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Isaiah

About this book
Chapter 34

1 Come near, you nations, and listen! Pay attention, you people! The earth and everything it contains must listen, the world and everything that lives in it. 2 For the Lord is angry at all the nations and furious with all their armies. He will annihilate them and slaughter them. 3 Their slain will be left unburied, their corpses will stink; the hills will soak up their blood. 4 All the stars in the sky will fade away,⁠ the sky will roll up like a scroll;⁠ all its stars will wither, like a leaf withers and falls from a vine or a fig withers and falls from a tree.⁠ 5 He says, “Indeed, my sword has slaughtered heavenly powers. Look, it now descends on Edom, on the people I will annihilate in judgment.” 6 The Lord’s sword is dripping with blood, it is covered with fat; it drips with the blood of young rams and goats and is covered with the fat of rams’ kidneys. For the Lord is holding a sacrifice in Bozrah,⁠ a bloody slaughter in the land of Edom.⁠ 7 Wild oxen will be slaughtered along with them, as well as strong bulls. Their land is drenched with blood, their soil is covered with fat. 8 For the Lord has planned a day of revenge, a time when he will repay Edom for her hostility toward Zion.⁠ 9 Edom’s streams will be turned into pitch⁠ and her soil into brimstone; her land will become burning pitch. 10 Night and day it will burn; its smoke will ascend continually.⁠ Generation after generation it will be a wasteland, and no one will ever pass through it again.⁠ 11 Owls and wild animals will live there, all kinds of wild birds will settle in it.⁠ The Lord will stretch out over her the measuring line of ruin and the plumb line of destruction. 12 Her nobles will have nothing left to call a kingdom, and all her officials will disappear. 13 Her fortresses will be overgrown with thorns; thickets and weeds will grow in her fortified cities. Jackals will settle there; ostriches will live there. 14 Wild animals and wild dogs will congregate there; wild goats will bleat to one another.⁠ Yes, nocturnal animals will rest there and make for themselves a nest. 15 Owls will make nests and lay eggs there; they will hatch them and protect them. Yes, hawks will gather there, each with its mate. 16 Carefully read the scroll of the Lord! Not one of these creatures will be missing, none will lack a mate. For the Lord has issued the decree, and his own Spirit gathers them. 17 He assigns them their allotment; he measures out their assigned place. They will live there permanently; they will settle in it through successive generations.

Texts in conversation

Compare Isaiah 34:4 and LXX Isaiah 34:4

Hebrew Bible · Septuagint

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Summary

Isaiah 34 describes the sky rolling up “like a scroll” and stars falling like leaves in a dramatic cosmic unraveling. The Greek Septuagint translation omits the opening phrase, perhaps due to a scribal or translation error.

Passages

Isaiah 34:4

Hebrew Bible
3 Their slain will be left unburied, their corpses will stink; the hills will soak up their blood. 4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, the sky will roll up like a scroll; all its stars will wither, like a leaf withers and falls from a vine or a fig withers and falls from a tree. 5 He says, “Indeed, my sword has slaughtered heavenly powers. Look, it now descends on Edom, on the people I will annihilate in judgment.”
740–450 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Isaiah

LXX Isaiah 34:4

Septuagint
3 And their people who were killed shall be cast forth, and their corpses; and their ill aroma shall come up, and the mountains shall be made wet with their blood. 4 And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll: and all the stars shall fall like leaves from a vine, and as leaves fall from a fig tree. 5 My sword has been made drunk in heaven: look, it shall come down upon Idumea, and with judgment upon the people doomed to destruction.
100–1 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in LXX Isaiah

References

"... Isaiah 34:4 ... there are textual uncertainties on the Hebrew side that may weaken the contribution of this verse to our discussion, though it is not clear that these doubts are weighty. Furthermore, it may be possible to account for the LXX minus (the opening has not been translated) by parablepsis, for both the first and second clauses ... Still further, our translator often collapses a series of syntactical units, such as these three verbal clauses. However, this will more often than not involve the use of elements of each of the Masoretic text units, whereas in this case the first of the three has been cleanly omitted ..."
David A. Baer, When We All Go Home: Translation and Theology in LXX Isaiah 56–66, JSOTSup 318 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 187–188.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Isaiah 34:4 and LXX Isaiah 34:4

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