Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 14

For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob ... —The words imply a foresight of the return of the Israelites from exile, and therefore of the exile itself. The downfall of Babylon was certain, because without it the mercy of the Lord to Israel could not be manifested. The whole section is an anticipation of the great argument of Isaiah 40-66, and the question of its authorship stands or falls on the same grounds.

The strangers shall be joined with them ... —The thought is one specially characteristic of the later prophecies of Isaiah (Isaiah 44:5; Isaiah 55:5; Isaiah 56:3–6), but is prominent in the earlier also (Isaiah 2:2). In later Hebrew the same words came to be applied to the proselytes who are conspicuous in the apostolic age (Acts 2:10; Acts 6:5), and in them, as before in the adhesion and support of the Persian kings and satraps, and as afterwards in the admission of the Gentiles into the kingdom of the Christ, we may trace successive fulfilments of the prophet’s words.

The people shall take them ... —Literally, the peoples. In Ezra 1:1-4; Ezra 6:7–8, we find what corresponded, in a measure, to the picture thus drawn. However, here, as elsewhere, the words paint an ideal to which there has been, as yet, no fully corresponding historical reality.

No period of later Jewish history has beheld the people ruling over a conquered race. If we claim a real fulfilment of the last clause of the verse, it is only in the sense in which the Latin poet said that Grœcia capta ferum victorem cepit (Horace, Epistles II. i. 156). The triumph of Israel has, so far, been found in its leading ideas and in the victory of the faith of Christ.

In Isaiah 56:3, the proselyte appears as admitted on terms of equality, whereas here, the terms are those of subjugation.

It shall come to pass ... —The condition of the exiles in Babylon is painted in nearly the same terms as in Habakkuk 2:13. A monarch bent on building towers and walls and palaces, who had carried off all the skilled labour of Jerusalem, was very likely to vex their souls with “fear” and “hard bondage.” So Assurbanipal boasts that he made his Arabian prisoners carry heavy burdens and build brickwork (Records of the Past, vol. 1, p. 104).

That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon. —The prophet appears once more (Isaiah 12:1) in his character as a psalmist. In the mashal or taunting-song that follows, the generic meaning of “proverb” is specialized (Habakkuk 2:6; Deuteronomy 28:37; 1 Kings 9:7, and elsewhere) for a derisive utterance in poetic or figurative speech. The Septuagint, singularly enough, renders the word here by “lamentation.”

How hath the oppressor ceased. —If we take “the golden city” of the English version as the correct rendering, it finds a parallel in the epithet of “gold abounding” applied to Babylon by Æschylus (Pers. 53). The word so translated is, however, not found elsewhere, and the general consensus of recent critics, following in the wake of the Targum and the Septuagint, is in favour of the rendering, the task-master, or the place of torture. The Vulgate, how has the tribute ceased, expresses substantially the same thought. The marginal reading, exactress of gold, seems like an attempt to combine two different etymologies.

The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked ... —The "staff" and the "sceptre" are alike symbols of power, the former being that on which a man supports himself, the other that which he wields in his arm to smite those who oppose him.