6:5 I said, “Too bad for me! I am destroyed, 1 for my lips are contaminated by sin, 2 and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin. 3 My eyes have seen the king, the Lord who commands armies.” 4
26:14 The dead do not come back to life,
the spirits of the dead do not rise. 5
That is because 6 you came in judgment 7 and destroyed them,
you wiped out all memory of them.
1 tn Isaiah uses the suffixed (perfect) form of the verb for rhetorical purposes. In this way his destruction is described as occurring or as already completed. Rather than understanding the verb as derived from דָּמַה (damah, “be destroyed”), some take it from a proposed homonymic root דמה, which would mean “be silent.” In this case, one might translate, “I must be silent.”
2 tn Heb “a man unclean of lips am I.” Isaiah is not qualified to praise the king. His lips (the instruments of praise) are “unclean” because he has been contaminated by sin.
3 tn Heb “and among a nation unclean of lips I live.”
4 tn Perhaps in this context, the title has a less militaristic connotation and pictures the Lord as the ruler of the heavenly assembly. See the note at 1:9.
5 sn In light of what is said in verse 14b, the “dead” here may be the “masters” mentioned in verse 13.
6 tn The Hebrew term לָכֵן (lakhen) normally indicates a cause-effect relationship between what precedes and follows and is translated, “therefore.” Here, however, it infers the cause from the effect and brings out what is implicit in the previous statement. See BDB 487 s.v.
7 tn Heb “visited [for harm]” (cf. KJV, ASV); NAB, NRSV “you have punished.”