Commentaria in Isaiam
Chapter Thirty-four. Synopsis of the Chapter
From the disaster of Sennacherib he rises, and flies as usual, to the destruction of the world at the end of the age, that from the slaughter of the Assyrians all the impious may learn how great a slaughter will come upon them in the day of judgment, and may leave their crimes and return to their senses. Again, in verse 5, he proposes another type of the destruction of the world, namely the destruction of Idumea; for then all the reprobate shall be punished with a like, nay greater, punishment than the Idumeans of old, namely with fire, pitch and brimstone, as he says in verse 9, and with perpetual desolation, that onocentaurs, fauns, lamiae and the like may dwell there, as he says in verse 11 and following.
1. Come near, ye nations, and hear, and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein, the world, and every thing that cometh forth of it. 2. For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their army: he hath killed them, and delivered them to slaughter. 3. Their slain shall be cast forth, and out of their carcasses shall rise a stench: the mountains shall be melted with their blood. 4. And all the host of heaven shall pine away, and the heavens shall be folded together like a book: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth from the vine and from the fig tree. 5. For my sword is inebriated in heaven: behold it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my slaughter unto judgment. 6. The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made thick with the fat of the blood of lambs and goats, with the blood of rams full of marrow: for there is a victim of the Lord in Bosra, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. 7. And the unicorns shall go down with them, and the bullocks with the mighty: their land shall be inebriated with blood, and their ground with the fat of fat ones. 8. For it is the day of the vengeance of the Lord, the year of recompenses for the judgment of Sion. 9. And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the ground thereof into brimstone: and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. 10. Night and day it shall not be quenched, the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste, none shall pass through it for ever and ever. 11. The onocrotalus and the porcupine shall possess it, the ibis and the raven shall dwell in it: and a line shall be stretched out upon it, that it may be reduced to nothing, and a plummet unto desolation. 12. Its nobles shall not be there: they shall rather call upon the king, and all its princes shall be nothing. 13. And thorns and nettles shall grow up in its houses, and the thistle in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be the habitation of dragons, and the pasture of ostriches. 14. And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself. 15. There hath the hedgehog had its hole, and brought up its young ones, and dug round about, and cherished them in its shadow: thither are the kites gathered together one to another. 16. Search ye diligently in the book of the Lord, and read: not one of them was wanting, one hath not sought for the other: for what proceeds from my mouth, he hath commanded, and his spirit hath gathered them. 17. And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it to them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they dwell therein.
1. Come near, ye nations, and hear.—Hugh, Lyranus and Castrius, from Theodoret and Origen, refer all this to the destruction of Judea; for in verse 8 it is said: “The year of recompenses for the judgment of Sion.” But the very words are against this; for he says: “The indignation of the Lord is upon all nations”; and: “Let the earth hear, and the fulness thereof; the world, and every thing that cometh forth of it.”
I say therefore that the Prophet speaks of the last judgment and the consummation of the age; for then all nations shall perish. So St. Jerome, Cyril, Procopius, and St. Augustine, Confessions, book 13, chapter 15, and Eusebius, book 11 On the Preparation for the Gospel, in the chapter On the renewal of the world; where he adds that Plato transferred this place of Isaias into his writings.
2. He hath killed them.—all the nations, partly by the fire of the conflagration of the world, partly by the scourges that precede it.
3. And out of their carcasses shall rise a stench.—He alludes to the carcasses of the Assyrians slain by the Angel, which rotted and stank. Such will there be also at the end of the world, partly in battles, partly otherwise slain by God.
The mountains shall be melted with their blood.—as if to say: So great will be the number of the slain that from their putrefaction, gore and corruption the mountains also will contract rot.
Second, as if to say: So many shall be slain, so much blood shall be shed, that the mountains shall be dissolved by blood and flow down. Hence Vatablus and others render, the mountains shall melt for blood. It is a hyperbole.
Third, Sanchez: “Mountains,” he says, that is, princes: they will lie unburied like the common people, and will waste and rot, wallowing in blood “of them,” that is, their own; for the Hebrews have the same pronoun reciprocal and absolute.
4. And all the host of heaven shall pine away.—The “host” or soldiers “of heaven” are sun, moon and stars. First, St. Thomas, Hugh, Vatablus, Lyranus and others explain by hyperbole thus: So great will be the calamity that the heaven seems as it were to perish; so great the affliction of those times that men will seem to themselves to see the heavens, which are stretched out, fold, contract and roll themselves together, and the very stars fall from heaven. Similar is Ezechiel 32:7. See Canon 32.
Second, St. Thomas, Lyranus and Sanchez explain thus, as if to say: Under Christ the worship of the stars and idolatry shall pine away and perish; for then they will not worship them as before they worshipped, but God and Christ: and so the stars shall fall, that is, the demons, from the heaven, as it were, of their divinity, which idolaters gave them by their worship. But this sense seems more remote and mystical; for the matter here is the consummation of the age.
Third, better, our Jerome Prado on Ezechiel 5, page 19, at the end: The heavens, he says, shall pine away, that is, flow down, so that stars, that is, lightnings, fall from heaven; for the common people, when it lightens, seem to themselves to see stars fall from heaven.
Fourth, and properly, the sun, moon and stars about the day of judgment will be moved, darkened and withdraw their light, so that they seem, at the indignation of God, to pine away, melt and dissolve. Others add that the stars will properly fall from heaven to earth. So St. Chrysostom, and Maldonatus on Matthew 24.
I assent; and the Sibyl in St. Augustine, City of God, book 18, chapter 23, says: The radiance of the sun is snatched away, and the chorus perishes among the stars: the heaven shall be dissolved, the splendor of the moon shall pass away.
From which Ovid sings thus, in book 1 of the Metamorphoses:
He remembers also that it is in the fates that there shall come a time when sea, earth, and the seized palace of heaven shall burn, and the toilsome mass of the world be in travail.
This is what Christ says, Matthew 24:29: “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven”; and John, Apocalypse 6:12, uses the same words as Isaias here, according to the Septuagint: “The sun,” he says, “became black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell upon the earth, as a fig tree casteth its green figs when it is shaken by a great wind; and the heaven departed as a third part of the sun, and a third part of the moon, and a third part of the stars, so that a third part of them was darkened, and a third part of the day did not shine.”
Symbolically, some in St. Jerome by the stars understand the demons who dwell in the air to tempt men, who from heaven, that is, from this air, will rush into hell in the day of judgment. Of these indeed it is truly said what follows: “For my sword is inebriated in heaven.”