1:4 1 The sinful nation is as good as dead, 2
the people weighed down by evil deeds.
They are offspring who do wrong,
children 3 who do wicked things.
They have abandoned the Lord,
and rejected the Holy One of Israel. 4
They are alienated from him. 5
9:17 So the sovereign master was not pleased 6 with their young men,
he took no pity 7 on their orphans and widows;
for the whole nation was godless 8 and did wicked things, 9
every mouth was speaking disgraceful words. 10
Despite all this, his anger does not subside,
and his hand is ready to strike again. 11
45:11 This is what the Lord says,
the Holy One of Israel, 12 the one who formed him,
concerning things to come: 13
“How dare you question me 14 about my children!
How dare you tell me what to do with 15 the work of my own hands!
63:7 I will tell of the faithful acts of the Lord,
of the Lord’s praiseworthy deeds.
I will tell about all 16 the Lord did for us,
the many good things he did for the family of Israel, 17
because of 18 his compassion and great faithfulness.
1 sn Having summoned the witnesses and announced the Lord’s accusation against Israel, Isaiah mourns the nation’s impending doom. The third person references to the Lord in the second half of the verse suggest that the quotation from the Lord (cf. vv. 2-3) has concluded.
2 tn Heb “Woe [to the] sinful nation.” The Hebrew term הוֹי, (hoy, “woe, ah”) was used in funeral laments (see 1 Kgs 13:30; Jer 22:18; 34:5) and carries the connotation of death. In highly dramatic fashion the prophet acts out Israel’s funeral in advance, emphasizing that their demise is inevitable if they do not repent soon.
3 tn Or “sons” (NASB). The prophet contrasts four terms of privilege – nation, people, offspring, children – with four terms that depict Israel’s sinful condition in Isaiah’s day – sinful, evil, wrong, wicked (see J. A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 43).
4 sn Holy One of Israel is one of Isaiah’s favorite divine titles for God. It pictures the Lord as the sovereign king who rules over his covenant people and exercises moral authority over them.
5 tn Heb “they are estranged backward.” The LXX omits this statement, which presents syntactical problems and seems to be outside the synonymous parallelistic structure of the verse.
6 tn The Qumran scroll 1QIsaa has לא יחמול (“he did not spare”) which is an obvious attempt to tighten the parallelism (note “he took no pity” in the next line). Instead of taking שָׂמַח (samakh) in one of its well attested senses (“rejoice over, be pleased with”), some propose, with support from Arabic, a rare homonymic root meaning “be merciful.”
7 tn The translation understands the prefixed verbs יִשְׂמַח (yismakh) and יְרַחֵם (yÿrakhem) as preterites without vav (ו) consecutive. (See v. 11 and the note on “he stirred up.”)
8 tn Or “defiled”; cf. ASV “profane”; NAB “profaned”; NIV “ungodly.”
9 tn מֵרַע (mera’) is a Hiphil participle from רָעַע (ra’a’, “be evil”). The intransitive Hiphil has an exhibitive force here, indicating that they exhibited outwardly the evidence of an inward condition by committing evil deeds.
10 tn Or “foolishness” (NASB), here in a moral-ethical sense.
11 tn Heb “in all this his anger is not turned, and still his hand is outstretched.”
sn See the note at 9:12.
12 sn See the note on the phrase “the Holy One of Israel” in 1:4.
13 tc The Hebrew text reads “the one who formed him, the coming things.” Among various suggestions, some have proposed an emendation of יֹצְרוֹ (yotsÿro, “the one who formed him”) to יֹצֵר (yotser, “the one who forms”; the suffixed form in the Hebrew text may be influenced by vv. 9-10, where the same form appears twice) and takes “coming things” as the object of the participle (either objective genitive or accusative): “the one who brings the future into being.”
14 tn Heb “Ask me” The rhetorical command sarcastically expresses the Lord’s disgust with those who question his ways.
15 tn Heb “Do you command me about…?” The rhetorical question sarcastically expresses the Lord’s disgust with those who question his ways.
16 tn Heb “according to all which.”
17 tn Heb “greatness of goodness to the house of Israel which he did for them.”
18 tn Heb “according to.”