Isaiah 10:33

10:33 Look, the sovereign master, the Lord who commands armies,

is ready to cut off the branches with terrifying power. ¹ 

The tallest trees ²  will be cut down,

the loftiest ones will be brought low.

Numbers 13:32

13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ³  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ⁴  to investigate is a land that devours ⁵  its inhabitants. ⁶  All the people we saw there ⁷  are of great stature.

Numbers 13:2

13:2 “Send out men to investigate ⁸  the land of Canaan, which I am giving ⁹  to the Israelites. You are to send one man from each ancestral tribe, ¹⁰  each one a leader among them.”

Numbers 21:20

21:20 and from Bamoth to the valley that is in the country of Moab, near the top of Pisgah, which overlooks the wilderness. ¹¹ 

Ezekiel 31:3

31:3 Consider Assyria, ¹²  a cedar in Lebanon, ¹³ 

with beautiful branches, like a forest giving shade,

and extremely tall;

its top reached into the clouds.

¹ tc The Hebrew text reads “with terrifying power,” or “with a crash.” מַעֲרָצָה (ma’aratsah, “terrifying power” or “crash”) occurs only here. Several have suggested an emendation to מַעֲצָד (ma’atsad, “ax”) parallel to “ax” in v. 34; see HALOT 615 s.v. מַעֲצָד and H. Wildberger, Isaiah, 1:448.

² tn Heb “the exalted of the height.” This could refer to the highest branches (cf. TEV) or the tallest trees (cf. NIV, NRSV).

³ tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

⁴ tn Heb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.

⁵ tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (’akhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.

⁶ sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.

⁷ tn Heb “in its midst.”

⁸ tn The imperfect tense with the conjunction is here subordinated to the preceding imperative to form the purpose clause. It can thus be translated “send…to investigate.”

⁹ tn The participle here should be given a future interpretation, meaning “which I am about to give” or “which I am going to give.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “one man one man of the tribe of his fathers.”

¹¹ tn Or perhaps as a place name, “Jeshimon.”

¹² sn Either Egypt, or the Lord compares Egypt to Assyria, which is described in vv. 3-17 through the metaphor of a majestic tree. See D. I. Block, Ezekiel (NICOT), 2:185. Like Egypt, Assyria had been a great world power, but in time God brought the Assyrians down. Egypt should learn from history the lesson that no nation, no matter how powerful, can withstand the judgment of God. Rather than following the text here, some prefer to emend the proper name Assyria to a similar sounding common noun meaning “boxwood” (see Ezek 27:6), which would make a fitting parallel to “cedar of Lebanon” in the following line. In this case vv. 3-18 in their entirety refer to Egypt, not Assyria. See L. C. Allen, Ezekiel (WBC), 2:121-27.

¹³ sn Lebanon was know for its cedar trees (Judg 9:15; 1 Kgs 4:33; 5:6; 2 Kgs 14:9; Ezra 3:7; Pss 29:5; 92:12; 104:16).