Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 11:6

"And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them." — Isaiah 11:6 (ASV)

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb... — It is significant of the prophet’s sympathy with the animal world that he thinks of it also as sharing in the blessings of redemption. Rapine and cruelty even there were to him signs of an imperfect order, or the consequences of a fall, even as for St. Paul they testified to a bondage of corruption (Romans 8:21). The very instincts of the brute creation should be changed in the age to come, and the lion should eat straw like the ox. People have discussed the question whether and when the words will receive a literal fulfillment, and the answer to that question lies behind the veil.

It may be that what we call the laws of animal nature in these respects are tending to a final goal, of which the evolution that has tamed the dog, the bull, the horse, is as it were a pledge and earnest (Sophocles, Antigone, 342-351). It may be, however, that each form of brute cruelty was to the prophet’s mind the symbol of a human evil, and the imagery admits, therefore, of an allegorical rather than a literal interpretation. The classical student will remember the striking parallelism of the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, which, in its turn, may have been a far-off echo of Isaiah’s thoughts, floating in the air or embodied in apocryphal Sibylline Oracles among the Jews of Alexandria and Rome.