1. Awake, awake. This unit of text includes two prophecies, this one at the beginning and another near the end, that begin with a twice-repeated imperative verb in the second-person feminine singular addressed to Zion (the other is “Turn aside, turn aside,” verse 11ff.). The repetitions are dictated by a powerful impulse of exhortation: Zion, long sunk in the dust and plunged in captivity, is urged to forget her sorrows and bestir herself to embrace her triumphant restoration.

2. sit on your throne. The Masoretic Text says only “Sit, O Jerusalem.” The transition follows the Targum, which adds “on your throne,” two Hebrew words that in all likelihood were dropped in a scribal error.

3. For nothing were you sold. You were sold into slavery (this is the verb generally used for enslavement), but nobody paid a price for you—your captors simply took you into slavery. Enslavement here amounts to a hyperbole because the exiled Judahites were not necessarily enslaved, or, in any case, surely not all of them.

4. To Egypt . . . then Assyria. There is, then, a history of being subject to slavery that goes back to the beginnings of the nation: first Egypt, then Assyria (which “enslaved” the northern kingdom), and now Babylonia.

5. howled. The Hebrew verb suggests a kind of derisive yelp.

6. shall they know on that day. The repetition of the verb “know” either has been scribally omitted or is meant to be implied.

7. How lovely on the mountains / the steps of the bearer of good tidings. The poet makes a boldly poignant choice in using “lovely,” the same word that is attached to the beautiful features of the beloved in the Song of Songs, for this is surprising in a reference to the feet of a messenger. The focus on the feet is because the messenger is running across the mountains to bring the good tidings.

8. Your watchmen. This probably continues the idea of the preceding verse—the watchmen, no doubt stationed on towers, see from afar the approach of the bearer of good tidings.

10. and all the ends of the earth have seen / the triumph of our God. As before, the return to Zion is imagined as an event enacted in a global theater, the restoration of an exiled people to its land being, at least as the prophet sees it, an unprecedented historical event that manifests God’s power.

11. come out from there. “There” has to be the condition of exile.

12. for the LORD goes before you, / and your rearguard is Israel’s God. This is a purposeful paradox: as you march back to Zion, God both leads the way as vanguard and protects you from behind as rearguard.

14. so marred beyond human his looks / and his features unlike humankind’s. This whole line vividly demonstrates the power of personification and hyperbole. Collective Israel is imagined as a person. In point of historical fact, the exiles, undergoing a fate that was by no means unprecedented, would scarcely have been perceived as having lost their humanity. In the poetic hyperbole, personified Israel, deprived of sovereignty, homeland, and place of worship, is envisaged as someone so degraded, humiliated, and abused by his condition in history that those who see him are appalled and can scarcely recognize a human form in this disfigured person.

15. he shall astound many nations. This is another instance in which the verb is anomalous, and so the translation is based on context.

kings shall seal their lips. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “kings shall purse their mouths closed.”