Isaías 4:4

When the Lord shall have washed away the filth... — This serves as the connecting link with Isaías 3:16. The prophet has not forgotten the daughters of Zion. Jehovah will wash away, as with the baptism of repentance, the “filth,” the moral uncleanness, that lay beneath their outward show of beauty. The “blood of Jerusalem,” in the next verse, has a wide range of meaning, from the “murders” of Isaías 1:15; Isaías 1:21, to the Moloch sacrifices in which the women had borne a conspicuous part (Salmos 106:38; Isaías 57:5; Ezequiel 22:2).

By the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning. — The word for “spirit” is better taken in its more literal meaning, as breath or blast, as in Isaías 30:27; Isaías 40:7. The words indicate that the prophet saw in the “blood” of which he speaks a greater enormity than that of the daughters of Zion. The one might be washed away. The other needed, as it were, the “fiery baptism” of the wrath of Jehovah. (Comp. Isaías 30:27; Mateus 3:11.) The Authorised Version “burning” represents the root-meaning of the word, but it is elsewhere (Isaías 6:13; Deuteronômio 13:5; Deuteronômio 17:7) used for “destruction” generally.