Isaiah chapter 52 is a short chapter, but it has a few verses that really belong with the next chapter, which is a controversial prophecy. The SAB calls this chapter boring, and indeed, there's not a lot going on here. Verse one says "henceforth" no uncircumcised people will come to Jerusalem, which the SAB notes is not true if you take henceforth to mean from the time of the writing of the prophecy; however, that may not be what it means. It may be referring to a time in the future, or perhaps even "uncircumcised" is poetic, meaning something more akin to the other term here, "unclean". Verse seven talks about "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings," which the SAB calls absurd, but clearly this is poetic, implying that the good tidings are what make the feet beautiful, not any actual physical characteristics of the feet. Verse ten is also marked as absurd, but I'm not at all sure why; I'm not sure what this verse really means, but it's clearly poetic as well, as really most of this chapter is. (I don't think watchmen will really be singing, which seems like a funnier picture to me than God's arm.)
Verses 13-15 really belong with the next chapter's narrative, which I'll deal with in my next post, but suffice it to say that Christians take this passage to be prophetic of the day of Jesus's death. Verse 14 talks about a person more beaten up than just about anybody, and Jesus was scourged and beaten in the face by soldiers. Jews believe this prophecy is about the Jewish people, many particularly the Holocaust. I'll perhaps discuss both of these views next time.
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Hebrew is a fascinating language in the way it makes compound words. I thought I would look at the Hebrew behind the verse about feet and "of him that bringeth good tidings" is all one word in Hebrew! It's from a root word meaning something like "messenger" and it's a verb conjugated to mean it's an action being done by a single male person, and while it's just one word in Hebrew, you probably couldn't very well bring out the meaning in a shorter English phrase.
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