2. hidden His face. The Hebrew merely says “face,” but the clear reference is to God. The first two verses of this chapter are a strong articulation of a basic idea of prophetic theology: if you want to know why God appears to be absent, allowing the people of Israel to suffer grievously at the hands of its enemies, the explanation is that God has withdrawn His presence because of the people’s offenses. Thus, one should not imagine that God in any way lacks the capacity to rescue Israel or to hear its prayers (verse 1); rather, the lack of divine intervention is solely the consequence of the people’s own actions.

4. There is none who sues in righteousness. While the verb used generally means “to call” or “to call out,” the parallel term in the second verset, nishpat, “comes to court,” suggests a judicial meaning, and that is the understanding of most biblical scholars.

5. Viper’s eggs . . . / a spiderweb. These two metaphors drawn from two of the more disagreeable members of the animal kingdom suggest two different negative consequences of the miscreant’s acts—respectively, lethally poisonous effects and flimsy, useless insubstantiality.

7. Their feet run to evil. The function of the two lines of poetry that constitute this verse is to spell out in explicit moral terms the meaning of the metaphors of viper and spiderweb.

9. Therefore is justice far from us. These words initiate a new prophecy. Instead of the preceding castigation of the evildoers first in the second person and then in the third person, this text speaks in the first-person plural on behalf of a people plunged in disaster, for whom God will dramatically intervene (verses 16–20). The hook, surely visible to the eye of the editor, that connects the two prophecies is the pronouncement about the lack of justice at the beginning of the second prophecy.

10. like blind men, / like the eyeless. This line neatly illustrates how in the second verset in lines of biblical poetry some sort of epithet (or often metaphor) is substituted for the standard term (here, “blind”) that appears in the first verset. “Eyeless” (more literally, “no-eyes”) concretizes the condition of blindness. The line is also an elegant chiasm: we grope—blind men—the eyeless—we grope.

the robust. The Hebrew ʾashamnim appears only here, so the proposed meaning, linking it with the root sh-m-n, which can mean either “healthy” or “fat,” is conjectural.

12. For many are our crimes before You. This, and what follows to the end of verse 15, is perfectly in accord with the theological notion of alienating God through evil actions that is expressed in verses 1–2, but here it constitutes a collective confession of sin.

14. for truth stumbles in the square. Since the square is the chief public place of the ancient city, usually facing the gates where courts of justice were held, the implication is that the entire society has violated the principles of justice.

16. And He saw that there was no man. At this point the prophet offers a new notion of God’s saving power: the society is so thoroughly given over to injustice that there is scarcely hope that anyone will emerge who can turn things around, and consequently God Himself decides that He must intervene.

17. And He donned triumph as His armor. The prophet now draws on the ancient Canaanite imagery of the warrior-god, which appears with some frequency in biblical poetry.

18. As for their deserts, as for that. The Hebrew preposition keʿal is unusual, but the sense reflected in the translation seems likely, if not certain.

wrath for His foes, just deserts for His enemies. All this continues the representation of God as a fierce warrior. If elsewhere in the Isaian corpus the enemies of Israel are conceived as God’s instrument, they have, after all, devastated, exiled, and subjugated the covenanted people, and in doing so they have become God’s enemies, on whom He will now wreak vengeance.

19. they shall fear. This translation agrees with Blenkinsopp that the verb is stronger than “revere,” the choice of several modern versions: God the warrior, sweeping over vast regions like a torrential river, inspires fear from east to west.

20. to those who turn back from crime in Jacob. Despite the idea of a unilateral divine initiative of rescue articulated in verses 16ff., here at the end the prophecy asserts that the redemption will come only for those who turn back to God.

said the LORD. This attribution of divine speech is introduced here to mark the end of the prophecy.

21. As for Me. What follows the prophecy is a prose epilogue. Some understand it as a formal conclusion to the whole section running from chapter 56 through chapter 59.

My spirit that is upon you. The “you” is singular, but the claim that it refers to the prophet, with “your seed” indicating his disciples, is questionable. Similar formulations in Deuteronomy and elsewhere clearly indicate the spirit of God that will continue to invest the covenanted people for all time, and there is no warrant for the use of “seed” in the sense of “disciple” rather than as a term for biological offspring. “Seed” in precisely this sense repeatedly figures in the covenantal promises to Abraham.