Isaiah 49:19

49:19 Yes, your land lies in ruins;

it is desolate and devastated. ¹ 

But now you will be too small to hold your residents,

and those who devoured you will be far away.

Isaiah 26:19

26:19 ² Your dead will come back to life;

your corpses will rise up.

Wake up and shout joyfully, you who live in the ground! ³ 

For you will grow like plants drenched with the morning dew, ⁴ 

and the earth will bring forth its dead spirits. ⁵ 

Isaiah 41:18

41:18 I will make streams flow down the slopes

and produce springs in the middle of the valleys.

I will turn the desert into a pool of water

and the arid land into springs.

Isaiah 65:17

65:17 For look, I am ready to create

new heavens and a new earth! ⁶ 

The former ones ⁷  will not be remembered;

no one will think about them anymore. ⁸ 

[49:19]  ¹ tn Heb “Indeed your ruins and your desolate places, and the land of your destruction.” This statement is abruptly terminated in the Hebrew text and left incomplete.

[26:19]  ² sn At this point the Lord (or prophet) gives the people an encouraging oracle.

[26:19]  ³ tn Heb “dust” (so KJV, NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV).

[26:19]  ⁴ tn Heb “for the dew of lights [is] your dew.” The pronominal suffix on “dew” is masculine singular, like the suffixes on “your dead” and “your corpses” in the first half of the verse. The statement, then, is addressed to collective Israel, the speaker in verse 18. The plural form אוֹרֹת (’orot) is probably a plural of respect or magnitude, meaning “bright light” (i.e., morning’s light). Dew is a symbol of fertility and life. Here Israel’s “dew,” as it were, will soak the dust of the ground and cause the corpses of the dead to spring up to new life, like plants sprouting up from well-watered soil.

[26:19]  ⁵ sn It is not certain whether the resurrection envisioned here is intended to be literal or figurative. A comparison with 25:8 and Dan 12:2 suggests a literal interpretation, but Ezek 37:1-14 uses resurrection as a metaphor for deliverance from exile and the restoration of the nation (see Isa 27:12-13).

[65:17]  ³ sn This hyperbolic statement likens the coming transformation of Jerusalem (see vv. 18-19) to a new creation of the cosmos.

[65:17]  ⁴ tn Or perhaps, “the former things” (so ASV, NASB, NIV, NRSV); TEV “The events of the past.”

[65:17]  ⁵ tn Heb “and they will not come up on the mind.”