Isaiah 4:2

In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious,.... When the beauty of the Jewish women shall be taken away, and their men shall he slain; by whom is meant, not the righteous and

In that day shall the branch of the LORD be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel. In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious.

In that day; about and after that time; when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of Zion by those dreadful judgments now described. The branch of the Lord; either, 1. The church and people of Israel, oft called God’ s vine or vineyard, as we saw before, and the branch of God’ s planting, . Or, 2. The Messiah, who is commonly defined in Scripture by this title, the Branch, 33:15 , whose name is expressly said to be the Branch, , of whom not only Christians, but even the Hebrew doctors, understand it. For after the foregoing miseries were brought upon the Jews, by the remainders of the Grecian empire, of which Daniel prophesies of exactly and particularly, and afterwards by the Roman empire, the Messiah was born; and after that utter destruction brought upon the Jewish city, and temple, and nation by Titus, the kingdom of the Messiah became beautiful and glorious, as it here follows. The fruit of the earth shall be excellent; the land which for the sins of the people was made barren, upon their repentance and return to Christ, shall recover its former fertility. Under this one mercy he seems to understand all temporal blessings, which, together with spiritual and eternal, God shall confer upon them; and withal to intimate the fruitfulness of the people (the earth or land being oft put for its inhabitants,) in knowledge, and grace, and all good works. That are escaped; that shall survive all the forementioned calamities.

Isaiah 4:2 In that day shall the branch of the LORD be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth [shall be] excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel.Ver. 2. In that day the branch of the Lord.] Here the prophet draweth to a close of this excellent sermon, and he concludeth it as he began, with a gracious promise of the coming and kingdom of Christ, and of the felicity of his subjects, which consisteth, first, In their sanctity; secondly, In their security. This is more amply set forth in Isaiah 11:1-16 The branch of the Lord.] The Lord Christ, the consolation and expectation of Israel, called elsewhere the bud or "branch." "The dayspring from on high," is by Beza rendered the branch from on high, and the branch of righteousness. The Jewish doctors also understand it of the Messiah; Istud germen quod de virga Iesse virore virgineo pullulavit, saith Bernard. The branch of the Lord he is called, saith Oecolampadius, because, being true God, he hath God to his Father in heaven; and the "fruit of the earth," because, being also true man, he had the Virgin to his mother on earth. Ecce habet incarnationis mysterium. Lo, here we have, saith he, the great mystery of "God manifested in the flesh." Others by the "fruit of the earth" here do understand the body of the Church, which is as the plant that groweth out of that branch. Shall be beautiful and glorious, excellent and comely.] Heb., "Beauty and glory," "excellence and comeliness," or gayness and goodliness, all in the abstract, and yet all too little. All this Christ is and more to his elect, who are here set forth by many titles, as "the escaped of Israel," the "residue in Zion," the "remnant in Jerusalem," the "written among the living there," &c. Saepe autem ad paupertatem aut paucitatem redigitur ecclesia. Howbeit known to the Lord are all his, as well as if he had their names set down in a book. Evasores Israelis.

(2) In that day . . .—The dark picture of punishment is relieved by a vision of Messianic glory, like that of Isa 2:1-4. The “day” is, as in Isaiah 3:18, the time of Jehovah’s judgments. The branch of the Lord . . .—The thought of the “branch,” though not the Hebrew word, is the same as in Isaiah 11:1. The word itself is found in the Messianic prophecies of Jer 23:5-6; Jeremiah 33:15; Zechariah 3:8; Zechariah 6:12. The two latter probably inherited both the thought and the word from this passage. Here, then, if we thus interpret the words, we have the first distinct prophecy in Isaiah of a personal Messiah. He is the “Branch of Jehovah,” raised up by Him, accepted by Him. And the appearance of that Branch has as its accompaniment (the poetic parallelism here being that at once of a resemblance and of contrast) the restoration of outward fertility. That thought Isaiah had inherited from Psalms 72:16; Hosea 2:21-22; Joe 3:18; Amos 9:13. He transmitted it to Ezekiel 34:27; Zechariah 9:16-17. The interpretation which takes “the branch [or growth] of the Lord” in its lower sense, as used collectively for “vegetation,” and, therefore, parallel and all but synonymous with the “fruits of the earth,” seems to miss the true meaning. Rabbinic exegesis may be of little weight, but the acceptance of the term as Messianic by Jeremiah and Zechariah is surely conclusive. It will be noted that the prophecy of the Branch (tsemach) here comes after a picture of desolation, just as that of the Branch (netzer) does in Isaiah 11:1. The thought seems applied by our Lord to Himself in John 12:24. For them that are escaped of Israel.—These are, of course, identical with the “remnant” of Isaiah 1:9; Isaiah 6:13, to whom the prophet had been taught to look as to the trusted depositaries of the nation’s future.

Verse 2. The branch of the Lord - "the branch of JEHOVAH"] The Messiah of JEHOVAH, says the Chaldee. And Kimchi says, The Messiah, the Son of David. The branch is an appropriate title of the Messiah; and the fruit of the land means the great Person to spring from the house of Judah, and is only a parallel expression signifying the same; or perhaps the blessings consequent upon the redemption procured by him. Compare Isaiah 45:8, where the same great event is set forth under similar images, and see the note there. Them that are escaped of Israel - "the escaped of the house of Israel."] A MS. has בית ישראל beith yisrael, the house of Israel.

2–6. The Final State of Zion and the Redeemed IsraelBeyond the great judgment there is revealed to the prophet a vision of the ideal religious community, blessed with an exuberant supernatural fertility imparted to the soil (Isaiah 4:2), purified from sin (Isaiah 4:3-4), and overshadowed by the protecting presence of Jehovah (Isaiah 4:5-6). It is a picture of the glorious Messianic age which immediately follows the day of the Lord. Those who inherit its glories are the survivors of the catastrophe (Isaiah 4:2-3). Although the section has no definite historical background, it is obviously written as the sequel to ch. 2. 3; the allusion to the “daughters of Zion” (Isaiah 4:4) would scarcely be intelligible apart from Isaiah 3:16 ff., and possibly the glory of nature mentioned in Isaiah 4:2 may form an antithesis to the artificial glories of civilisation in Isaiah 2:7 ff. At the same time it is reasonable to suppose that the verses have only a literary connexion with the preceding oracles, and formed no part of Isaiah’s spoken message in the time of Ahaz. By some recent critics (Duhm, Hackmann, Cheyne) the passage is assigned to a later editor of Isaiah’s prophecies, and even so cautious a scholar as Dillmann hesitates with regard to the last two verses.” The objections are based chiefly on considerations of style, and on the alleged post-Exilic character of the ideas and the symbolism. It is true that some leading words (such as those rendered “branch,” “create,” “defence,” “covert”) do not occur elsewhere in genuine writings of Isaiah. The imagery also is of a more pronounced apocalyptic cast than we might expect from Isaiah, and the style seems somewhat laboured and cumbrous. But on the other hand the main ideas—the salvation of a remnant, purification through judgment, the regeneration of nature—can all be paralleled from Isaiah, and this fact must be allowed some weight in favour of his authorship.

The branch of the Lord - צמח יהוה yehovâh tsemach. “The sprout” of Yahweh. This expression, and this verse, have had a great variety of interpretations.

2. And now the counterpart to this fearful prophecy, which was begun in chap. Isaiah 2:1-5, is resumed, and brings this long discourse to an end.