อิสยาห์ 51:20 วิจารณ์

This chapter is designed for the comfort and encouragement of those that fear God and keep his commandments, even when they walk in darkness and have no light. Whether it was intended primarily for the support of the captives in Babylon is not certain, probably it was; but comforts thus generally expressed ought not to be so confined. Whenever the church of God is in distress her friends and well-wishers may comfort themselves and one another with these words, I. That God, who raised his church at first out of nothing, will take care that it shall not perish (Isa 51:1-3). II. That the righteousness and salvation he designs for his church are sure and near, very near and very sure (Isa 51:4-6). III. That the persecutors of the church are weak and dying creatures (Isa 51:7, Isa 51:8). IV. That the same power which did wonders for the church formerly is now engaged and employed for her protection and deliverance (Isa 51:9-11). V. That God himself, the Maker of the world, had undertaken both to deliver his people out of their distress and to comfort them under it, and sent his prophet to assure them of it (Isa 51:12-16). VI. That, deplorable as the condition of the church now was (Isa 51:17-20), to the same woeful circumstances her persecutors and oppressors should shortly be reduced, and worse (Isa 51:21-23). The first three paragraphs of this chapter begin with, "Hearken unto me," and they are God's people that are all along called to hearken; for even when comforts are spoken to them sometimes they "hearken not, through anguish of spirit" (Exo 6:9); therefore they are again and again called to hearken (Isa 51:1, Isa 51:4, Isa 51:7). The two other paragraphs of this chapter begin with "Awake, awake;" in the former (Isa 51:9) God's people call upon him to awake and help them; in the latter (Isa 51:17) God calls upon them to awake and help themselves.

INTRODUCTION TO ISAIAH 51 This chapter gives the church and people of God reason to expect comfortable times and certain salvation, though they had many enemies. They are directed to look to Abraham and Sarah, signified by the rock and hole of the pit, and observe how he was called alone, blessed and increased; which should be improved as an argument to strengthen their faith, that God could and would bless and increase his church, though in a low estate, and bring it into a flourishing one, Isa 51:1. They are assured of the publication of the Gospel, expressed by the law, doctrine, and judgment of the Lord; by which means the righteousness and salvation of Christ should be brought nigh to them, as the object of their trust and confidence, Isa 51:4, and also of the perpetuity of his righteousness and salvation, when the heavens, and the earth, and the inhabitants of it, should decay, even their revilers and persecutors, and therefore they need not fear their reproaches and revilings, Isa 51:6, upon which follows a prayer of faith, that the Lord would exert his power as in former times, when he destroyed the Egyptians, and dried up the Red sea for Israel to pass through, the ransomed of the Lord; from whence it might be concluded, that the redeemed of the Lord would be brought into a very comfortable condition again, Isa 51:9 wherefore they had no reason to be afraid of men, since the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, would deliver, comfort, and establish them, of which he assured them by his prophet, Isa 51:12, and though Jerusalem and her sons were, or would be, in a very distressed condition, through the sword and famine, which is described, Isa 51:17, yet they should be delivered out of it, and their persecutors should be brought into the same, Isa 51:21.

Thy sons have fainted,.... Through want of food, or at the desolation made, and have no spirit in them to appear in the interest of true religion: they lie at the head of all the streets; emaciated by famine, and not able to walk, but drop down in the streets, and there lie panting and pining away; or slain by the enemy; or with the famine, and the sword, as Aben Ezra, and none to bury them; so the dead bodies of the witnesses shall lie in the street of the great city unburied, Rev 11:8. as a wild bull in a net; that is slain, being taken; or, if alive, however it flings about and struggles, cannot extricate itself: so it may denote such that survive the calamity, yet held under the power of the enemy; and though inwardly fretting, and very impatient, cannot help themselves, no more than such a creature taken in a toil or net; which Aben Ezra takes to be a fowl, to which a net best agrees; and the Vulgate Latin version renders it, "as the oryx snared"; which Drusius says is the name of a bird; though it is used for a wild goat. So Aristotle (w) makes mention of it as of the goat kind, and says it has two hoofs, or is cloven footed, and has one horn; and Bochart (x) takes it to be the same with the unicorn of the Scriptures, or the "monoceros"; and, according to some writers (y), it is a very fierce and bold creature, and not easily taken; and therefore it is no wonder, when it is in the net, that it strives, though in vain, and till it is weary, to get out of it, and yet is obliged to lie there. But Kimchi says the word here used signifies a wild ox or bull (z), as we render it: in Hebrew it is called "tho" or "thoa", and very probably is the same with the "thoos" mentioned by Aristotle (a) and Pliny (b), and is rendered a wild ox in Deu 14:5, where it is reckoned among sheep, goats, and deer. It is strange that the Septuagint should render it, "as beet half boiled"; or flaccid and withering, as the Syriac and Arabic versions, taking it for an herb: and as much out of the way is the Targum, which renders it, "as broken bottles:'' they are full of the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of thy God; that is, Jerusalem's sons, the members of the church of God, professors of religion, now full of calamities, which may seem to flow from the wrath of God, and be rebukes in fury, when they are only in love, Rev 3:19 and from whence they shall be delivered, and their enemies punished, as follows. (w) Hist. Animal. l. 2. c. 1. (x) Hierozoic. l. 3. c. 27, 28. (y) Oppian. de Cyneget. l. 2. apud Gataker. & Sanctium in loc. "saevus oryx", Martial. l. 13. Epigr. 95. (z) And so it is explained in Gloss. in T. Bab. Bava Kama, fol. 117. 1. (a) Hist. Animal. l. 2. c. 17. (b) Nat. Hist. l. 8. c. 34.

Whoever is at any time unbelieving is called a raw beet root, whereas whoever is happy in the faith of the simple, without paying attention to reflection and the truth of doctrines but who performs deeds of justice, can be called a cooked beet root; in turn, the one who floats between vices and the virtues and approaches the service of God with a mixed heart can be called semi-cooked.… Those who sin in the law will be judged by the law, which works the wrath of God for those who are half-hearted.…Let us come, following the Septuagint, to the spiritual sense. It is said to the soul brought down by vices and the upsets of drunkenness that it may come to know the Lord its Judge as one who will give reasons for all things. And if they turn to better things, the cup will be given over to those who humiliated them.… It should be noted that others did not force Israel or make it, who was once upright, now bent down to the earth, but their own will was directly toward abandonment. [Israel] by its own will put its neck or back or whole body down low for those who abused it within and without.

(Verse 20.) Your sons are cast out, they have slept at the head of all the streets, like a trapped wild goat: full of the indignation of the Lord, the rebuke of your God. LXX: Your sons are destitute and sleeping at the head of all the streets: like a half-cooked beet, full of the fury of the Lord, and lacking from the Lord your God. As for the half-cooked beet, the remaining interpreters translated it as a captured and trapped wild goat, which is called 'Tho' in Hebrew, a type of wild animal found in the wilderness, listed among the clean animals in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Syriac language they have translated as thoreth, which means beta. Let us pass over the name and consider the meaning of it. Your sons, like wild oxen caught in snares, have slept in the streets and public squares, placing their naked bodies on the bare ground, thereby revealing the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of their God, indicating their own misery. Furthermore, according to the Seventy: those who do not desire spiritual riches in every word, knowledge, and good work, but choose to be poor and not endure the threat, will by no means dwell in the houses that are built with virtues, but will remain at the beginning of the roads and at the exit, touching everything and leaving everything behind. Those who are said to sleep well in that sleep, of which it is written: They have slept their sleep and found nothing (Ps. 75:6). In that sleep, the Assyrian king has put them to sleep. And they are compared to half-cooked beets, which are a type of vegetable that is very cheap and fragile. About these vegetables, I believe that it is said in the Psalms: Do not be jealous of evildoers, nor envy those who do iniquity. For like grass, they will quickly wither, and like the green vegetables, they will quickly fall (Ps. 36:1, 2). For it is the food of the sick. He who is once unbelieving is called raw beetroot. But he who is content with simple faith, without reason and the truth of doctrines, performs the works of justice, can be called cooked beetroot. Furthermore, he who fluctuates between vices and virtues, and approaches the service of God with a double heart, is most rightly called half-cooked beetroot, of whom God speaks in the Apocalypse of John: Would that you were either hot or cold: but because you are lukewarm, I will vomit you out (Rev. III, 15, 16). Those who are lukewarm and sleeping are full of the fury of the Lord, and they are loose, or failing, through the Lord God. Not that the Lord is the cause of their loosening, who did not make death, nor does he take pleasure in the destruction of the living. But rather, those who have sinned in the Law, let them be judged by the Law, which works the wrath of God against those who are transgressors of it.

By the slumber, he has indicated their indolence, and by the cooked vegetables their laxness. But what he adds is even harsher than what he has said before: “They that are full of the anger of the Lord are caused to faint by the Lord God.” By their iniquity they draw my anger, and by reason of my anger, they are deprived of my kind attention and despoiled of every kind of strength.

938. Third, he shows the reason for this: your children are cast forth, from their land, they have slept at the head of all the ways, resting on the way, when they were led in captivity. As the oryx, "orix, oricis," an unclean animal, the water mouse, or an animal that sleeps a lot, namely, the lira, or a certain bird which is in Africa; or "orix, origis," a clean animal similar to a goat, about which, see Deuteronomy 14:5; according to the Septuagint: the beta, which is a certain plant that fades quickly in the heat of the sun, or a kind of common vegetable: her young children were dashed in pieces (Nah 3:10).

Sequel of the prophecies of Jeremiah against Babylon. The dreadful, sudden, and final ruin that shall fall upon the Chaldeans, who have compelled the nations to receive their idolatrous rites, (see an instance in the third chapter of Daniel), set forth by a variety of beautiful figures; with a command to the people of God, (who have made continual intercession for the conversion of their heathen rulers), to flee from the impending vengeance, Jer 51:1-14. Jehovah, Israel's God, whose infinite power, wisdom and understanding are every where visible in the works of creation, elegantly contrasted with the utterly contemptible objects of the Chaldean worship, Jer 51:15-19. Because of their great oppression of God's people, the Babylonians shall be visited with cruel enemies from the north, whose innumerable hosts shall fill the land, and utterly extirpate the original inhabitants, vv. 20-44. One of the figures by which this formidable invasion is represented is awfully sublime. "The Sea is come up upon Babylon; she is covered with the multitude of the waves thereof." And the account of the sudden desolation produced by this great armament of a multitude of nations, (which the prophet, dropping the figure, immediately subjoins), is deeply afflictive. "Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness; a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby." The people of God a third time admonished to escape from Babylon, lest they be overtaken with her plagues, Jer 51:45, Jer 51:46. Other figures setting forth in a variety of lights the awful judgments with which the Chaldeans shall be visited on account of their very gross idolatries, Jer 51:47-58. The significant emblem with which the chapter concludes, of Seraiah, after having read the book of the Prophet Jeremiah against Babylon, binding a stone to it, and casting it into the river Euphrates, thereby prefiguring the very sudden downfall of the Chaldean city and empire, Jer 51:59-64, is beautifully improved by the writer of the Apocalypse, Rev 18:21, in speaking of Babylon the Great, of which the other was a most expressive type; and to which many of the passages interspersed throughout the Old Testament Scriptures relative to Babylon must be ultimately referred, if we would give an interpretation in every respect equal to the terrible import of the language in which these prophecies are conceived.

As a wild bull in a net: they are full, etc. "Like the oryx taken in the toils; drenched to the full" - "Perhaps מכמרה מלאים michmerah meleim." Secker. The demonstrative ה he, prefixed to מלאים meleim, full, seems improper in this place.

ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE FAITHFUL REMNANT OF ISRAEL TO TRUST IN GOD FOR DELIVERANCE, BOTH FROM THEIR LONG BABYLONIAN EXILE, AND FROM THEIR PRESENT DISPERSION. (Isa. 51:1-23) me--the God of your fathers. ye . . . follow after righteousness--the godly portion of the nation; Isa 51:7 shows this (Pro 15:9; Ti1 6:11). "Ye follow righteousness," seek it therefore from Me, who "bring it near," and that a righteousness "not about to be abolished" (Isa 51:6-7); look to Abraham, your father (Isa 51:2), as a sample of how righteousness before Me is to be obtained; I, the same God who blessed him, will bless you at last (Isa 51:3); therefore trust in Me, and fear not man's opposition (Isa 51:7-8, Isa 51:12-13). The mistake of the Jews, heretofore, has been, not in that they "followed after righteousness," but in that they followed it "by the works of the law," instead of "by faith," as Abraham did (Rom 9:31-32; Rom 10:3-4; Rom 4:2-5). hole of . . . pit--The idea is not, as it is often quoted, the inculcation of humility, by reminding men of the fallen state from which they have been taken, but that as Abraham, the quarry, as it were (compare Isa 48:1), whence their nation was hewn, had been called out of a strange land to the inheritance of Canaan, and blessed by God, the same God is able to deliver and restore them also (compare Mat 3:9).

head of all . . . streets-- (Lam 2:19; Lam 4:1). wild bull--rather, "oryx" [JEROME], or gazelle [GESENIUS], or wild goat [BOCHART]; commonly in the East taken in a net, of a wide sweep, into which the beasts were hunted together. The streets of cities in the East often have gates, which are closed at night; a person wishing to escape would be stopped by them and caught, as a wild animal in a net.

The prophetic address now turns again from the despisers of the word, whom it has threatened with the torment of fire, to those who long for salvation. "Hearken to me, ye that are in pursuit of righteousness, ye that seek Jehovah. Look up to the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hollow of the pit whence ye are dug. Look up toe Abraham your forefather, and to Sara who bare you, that he was one when I called him, and blessed him, and multiplied him. For Jehovah hath comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins, and turned her desert like Eden, and her steppe as into the garden of God; joy and gladness are found in her, thanksgiving and sounding music." The prophecy is addressed to those who are striving after the right kind of life and seeking Jehovah, and not turning from Him to make earthly things and themselves the object of their pursuit; for such only are in a condition by faith to regard that as possible, and in spirit to behold that as real, which seems impossible, and in spirit to behold that as real, which seems impossible to human understanding, because the very opposite is lying before the eye of the senses. Abraham and Sarah they are mentally to set before them, for they are types of the salvation to be anticipated now. Abraham is the rock whence the stones were hewn, of which the house of Jacob is composed; and Sarah with her maternal womb the hollow of the pit out of which Israel was brought to the light, just as peat is dug out of a pit, or copper out of a mine. The marriage of Abraham and Sarah was for a long time unfruitful; it was, as it were, out of hard stone that God raised up children to Himself in Abraham and Sarah. The rise of Israel was a miracle of divine power and grace. In antithesis to the masculine tsūr, bōr is made into a feminine through maqqebheth, which is chosen with reference to neqēbhâh. to חצּבתּם we must supply ממּנּוּ ... אשׁר, and to נקּרתּם, ממּנּה ... אשׁר. Isa 51:2 informs them who the rock and the hollow of the pit are, viz., Abraham your forefather, and Sarah techōlelkhem, who bare you with all the pains of childbirth: "you," for the birth of Isaac, the son of promise, was the birth of the nation. The point to be specially looked at in relation to Abraham (in comparison with whom Sarah falls into the background) is given in the words quod unum vocavi eum (that he was one when I called him). The perfect קראתיו relates the single call of divine grace, which removed Abraham from the midst of idolaters into the fellowship of Jehovah. The futures that follow (with Vav cop.) point out the blessing and multiplication that were connected with it (Gen 12:1-2). He is called one ('echâd as in Eze 33:24; Mal 2:15), because he was one at the time of his call, and yet through the might of the divine blessing became the root of the whole genealogical tree of Israel, and of a great multitude of people that branched off from it. This is what those who are now longing for salvation are to remember, strengthening themselves by means of the olden time in their faith in the future which so greatly resembles it. The corresponding blessing is expressed in preterites (nicham, vayyâsem), inasmuch as to the eye of faith and in prophetic vision the future has the reality of a present and the certainty of a completed fact. Zion, the mother of Israel (Isa 50:1), the counterpart of Sarah, the ancestress of the nation-Zion, which is now mourning so bitterly, because she is lying waste and in ruins - is comforted by Jehovah. The comforting word of promise (Isa 40:1) becomes, in her case, the comforting fact of fulfilment (Isa 49:13). Jehovah makes her waste like Eden (lxx ὡς παράδεισον), like a garden, as glorious as if it had been directly planted by Himself (Gen 13:10; Num 24:6). And this paradise is not without human occupants; but when you enter it you find joy and gladness therein, and hear thanksgiving at the wondrous change that has taken place, as well as the voice of melody (zimrâh as in Amo 5:23). The pleasant land is therefore full of men in the midst of festal enjoyment and activity. As Sarah gave birth to Isaac after a long period of barrenness, so Zion, a second Sarah, will be surrounded by a joyous multitude of children after a long period of desolation.