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. 1
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, 2
their corpses will stink; 3
the hills will soak up their blood. 4
34:4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, 5
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. 6
1 tn Heb “the world and its offspring”; NASB “the world and all that springs from it.”
2 tn Heb “will be cast aside”; NASB, NIV “thrown out.”
3 tn Heb “[as for] their corpses, their stench will arise.”
4 tn Heb “hills will dissolve from their blood.”
3 tc Heb “and all the host of heaven will rot.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsaa 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.”
4 tn Heb “like the withering of a leaf from a vine, and like the withering from a fig tree.”