Isaiah 34 Bible study: Rolled up like a scroll

The chapter opens with a call: "Come near, you nations, to hear! Listen, you peoples. Let the earth and all it contains hear, the world, and everything that comes from it" (34:1). It is the first verse of the part of Isaiah the book's introduction calls "Come near, you nations" (34:1-35:10). Here is what almost everyone misses: for four verses the chapter speaks of all the nations, "For the LORD is enraged against all the nations, and angry with all their armies" (34:2), and of the sky (34:4). Only then does it name one people: "Behold, it will come down on Edom" (34:5), and one city, Bozrah (34:6). From 34:9 to the end it speaks of one place, with "Its streams" and "its dust" (34:9). The chapter moves between I and the LORD, as the text has it: "my sword" (34:5), then "The LORD’s sword" (34:6); and near the end, "my mouth has commanded, and his Spirit has gathered them" (34:16). The chapter names Edom and Bozrah as the text has them, and these notes apply none of it to any people, nation, land or conflict today.

Isaiah 34:4→leads toRevelation 6:13-17

"All of the army of the sky will be dissolved. The sky will be rolled up like a scroll, and all its armies will fade away, as a leaf fades from off a vine or a fig tree" (Isaiah 34:4). Revelation is "the Revelation of Jesus Christ" (Revelation 1:1). In it John sees "a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain" (Revelation 5:6), and "the Lamb opened one of the seven seals" (Revelation 6:1). At the sixth seal, "The stars of the sky fell to the earth, like a fig tree dropping its unripe figs when it is shaken by a great wind. The sky was removed like a scroll when it is rolled up" (Revelation 6:13-14). The kings of the earth and every slave and free person hid themselves, and said to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb" (Revelation 6:16), "for the great day of his wrath has come, and who is able to stand?" (Revelation 6:17). Revelation doesn't name Isaiah, and no link between the Hebrew and Greek words is claimed, so setting the two side by side is a reading. Some hear in Revelation 6:13-14 the scroll and the fig tree of Isaiah 34:4, taken up for "the great day of his wrath" (Revelation 6:17). Others read Isaiah 34:4 of the LORD's day that the chapter goes on to speak of (Isaiah 34:5-8), with nothing said of Jesus, and read Revelation 6 on its own. Neither reading names a date or an event, and these notes pick neither.

סֵפֶרsefersay SAY-fer

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "missive, document, writing, book", and among its uses "book or scroll, in which something is written to preserve it for future use". Strong's: "properly, writing (the art or a document); by implication, a book". The chapter has it twice: "The sky will be rolled up like a scroll" (34:4), and "Search in the book of the LORD, and read" (34:16). The scroll the sky is rolled up like and the book the reader is sent to are one Hebrew word. In Hebrew the book of the LORD is sefer with the divine name, and the Hebrew Bible has the two side by side in 34:16 only. Isaiah has sefer 12 times in Hebrew, among them "the words of a book that is sealed" (Isaiah 29:11).