Saturday 7 January 2017

Isaiah 60 - just the first verse

O dear, O dear, when one comes with a certain type of concordance in mind to the traditional purple passages of favorite scripture, then all 16th century poetry goes out the window.

Light - be light, arise vs rise, upon or against or on or by or what?

That first verse was painful -
ק֥וּמִי א֖וֹרִי כִּ֣י בָ֣א אוֹרֵ֑ךְ
וּכְב֥וֹד יְהוָ֖ה עָלַ֥יִךְ זָרָֽח

Here are the stems and glosses I have used so far for the words in this verse. (Crossed out is a variant that is used in an acrostic.)

קום arise, assignation, blur, height, hold high, place, quicken, quickly arise, quite arisen, raise, risen corn, sneering, upheld, uphold, waking arising,
So Arise is OK for a beginning - though note the significant homonym place.

אור enlighten, give light, light, light-giving, lightened, pyre, reveal, shine light, show light, Ur
There is no shine here. I have used that gloss for יפה. I will avoid the compromise here since there is a repeated root in the first half-verse. Maybe I should use pyre! (my opening word in Psalm 119:135)

כי 'cause,-,--,...for, because, case, except, how, if, only, though, what, when
This is a varied connector with lots of differing contexts.

בוא bring, come, comply, conduct, cue rise set (Psalm 104, Malachi, Amos), enter, entrance, entry, go, income, introduced, wields, progress, recedes, summon,
This is one of several common words that I abandoned concordance on - going, coming, bringing, walking etc.

כבד glory, heavy, liver, pile (and glorify etc)
יהוה Yahweh,
No problem with the glory of Yahweh. It is clearly not Yahweh's liver

על --,...,about, before, beside, concerning, out, over, per, since, though, through, towards, when, where,
This root yields a large number of variants. When used with a pronoun, the preposition may disappear in English because it is implied in the verb (as is the case for many prepositions).

What does the glory do - is it upon, on, against, through, over? And what is the connotation of the preposition? Is it all 'sweetness and light'?

זרח native, rise, sunrise, zenith-bearing, Zerach (native = the one who 'rose' in the land, Numbers 9:14).

OK - Handel is out the window. But something must be written...

What would you write?

Arise, be the pyre, for your light has come,
and the glory of Yahweh over you is at its zenith.

? (there are some more clues in the second verse where עָלַ֥יִךְ occurs twice more as does זרע. So zenith is too awkward for verse 1.)


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