Commentaria in Isaiam
And a line shall be stretched out upon it—as if to say: God, with certain and exact judgment, equalling punishments to deserts, likewise with certain sentence, destination and designation (for this is a measure), will lay it waste, and annihilate its glory. This measure of devastation therefore will be “a plummet unto desolation,” that is, will be as it were a builder’s line stretched on the earth, that by it it may be plainly desolated, razed and levelled with the ground. It is a metaphor from the line or plummet of builders, by which they measure houses to be raised or pulled down, that by it they may precisely raise or demolish them. Hence Vatablus renders, he shall stretch over it the line of emptiness, and the stones of vacuity; or, as others, the plummet stones of vanity. So Isaias, chapter 28, verse 17. For “unto desolation” the Hebrew has bohu, the name by which the formless earth, created on the first day of the world, is called, which our translator renders in Genesis 1: “And the earth was void and empty”; as if to say: Idumea, and its antitype the earth, will be reduced in the day of judgment by fire into that emptiness, nakedness and formlessness which it had at the beginning of the world, at its creation. So Virgil says: “And the plains where Troy was.”
Hence it seems little probable what some hold, that the earth after the judgment is to be adorned with its plants, trees, fruits and the like, like the earthly paradise, that in it infants who died without baptism in original sin may live pleasantly.
12. Its nobles shall not be there (the nobles of Idumea shall be slain, or despoiled and carried off by the Chaldeans, like the ignoble. Whence the remnant of the ruined nation) shall rather call upon the king—that is, in so great a desolation they will wish for a leader who may succor their afflicted affairs; but no one will wish to undertake the governing of a ruined commonwealth. Otherwise Lyranus; for by “king” he understands Nabuchodonosor, who laid waste Idumea: for him the conquered and suppliant Idumeans called upon. In like manner at the end of the world, after the preceding scourges of extreme destruction, which are described in Apocalypse 8 and 9, the remnant of men will wish for themselves a king, either Antichrist or, he being slain, another like and most powerful monarch; but in vain: for he himself with all his princes, that is, all his strength, pomp, wealth and glory, shall be reduced to nothing.
Otherwise Vatablus, Forerius and others divide and render the Hebrew, but with the same sense already given.
13. And thorns and nettles shall grow up in its houses.—Literally these and the following things were true in Idumea laid waste; symbolically, the world being burned, they signify that the devastation will be utter.
And the thistle (paliurus).—It is a kind of thorn and bramble, says Pliny, book 24, of which Virgil, Eclogue 5:
The thistle and the paliurus with its sharp thorns spring up.
14. And demons shall meet with onocentaurs, etc.— Note that the Centaurs, according to Pindar and Plutarch in Gesner, in the chapter On the horse, are sprung from the centaur, son of Ixion, when he mated with the Magnesian mares; for from this union, they say, were born offspring who were like their father, a man, in the upper part, and like their mother, a mare, in the lower. Gesner, in the chapter on the ass, reports the same from Plutarch, Aelian and Volaterranus: the onocentaur is an animal with the neck, breast and teats of a woman, and with human shoulders, arms and fingers, but with the back, flanks and feet of an ass, and also of an ashen colour. But the learned laugh at these fables, handed down by popular report and credulity. Hence note with St. Jerome that Holy Scripture, or our Interpreter, and the Septuagint, here and elsewhere, now and then allude to the fables of the poets. So Judith 16:8 alludes to the fable of the Titans, for it says: “Neither did the sons of the Titans strike him (Holofernes), but Judith.” So in Job 42:14, for “horn of antimony” the Septuagint render “horn of Amalthea” (who is feigned to have been the goat of Jove). So here it names “lamiae” and “onocentaurs.” The fable of the onocentaurs seems therefore to have arisen from this, that a Thessalian king ordered men sitting on horses to goad with long spears bulls maddened by the gadfly and fleeing, and so to drive them into the city. To rude men of old this was a new and unaccustomed thing, namely a man sitting on a horse or an ass, and it seemed to them one nature, one animal mixed of horse or ass and man, namely a centaur. Hence they were called centaurs from the Greek word for to prick, that is to goad, and from the bull; a centaur, then, is one who goads a bull. Add the Greek word for horse, and it will be hippocentaur; add the word for ass, and it will be onocentaur. Servius relates this in book 3 of the Georgics, and from him Leo Castrius, Henri Estienne under the word centaurus, and Gesner. Servius adds: “Others say that the fable of the centaurs was devised to express the swiftness of human life, since the horse is known to be the swiftest of animals.” By onocentaurs, then, understand here such spectres or demons, who put on these monstrous shapes and phantoms, so as to appear partly men, partly horses or asses; and this to terrify and mock men. This is plain from the Life of St. Anthony in St. Athanasius: for Anthony, seeking St. Paul the first hermit in the desert, saw a beast human as far as the groin, which then ended in an ass, and he put it to flight with the sign of the cross, mocking it. As for Pliny, book 7, chapter 3, who says he saw a hippocentaur brought in honey to the Emperor Claudius, it was certainly a sea or land monster, resembling partly a horse, partly a bull, different from these of ours; hence he himself does not describe its form.
And the hairy one shall cry to another.—A man to his neighbour: man, that is, each one; for in Hebrew “man” signifies distribution, and likewise a multitude. Moreover the hairy ones are the same demons, shaggy in the shape of goats, whom antiquity called Fauns and Satyrs; hence the Chaldee renders it: Demons shall sport with one another (and, as he said in chapter 13, shall dance). Note: demons delight in dances and attend them. Hence Conrad Clingius, in his Of Theological Places, chapter On the Dance, says: “The dance is a circle whose centre is the devil and whose circumference is all his angels”; and Basil here, in chapter 13, relates that men learned dancing from demons. Unless you prefer to take these monsters, with Gesner, to be a kind of ape, or animals born from the unnatural union of a man with a goat or other beasts; such as St. Jerome in the Life of St. Paul the hermit asserts was brought to Alexandria; although he doubts, and rightly, whether that other creature which St. Anthony saw was an animal or a demon: for it conversed with him with human reason and voice, though he calls it a beast, and it is certain it was not a man.
Morally, St. Gregory, Morals, book 7: “Dragons,” he says, “are the wicked, ostriches hypocrites; onocentaurs the lustful and proud, who, subject to the vices of lust, lift up the neck where they ought to be humbled. The hairy one cries to another, when a preceding fault, for example gluttony, invites the one that follows, lust.”
There the lamia hath lain down.—The lamiae are incubus and succubus demons, or their phantoms, which are called Empusae; they have the form of women, and are said to entice men to lust in order to devour them: for Philostratus, book 4 of the Life of Apollonius, relates that such a phantasm enticed Menippus; and the form of these, wholly fabulous, is described by Plutarch, Aristophanes and Eustathius. They are called lamiae from the Greek word for throat; or from Lamia, that cruel queen of Pontus, who cut open the wombs of pregnant women and devoured the children drawn out of them, of whom Aristotle speaks in the Ethics, and Clement of Alexandria in the Protrepticus; or, as Diodorus, Favorinus and Suidas say, from Lamia, queen in Asia on the mountain near Automolae, who, having lost her son, in her jealousy ordered the sons of all other mothers to be killed. Others would have lamiae named as if lanias, from tearing to pieces. Hence the nocturnal spectres with which nurses frighten children are called lamiae, as though they would devour children, hostile to women in childbed. It is altogether likely that foolish, fearful (for as lovers feign dreams for themselves, so do the fearful) and superstitious men of old rashly counted among the natural kinds of animals various vain phantoms, or apparitions and shapes of demons, and indeed invented many things, as a painter does who joins a horse’s neck to a human head. So Strabo, and Lucilius in Lactantius and Gesner, think of the lamiae. Certainly the Hebrew word comes from the word for night, and signifies a nocturnal spectre or monster. Hence the Chaldee renders it the owl, or night-wanderer.