Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament · Isaiah Chương 21

On the other hand, what Xenophon so elaborately relates, and what is also in all probability described in Daniel 5:30 (compare Jeremiah 51:39, Jeremiah 51:57), is referred to in Isaiah 21:5: “They cover the table, watch the watch, eat, drink. Rise up, ye princes! Anoint the shield!” This is not a scene from the hostile camp, where they are strengthening themselves for an attack upon Babylon: for the express allusion to the covering of the table is intended to create the impression of confident and careless good living; and the exclamation “anoint the shield” (cf., Jeremiah 51:11) presupposes that they have first of all to prepare themselves for battle, and therefore that they have been taken by surprise. What the prophet sees, therefore, is a banquet in Babylon. The only thing that does not seem quite to square with this is one of the infinitives with which the picture is so vividly described (Ges. §131, 4, b), namely tzâpōh hatztzâphith . Hitzig's explanation, “they spread carpets” (from tzâphâh , expandere , obducere , compare the Talmudic tziphâh , tziphtâh , a mat, storea ), commends itself thoroughly; but it is without any support in biblical usage, so that we prefer to follow the Targum, Peshito, and Vulgate (the Sept. does not give any translation of the words at all), and understand the hap. leg. tzâphith as referring to the watch: “they set the watch.” They content themselves with this one precautionary measure, and give themselves up with all the greater recklessness to their night's debauch (cf., Isaiah 22:13). The prophet mentions this, because (as Meier acknowledges) it is by the watch that the cry, “Rise up, ye princes,” etc., is addressed to the feasters. The shield-leather was generally oiled, to make it shine and protect it from wet, and, more than all, to cause the strokes it might receive to glide off (compare the laeves clypeos in Virg. Aen. vii. 626). The infatuated self-confidence of the chief men of Babylon was proved by the fact that they had to be aroused. They fancied that they were hidden behind the walls and waters of the city, and therefore they had not even got their weapons ready for use.

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The prophecy is continued with the conjunction “for” ( ci ). The tacit link in the train of thought is this: they act thus in Babylon, because the destruction of Babylon is determined. The form in which this thought is embodied is the following: the prophet receives instruction in the vision to set a m e tzappeh upon the watch-tower, who was to look out and see what more took place. “For thus said the Lord to me, Go, set a spy; what he seeth, let him declare.” In other cases it is the prophet himself who stands upon the watch-tower (Isaiah 21:11; Habakkuk 2:1-2); but here in the vision a distinction is made between the prophet and the person whom he stations upon the watch-tower ( specula ). The prophet divides himself, as it were, into two persons (compare Isaiah 18:4 for the introduction; and for the expression “go,” Isaiah 20:2). He now sees through the medium of a spy, just as Zechariah sees by means of the angel speaking in him; with this difference, however, that here the spy is the instrument employed by the prophet, whereas there the prophet is the instrument employed by the angel.

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What the man upon the watch-tower sees first of all, is a long, long procession, viz., the hostile army advancing quietly, like a caravan, in serried ranks, and with the most perfect self-reliance. “And he saw a procession of cavalry, pairs of horsemen, a procession of asses, a procession of camels; and listened sharply, as sharply as he could listen.” Receb , both here and in Isaiah 21:9, signifies neither riding-animals nor war-chariots, but a troop seated upon animals - a procession of riders. In front there was a procession of riders arranged two and two, for Persians and Medes fought either on foot or on horseback (the latter, at any rate, from the time of Cyrus; vid., Cyrop. iv 3); and pârâsh signifies a rider on horseback (in Arabic it is used in distinction from râkib , the rider on camels). Then came lines of asses and camels, a large number of which were always taken with the Persian army for different purposes. They not only carried baggage and provisions, but were taken into battle to throw the enemy into confusion. Thus Cyrus gained the victory over the Lydians by means of the great number of his camels (Herod. i. 80), and Darius Hystaspis the victory over the Scythians by means of the number of asses that he employed (Herod. iv 129). Some of the subject tribes rode upon asses and camels instead of horses: the Arabs rode upon camels in the army of Xerxes, and the Caramanians rode upon asses. What the spy saw was therefore, no doubt, the Persian army. But he only saw and listened. It was indeed “listening, greatness of listening,” i.e., he stretched his ear to the utmost ( rab is a substantive, as in Isaiah 63:7; Psalms 145:7; and hikshib , according to its radical notion, signifies to stiffen, viz., the ear);

(Note: Böttcher has very correctly compared kâshab ( kasuba ) with kâshâh ( kasa ), and Fleischer with sarra ( tzâr ), which is applied in the kal and hiphil ( asarra ) to any animal (horse, ass, etc.) when it holds its ears straight and erect to listen to any noise ( sarra udhneı̄h , or udhnahu bi - udhneı̄h , or bi - udhnı̄h iv. , asarra bi - udhnı̄h , and also absolutely asarra , exactly like hikshib ).)

but he heard nothing, because the long procession was moving with the stillness of death.

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At length the procession has vanished; he sees nothing and hears nothing, and is seized with impatience. “Then he cried with lion's voice, Upon the watch-tower, O Lord, I stand continually by day, and upon my watch I keep my stand all the nights.” He loses all his patience, and growls as if he were a lion (compare Revelation 10:3), with the same dull, angry sound, the same long, deep breath out of full lungs, complaining to God that he has to stand so long at his post without seeing anything, except that inexplicable procession that has now vanished away.

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But when he is about to speak, his complaint is stifled in his mouth. “And, behold, there came a cavalcade of men, pairs of horsemen, and lifted up its voice, and said, Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the images of its gods He hath dashed to the ground!” It is now clear enough where the long procession went to when it disappeared. It entered Babylon, made itself master of the city, and established itself there. And now, after a long interval, there appears a smaller cavalcade, which has to carry the tidings of victory somewhere; and the spy hears them cry out in triumph, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon!” In Revelation 18:1-2, the same words form the shout of triumph raised by the angel, the antitype being more majestic than the type, whilst upon the higher ground of the New Testament everything moves on in spiritual relations, all that is merely national having lost its power. Still even here the spiritual inwardness of the affair is so far expressed, that it is Jehovah who dashes to the ground; and even the heathen conquerors are obliged to confess that the fall of Babylon and its pesilim (compare Jeremiah 51:47, Jeremiah 51:52) is the work of Jehovah Himself. What is here only hinted at from afar - namely, that Cyrus would act as the anointed of Jehovah - is expanded in the second part (Isaiah 40-66) for the consolation of the captives.

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The night vision related and recorded by the prophet, a prelude to the revelations contained in Chapters 40-60, was also intended for the consolation of Israel, which had already much to suffer, when Babylon was still Assyrian, but would have to suffer far more from it when it should become Chaldean. “O thou my threshing, and child of my threshing-floor! What I have heard from Jehovah of hosts, the God of Israel, I have declared to you.” Threshing ( dūsh ) is a figure used to represent crushing oppression in Isaiah 41:15 and Micah 4:12-13; and judicial visitation in Jeremiah 51:33 (a parallel by which we must not allow ourselves to be misled, as Jeremiah has there given a different turn to Isaiah's figure, as he very frequently does); and again, as in the present instance, chastising plagues, in which wrath and good intention are mingled together. Israel, placed as it was under the tyrannical supremacy of the imperial power, is called the m edŭsshâh (for medūshah , i.e., the threshing) of Jehovah - in other words, the corn threshed by Him; also His “child of the threshing-floor,” inasmuch as it was laid in the floor, in the bosom as it were of the threshing-place, to come out threshed (and then to become a thresher itself, Micah 4:12-13). This floor, in which Jehovah makes a judicial separation of grains and husks in Israel, was their captivity. Babylon is the instrument of the threshing wrath of God. But love also takes part in the threshing, and restrains the wrath. This is what the prophet has learned in the vision (“I have heard,” as in Isaiah 28:22) - a consolatory figure for the threshing-corn in the floor, i.e., for Israel, which was now subject to the power of the world, and had been mowed off its own field and carried captive into Babylonia.

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This oracle consists of a question, addressed to the prophet from Seir, and of the prophet's reply. Seir is the mountainous country to the south of Palestine, of which Edom took possession after the expulsion of the Horites. Consequently the Dumah of the heading cannot be either the Dūma of Eastern Hauran (by the side of which we find also a Tema and a Buzan); or the Duma in the high land of Arabia, on the great Nabataean line of traffic between the northern harbours of the Red Sea and Irak, which bore the cognomen of the rocky ( el - gendel ) or Syrian Duma (Genesis 25:14); or the Duma mentioned in the Onom., which was seventeen miles from Eleutheropolis (or according to Jerome on this passage, twenty) “ in Daroma hoc est ad australem plagam ,” and was probably the same place as the Duma in the mountains of Judah - that is to say, judging from the ruins of Daume, to the south-east of Eleutheropolis (see the Com. on Joshua 15:52), a place out of which Jerome has made “a certain region of Idumaea, near which are the mountains of Seir.” The name as it stands here is symbolical, and without any demonstrable topographical application. Dūmâh is deep, utter silence, and therefore the land of the dead (Psalms 94:17; Psalms 115:17). The name אדום is turned into an emblem of the future fate of Edom, by the removal of the a sound from the beginning of the word to the end. It becomes a land of deathlike stillness, deathlike sleep, deathlike darkness. “A cry comes to me out of Seir: Watchman, how far is it in the night? Watchman, how far in the night?” Luther translates the participle correctly, “they cry” ( m an ruft ; compare the similar use of the participle in Isaiah 30:24; Isaiah 33:4). For the rest, however, we have deviated from Luther's excellent translation, for the purpose of giving to some extent the significant change from מלּילה and מלּיל . The more winged form of the second question is expressive of heightened, anxious urgency and haste. The wish is to hear that it is very late in the night, and that it will soon be past; min is partitive (Saad.), “What part of the night are we at now?” Just as a sick man longs for a sleepless night to come to an end, and is constantly asking what time it is, so do they inquire of the prophet out of Edom, whether the night of tribulation will not be soon over. We are not to understand, however, that messengers were really sent out of Edom to Isaiah; the process was purely a pneumatical one. The prophet stands there in Jerusalem, in the midst of the benighted world of nations, like a sentry upon the watch tower; he understands the anxious inquiries of the nations afar off, and answers them according to the word of Jehovah, which is the plan and chronological measure of the history of the nations, and the key to its interpretation. What, then, is the prophet's reply? He lets the inquirer “see through a glass darkly.”

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“Watchman says, Morning cometh, and also night. Will ye inquire, inquire! Turn, come!!” The answer is intentionally and pathetically expressed in an Aramaean form of Hebrew. אתא (written even with א at the end, cf., Deuteronomy 33:2) is the Aramaean word for בּוא ; and בּעה בּעא ) the Aramaean word for שׁאל , from the primary form of which ( בּעי ) the future tib‛âyūn is taken here (as in Isaiah 33:7), and the imperative b e 'ây (Ges. §75, Anm. 4). אתיוּ , which is here pointed in the Syriac style, אתיוּ , as in Isaiah 56:9, Isaiah 56:12, would be similarly traceable to אתי (cf., Ges. §75, Anm. 4, with §23, Anm. 2). But what is the meaning? Luther seems to me to have hit upon it: “When the morning comes, it will still be night.” But v'gam (and also) is not equivalent to “and yet,” as Schröring explains it, with a reference to Ewald, §354, a. With the simple connection in the clauses, the meaning cannot possibly be, that a morning is coming, and that it will nevertheless continue night, but that a morning is coming, and at the same time a night, i.e., that even if the morning dawns, it will be swallowed up again directly by night. And the history was quite in accordance with such an answer. The Assyrian period of judgment was followed by the Chaldean, and the Chaldean by the Persian, and the Persian by the Grecian, and the Grecian by the Roman. Again and again there was a glimmer of morning dawn for Edom (and what a glimmer in the Herodian age!), but it was swallowed up directly by another night, until Edom became an utter Dūmâh , and disappeared from the history of the nations. The prophet does not see to the utmost end of these Edomitish nights, but he has also no consolation for Edom. It is altogether different with Edom from what it is with Israel, the nocturnal portion of whose history has a morning dawn, according to promise, as its irrevocable close. The prophet therefore sends the inquirers home. Would they ask any further questions, they might do so, might turn and come. In shūbū (turn back) there lies a significant though ambiguous hint. It is only in the case of their turning, coming, i.e., coming back converted, that the prophet has any consolatory answer for them. So long as they are not so, there is suspended over their future an interminable night, to the prophet as much as to themselves. The way to salvation for every other people is just the same as for Israel - namely, the way of repentance.

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