1. The heavens are My throne . . . / What house would you build for Me. These words are in keeping with a theme of Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple (1 Kings 8), which may well have been composed in this post-exilic period. The point, as in Solomon’s prayer, is not a categorical rejection of the Temple but resistance to the popular idea that it was literally God’s house.

2. to the poor man / and to the broken of spirit who trembles at My word. The argument here is clearly against materialist notions of closeness to the deity. What a compassionate God wants is not a grand building but suffering humanity that is attuned to the divine word.

3. Who slaughters an ox, who strikes down a man. These words begin a new prophecy, which is a castigation of those given over to syncretistic or pagan forms of worship. The entire concluding chapter of Isaiah is made up of brief textual units only imperfectly connected with each other. This somewhat fragmented character may be the consequence of editorial process, in which remaining fragments of writing were drawn together at the end, as is the case in the last chapter of the Song of Songs. Some commentators think that the offensive rites listed here took place within the precincts of the Temple itself, although that is not altogether clear. In any case, all four versets here are structured as pairings of contradictions: a person slaughters an ox, which is acceptable, but kills a man (some think, in ritual slaughter); conducts the acceptable sacrifice of a sheep but also breaks the neck of a dog in a sacrificial rite; brings up in offering—a term usually set aside for grain offering—the blood of a pig.

strange gods. The Hebrew ʾawen has the basic meaning of “wrongdoing” but is sometimes used as a pejorative epithet for pagan gods.

5. you who tremble at His word. This recurrent designation of the pious, as Blenkinsopp plausibly contends, probably refers to a sect or at least a group of true believers who resist the repellent practices of the paganizers enumerated in verse 3. The sense of a deep schism within the people is brought out in the next line, “Your brothers who hate you.”

Let the LORD be honored, / and we shall see your joy. These words are uttered in biting sarcasm to those “who tremble at His word” by the people who hate them.

7. Before she labors, she gives birth. This begins still another prophecy. The “she” is Zion, and the image of childbirth is one picked up from Second Isaiah. To give birth without labor is to reverse the curse on Eve in Genesis, and it also suggests the miraculous swiftness with which the redemption is to be realized.

8. in a single breath. Literally, “in one time.”

11. that you suck and be sated / from her comforting breast. The metaphor of nursing infants builds on the birth imagery of the previous passage. The received text reads shod, “spoils,” but this is certainly a scribal bowlderization of shad, “breast,” just as it is in 60:16.

teat. The Hebrew ziz occurs in only one other place in the Bible, but in a sense that is inappropriate here. Both the poetic parallelism and a proposed Arabic cognate suggest that it means “breast” or “nipple.”

12. the glory of nations. The context would indicate that “glory” here implies “wealth.”

your babes shall be borne on the hip, / and on knees they shall be dandled. This line is a virtual citation of 60:4.

13. comforts . . . / comfort . . . / comforted. The triple insistence on this verb, following “her comforting breast” is an explicit allusion to the comforting, “Comfort. O comfort My people,” at the beginning of chapter 40, bringing all of 40–66 to closure in an envelope structure.

14. the LORD’s hand. As often elsewhere, “hand” suggests “power.”

16. His sword against all flesh. The phrase “all flesh,” as in the Flood story (which may be a relevant linguistic and thematic background here), means “all humankind.” The objects, then, of divine fury in this passage are by no means restricted to the paganizers in the Judahite population but extend to all the nations that have violated God’s law, whether by oppressing Israel or in other ways.

17. Those who consecrate themselves. As the text moves from poetry to prose, the objects of God’s wrath again are those who engage in pagan rituals. One suspects that this verse did not originally belong with what precedes it. “Consecrate” means to prepare oneself ritually—perhaps through ablution and other acts of purification—to engage in the pagan worship.

following one in the center. Though “one” in the consonantal text is masculine, the Masoretic marginal note changes it to a feminine. This might be a priestess ministering in the cult, or it might be a vision of Asherah, the Canaanite fertility goddess, here worshipped by those gathered round her in the sacred gardens.

19. I will . . . send from them survivors to the nations. In Second Isaiah, there is a vision of acceptance of proselytes. This prophecy at the end goes a step further, imagining that those among the nations who have finally seen God’s glory wish to be sent out to the far reaches of the known earth, as far as North Africa (Lud) and Greece (Javan) to bring the good news of YHWH’s universal dominion. This comes close to the project of a mission of conversion in Acts and in the Pauline Epistles.

20. they shall bring your brothers . . . as an offering. “Offering,” minhaḥ, which means either “grain offering” or “tribute,” is used here metaphorically: the gentiles who bring back the exiles to Zion will be as if bringing an offering to the Temple.

as the Israelites bring a grain offering. This clause explains the metaphor.

21. I shall take to be priests and Levites. This declaration, unless it is somehow figurative, is a radical departure from earlier tradition, in which it is stipulated that only men from the tribe of Levi are allowed to perform these functions, and certainly not proselytes.

22. For as the new heavens and the new earth. The book now concludes with an eschatological prophecy, again in poetry, that reprises the idea of a new creation put forth in 65:17.

23. all flesh. Once again, this expression means “all humankind,” and so we have a universalist vision of all humanity coming to Jerusalem to worship God there. The precursor to this prophecy is Isaiah 2:2–5.

24. And they shall go out and see / the corpses of the people who rebelled against Me. This gloating—a sense implied by the verb “to see” followed in the Hebrew, as here, by the preposition that means “in”—over the corpses of God’s enemies, whether they are Judahite paganizers or those of the nations who resisted God’s word, is hardly an edifying note on which to conclude the Book of Isaiah, as various commentators have noted. When these verses were taken up as the prophetic reading or haftarah for the sabbath that falls on the new moon, verse 23 was repeated after verse 24, in part to stress the conjunction of sabbath and new moon but probably also to conclude the reading on an upbeat.