Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 14:2

"And the peoples shall take them, and bring them to their place; and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of Jehovah for servants and for handmaids: and they shall take them captive whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors." — Isaiah 14:2 (ASV)

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.