1:22 Your 1 silver has become scum, 2
your beer is diluted with water. 3
44:4 They will sprout up like a tree in the grass, 4
like poplars beside channels of water.
1 tn The pronoun is feminine singular; personified Jerusalem (see v. 21) is addressed.
2 tn Or “dross.” The word refers to the scum or impurites floating on the top of melted metal.
3 sn The metaphors of silver becoming impure and beer being watered down picture the moral and ethical degeneration that had occurred in Jerusalem.
4 tn The Hebrew term בֵין (ven) is usually taken as a preposition, in which case one might translate, “among the grass.” But בֵין is probably the name of a tree (cf. C. R. North, Second Isaiah, 133). If one alters the preposition bet (בְּ) to kaf (כְּ), one can then read, “like a binu-tree.” (The Qumran scroll 1QIsaa supports this reading.) This forms a nice parallel to “like poplars” in the next line. חָצִיר (khatsir) is functioning as an adverbial accusative of location.