Text -- Isaiah 34:1-6 (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. 34:5 He says, “Indeed, my sword has slaughtered heavenly powers. Look, it now descends on Edom, on the people I will annihilate in judgment.” 34:6 The Lord’s sword is dripping with blood, it is covered with fat; it drips with the blood of young rams and goats and is covered with the fat of rams’ kidneys. For the Lord is holding a sacrifice in Bozrah, a bloody slaughter in the land of Edom.

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.”

NET Notes: Isa 34:5

¹ tn The words “he says” are supplied in the translation for clarification. The Lord speaks at this point.

² tn Heb “indeed [or “for”] my sword is drenched in the heavens.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsa^a has תראה (“[my sword] appeared [in the heavens]”), but this is apparently an attempt to make sense out of a difficult metaphor. Cf. NIV “My sword has drunk its fill in the heavens.”

sn In v. 4 the “host of the heaven” refers to the heavenly luminaries (stars and planets, see, among others, Deut 4:19; 17:3; 2 Kgs 17:16; 21:3, 5; 23:4-5; 2 Chr 33:3, 5) that populate the divine/heavenly assembly in mythological and prescientific Israelite thought (see Job 38:7; Isa 14:13). As in 24:21, they are viewed here as opposing God and being defeated in battle.

³ sn Edom is mentioned here as epitomizing the hostile nations that oppose God.

NET Notes: Isa 34:6

¹ tn The verb is a rare Hotpaal passive form. See GKC 150 §54.h.

² tn The words “it drips” are supplied in the translation for stylistic reasons.

³ tn The words “and is covered” are supplied in the translation for stylistic reasons.

⁴ tn Heb “for there is a sacrifice to the Lord.”

⁵ sn The Lord’s judgment of Edom is compared to a bloody sacrificial scene.

⁶ tn Heb “great” (so KJV, NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV).