2. I am about to make Jerusalem a bowl of poison. The besiegers will imagine that they are about to overwhelm Jerusalem, but instead they themselves will be destroyed.

Judah, too, shall be caught in the siege. There is no “caught” in the Hebrew, but this translation follows the precedent of two other modern English versions in adding it in order to avoid the impression that the kingdom of Judah is to take part in the siege against Jerusalem. Though one can lay siege only to a city, not to a kingdom, the obvious sense is that Judah, too, will be attacked by invaders.

3. a burdensome stone. This is a complementary metaphor to the bowl of poison. The stone is too heavy to be lifted (by the invaders), and those who attempt it will only injure themselves.

4. I will strike every horse with confusion. Now the two metaphors are translated into military facts: the enemy’s horses will run amok and then go blind, and their riders will lose their minds, and thus the invading army will fall into fatal disarray.

5. strength for me. The Hebrew ʾamtsah, a familiar verbal stem but an anomalous form, is best construed as a noun.

6. a flaming brazier . . . a flaming torch. This is the third figurative representation of Jerusalem’s destructive force and the most violent of the three.

7. And the LORD shall rescue the tents of Judah first. The prophet introduces a somewhat surprising political note here: even though Jerusalem is the capital, it should not think of itself as the exclusively important domain of God’s people, and, to that end, He will rescue the regions outside Jerusalem first. But the next verse offers a counterbalance to this statement.

8. like a god. The Hebrew uses the polyvalent ʾelohim, which can mean “God,” “god,” or “divine being.” The first of these three senses should be excluded because it would be too extravagant, and theologically inadmissible, to say that the house of David was like God.

10. grace and graciousness. Two cognates appear in the Hebrew, ḥein and taḥanunim. While the latter elsewhere means “supplications,” the present context suggests that here it has sense close to ḥein.

look upon. The Masoretic Text has “look to Me [ʾeilay], revocalized here as ʾeiley [“to” or “upon”].

mourn for them like the mourning for an only child. It is puzzling that a prophecy promising the destruction of Judah’s enemies and the pouring out of a spirit of grace upon the people should conclude in this wave of desperate mourning. The least complicated explanation is Rashi’s: in the battle to defend the city, many have fallen by the sword, and so the triumph is darkened by a deep sadness over these terrible losses.

11. as great as the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon. These are two Canaanite gods, here conflated, as they may have been in popular religion. The mourning indicates that Hadad-Rimmon was a dying god, like Tammuz and like the Greek Adonis, whose annual descent into the underworld was marked by rites of grief.