Isaiah 21:1

The burden of the desert of the sea Perhaps, The oracle, "Desert of the Sea." The first of a series of enigmatic headings, all but peculiar to this section of the book: Isaiah 21:11; Isaiah 21:13; Isaiah 22:1 (cf. Isaiah 30:6). In the majority of cases they are to be explained as catchwords, taken from the body of the oracle (in this instance the fourth word of the original, "desert"). Similarly David's lament over Saul and Jonathan is entitled the song of "the bow," 2 Samuel 1:18, cf. 2 Samuel 21:22. The words "of the sea" are wanting in the LXX. Some render "deserts" (reading midbarîmfor midbar-yâm). Others, again, regard the fuller form as an emblematic designation of Babylon or Babylonia: the country that was once a sea (θάλασσα Herod. i. 184) and shall be so again.

in the south Lit. "in the Negeb," the dry pastoral region in the south of Judah and beyond. The inference that the prophecy was written in Palestine is plausible, but not inevitable, since the word is used of the southern direction. For pass through, render sweeping along.

it(the undefined danger) cometh from the desert probably the flat region S.E. of Babylon, between it and Elam. a terrible land cf. Isaiah 30:6; Deuteronomy 1:19; Deuteronomy 8:15, &c.