The Holy Bible – Knox Translation
The Prophecy of Isaias
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Chapter 15
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1
What burden for Moab? Ar Moab has fallen in a night, and all is still; Moab’s battlements have fallen in a night, and all is still!
2
Prince✻ and people of Dibon have gone up to the hill-shrines to lament; on Nabo and on Medaba, Moab cries aloud, every head cropped, every beard shaved in mourning.
‘Prince’; literally, ‘the house’, unless the word conceals a proper name, but it seems likely that the text here is corrupt.
3
In the streets, men walk girded with sackcloth; house-top and square echo with loud crying, that breaks into tears.
4
The dirge goes up from Hesebon and Eleale, so loud that Jasa hears it; well may the warriors of Moab cry out; the very soul of Moab utters a cry.
5
My heart laments for Moab, once ringed with walled cities as far as Segor; Segor that now moans like a full-grown heifer.✻ There is weeping on the slopes of Luith; along the Oronaim road they wail aloud for misery.
Literally, in the Latin, ‘My heart laments for Moab; its bars reach as far as Segor, a calf of three years old’. Some think the word ‘bars’ should be ‘fugitives’, by a different understanding of the Hebrew text, and it is possible that the ‘calf of three years old’ conceals a proper name.
6
The waters of Nemrim will turn into desert; old grass has withered, new grass has failed, and their banks are green no more.
7
Heavy their reckoning, to match the abundance of their riches; a nation in exile, carried away to the Vale of Willows.✻
In the Hebrew text, the first half of this verse is generally understood to mean ‘What remains of their abundance, their store’, and it is this which is carried away to the ‘Vale of Willows’ in an effort to save it. St Jerome understands that the inhabitants themselves are carried away to the ‘Vale of Willows’, possibly with a reference to Ps. 136.2.
8
A cry goes up all about the frontiers of Moab; Gallim echoes the lament, and the well of Elim hears the sound of it.
9
Dibon’s waters already swollen with blood; and still for Dibon I have perils in store, lions to meet the fugitives, the remnant that is left in the land of Moab.✻
The reference to fresh troubles soon to arise may be compared with 14.29 above, though it is not certain that the events dealt with in the two passages are contemporary.
