Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 41:19

"I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, and the myrtle, and the oil-tree; I will set in the desert the fir-tree, the pine, and the box-tree together:" — Isaiah 41:19 (ASV)

I will plant in the wilderness. — A picture as of the Paradise of God (Isaiah 51:3), with its groves of stately trees, completes the vision of the future. The two groups of four and three, making up the symbolic seven, may probably have a mystic meaning.

The “shittah” is the acacia; the “oil tree,” the wild olive, as distinguished from the cultivated (Romans 11:17); the “fir tree” is probably the cypress; the “pine” stands for the plane, always—as in the opening of Plato’s Phœdrus, and the story of Xerxes in Herodotus vii. 31—the glory of Eastern scenery; and the “box-tree” is perhaps the larch, or a variety of cedar.

The “myrtle” does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament until after the exile (Nehemiah 8:15; Zechariah 1:8; Zechariah 1:10–11), but then it appears as if indigenous. It supplies the proper name Hadassah (Esther) in Esther 2:7.