Isaiah Chapter 65 verse 25 Holy Bible

Isaiah 65 : 25 Bible Verse Songs

• Lion And The Lamb by Chidinma

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 25. - The wolf and the lamb shall feed together (comp. Isaiah 11:6-8; Hosea 2:18). The portraiture here is far less elaborate than in the earlier chapter, to which the present passage may be regarded as a refer-once. (For the sense in which the entire picture is to be understood, see the comment upon Isaiah 11:6-9). Dust shall be the serpent's meat. Here we have a new feature, not contained in the earlier description. Serpents shall become harmless, anal instead of preying upon beasts, or birds, or reptiles, shall be content with the food assigned them in the primeval decree, "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life" (Genesis 3:14). Mr. Cheyne appositely notes that "much dust is the food of the shades in the Assyrio-Babylonian Hades" (see the "Legend of Ishtar" in the 'Records of the Past,' vol. 1. p. 143, line 8). They shall not hurt nor destroy. Repeated from Isaiah 11:9, word for word. In neither case should we regard the subject of the sentence as limited to the animals only. The meaning is that there shall be no violence of any kind, done either by man or beast, in the happy period described.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(25) The wolf and the lamb . . .--The words point to what have been called the discords in the harmony of Nature, the pain and death involved, of necessity, in the relation of one whole class of animals to another. In St. Paul's language, the "whole creation groaneth and travaileth together" (Romans 8:22). In the new heaven and the new earth of the prophet's vision there would be no such discords. The flesh-eating beasts should change their nature; even the serpent, named, probably, with special reference to Genesis 3, as the starting-point of the discords, shall find food in the dust in which he crawls, and shall be no longer a destroyer. The condition of the ideal Paradise should be restored. The picture finds a parallel, perhaps a replica, in Virgil, Eel. 4. Do the poet and the prophet stand on the same footing? or may we look for a literal fulfilment of the words of the one, though not of the other? The answer must be given in words that are "wary and few." We dare not, on the one hand, fix times and seasons, or press the letter of prophetic visions as demanding a fulfilment. On the other, the permanence of Israel as a people suggests the possibility of a restored Jerusalem, and modern theories of evolution point to the gradual elimination of the fiercer animals as part of the conquests of humanity.