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ISAIAH INSTITUTE TRANSLATION

  Isaiah

34

Isaiah 34

The nations are slaughtered and their lands laid waste in Jehovah’s day of vengeance on behalf of Zion.

1 Come near, you nations, and hear!Pay attention, you peoples!Let the earth give heed, and all who are upon it,the world, and all who spring from it. 2 Jehovah’s rage is upon all nations,his fury upon all their hosts;he has doomed them,consigned them to the slaughter.
3 Their slain shall be flung outand their corpses emit a stench;atheir blood shall dissolve on the mountains, 4 their fat decompose [on the hills]awhen the heavens are rolled up as a scroll,and their starry hosts shed themselves with one accord,like withered leaves from a vine,or shriveled fruit from a fig tree. 5 When my sword drinks its fill in the heavens,it shall come down on Edom in judgment,on the people I have sentenced to damnation.
6 Jehovah has a sword that shall engorge with bloodand glut itself with fat—the blood of lambs and he-goats,the kidney fat of rams.For Jehovah will hold a slaughter in Bozrah,an immense massacre in the land of Edom; 7 among them shall fall buffalo, bulls, and steers.
Their land shall be saturated with blood,their soil enriched with fat.
8 For it is Jehovah’s day of vengeance,the year of retribution on behalf of Zion.
9 Edom’sb streams shall turn into lavaand her earth into brimstone;her land shall become as burning pitch. 10 Night and day it shall not be quenched;its smoke shall ascend forever.It shall remain a wastelandfrom generation to generation;through endless ages none shall traverse it. 11 But hawks and falcons shall possess it,and owls and ravens inhabit it.It shall be surveyed with muddled measureand chaotic weight.
12 Shall they summon its nobles when it is no kingdom,when all its lords no longer exist? 13 For thorns shall overgrow its palaces,thistles and briars its strongholds;it shall become the haunt of howling creatures,a reservec for birds of prey. 14 Prairie wolves shall greet jackals,and wild goats call to one another.There too shall the night owl find reposeand discover for herself a resting place. 15 There shall the hawk owl nest and lay eggs,hatch them and brood over her young.There too shall kites come together,each one accompanying her mate.
16 Search, and read it in the book of Jehovah:None is unaccounted for, not one lacks her mate.By his mouth he decreed it,by his Spirit he brings them together. 17 It is he who allots them an inheritance,his hand that divides it by measure.They shall possess it forever,inhabit it from generation to generation.

  • a3 A problematic couplet, whose literal translation of MT reads the mountains shall dissolve with their blood, and all the host of heaven decompose. Hebrew kol ṣěbāᵓ haššamayîm, emended to gibᶜôt mēḥelbām and the sense of the passage rendered congruent with its context; compare the parallelism blood/fat, verses 6–7, and the reading hills for host of heaven, LXX.
  • a4 A problematic couplet, whose literal translation of MT reads the mountains shall dissolve with their blood, and all the host of heaven decompose. Hebrew kol ṣěbāᵓ haššamayîm, emended to gibᶜôt mēḥelbām and the sense of the passage rendered congruent with its context; compare the parallelism blood/fat, verses 6–7, and the reading hills for host of heaven, LXX.
  • b9 Hebrew Her.
  • c13 Hebrew ḥāṣîr, grass, emended to ḥāṣēr.


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