1. Sing gladly. Although the natural association of song and joy is virtually idiomatic in biblical poetry, this prophet’s repeated emphasis on song implicitly points to his own use of the medium of poetry to conjure up a joyous vision of the people restored to its land.

the one with a husband. The passive form beʿulah designates a woman who has a husband, baʿal, but it also has a sexual connotation because the active verb showing this root means “to cohabit,” “to possess sexually.” Thus, the beʿulah is the woman who has a bedmate, unlike “the desolate one.” Compare verse 5, where the active verbal form boʿalayikh is translated as “he who takes you to bed.”

2. your tent. While the actual habitations would of course have been stone houses, poetry, with its intrinsic attachment to archaic language, invokes the tent as the archetypal dwelling.

4. the shame of your youth . . . / the dishonor of your widowhood. As is often the case in biblical poetry, there is an implied temporal progression from the first verset to the second. First, Israel was a young bride who shamefully betrayed her husband. As a result, the bitter fate of widowhood was inflicted on her (God was “dead” to Israel), a condition that in this society was a humiliation because the woman was left without the sustaining support of the husband.

5. he who takes you to bed . . . / your redeemer. The widow again has a husband, who provides the “desolate one” with the gratification a woman needs. The parallel term “redeemer” is used here less in a theological sense than in a social one—the “redeemer,” goʾel, is the man who marries the widow, thus redeeming her from her condition of abandonment. The Book of Ruth uses goʾel precisely in this sense.

8. with everlasting kindness. The Hebrew noun ḥesed is a nexus of several related meanings. It can mean “kindness” or, as some render it, “love” (and the King James Version joins the two with “loving kindness”). It also suggests the “loyalty” or “faithfulness” of one party to another in a covenantal or conjugal relationship, and that sense is also obviously in play here. The connotation of “faithfulness” may be especially strong when “kindness” is used again in verse 10.

11. I am about to lay your stones with turquoise. Although this new prophecy begins with “Afflicted, storm-tossed woman,” the focus of the vision of national restoration now shifts from the widowed and/or childless wife to the buildings of the city. The resplendent restored Jerusalem is to be built not out of stones but with precious jewels. The reader should be alerted that the precise identification of most of these precious stones, as elsewhere in the Bible, is uncertain. The dazzling bejeweled Jerusalem is obviously a poetic hyperbole, but it lays the ground for eschatological imaginings of Jerusalem as the glorious City of God.

15. none shall strike fear if it is not from Me. The Hebrew syntax is ambiguous, and the verb gor is anomalous, though it probably is related to the more familiar noun, magor, “terror,” as this translation assumes.

16. the weapons. The all-purpose keli can also mean vessel, tool, or gear, but it is used in the very next verse in the sense of “weapon,” and that is probably what it means here as well.

the Destroyer to wreak havoc. The “Destroyer” would be the mythological agent who stalks through the land of Egypt in the terrible tenth plague, killing the firstborn. The intended relation of this verset to the preceding one is oppositional: man—himself created by God—forges his weapons in the workshop of the metalsmith, but God has the power to create a Destroyer who has an incomparably more devastating instrument of destruction. The image of God defending Israel with insuperable force complements the image of the jewel-studded Zion that precedes it: God promises to rebuild Jerusalem as a city of supernal splendor, and He then guarantees that no enemy will be able to assail the city.