which passersby tread.