1. Rise, O shine for your light has come. Often thought of, with the next two chapters, as the core of Trito-Isaiah, this poem picks up the motif of transcendent light from Second Isaiah and transforms it into an enthralling poetic vision of Zion magnificently restored. This vision is dramatically developed in the next two verses, in which the whole earth is imagined engulfed in darkness, and Zion’s brilliant dawn offers light for humankind.

3. your dawning. The Hebrew verbal stem z-r-ḥ does not mean merely “to shine,” as several translations show, but the breaking light of dawn, a pointed word choice because Zion’s light is to come after the long dark night of the nations.

4. Your sons shall come from afar. The entire line builds on the image of Zion’s sons and daughters being brought back to their homeland in Isaiah 49:14–21.

dandled. The Hebrew verb, ʾaman, suggests caring for or tending to a child.

6. A tide of camels. The first noun here, shifʿah, indicates a flow or spate. The poetic image is of an endless flow of caravans of camels that is like a stream or tide.

7. the house of My splendor I will make splendid. This is not a redundancy. The Temple by rights is the house of God’s splendor, but only when it is completely rebuilt and grandly refurbished will it achieve its status as the house of God’s splendor.

8. Who are these who fly like a cloud. The obvious reference is to the exiles flocking back to their land. Although this and the next two verses reflect a clear connection with the sundry prophecies of the return to Zion in chapters 40–55, the difference is that the point of view here appears to be that of someone in Zion watching the crowd of returned exiles as it approaches.

9. Tarshish ships. This is an exercise of poetic license to convey the idea of the exiles being brought from afar because in fact they would be coming overland from Mesopotamia, not from the west by sea.

10. And foreign sons shall build your walls, / and their kings shall serve you. This fantastic flourish is another motif picked up from chapters 40–55.

11. And they shall open your gates perpetually. As the next poetic line makes clear, the gates are open to bring in the wealth of nations. But normally, the gates of a city would be closed at least at night to guarantee its security, so what is envisaged here is a perfectly peaceful city that will never be attacked. This is still another instance in which the poem builds on hyperbole.

their kings as captives driven. The verb for “drive” is usually attached to animals or prisoners, so “as captives” is implied though not stated.

12. For the nation and the kingdom. This entire verse, which is in prose, looks like an editorial intervention meant to point the moral of the poem.

16. And you shall suckle the milk of nations. In 49:23 foreign princesses were to become the wet nurses of Judahite infants; here, that extravagant image is rerun metaphorically.

royal breasts. The Masoretic Text is vocalized to read shod, “booty,” but the original word was almost certainly shad, “breast,” either mistakenly vocalized by the Masoretes or altered by them because the image troubled them.

17. governance. The Hebrew pequdah is one of those biblical terms that can mean half a dozen different things, but in context, and with regard to the parallelism, this is the most likely sense here. Abraham Ibn Ezra sees it as an ellipsis for ʾanshey pequdah, “men of governance.”

18. outrage . . . / wrack and ruin. These are conventional outcries in response to a disaster—for example, a person attacked by marauders.

19. No more shall the sun be your light by day. At the beginning of the poem, Israel’s radiance lit up the world. Now, the heavenly luminaries are to be replaced by God, as an everlasting source of light. Again, poetic hyperbole points the way to eschatological vision.

21. your people . . . / shall forever possess the land. The land in question is of course the Land of Israel, and this is an especially pointed promise to a people that little more than a century earlier had been violently uprooted from its land.

22. a mighty nation. The Hebrew adjective can equally mean “multitudinous.”

in its due time I will hasten it. The entire prophecy has conjured up the idea of a glorious national restoration. At the time it was delivered, in the early or middle decades of the fifth century B.C.E., the Judahite community was in disarray, the rebuilding of Jerusalem proceeding fitfully, inner divisions manifesting themselves, fears of armed attacks hovering over the Judahites. Thus the prophet is constrained to have God say that He will hasten the arrival of the grand restoration, but only in its due time.