Text -- Isaiah 34:1-4 (NET)

The Lord Will Judge Edom

34:1 Come near, you nations, and listen! Pay attention, you people! The earth and everything it contains must listen, the world and everything that lives in it. 34:2 For the Lord is angry at all the nations and furious with all their armies. He will annihilate them and slaughter them. 34:3 Their slain will be left unburied, their corpses will stink; the hills will soak up their blood. 34:4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, the sky will roll up like a scroll; all its stars will wither, like a leaf withers and falls from a vine or a fig withers and falls from a tree.

Commentary -- Verse Notes / Footnotes

NET Notes: Isa 34:1

¹ tn Heb “the world and its offspring”; NASB “the world and all that springs from it.”

NET Notes: Isa 34:3

¹ tn Heb “will be cast aside”; NASB, NIV “thrown out.”

² tn Heb “[as for] their corpses, their stench will arise.”

³ tn Heb “hills will dissolve from their blood.”

NET Notes: Isa 34:4

¹ tc Heb “and all the host of heaven will rot.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsa^a inserts “and the valleys will be split open,” but this reading may be influenced by Mic 1:4. On the other hand, the statement, if original, could have been omitted by homoioarcton, a scribe’s eye jumping from the conjunction prefixed to “the valleys” to the conjunction prefixed to the verb “rot.”

² tn Heb “like the withering of a leaf from a vine, and like the withering from a fig tree.”