A Prophecy of Esau and Jacob

Trump Wants Rare Earths; but Challenges Ahead

•October 25, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Trump Wants Rare Earths. He has signed an agreement with Australian’s Albanese to provide rare earths ‘solution’ to the US.

“In a year from now we’ll have so much (critical minerals) … you won’t know what to do with them,” Trump boasted.

But challenging China’s Dominance will take more than signing an agreement of an $8.5 billion rare earths and critical minerals deal to overcome. Could the US or Australia have the experience or technology to seperate and refine the earth earth?

Rare earths are tightly bound together with other elements in nature, so separating them is a complex process often involving at least 50 stages; some say over a hundred processes. It’s as difficult as separating grape juice from coconut juice after mixing them together.

AsiaTimes • October 13, 2025 ~ SBS

The recent intensification of US-China trade frictions, marked by China’s expanded export controls on rare earth elements (REEs) announced on October 9, 2025, and President Donald Trump’s subsequent 100% tariff threat on October 10, underscores the deepening mistrust between the world’s two largest economies.

China, which controls 85-90% of global rare earth processing capacity, introduced the measures through a series of Ministry of Commerce notices affecting rare earths, processing technologies, batteries, and superhard materials, with most taking effect on November 8.

In response, Trump threatened an additional 100% tariff on top of a previous 30% levy imposed on all Chinese imports starting November 1, while casting doubt on the planned Trump-Xi meeting at the APEC summit on October 31.

Markets reacted sharply, erasing over US$1.5 trillion in value in just two days. The exchange, coming amid prior US measures, signals a shift toward deeper bifurcation of supply chains, with broader implications for global trade.

A key distinction from earlier actions lies in the scope of China’s October controls compared to those in April 2025. The April measures targeted seven REEs, primarily raw exports, and led to temporary shortages that were mitigated through several in-person bilateral talks from May to mid-September, resulting in a relatively limited impact on global companies dependent on REEs for EVs, semiconductors and precision military equipment.

In contrast, the recent tightening of export controls add five heavy REEs essential for EV magnets and precision-guided munitions, while extending restrictions to refining technologies, equipment and products containing as little as 0.1% Chinese-processed REEs. Export licenses are now required, with automatic denials for military or dual-use applications.

In addition, the controls also include extraterritorial elements, such as “Chinese persons” rules that prohibit Chinese nationals from engaging in overseas REE activities without government approval, similar to America’s “US persons” restrictions on sensitive technologies.

This mirrors the US “foreign direct product” rule and could lead to a Chinese “Entity List” to monitor global end-users, extending enforcement beyond China’s borders. These provisions target broader supply chains, affecting industries that rely on REEs for magnets, lasers and etching processes.

The impacts will ripple across industries, particularly in the US. Up to 30% of US Pentagon initiatives, including F-35 avionics, could face delays due to REE shortages. Aviation giant and defense contractor Boeing may also encounter production setbacks from limited access to specialized magnets.

In semiconductors, firms like Nvidia, Intel and Apple may see costs rise by around 25%. The EV sector, including Tesla, Ford, and GM, faces potential production cuts of 15-30% due to shortages.

Beyond the US, European companies like Airbus and automakers such as Volkswagen, Hyundai and Toyota, along with Taiwan’s TSMC chip maker, also stand to be significantly affected.

China’s provocative timing, just before the APEC summit, appears linked to recent US actions and potentially Taiwan-related developments.

1. On September 29, the US Commerce Department implemented the “Affiliates Rule,” extending Entity List restrictions to entities owned 50% or more by listed parties, limiting Chinese evasion tactics.

2. That same day, the Senate passed the BIOSECURE Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, prohibiting US biotech sourcing from designated Chinese firms.

3. It also advanced the FIGHT China Act, which would block outbound investments in Chinese semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum sectors. These steps reflect a bipartisan push for economic security.

Taiwan may represent another layer of concern for China, helping explain the sharp escalation. On September 30, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick proposed a “50-50” split in chip production to boost US domestic output and enhance Taiwan’s security.

But on October 1, Taiwan’s president rejected the plan, citing risks to the island’s “silicon shield” and noting that TSMC intends to locate only 20% of its advanced production in Arizona by 2030.

Still, China is likely concerned about the possibility that Taiwan could transfer its advanced chip technology and capabilities to the US. Furthermore, the extraterritorial provisions in China’s new export controls could hit TSMC’s chip sales to US firms by requiring Beijing’s licensing for essential materials. A potential inclusion of TSMC on a Chinese Entity List would further complicate the US AI supply chain.

While Chinese officials have begun signaling a desire to resume negotiations and de-escalate tensions, China’s initial response to Trump’s 100% additional tariff threat included an antitrust probe into Nvidia’s AI chip practices, intensified port inspections on Nvidia and Qualcomm semiconductors in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and new fees on US-linked vessels.

Looking ahead – even if a truce is reached again to save the Trump-Xi in-person meeting this month in Seoul – deepening mistrust and the potentially significant consequences of the ongoing export control war are likely to accelerate the bifurcation of supply chains.

As the US suffers from REE shortages – or the threat of them – it will likely ramp up investment in alternative REE sources and refining capabilities.

China, for its part, will continue reducing its dependence on US technology as well as the US market, accelerating its push for more self-reliance. Global companies, particularly in semiconductors, EVs, and defense, will face higher costs as they adjust to parallel systems.

~~~~~

China controls practically 100% of global supply of dysprosium and terbium and added both to export controls on April 4. Tellingly, Beijing didn’t bother restricting sales of neodymium, cognizant of alternative sources—and the fact they are largely useless without their heat-resistant siblings.

So where can American firms source dysprosium and terbium—and fast?

At the Lynas rare earth mine in Mount Weld, Western Australia, yellow diggers scoop the tawny earth and dump it into soot-stained trucks. Following on-site concentration, the semi-refined ore is then taken on a four-hour drive to processing facilities in nearby Kalgoorlie, or loaded on ships to Malaysia, where in the seaside town of Kuantan Lynas operates the world’s largest rare earth processing plant. Crucially, in May the Kuantan plant produced its first batch of dysprosium and is expecting its first terbium this month.

“This is an exciting achievement for Lynas and for manufacturers keen to secure a resilient supply of separated rare earths products,” Amanda Lacaze, CEO and managing director of Lynas Rare Earths, tells TIME. “We have stated our intention to meet the needs of the US Defense Industrial Base on a priority basis.”

It’s a great start, but given the insatiable global appetite for rare earths, many more sources will ultimately be needed. And other options are years from fruition.

It was with great fanfare that Trump signed a deal with Ukraine in March that ostensibly handed half the war-torn nation’s future oil, gas, and mineral wealth—including rare earths—to the US. The only problem is that Ukraine may have abundant reserves of lithium and titanium, but it doesn’t actually have rare earths in any sizable deposits worthy of exploitation.

What about Greenland? Trump has repeatedly touted buying or even invading the semi-autonomous Danish province, citing its mineral wealth. In March, Vice President JD Vance led a U.S. delegation including National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright to Greenland. But while Greenland does boast 18% of the world’s total rare earth reserves, accessing them is extremely problematic, owing to freezing temperatures and a thick layer of silica. Chinese, American, and European prospectors have spent decades trying to figure out how to extract these resources without any success. Today, Greenland has no functioning rare earth mines.

Other options are more feasible. Brazil has the world’s third largest reserves of rare earths and is aggressively exploring this space, while Saudi Arabia also boasts significant deposits and signed a cooperation agreement with the US on critical minerals during Trump’s visit in May. MP Materials and Saudi Arabia’s national mining company, Maaden, also signed a MoU to collaborate on establishing a rare earth supply chain in the Gulf state.

Meanwhile, Japan’s state-owned energy firm JOGMEC and gas firm Iwatani have unveiled plans to invest up to $120 million in a French rare earths refining project.

And with Africa boasting four of the top 10 nations for rare earth exploration last year—namely South Africa, Namibia, Uganda, and Malawi—the continent stands to play a huge role in future supply chains.

But there are also options closer to home. Other than Mountain Pass, Lynas has secured $258 million from the US Department of Defense to build a heavy rare earth refinement facility in Seadrift, Texas. “The US facility has been designed with the capability to process feedstock from other sources as and when they become available and are qualified,” says Lacaze.

Meanwhile, NioCorp has the permits to build a rare earth processing facility at its Elk Creek Mine in Nebraska and is currently waiting on a $780 million financing agreement with the US Export–Import Bank for the $1.2 billion project, which will take around three years to get online. Smith, the NioCorp CEO, says he is currently 2.5 steps through a four-step approval process, which if greenlighted will provide up to 1,500 jobs during construction followed by a 450-strong full-time crew. Although Smith predicts Elk Creek could service all Department of Defense dysprosium and terbium needs, he’s under no illusions about the scale of the challenge.

“One thing absolutely for sure is that NioCorp, by itself, is not the whole answer to the problem,” he says. “So we’re rooting for anybody to be an additional part of the solution. We need to put all the parts together to really be formidable against China.”

Unfortunately, simply seeding projects in friendly countries doesn’t solve the problem. For one, China controls the separation and refining equipment market and placed export controls on those technologies in December 2023. Today, the rare earth refining industry is scrambling to reverse engineer Chinese technologies or innovate entirely new ones.

There is also the matter of expertise. Refining rare earths is “a whole new art unto itself,” says Smith. Heavy rare earth elements are extremely close to each other in terms of their atomic weights, making the process to separate each from the other at sufficient purity levels for commercial or military applications extremely taxing.

“There’s chemical engineering involved, there’s physics, there’s kinetics,” says Smith. “It takes a whole bunch of knowhow, practice, and art to get heavy rare earths into their final purified oxide form. As well as a big investment.”

The cash injections needed keep on growing. Lynas’s Texas project, for one, is currently stalled as the firm seeks more government funding on top of the nine figures already pledged. “Following design changes to accommodate local permitting, additional CAPEX will be required, and Lynas is in discussion with the US government with respect to this funding,” says Lacaze.

But even if all these new rare earth projects are realized across the globe, challenging Chinese dominance must still overcome its toughest obstacle: price.

China has spent decades building out massive capacity for rare earth minerals, so all other competitors operate at a huge disadvantage. “The inside China price is used by outside China customers as a benchmark,” says Lacaze. “We have not observed any intent from the majority of non-Chinese consumers to pay a significant premium to the inside China price.”

Moreover, China’s massive processing capacity means it just opens the spigot whenever a potential competitor emerges to price them out of the market. The Chinese state has no problem eating any short-term losses to maintain key strategic levers over the global economy. It’s a similar dynamic for many different minerals, including cobalt, nickel, and titanium. Today, neodymium oxide costs less than $60 per kilogram—around half its 2023 cost—and is forecast to get even cheaper.

“One of the biggest challenges we face is that rare earth prices are very low,” says Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And a lot of that has been achieved through market manipulation by China increasing and increasing production.”

The cost issue looks frankly impossible to solve. Other than technical challenges, refining rare earth minerals uses a huge amount of water. Back when China was first ramping up its rare earth industry, wastewater was just discharged into the nearest river, although environmental standards have tightened considerably in recent years. In the US or other developed economies, wastewater must be evaporated in huge kilns to isolate and dispose of pollutants—though this is a very energy intensive and thus costly process. “And it’s not something that China has to do,” shrugs Smith.

So, the big question is how American—or Saudi or African—rare earths can survive in such a cost-competitive marketplace. Various mechanisms have been considered: One is a Contract for Difference model, which is common in agriculture and says that if prices fall below a certain point the government will pay the difference. Another option is having the government serve as an Offtaker of Last Resort, agreeing to buy minerals at a certain price if nobody wants them on the open market.

However, “in the US, at least in an era of DOGE, putting in an indefinite OPEX subsidy is quite politically unpalatable,” says Baskaran. “But it is what China will do, so how do we compete against a country that’s willing to inject fiscal support at any part of the supply chain to retain their dominance?”

Another potential solution is one very close to Trump’s heart: tariffs. By hiking levies on Chinese rare earths, the US could strongarm firms to source from preferred friendly nations. But this essentially shifts the cost burden from government to businesses, undermining their global competitiveness with unknown ramifications down the line.

For Smith, tariffs are merely a stop-gap solution. “The answer cannot be for President Trump to issue a tariff,” he says. “We need to be competitive with or without tariffs by increasing our technology, improving our processes, using more robotics. But we must have a legitimate business at the end of the day.”

Posted in Rare Earth & Critical Materials, US

Jeremiah (Ch 33-34)

•October 24, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The list of kings of Judah towards the end; in successive reigns, as Josiah (reign 640–609 BC), Jehoahaz (reign 609 BC), Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC), Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597 BC), and Zedekiah (reign 597–586 BC)

An enemy from the South, The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!
For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Jeremiah 33

¹ Moreover the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the second time, while he was yet shut up in the court of the prison, saying, — Jeremiah was still shut up in prison, which was within the court of the king’s palace;

² “Thus saith the Lord the maker thereof, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name: — the Lord isn’t his name, the Lord is a title; God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH; Yehovah is his name (more at the end)

³ ‘Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.’ — some copies read it, “things reserved” or “hidden things that you have not known,” as the Targum says; and so Rashi interprets it of future events, of things reserved in the heart of God;

— which thou knowest not; until revealed; canst be known without further revelation; that by these great and hidden things are not meant the destruction of Jerusalem, nor the seventy years’ captivity,

— nor return from that, nor things which Jeremiah had been made acquainted with time after time, and had prophesied of them; but something not revealed as yet; such great and hidden things might be “sweet as honey in the mouth but would make thy belly bitter,” Revelation 10:9-10

⁴ For thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the houses of this city and concerning the houses of the kings of Judah, which are thrown down by the siege mounds and by the sword: — the Targum says, “which they pulled down, and threw up mounts to strengthen the wall, against those that kill with the sword.”

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

⁵ ‘They come to fight with the Chaldeans, but it is to fill them with the dead bodies of men whom I have slain in Mine anger and in My fury, and for all whose wickedness I have hid My face from this city.

— and for all whose wickedness God have hid his face from the city; had no pity for it, showed no mercy to it, gave it no help and assistance, or protection, having withdrawn his presence from it. So the Targum says, “I have caused my Shekinah to depart from this city, because of their wickedness.”

⁶Behold, I will bring it health and cure; and I will cure them and will reveal unto them the abundance of peace and truth.

⁷ And I will cause the captivity of Judah and the captivity of Israel to cease, and will build them as at the first. — and I will cause the captivity of Judah and of Israel to return;

— emphasis being made of the return of the captivity of Israel, or the ten tribes, as well as that of Judah, shows that this prophecy does not relate to the return of the Jews from their seventy years’ captivity in Babylon; but is to be understood to be yet in the future;

— according to the Septuagint of Ezekiel 4, the captivity of Judah is 40 years whereas the captivity of Israel will be 190 years. For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

⁸ And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity whereby they have sinned against Me; and I will pardon all their iniquities whereby they have sinned and whereby they have transgressed against Me.

— only after paying the iniquity would both the house of Israel (190 years) and the house of Judah (40 years) be cleansed. For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

⁹ And it shall be to Me a name of joy, a praise and an honor before all the nations of the earth, which shall hear all the good that I do unto them; and they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that I provide unto it.’

— and they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that God procure unto it; that is, they shall fear the Lord, and tremble at his word; not only with a slavish, but also filial fear, which is consistent with joy, gladness and a reconcilation with God.

¹⁰ “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Again there shall be heard in this place (which ye say shall be desolate, without man and without beast, even in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without man and without inhabitant and without beast),

¹¹ the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voice of them that shall say, “Praise the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good; for His mercy endureth for ever”

— and of those who shall bring the sacrifice of praise into the house of the Lord. For I will cause to return the captives of the land, as at the first, saith the Lord.

— such wild partyings the likes of Paris Hilton’s would ease and instead they would ask, “Why hath the Lord pronounced all these evils against us? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?”

¹² “Thus saith the Lord of hosts: ‘Again in this place which is desolate, without man and without beast, and in all the cities thereof shall be a habitation of shepherds causing their flocks to lie down.

¹³ In the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the vale, and in the cities of the South, and in the land of Benjamin, and in the places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, shall the flocks pass again under the hands of him that counteth them,’ saith the Lord.

¹⁴ “‘Behold, the days come,’ saith the Lord, ‘that I will perform that good thing which I have promised unto the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. — behold, the days are coming; there shall come a time when he will verify every good word which he hath spoken to, or concerning his people.

¹⁵ In those days and at that time will I cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David; and He shall execute judgement and righteousness in the land. — this will be during the Millennium, where the Messiah, a Branch of David, will reign; but this could be king David himself, being raised from the dead.

¹⁶ In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely. And this is the name wherewith she shall be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.’

¹⁷ “For thus saith the Lord: ‘David shall never be in want for a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; — David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel;

— or “there shall not be cut off unto David a man” and this is to be understood of the temporal kingdom of David, which has mysterious been preserved from even a long time ago. For more on how this riddle ist expounded, see “Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright” by J.H. Allen (1847-1930).

¹⁸ neither shall the priests, the Levites, be in want for a man before Me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.’”

— neither shall the priests the Levites for want a man before me; although the work of the Levitical priesthood has been abandoned long ago, their line, clan or tribe had mysterious been preserved.

¹⁹ And the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah, saying,

²⁰ “Thus saith the Lord: ‘If ye can break My covenant of the day and My covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season, — thus saith the Lord, if you can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night; the same with the ordinances of the sun, moon, and stars, Jeremiah 31:35;

— the original constitution and law of nature, settled from the beginning of the world and observed ever since, in the constant revolution of day and night; and which was formed into a covenant and promise to Noah, after the deluge, that day and night should not cease, as long as the earth remained,

²¹ then may also My covenant be broken with David My servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne, and with the Levites the priests, My ministers.

²² As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the seed of David My servant and the Levites who minister unto Me.’”

²³Moreover the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying,

²⁴ “Considerest thou not what this people have spoken, saying, ‘The two families which the Lord hath chosen, He hath even cast them off’? Thus they have despised My people, that they should be no more a nation before them.

— with respect to the two families, these two families being the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah; their neighbors have “despised my people,” claiming that they had rejected God and then Jesus and hence their well-accepted paganized “Christians” are the chosen of God; hence the birth and prominence of the replacement theology today;

— replacement theology is the view that our modern Ishtar- and Mithras-worshipping church is the new Israel that has permanently replaced or superseded Israel as the people of God.

²⁵ Thus saith the Lord: ‘If My covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth, — ”Not so” the Lord says;

²⁶ then will I cast away the seed of Jacob and David My servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; for I will cause their captivity to cease, and have mercy on them.’”

— from the Message Bible:

“Well, here’s God’s response: ‘If my covenant with day and night wasn’t in working order, if sky and earth weren’t functioning the way I set them going, then, but only then, you might think I had disowned the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David, and that I wouldn’t set up any of David’s descendants over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But as it is, I will give them back everything they’ve lost. The last word is, I will have mercy on them.’” Jeremiah 33:25-26 MSG

~~ 12,24,33 ~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah, which are embedded in the Masoretic text over 6000 times, yet when translated into our English language most had been translated as Lord, or LORD, which are titles, but not his name. His name is יהוה‎ Yehovah, or YEHOVAH (but there are no capital letters in Hebrew).

It wasn’t until 1524 that Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian, invented the letter J that this new letter started to take a hold in the writings of western Europe. Even in 1611 when the English Bible the King James has our subject of study by the prophet Jeremiah, he was known as Ieremiah. So Jehovah is a very late comer.

But the Orthodox Jews have gone overboard, so holy is his name, they believe, they refrain from even calling his name, referring to him as Hashem, that is, “The Name,” which isn’t his name; just pointing, saying somewhat ‘you know what name I mean.’ His name is Yehovah, and is also not Yahweh, which is the Samaritan counterfeit version.

It is the same as the name Jesus we used today; if his name was used in his time two thousand years ago, he would have been known as Yeshua instead of Jesus. But never mind, as had often been the case, the essence is more important than the form.

His name Yehovah, is specifically stated, and should be used. Titles are okay, but sometimes He asked us pointedly to call on His name. The following verses translated as the LORD erred in presenting His name:

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Jeremiah 34

Because of their breach of covenant to let servants go free, after six years of bondage, it is another cause of the taking and burning of Jerusalem; of the captivity of Zedekiah king of Judah; and of the destruction of the whole land.

¹The word which came unto Jeremiah from the Lord when Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army, and all the kingdoms of the earth of his dominion, and all the people, fought against Jerusalem and against all the cities thereof, saying,

²“Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: Go and speak to Zedekiah king of Judah and tell him, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire.

— behold, God will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire; Jeremiah 32:3; which was exactly accomplished, Jeremiah 52:13.

³And thou shalt not escape out of his hand, but shalt surely be taken and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall behold the eyes of the king of Babylon, and he shall speak with thee mouth to mouth, and thou shalt go to Babylon.

— and thou, Zedekiah king of Judah, shalt not escape from his hand, but shalt certainly be delivered into his hand; and his mouth shall speak with thy mouth; such atmosphere will help Zedekiah to fear God and trembled at his word, even belatedly;

⁴ Yet hear the word of the Lord, O Zedekiah king of Judah. Thus saith the Lord of thee: Thou shalt not die by the sword, — yet hear the word of the Lord, O Zedekiah king of Judah; which, though a king destined to be a captive, he ought to hearken to the Lord;

— thus saith the Lord, thou shalt not die by the sword: or of a violent death; and therefore fear not to deliver thyself and city into the hands of the king of Babylon; for Zedekiah fears he would put him to death immediately.

⁵ but thou shalt die in peace; and with the burnings of thy fathers, the former kings who were before thee, so shall they burn incense for thee; and they will lament thee, saying, “Ah, lord!” For I have pronounced the word, saith the Lord.’”

— fear brought Zedekiah apparently to repentance (Jeremiah 38:14-17); thus received some mercy; and thus shall not die a violent death through the sword, but in peace and be buried with honour; unlike Jehoiakim.

⁶ Then Jeremiah the prophet spoke all these words unto Zedekiah king of Judah in Jerusalem,

King Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign

⁷ when the king of Babylon’s army fought against Jerusalem and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish and against Azekah; for these fortified cities remained of the cities of Judah.

— and against all the cities of Judah that were left; unconquered; when Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land and ravished all the cities that lay in his way; and it seems there were none that stood out against him but Jerusalem, now besieged by him, and two others, mentioned below;

— against Lachish, and against Azekah; for these defenced cities remained of the cities of Judah; two cities that had been fortified by Rehoboam, II Chronicles 11:9; and were still standing besides Jerusalem, which as yet had not fallen into the army of Babylon.

⁸ This is the word that came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people who were at Jerusalem to proclaim liberty unto them:

— the word from the Lord came to Jeremiah, after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people to proclaim liberty unto them, according to the Lord’s ordinance for Hebrews to keep the members of their own nation as bond-servants for only six years, and on the seventh year be given their liberty, Exodus 21:22;

⁹ that every man should let his manservant and every man his maidservant, being a Hebrew or a Hebrewess, go free, that none should be served by them, to wit: by a Jew, his brother. — cause or compel them to be bond-servants, to wit, of a Jew, an Hebrew or an Hebrewess, for the Law concerned these only, not the slaves of another nationality.

¹⁰ Now when all the princes and all the people, who had entered into the covenant, heard that every one should let his manservant and every one his maidservant go free, that none should be served by them any more, then they obeyed and let them go.

— they listened and let them go free. That is, they conformed to the obligations of the covenant, which they had entered into at the instigation of their princes.

¹¹ But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids whom they had let go free to return, and brought them into subjection for servants and for handmaids.

— but afterwards they relented, having cold feet from the law of God, and their own agreement, and returned to their former usage of their servants; they changed their minds and measures.

¹² Therefore the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

¹³ “Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: I made a covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, saying,

¹⁴ ‘At the end of seven years let go every man his brother, a Hebrew who hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go free from thee.’ But your fathers hearkened not unto Me, neither inclined their ear.

— this is another sin of Israel, the year of non release of (1) a slave and (2) release of debt; (3) the release of the land, a year of rest; but your fathers hearkened not unto me, neither inclined their ear; to obey the laws of God;

— this is not to be understood of the fathers with whom the covenant was first made; but their posterity in later times, who yet lived long before the present generation, and so it appears that this law had been long neglected.

¹⁵ And ye had now turned, and had done right in My sight in proclaiming liberty every man to his neighbor; and ye had made a covenant before Me in the house which is called by My name.

— if they couldn’t grant bonded servants their liberty, neither would God grant them freedom, hence off into Babylon they go;

¹⁶ But ye turned and polluted My name, and caused every man his servant and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at liberty at their pleasure, to return, and brought them into subjection to be unto you for servants and for handmaids.

¹⁷ “Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not hearkened unto Me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother and every man to his neighbor. Behold, I proclaim a ‘liberty’ for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

— thus saith the Lord: ye have not hearkened unto me in proclaiming liberty, hence off you go to the sword, to pestilence, to famine and into captivity; for seventy years.

¹⁸ And I will give the men who have transgressed My covenant, who have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before Me when they cut the calf in twain and passed between the parts thereof—

¹⁹ the princes of Judah and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf—

²⁰ I will even give them into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of them that seek their life; and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the fowls of the heaven and to the beasts of the earth.

— off to the Sword, to the Pestilence, and to the Famine; and to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven and to the beasts of the earth.

²¹ And Zedekiah king of Judah and his princes will I give into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life, and into the hand of the king of Babylon’s army which has gone up from you. — once God has decreed somthing, he is determined to carry it through.

²² Behold, I will command, saith the Lord, and cause them to return to this city; and they shall fight against it, and take it, and burn it with fire. And I will make the cities of Judah a desolation without an inhabitant.”

— and your enemies shall fight against you and take your cities and burn them down; they fought against it by shooting arrows from their bows, casting stones from their engines and by beating down the walls with their battering rams; and after making breaches, they entered in and took the city; burnt the Temple and palaces with fire; Jeremiah 52:4;

— and God will make the cities of Judah a desolation without an inhabitant: many of them were already; the king of Babylon having taken, ravaged and plundered them before he came to Jerusalem; and those that escaped the sword, fled;

— as Lachish and Azekah, Jeremiah 34:7; which should fall into the hands of the enemy, and the inhabitants thereof be forced to flee into other countries, or would be carried away as captives; so that they would be but few, if any, to dwell in these two cities.

Posted in Jeremiah

Vatican Allows Rival Faith in Apostolic Library

•October 23, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Vatican Allows Designated Muslim Prayer Room in Apostolic Library, which houses over 80,000 ancient manuscripts, 2 million books, graphic collections, 150,000 documents, and more.

The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Apostolic Library in Vatican City

NR National Review • October 17, 2025 ~ Sky News

The Vatican will open a prayer room in the Vatican Apostolic Library for Muslim scholars.

One of world’s oldest libraries, the Holy See’s library includes millions of theologically significant texts from the Catholic Church and other religions. The Vatican Library is selectively open to scholars of all disciplines for research purposes.

Muslim scholars “have asked us for a room with a carpet for praying and we have given it to them,” Vice Prefect of the library Giacomo Cardinali said, explaining that the library is home to “incredibly old Qurans” and Hebrew, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Chinese texts.

“We are a universal library,” Cardinali said, and the decision to grant Muslims a space for prayer is part of the Vatican’s effort to bolster an international academic community.

The Church’s library is a celebration of shared human knowledge, Cardinali added, not knowledge belonging to one particular religious sect.

The Vatican’s accommodations stand in stark contrast to other faiths, which forbid or severely restrict Christians from visiting certain holy sites. Non-Muslims are not allowed to visit Islam’s holy city of Mecca, for example.

Some Christians criticized the Church’s decision as “effectively allowing a rival faith to set up shop on its property.” Others described the move as a way for the Church to display that “truth has nothing to fear from study.”

The Vatican has allowed ‘rival faith to set up shop’ in the Apostolic Library

Pope Leo XIV has in his ministry so far placed an emphasis on interfaith dialogue. In May, Pope Leo hosted inter-religious delegations at the Holy See to boost ecumenism, saying that Christians should unite “in a spirit of human fraternity.” Pope Leo’s language mirrors that of his predecessor, Pope Francis, who “promoted both the ecumenical path and inter-religious dialogue,” the current Pope said.

“Through his words and actions, [Pope Francis] opened new avenues of encounter, to promote ‘the culture of dialogue as the path; mutual collaboration as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard,” Leo said, adding that “[Francis did this] above all by cultivating interpersonal relations, in such a way that, without taking anything away from ecclesial bonds, the human trait of the encounter was always valued.”

A Christian witness of fraternity will “contribute to building a more peaceful world, something that all men and women of good will desire in their hearts,” Leo added.

The Vatican’s Apostolic Library admits a maximum of 60 researchers into its study rooms per day. Researches must submit an application, including a letter of introduction, proof of academic qualifications, and a copy of a valid ID to receive access to the archives.

Church leaders began the process of digitizing the Vatican’s archives in 2012, a project that works to amplify the Church’s role as a custodian of history and make accessible the Vatican’s 80,000 ancient manuscripts, 2 million books, graphic collections, 150,000 documents, and more.

Posted in Islamic, Judiasm, Scriptures Studies

Jeremiah (Ch 31-32)

•October 22, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Chapter 31 is connected with the house of Israel and is full of prophecies and judgement of the house of Joseph. It begins with the principal promise of the covenant, confirmed by past experience, and with a fresh declaration of God’s everlasting commitment to Israel; “Rachel, weeping for her children,” the firstborn being Ephraim; but who are of the house of Joseph today?

On a Study of the identities of Ephraim and Manasseh, see (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

An enemy from the South, The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

For into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

The Learning of Fear by the Sword, Famine, Pestilences and by Captivity

Jeremiah 31

¹ “At the same time,” saith the Lord, “will I be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people.” — the Lord pronounced, I will be the God of all the families of Israel;

— that is, the house of Jacob; not one or two families, but of every family; which means this will be prophetic, yet in the future as the full house of Israel has never return.

² Thus saith the Lord: “The people who were left from the sword found grace in the wilderness, even Israel, when I went to cause him to rest.”

— thus the Lord saith, the people which were left of the Sword; which were not consumed by the sword of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and who survived through his cruel edicts, and by his Sword, Famine and Pestilence.

³ The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

Rejoicing with a Timbrels or a Tambourine for dance

⁴Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel; thou shalt again be adorned with thy timbrels, and shalt go forth in the dances of them that make merry. — the Israelites have the title of “virgin of Israel” bestowed upon them to imply that, in consequence of their repentance after captivity,

— “they should be washed from the stains of their idolatries,” and they did; but other problems developed over the years: hypocrisies, over application of the laws, strigent Sabbath-keepings ordinances while forgetting justice, mercy and faith;

⁵ Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall eat them as common things. — “the mountains of Samaria” is situated in today’s West Bank, which is populated by Palestinians and under their control;

— the ten tribes, especially Ephraim, haven’t regain their land yet; perhaps B’ney Yosef (Children of Joseph) the North America branch could spearhead their recovery and set up the continent of North America for a global Hebraic awakening?

⁶ For there shall be a day that the watchmen upon Mount Ephraim shall cry, ‘Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.’” — is B’ney Yosef, and the many evangelical preachers, which are mainly based in the United States (Ephraim) their watchmen refered here?

— but most evangelical preachers are blind (and deluded by their own replacement theory) to the modern identity of who the identify of who Ephraim is. So let’s wait and see if they’ll wake up;

— and since God has foretold that watchmen will arise, so there will be at least one, whether is it B’ney Yosef or not we couldn’t be sure yet; or would there be other organizations? Perhaps there are a few watchmen, [one, namely wulfstein.org] it’s in the plural, one watchman among many.

⁷ For thus saith the Lord: “Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chief of the nations; proclaim ye, praise ye, and say, ‘O Lord, save Thy people, the remnant of Israel.’

— “the chief of the nations” is obviously Ephraim, the United States of America; that’s the topdog! Hence whoever the watchmen is upon Mount Ephraim, he will cry aloud, “Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion”

— again, there is a parallel passage from Ezekiel 6 with some comments below:

² “Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them

— Son of man, set thy face towards the mountains of Israel; or cities of Israel, the future inhabitants of them; not the ancient ten tribes, for they had been carried captive long before this time, even in the times of Hezekiah; but far more likely, into the far future unless it can be thought that this prophecy is designed to show the reason of their captivity, which isn’t.

³ and say: ‘Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God. Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys: Behold I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. — this message to the “mountains of Israel;” these mountains refer to the United States, UK and France…

— “and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys;” the hills: Ireland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Finland, and Iceland; and the valleys, the low countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg;

— and to the rivers; where during the nineteenth century, the British Royal Navy were known to “Rule the Waves” and the United States having been plowing up and down the five oceans with her Seven Fleets since the British left the scene.

⁸ Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child, and her that travaileth with child together; a great company shall return thither.

⁹ They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them; I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble; for I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn.

— for am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn; and so very dear to him, as in Jeremiah 31:20. So the Targum says “and Ephraim is beloved before me;” all the blessings which God bestows upon men, whether Israelites or not, all flow from being as Abraham’s children;

— Abraham is a father to them in covenant; and bestows his children’s blessings on them. The indication is to Joseph’s having the birthright, and whose younger son, Ephraim, was preferred to Manasseh the elder, 1 Chronicles 5:2. Ephraim becomes the head of Israel, the ten tribes, but excludes Judah, who has the scepter.

¹⁰ “Hear the word of the Lord, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, ‘He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him as a shepherd doth his flock.’

¹¹ For the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he.

¹² Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord—for wheat and for wine and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd; and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and they shall not sorrow any more at all.

¹³ Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together; for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them and make them rejoice from their sorrow.

— for a country like the United States now, with thick layers of filths, to be a virgin, it has to undergo much purifications, which in God’s eye has to undergo a prolonged captivity, each layer of onion to be pilled off one by one; for 190 years;

¹⁴ And I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness, and My people shall be satisfied with My goodness,” saith the Lord.

¹⁵ Thus saith the Lord: “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel, weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because they were no more.” — Ramah was a city of Benjamin, near which Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, was buried;

— Rachel weeping for her children; not really and in person, but by a figurative way for dark days in Ephraim and Manasseh. Rachel being the mother of Joseph and Benjamin; Joseph being the father of Ephraim and Manasseh.

— Judah’s experience under Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was just a preamble; just 70 years; currently a great captivity for Ephraim for 190 years is in the making! Perhaps a super hyperinflation caused by a de-petroldollarization would be a start? (more on this de-petroldollarizationat the end)

¹⁶ Thus saith the Lord; “Restrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded,” saith the Lord; “and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. — refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears; though sorrow on such an occasion may be lawfully indulged,

— yet it ought to be moderated; and attention should be given to those things which may serve to relieve it, and especially when they come from the Lord himself; then a stop is to be put to the mournful voice, and wet eyes are to be dried up.

¹⁷And there is hope in thine end,” saith the Lord, “that thy children shall come back to their own border. — this would be during the Millennium.

The Charging Bull or the Wall Street Bull in the City of New York

¹⁸ “I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus: ‘Thou hast chastised me and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke; turn Thou me, and I shall be turned, for Thou art the Lord my God. — hey, Ephraim is here associated with the bull or bullock;

— thou hast chastised me and I was chastised; one possibility is that Ephraim has to undergo a cleaning of 190 years, and Judah 40; why the difference? Perhaps Judah had undergo numerous pogroms and cleanings whereas Ephraim has none since the day when went captivity and into apparent oblivion;

— Ephraim chastised . . . as a bullock; see, Ephraim is being symbolized by the bullock or ox again:

Jeremiah 32

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. — in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar;

— that would be 597 BC, the same with Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, a year before the taking of the city of Jerusalem; for that was in the eleventh of Zedekiah, and the nineteenth of Nebuchadnezzar; Jeremiah 52:1.

²For then the king of Babylon’s army besieged Jerusalem; and Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in the court of the prison, which was in the king of Judah’s house. — and Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in prison, which was in the court of the the king’s palace;

³ For Zedekiah king of Judah had shut him up, saying, “Why dost thou prophesy and say, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it;

— king Zedekiah showing himself his own stupidity and hardness of heart to imprison a prophet of the Lord when surrounded by an army and that according to the prediction of a true prophet; who warned them of the taking of their city, and carrying them off as captives.

⁴ and Zedekiah king of Judah shall not escape out of the hand of the Chaldeans, but shall surely be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him mouth to mouth, and his eyes shall behold his eyes;

— and Zedekiah shall not escape out of the hand of the Chaldeans; repeated to the king, who, upon the taking of the throne, he would endeavour to scheme his escape as he did; but wasn’t successful, Jeremiah 52:8.

⁵ and he shall lead Zedekiah to Babylon, and there shall he be until visit I him, saith the Lord; though ye fight with the Chaldeans, ye shall not prosper’?”

— and Nebuchadnezzar shall lead Zedekiah to Babylon; as he did in chains from Riblah, where he was brought unto Nebuchadnezzar after he was taken, endeavouring to make his escape, Jeremiah 52:8.

⁶ And Jeremiah said, “The word of the Lord came unto me, saying: — this would be a new vision;

⁷ Behold, Hanameel the son of Shallum thine uncle shall come unto thee, saying, ‘Buy thee my field that is in Anathoth; for the right of redemption is thine to buy it.’

— behold, Hanameel the son of Shallum thine uncle shall come unto thee; Hilkiah, the father of Jeremiah, and this Shallum, were his own brothers; so that Jeremiah and Hanameel were first cousins:

— saying, buy thee my field that is in Anathoth; the place from whence Jeremiah came, about two or three miles from Jerusalem, and therefore must be in the possession of the Chaldean army; wherefore it may seem very strange in Hanameel to propose it to sale, and stranger still for Jeremiah, who was in the palace’s prison, to buy it.

⁸ So Hanameel mine uncle’s son came to me in the court of the prison according to the word of the Lord, and said unto me, ‘Buy my field, I pray thee, that is in Anathoth, which is in the country of Benjamin; for the right of inheritance is thine, and the redemption is thine; buy it for thyself.’ Then I knew that this was the word of the Lord.

— the words “the right of inheritance is thine” indicate that Hanameel had no children; Leviticus 25:25 says such a sale could put the property within the family’s estate according to the Law of inheritance. Numbers 35:5 designates how and where land are to be set aside for Levites and priests;

— if not sold, a foreigner, like the Chaldeans, might misappropriate the property since he hasn’t any heir. But Jeremiah, being in prison for his prophecy, also don’t have any heir, he was not even allowed to get married (Jeremiah 16:2);

— one possibility is that Hanameel was dying and now at his death trip? Another possibility is that he was designated to go to Babylon as a captive, hence he would like to sell it, have some reserve, buy a house and dwell in Babylon in compliance to God’s word in Jeremiah 29:5 “Build ye houses and dwell in them.”

⁹ “And I bought the field from Hanameel my uncle’s son, that was in Anathoth, and weighed out to him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver. — Jeremiah bought the field, despite being in prison;

— thought at a small price; as compared with the four hundred shekels paid by Abraham for the field of Ephron (Genesis 23:16); or the fifty paid by David for the threshing-floor and oxen of Araunah, II Samuel 24:24.

¹⁰And I subscribed the evidence and sealed it, and took witnesses, and weighed him the money in the balances. — being a just man, Jeremiah did all to comply with God’s ordinances and legal procedures in the property transfer;

¹¹ So I took the evidence of the purchase, both that which was sealed according to the law and custom and that which was open;

— Jeremiah oblidged to Hanameel’s requst as it seemed his cousin needed the money; as he could be designated to go to Babylon, willingingly or unwillingly, as a captive, and in compliance to God’s word in Jeremiah 29:5 to build houses and dwell there; plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.

¹² and I gave the evidence of the purchase unto Baruch the son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, in the sight of Hanameel mine uncle’s son, and in the presence of the witnesses who signed the book of the purchase, before all the Jews who sat in the court of the prison.

— in the sight of Hanameel mine uncle’s son; of whom the purchase was made: the word “son” is not in the text, which has led some to think that both were present at this bargain, both the uncle and the uncle’s son;

¹³ And I charged Baruch before them, saying,

¹⁴ ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, this evidence of the purchase, both which is sealed and this evidence which is open, and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days.

— the “earthen vessels” in which they kept their most precious treasures; was obviously a better protection against damp or decay than one of wood, and was the security of the household;

— “may continue many days” implied the captivity would be long; and the captives need to settle down; build houses and dwell there; plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; and so might continue many years, to the end of the captivity, all for seventy years.

¹⁵ For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.’ — Jeremiah, being in prison for his prophecy, purchased a piece of land;

— this was to signify, that though Jerusalem was besieged, and the whole country likely to be laid waste, yet the time would come, when houses, and fields and vineyards and all the laws and ordinances pertaining to inhertinance of land and property would be restored.

Jeremiah Buys Land in Prison, Symbolizing a Future Redemption

¹⁶ “Now when I had delivered the evidence of the purchase unto Baruch the son of Neriah, I prayed unto the Lord, saying:

¹⁷ Ah Lord God! Behold, Thou hast made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and outstretched arm; and there is nothing too hard for Thee.

— and there is nothing too hard for thee; or “hidden from thee” which his wisdom and knowledge did not reach, or his power could not effect: or which is “too wonderful for thee.”

¹⁸ Thou showest lovingkindness unto thousands, and recompensest the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them. The Great, the Mighty God, the Lord of hosts is His name, — kindness, grace and justice are all over the OT era, not something new that just pop up in the NT;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah; not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century;

¹⁹ great in counsel and mighty in work. For Thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings; — to give everyone according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings:

²⁰ who hast set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt even unto this day, and in Israel and among other men, and hast made Thee a name, as at this day;

²¹ and hast brought forth Thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt, with signs and with wonders, and with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great terror;

— with great signs and wonders; which he wrought for them at the time of their deliverance, slaying the firstborn; and at the Red sea, and in the wilderness, after he brought them out of Egypt,

²² and hast given them this land which Thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey. — a land flowing with milk and honey; that is, abounding with all necessary things, and all pleasant things.

²³ And they came in and possessed it, but they obeyed not Thy voice, neither walked in Thy law: they have done nothing of all that Thou commanded them to do. Therefore Thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them.

²⁴ Behold the siege ramps! They have come unto the city to take it; and the city is given into the hand of the Chaldeans, who fight against it, because of the sword and of the famine and of the pestilence. And what Thou hast spoken has come to pass, and behold, Thou seest it.

— and what thou hast spoken is come to pass; what was foretold by the prophets, and by himself, was now fulfilling:

²⁵ And Thou hast said unto me, O Lord God: ‘Buy thee the field for money, and take witnesses,’ for the city is given into the hand of the Chaldeans.”

²⁶ Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying,

²⁷ “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is there any thing too hard for Me? — is there anything too hard for me? suggesting, that though the city of Jerusalem should be destroyed, and the inhabitants carried captive, yet he could return them again to their own land;

²⁸ Therefore thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the Chaldeans and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall take it. — which Nebuchadnezzar could not do, notwithstanding his powerful army, had not the Lord delivered it into his hands.

²⁹And the Chaldeans who fight against this city shall come and set fire on this city, and burn it with the houses upon whose roofs they have offered incense unto Baal, and poured out drink offerings unto other gods to provoke Me to anger. — they have polluted this Temple by idolatry, they have offered incense and paid homage to the idol Baal;

³⁰ For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have done only evil before Me from their youth; for the children of Israel have only provoked Me to anger with the work of their hands, saith the Lord. — both the northern house of Israel and the southern house of Judah have done evil before God;

³¹ For this city hath been to Me as a provocation of Mine anger and of My fury from the day that they built it even unto this day, so that I should remove it from before My face — instead having joy and a blessing, Jerusalem had became a provocation of sourse of God’s anger and fury;

³² because of all the evil of the children of Israel and of the children of Judah, which they have done to provoke Me to anger — they, their kings, their princes, their priests, and their prophets, and the men of Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem;

— again, both the northern house of Israel and the southern house of Judah have done evil before God; “they, their kings, their princes, their priests, and their prophets,” that is, their false prophets,

³³ And they have turned unto Me the back and not the face. Though I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have not hearkened to receive instruction; — sometimes God is explicit in expressing why Israel sinned, like idolatories;

— but other times God just hint at what’s wrong with his people; here is another one: “they have turned unto me their back and not the face” for which the more details are found in the writing of another prophet, Ezekiel (more at the end)

³⁴ but they set their abominations in the house which is called by My name to defile it. — the house which is called by my name, that is, in the Temple; on the day that the Temple was founded, Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter, who then led Solomon astray.

³⁵ And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech, which I commanded them not, neither came it into My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

— to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech: the phrase, “through the fire” is not in the text; but is well enough supplied from the Targum.

³⁶ “And now therefore thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning this city whereof ye say, ‘It shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon by the sword and by the famine and by the pestilence’:

— the learning process by being “delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon by the Sword and by the Famine and by the Pestilence” is to learn the fear of the Lord.

³⁷ Behold, I will gather them out of all countries whither I have driven them in Mine anger and in My fury and in great wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely.

— again, this is to learn the fear of the Lord; simply because the current crop of kings, princes, priests and false shepherds has no fear of the Lord;

— they lied, they cheat, and they looted; and they thought they can get away with it:

For a small sample of what they had done, see:

Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square
Britain stole $45 trillion from India
Colin Power’s Lie of the Century!

³⁸ And they shall be My people, and I will be their God;

³⁹ and I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me for ever, for the good of them and of their children after them. — “that they may fear me for ever” a parallel in the reverse of the wicked is expressed in Jeremiah 2:19 “and that the fear of Me is not in thee,” saith the Lord God of hosts.”

— and the only way you will learn to fear God is to be “delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon by the sword and by the famine and by the pestilence;” of course, a new Babylon is upon the horizon, for more, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

⁴⁰ And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me.

— surely this is not after the return from the Babylonish captivity; but after the Second Exodus, during the Millennium, when God will install a new covenant, and “I will put my fear in their hearts.”

⁴¹ Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with My whole heart and with My whole soul. — upon repentence, God will whole heartedly rejoice over them;

⁴² “For thus saith the Lord: As I have brought all this great evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them. — giving them one true heart and one way; putting God’s fear into them; causing them to persevere to the end.

⁴³And fields shall be bought in this land whereof ye say, ‘It is desolate without man or beast. It is given into the hand of the Chaldeans.’ — this is after the return from the Babylonish captivity.

⁴⁴ Men shall buy fields for money, and sign evidences and seal them, and take witnesses in the land of Benjamin and in the places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah and in the cities of the mountains, and in the cities of the valley and in the cities of the South; for I will cause their captives to return, saith the Lord.”

~~ v33 ~~

More about turning their back against God Jeremiah 32:33; and more details in Ezekiel 8

¹⁵ Then said He unto me, “Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these.”

¹⁶ And He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’S house, and behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east. Ezekiel 8:15-16

— the heads of the twenty-four courses of the priesthood, led by the high priest, making up the “twenty five men” were not only worshipping the sun: they were doing so in the very temple of God, with their backs turned upon the presence of God!

— and so the Targum of Ezekiel 8:16 renders it, “and, lo, they corrupted themselves, worshipping facing the east the sun; their backs toward the temple of the Lord” — turned their backs to the most holy place; which is an aggravation of their impiety; casting the utmost contempt for God:

Moses’ warnings in Deuteronomy 17

³ And [if you] hath gone and served other gods and worshiped them, either the sun or moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded,

⁴ and it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it and inquired diligently, and behold, it be true and the thing certain that such abomination is wrought in Israel,

⁵ then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman who has committed that wicked thing unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die. Deuteronomy 17:3-5

— today, more than 98.5 percent of Christians are honoring the SUN by observing SUNday worship. They have “their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the SUN toward the east; whose penalty is to be stoned to death – ’till they die.

— also, following the SUN-worshipping Samaritans, most Church of God Communities are showing their contempt for God by having their “wavesheaf offering” and Pentecost on a SUNday; always on a SUNday. And these are supposedly in God’s Sanctuary, but God says He is a jealous God, so these pretentious Christians could be spewed out of His mouth! A death penalty – ’till they die!

Posted in Jeremiah

Germany In A Rare Earth Trap

•October 21, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Germany is in a Rare Earth Trap: Up To 4 Million German Jobs At Risk As Beijing Tightens

“The Middle East has oil but China has rare earths,” says the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in a visit to Inner Mongolia in 1992.

ZeroHedge • October 17, 2025

Rare earth elements have become geopolitical dynamite. According to a new analysis by consultancy McKinsey & Company, up to four million jobs in Germany are on the line if top supplier China imposes a permanent export ban.

These critical minerals are indispensable to Germany’s high-tech economy: they’re used in precision sensors, specialized magnets, and control systems essential to engineering, defense, communications, and aerospace. Without them, a significant share of the country’s industrial value creation would grind to a halt.

McKinsey’s analysis, cited by Handelsblatt, puts the risk in stark numbers: one million jobs in core technology sectors could be directly threatened if supply lines collapse. These industries generate about €150 billion in annual value added — the beating heart of German innovation and manufacturing.

The Downstream Domino Effect

The fallout wouldn’t end there. A vast network of suppliers and consumer-oriented industries tied to those wages depends on stable supply chains and geopolitical calm. McKinsey estimates another three million jobs in downstream sectors and retail would be at risk if a trade war with China triggered a lasting supply cutoff.

In a worst-case scenario, Germany faces a total of four million endangered jobs and an annual value-added loss of €370 billion — roughly 9% of its GDP. While this is a modeling scenario, it illustrates the brutal leverage of global resource politics.

Germany’s industrial fragility is already visible. Since 2018, output in key sectors like mechanical engineering has collapsed by over 30%, with total industrial production down about a quarter. Roughly 250,000 well-paid industrial jobs have disappeared — and the slide shows no sign of stopping. A sudden cutoff of rare earth imports would collapse entire production lines within weeks.

Up To 4 Million German Jobs At Risk As Beijing Tightens Rare Earth

Choke Point: China

Germany is dangerously dependent on China, which controls around 70% of global rare earth production and about 90% of processing capacity. In 2024, 65% of Germany’s rare earth imports — 5,200 tons worth over €64 million — came directly from China. If Beijing turns off the tap, Europe’s high-tech supply chain will stall like an engine without fuel.

Given its market dominance, Beijing wields enormous pricing and coercive power. That’s why finding alternative sources has become a top priority in both Brussels and Washington.

One unlikely player in this global chess game: Greenland. The island’s Kringlerne and Kvanefjeld deposits hold some of the largest known rare earth reserves in the world — enough to supply global demand for decades.

Greenland: The West’s Escape Hatch?

Greenland’s strategic value is obvious: it could break China’s stranglehold on critical minerals essential to both high-tech and energy transition industries. But between ambition and reality lies a canyon. Development has so far been blocked by high infrastructure costs, strict environmental regulations, complex permitting, and local opposition — a textbook case of Western self-handicapping.

Europe’s fatal dependency on Beijing’s goodwill has created a dangerous global imbalance. Brussels is largely defenseless against China’s state-backed export machine, which is flooding Europe with cheap goods while Beijing holds the decisive rare earth trump card.

From a European perspective, the question is obvious: Would closer strategic alignment with Washington have been smarter than constant confrontation?

Strategic Rift with Washington

Such a pivot would require a radical shift in Brussels. The US under Donald Trump has returned to minimal government and free-market principles. For Europe to partner effectively, it would have to shed its climate obsession and embrace real market economics.

The transatlantic gap is stark. Europe imports around 60% of its energy, is resource-poor, and has isolated itself geopolitically by breaking with Russia. The US, in contrast, is energy independent and can leverage economic and military power to secure access — whether through Greenland, domestic mining, or temporary Chinese imports.

Trump’s tariff strategy has shown how powerful this leverage can be: tariffs on Chinese goods have not triggered US inflation because producers and traders in China absorbed the costs through their margins. Washington has a massive geopolitical hammer — and it will use it to secure rare earths.

EU Digging Its Own Hole

While the US uses hard power to push Beijing to the table, Europe is losing access to its former resource-rich spheres of influence. What France experienced in Niger — losing uranium access — is now repeating on a continental scale.

Brussels’ response: recycling initiatives and trade deals with South American countries to cover part of its rare earth demand. These may ease pressure but won’t solve the structural problem: dependency remains.

If Europe wants to protect its industrial base, it must negotiate — at potentially high cost — to buy time for a fundamental policy reset. That means returning to free-market principles, ditching its climate cult, and rebuilding transatlantic trust.

But political reality tells a different story. Neither Brussels nor Berlin shows any sign of abandoning the eco-socialist path. In the end, it will be Europe’s workers who pay the price.

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” Isaiah 28:1

“For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. As you have done, it shall be done to you; your dealings will return upon your own head” Obadiah 1:15

Posted in China, Europe, Germany, Rare Earth & Critical Materials

Jeremiah (Ch 29-30)

•October 20, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Chapter 29 involves Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles and its Consequences.

Just as certain false prophets had tried to arouse and maintain false hopes among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, there were also certain men who were active among the exiles in Babylon. The result was that a spirit of discontent and restlessness took hold among the captives, which not only increased the bitterness of their affliction, but also tended to be confused as to who was a true prophet of God and who wasn’t.

Jeremiah therefore, by God’s command, sent a letter to the exiles, in which he reaffirmed them some prophetic insights if they were to accept God’s words that they obey the Chaldeans, not be fostered by false prophets, who urged the people to rebel against their conquerors; but built houses, plant vineyards and be prepared for a long stay in Babylon.

Then Hananiah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah’s neck, and broke it, Jeremiah 28:10

Jeremiah 29

The Contents of Jeremiah’s Letter.

¹ Now these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem unto the residue of the elders who were carried away captives, and to the priests, and to the prophets, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon

— now, these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem unto the elders of the exile, to those who had survived the hardships up to that time;

— and to the captives, the priests, prophets and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon, to the congregation of the exiles, disorganized as it was in the conditions of their living situation;

— and the prophets: including one true prophet that was carried captive, and that was Ezekiel, which was granted numerous visions from God and compiled into another prophetic book, Ezekiel, after his name; but of false prophets there were many.

² (after Jeconiah the king, and the queen, and the eunuchs, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the carpenters, and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem), — after that Jeconiah (Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597)), the king, and the queen, Nehushta, the dowager, daughter of Einathan,

— and the eunuchs, the courtiers or chamberlains, high court officers, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the carpenters, and the smiths, all the artisans and craftsmen of the city, II Kings 24:16, were carried off to Babylon.

³ by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent unto Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, saying:

⁴ “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all who are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon: — the Introduction of the Letter;

⁵ Build ye houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them. — the Contents of the Letter; the exile would be 70 years, not just 2 years! So build houses;

— the endtime iniquite, which could be a form of an exile, of whom Ezekiel was one for “bearing their iniquity” for the house of Israel could be 190 years, and not just 3 and a half years; see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

⁶ Take ye wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters, that ye may be increased there, and not diminished.

— be productive, take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; not that they were to take wives of the Chaldeans, but of those of their own nation; for intermarriages with heathens were forbidden; in order to propagate their posterity and keep up successions.

⁷ And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. — and seek the peace of the city; the prosperity and happiness of Babylon, or any other city in Chaldea, where they were placed:

— this they were to do by prayer and supplication to God, and by all other means that might be any ways conducive to the good of the state where they were.

⁸ For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Let not your prophets and your diviners who are in the midst of you deceive you, neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. — let not your prophets be in the midst of you to deceive you;

— these are false prophets and there were many; who pretended to foretell future events, and who were too apt to believe them; these insinuated, that in a little time they should have their liberty, and soon return to their own land, contrary to the prophecies that came from the Lord himself.

⁹ For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord.

¹⁰ “For thus saith the Lord: That after seventy years are accomplished at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, causing you to return to this place. — for thus saith the Lord, that after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon;

— these seventy years are not to be reckoned from the last captivity under Zedekiah; nor from the present time; nor from the first of Jeconiah’s captivity; but the fourth year of Jehoiakim, and the first of Nebuchadnezzar, when he came up against Jerusalem; Jeremiah 25:1.

¹¹ For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

¹² Then shall ye call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me and I will hearken unto you. — then shall ye call upon me; when the expected end is about to be drawn near;

— and ye shall go and pray unto me: walk in my ways; or rather ye shall go into your private closets where prayers are made, and there put up your petitions; that they should continue praying without ceasing, until they enjoyed the blessing, and had the expected end given:

— and I will hearken unto you: God is a God hearing Being; he listens to the requests of his people, but answers them in his own time and way; which is no small encouragement to pray unto him.

¹³ And ye shall seek Me and find Me when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.

¹⁴And I will be found by you, saith the Lord, and I will return you from captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the Lord; and I will bring you back into the place from whence I caused you to be carried away captive.

— since the return from captivity is not just from Babylon but “from all the nations” this hint is subtle, “from all the places whither I have driven you” it hints at a prophetic message, and this message is for the endtimes.

One parallel passage from Ezekiel 6:

² “Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them — Son of man, set thy face towards the mountains of Israel… or cities of Israel, the future inhabitants of them; not the ancient ten tribes, for they had been carried captive long before this time, even in the times of Hezekiah; but far more likely, into the far future unless it can be thought that this prophecy is designed to show the reason of their captivity, which isn’t.

³ and say: ‘Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God. Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys: Behold I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. — this message to the “mountains of Israel;” these mountains refer to the United States, UK and France… “and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys;” the hills: Ireland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Finland, and Iceland; and the valleys, the low countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg;

— and to the rivers; where during the nineteenth century, the British Royal Navy were known to “Rule the Waves;” and the United States having been plowing up and down the five oceans with her Seven Fleets since the British left the scene.

¹⁵ “Because ye have said, ‘The Lord hath raised us up prophets in Babylon’ — the Lord hath raised us up prophets in Babylon; this is meant to be false prophets who foretold nothing but peace and prosperity;

— there is no need of other prophets if they have listened to those in Judea and in Jerusalem; but these are false prophets; who speak smoothly, foretold nothing but peace and prosperity; and as such, considered themselves as prophets sent by God, when they were not.

¹⁶ know that thus saith the Lord of the king that sitteth upon the throne of David, and of all the people that dwelleth in this city, and of your brethren who have not gone forth with you into captivity;

— these are those that refused to go into Babylon, saith the Lord, and be well with them; but those who refused to go are actually disobeying God.

¹⁷ thus saith the Lord of hosts: Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs that cannot be eaten, they are so evil. — when they are actually disobeying God, they could expect to face the consequences; and that is “the Sword, the Famine and the Pestilence.”

¹⁸ And I will persecute them with the sword, with the famine, and with the pestilence, and will deliver them to be removed to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse and an astonishment and a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations whither I have driven them,

— and God will persecute them with the “Sword, the Famine and the Pestilence,” or “follow after them” such as their escape out of the city and go into Egypt or other countries for shelter and safety; should be pursued by the vengeance of God and should fall by Sword, Famine or Pestilence.

¹⁹ because they have not hearkened to My words, saith the Lord, which I sent unto them by My servants the prophets, rising up early and sending them; but ye would not hear, saith the Lord.

— because they have not hearkened to my words, saith the Lord; words which were spoken to them by the prophets; not hearkening to them, but despising them, a contempt of God and his words, were the cause of their ruin.

²⁰ “Hear ye therefore the word of the Lord, all ye of the captivity, whom I have sent from Jerusalem to Babylon. — all ye of the captivity; some parts of this letter are directed to one region of the captives, and others to another part; some being good men, some bad;

²¹ Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab the son of Kolaiah, and of Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah, who prophesy a lie unto you in My name: Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and he shall slay them before your eyes.

— Ahab, the son of Kolaiah, and Zedekiah, the son of Maaseiah, which prophesy a lie unto you: two false prophets, of whom we have no account anywhere else but only here; and are false prophets, that they of the captivity boasted of that God had raised unto them in Babylon.

²² And of them shall be taken up a curse by all the captivity of Judah who are in Babylon, saying, ‘The Lord make thee like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire,’

— “taken up a curse” or “burnt them” not at once, but with a slow fire; burning persons with fire, and casting them into a fiery furnace, were ways used by the Chaldeans in putting persons to death, Daniel 3:6.

²³ because they have committed villainy (wicked or criminal behaviour) in Israel, and have committed adultery with their neighbors’ wives, and have spoken lying words in My name which I have not commanded them. Indeed I know, and am a witness, saith the Lord.”

²⁴Thus shalt thou also speak to Shemaiah the Nehelamite, saying, — or, Shemaiah “the dreamer” because he pretended to have dreams from the Lord;

— or because what he delivered as prophecies were mere dreams; as that the captives should quickly return to their own land; so the Targum, paraphrasing “Shemaiah, who was of Halem;” he was another of the false prophets in Babylon.

²⁵ “Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying: Because thou hast sent letters in thy name unto all the people who are at Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, and to all the priests, saying,

— this is an example of taking God’s name in vain, by not giving credit to God; he was ignoring God as originator of the message, even if he was writing in the Lord’s name; this is from the Message Bible:

And this is the Message for Shemaiah the Nehelamite: “God-of-the-Angel-Armies, the God of Israel, says: You took it on yourself to send letters to all the people in Jerusalem and to the priest Zephaniah son of Maaseiah and the company of priests.

In your letter you told Zephaniah that God set you up as priest replacing priest Jehoiadah. He’s put you in charge of God’s Temple and made you responsible for locking up any crazy fellow off the street who takes it into his head to be a prophet. Jeremiah 29:24-26 MSG

— there is no authorisaton such as “Thus saith the Lord to me:” Jeremiah 27:2; or “The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah . . . which Jeremiah the prophet spoke unto all the people of Judah,” Jeremiah 25:1-2; or, “Thus saith the Lord: “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and speak there this word,” Jeremiah 22:1

²⁶ ‘The Lord hath made thee priest instead of Jehoiada the priest, that ye should be officers in the house of the Lord for every man that is mad and maketh himself a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in prison, and in the stocks.

²⁷Now therefore, why hast thou not reproved Jeremiah of Anathoth, who maketh himself a prophet to you?

— now therefore why hast thou not reproved (reprimand) Jeremiah of Anathoth; this could be another Jeremiah, the original true one is “Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin,” Jeremiah 1:1;

— or, he was Shemaiah “the dreamer” writing as “Jeremiah of Anathoth,” resembling closely to “Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah” the true prophet.

²⁸ For therefore he sent unto us in Babylon, saying: This captivity is long; build ye houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.’” — for therefore he sent unto us in Babylon, saying; “this captivity is long; build ye houses and dwell in them . . .”

— this, even where “Jeremiah of Anathoth,” didn’t change Jeremiah’s message, it is unacceptable in God’s sight!

— and this is from the Message Bible

“So why haven’t you done anything about muzzling Jeremiah of Anathoth, who’s going around posing as a prophet?

He’s gone so far as to write to us in Babylon, ‘It’s going to be a long exile, so build houses and make yourselves at home. Plant gardens and prepare Babylonian recipes.’” Jeremiah 29:28 MSG — this is pilgarising Jeremiah’s message without giving due credits; and it is a sin.

²⁹ And Zephaniah the priest read this letter in the ears of Jeremiah the prophet. — in the ears of Jeremiah the prophet: to let him know who were his enemies abroad;

— who normally stir up trouble against him; in pretence of proceeding equitably with him; not different in his message, or brought up any accusation and charge against him.

³⁰ Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, — this Word is to “Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah” the true prophet.

³¹ “Send to all those of the captivity, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord concerning Shemaiah the Nehelamite: Because Shemaiah hath prophesied unto you, and I sent him not and he caused you to trust in a lie, — this message is to Shemaiah the liar; or Nehelamite “the dreamer”

³² therefore thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will punish Shemaiah the Nehelamite and his seed: he shall not have a man to dwell among this people, neither shall he behold the good that I will do for My people, saith the Lord, because he hath taught rebellion against the Lord.’”

— behold, I will punish Shemaiah the Nehelamite “the dreamer” and his seed; not him only, but his posterity also: thus God sometimes visits the sins of parents on their children, they being, as it were, a part of themselves, and often times partners with them in their iniquities:

— he shall not have a man to dwell among this people; either at Babylon, or at Jerusalem, whither he had promised a speedy return:

— neither shall he behold the good that I will do for my people, saith the Lord; by returning them, after seventy years captivity, to their own land, and to the enjoyment of all their privileges, civil and religious.

More into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

The Septuagint on chapter 29 is very different; I’ll have it below for a seperate study:

¹Thus saith the Lord against the Philistines;

²Behold, waters come up from the north, and shall become a sweeping torrent, and it shall sweep away the land, and its fulness; the city, and them that dwell in it: and men shall cry and all that dwell in the land shall howl, ³at the sound of his rushing, at the sound of his hoofs, and at the rattling of his chariots, at the noise of his wheels: the fathers turned not to their children because of the weakness of their hands, ⁴in the day that is coming to destroy all the Philistines: and I will utterly destroy Tyre and Sidon, and all the rest of their allies: for the Lord will destroy the remaining inhabitants of the islands. ⁵Baldness is come upon Gaza; Ascalon is cast away, and the remnant of the Enakim.

⁶How long wilt thou smite, O sword of the Lord? how long will it be ere thou art quiet? return into thy sheath, rest, and be removed.

⁷How shall it be quiet, whereas the Lord has given it a commission against Ascalon, and against the regions on the sea-coast, to awake against the remaining countries!

Jeremiah 30

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint; and to dismiss it as another testimony, as many Churches do, is a disgrace. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

² “Thus speaketh the Lord God of Israel, saying: ‘Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. — saying, write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book; perhaps that how this book of Jeremiah comes about;

— being issues of consequence, that they might remain so after ages; and be read to the use, study and for edification of the Lord’s people for their time and in times to come.

³ For lo, the days come,’ saith the Lord, ‘that I will bring back from captivity My people Israel and Judah,’ saith the Lord; ‘and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.’”

— and God will cause them to return to the land that he gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it; the land of Canaan, given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and which shall be again by the Jews and Israelites their posterity; so we may mediate how we can understand this and other prophecies.

⁴ And these are the words that the Lord spoke concerning Israel and concerning Judah: — and these are the words concerning Israel and concerning Judah; these these are prophetic as Israel were already in exile over a hundred years ago;

— which follow in this chapter and others; first concerning Israel, the ten tribes; and then concerning the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin,

— that is, concerning all Israel; whereas, if this prophecy only respects the return from the captivity in Babylon, there is very little in it which concerns the ten tribes. The words may be rendered, “unto Israel, and unto Judah” as being the subjests to whom they were directed.

⁵ “For thus saith the Lord: ‘We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear and not of peace. — words of bitterness as we have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace;

— which is to be understood, of the fear and dread injected into them by the Babylonians when they besieged their city, and burned that, and their Temple.

⁶ Ask ye now, and see whether a man doth travail with child? Why do I see every man with his hands on his loins, as a woman in travail, and all faces are turned into paleness?

— every man with his hands his loins, as a woman in travail; this metaphor is made use of, both to express the sharpness and shortness of this distress; as the pains of a woman in travail are very sharp, yet short, and, when over, quickly forgotten.

⁷ Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it. It is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it. — the “time of Jacob’s trouble” could parallel Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

⁸ “‘For it shall come to pass in that day,’ saith the Lord of hosts, ‘that I will break his yoke from off thy neck, and will burst thy bonds, and strangers shall no more be served by him.

⁹ But they shall serve the Lord their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up unto them. — and David their king; perhaps literally, for David their king shall be raised from the dead and reign over them.

¹⁰ “‘Therefore fear thou not, O My servant Jacob,’ saith the Lord; ‘neither be dismayed, O Israel; for lo, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from the land of their captivity; and Jacob shall return, and shall be in rest and be quiet, and none shall make him afraid.

— this is again prophetic, into the Millennium, their return are “from afar” whereas Babylon was nearby comparatively; that is, after their second capitivty;

For more see, A Greater than the Egyptian “Exodus”

¹¹ For I am with thee,’ saith the Lord, ‘to save thee; though I make a full end of all nations whither I have scattered thee, yet will I not make a full end of thee; but I will correct thee in measure, and will not leave thee altogether unpunished.’

— though I will make a full end of all nations whither I have scattered thee, yet will I not make a full end of thee; perhaps a full end has been made of the old Assyrians, Chaldeans and Egyptians; these people and their names are no more; old societies, because Egypt and Assyria would still be around: Zechariah 14:18-19; Isaiah 19:23

— the destruction of the national life of the heathen nations on whom judgement was to fall should be complete and irreversible, so that old Moab, Ammon and Edom, should no more have a place in the history of the world;

— but to the house of Judah and the house of Israel, the Targum says, “I will bring suffering upon you for your instruction, yet in justice I will spare you.”

¹² “For thus saith the Lord: ‘Thy bruise is incurable, and thy wound is grievous. — emphasizes the depth of Israel’s spiritual and national injury. It’s not a superficial ailment: it’s profound and debilitating.

¹³ There is none to plead thy cause, that thou mayest be bound up; thou hast no healing medicines. — Israel has no intercessor, no one to plead mercy or healing for her.

¹⁴ All thy lovers have forgotten thee; they seek thee not; for I have wounded thee with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one for the multitude of thine iniquity, because thy sins were increased.

— all thy lovers have forgotten thee; the Egyptians and Assyrians were historic, but Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico could be futuristic, whom they sought for help, and entered into an alliance with, and who promised them great things; but forgot their promises and forsook them (more at the end)

¹⁵ Why criest thou for thine affliction? Thy sorrow is incurable for the multitude of thine iniquity; because thy sins were increased, I have done these things unto thee. — many repeats for iniquity, sins, emphasizing both the severity of the pain and the weight of the sin that caused it.

¹⁶ Therefore all they that devour thee shall be devoured, and all thine adversaries, every one of them, shall go into captivity; and they that despoil thee shall be a spoil, and all that prey upon thee will I give for a prey.

— and all thine adversaries, everyone of them, as were the Assyrians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Grecians, Romans and the Papacy, shall also go into destruction; Revelation 13:10, “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity. He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword…”

¹⁷ For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds,’ saith the Lord, ‘because they called thee an outcast, saying, “This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after.”’

¹⁸ “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Behold, I will bring back from captivity Jacob’s tents, and have mercy on his dwelling places; and the city shall be built upon her own heap, and the palace shall remain after the manner thereof.

— althought not explicitly stated here, the Targum identifies this city as Jerusalem, and the Temple rebuilt; and God will have mercy on his dwelling places; by restoring the full house of Israel or Jacob’s posterity, to their dwelling places in Jerusalem, and other places rebuilt by them and for them;

— the Targum says in full

“Thus says the Lord: I will restore the captivity of Jacob’s land, and I will have compassion on his dwellings. The city of Jerusalem shall be rebuilt on its proper site, and the Temple shall be established when He sees it.”

¹⁹ And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of them that make merry; and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few; I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small.

²⁰ Their children also shall be as in former time, and their congregation shall be established before Me, and I will punish all that oppress them.

²¹ And their nobles shall be of themselves, and their governor shall proceed from the midst of them; and I will cause him to draw near, and he shall approach unto Me; for who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto Me?’ saith the Lord.

²² ‘And ye shall be My people, and I will be your God.’”

²³ Behold, the whirlwind of the Lord goeth forth with fury, a continuing whirlwind; it shall fall with pain upon the head of the wicked.

²⁴ The fierce anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has done it, and until He has performed the intents of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it.

— in the latter days ye shall consider it; and in considering it in the latter days you shall understand it; and see it wholly and fully. The eyes of his shepherd will finally be opened; thus that means that today’s shepherd are blind, naked and wretched!

~~~

More about “all thy lovers have forgotten thee” Jeremiah 30:14 which runs parallel with another verse in Ezekiel 16:37

Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated. I will even gather them round about against thee and will uncover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness Ezekiel 16:37:

— when the going gets tough, the tough gets going and American allies (Germany, Italy, Turkey and Spain; Brazil, Argentina and Mexico; South Africa, Algeia, Nigeria and Egypt; Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan; S Korea, the Philippines and Japan?) will take their own interests first, team up with other enemies of the United States (Venezuela, Iran, N Korea, Russia and China) and will turn against the United States.

And this is not these countries’ doings, but it is God’s will that will cause these allies to be against the United States, and it is again God’s will through His Spirits that will trap the United States in a snare “And I will spread My net upon him, and he shall be taken in My [not China’s nor Russia’s] snare,” Ezekiel 17:20; and he will be like a beast caught in a cage squealing away to no avail, then uncover her nakedness, American nakedness.

More about the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!
For another about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

Posted in Jeremiah

China to apply domestic law abroad

•October 19, 2025 • Leave a Comment

US rivalry pushing China to apply domestic law abroad, legal experts say

Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on behalf of Trump under a US warrant.

Yahoo • October 25, 2025

China is increasingly applying domestic law beyond its borders in response to US pressure, legal analysts have suggested.

The “foreign-related rule of law” concept was first unveiled in 2019, and soon gained prominence.

Some leading Chinese legal analysts and policy advisers have said that the United States was responsible for this.

The 2023 Law on Foreign Relations was central to this drive, along with last year’s Law on Foreign State Immunity and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law of 2021.

Beijing also introduced export controls on products that have dual military and civilian uses as well as rare earth metals.

“Simply put, it comes down to whether the global order should be governed by international law or by domestic law – and this is the dilemma facing the international community today,” Cai Congyan, a legal professor from Fudan University, told a seminar at Hong Kong University law school on Monday.

He added: “Domestic law is playing an increasingly important role in managing relations between states, while the influence of international law is diminishing.

“China’s concept of ‘foreign-related rule of law’ embodies its vision of how the global order should be regulated.”

The US has taken legal action against some of China’s leading tech firms. Huawei Technologies chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada and later pleaded guilty while ZTE has been accused of breaching US export control and sanctions laws.

“The role of international law is fading, while domestic law is becoming more important – not only in the US, but also in Europe. As China and other Global South countries gain influence, Western powers can no longer control institutions like the World Trade Organization or the United Nations as before,” Cai said.

He said this trend was “dangerous” for everyone, but Beijing would be “drawn” into the same direction as the US.

This year Beijing has increased its use of legal measures against the US, including recent curbs on rare earth exports and higher shipping fees.

Wang Jiangyu, a professor of law at City University of Hong Kong, said Beijing should “justify” its legislation and avoid the impression that it was using the law as a “toolbox to protect [its] national interests.”

Wang said China should “construct a narrative to persuade the international community” that its policies were justified.

“To construct a narrative that is widely accepted by the international community – one that people genuinely believe is good – which may in fact serve one’s own interests,” he said.

“In this regard, the United States has been the most successful in building such a system since the end of World War II.”

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” Isaiah 28:1

“For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. As you have done, it shall be done to you; your dealings will return upon your own head” Obadiah 1:15

Posted in China

Jeremiah (Ch 27-28)

•October 18, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Question: As Türkiye and Hungary have expressend joining BRICS, would Nato kick out these two countries? Then Nato could speak with a single voice, which could be their aim!

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

And I went unto the angel and said unto him, “Give me the little book.” And he said unto me, “Take it and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey” Revelation 10:9

Understanding what that bitterness is, in the “latter days” that is, in the distant future; ye shall understand it clearly, viz. that the calamities of what that bittlerness was meant to be, which will have come upon the whole world are the divine judgement upon our sins. Only in the endtime would we be able to understand this fully.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint; and to dismiss it as another testimony for spiritual inspiration and understanding, as virtually all the endtime Churches do, is an absolute disgrace.

The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. That is, the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us today from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

Hence, for ignoring the Targum as an authority for Understanding and Truth, the endtime Churches has being described as wretches, blind and naked; and would be thus justifiably destined to be spewed out of God’s mouth!

Jeremiah 27

The year in that Jeremiah began to prophesy, Jeremiah 1:2 in the thirteenth year of Josiah reign would be around 628 BC, and he preached for the last 19 years of Josiah’s life, until 609 BC when Josiah died. By the time the kings of Judah reigns ended with Zedekiah being exiled to Babylon and his reign ended in 586 BC, Jeremiah’s prophesying life work in and around Jerusalem would have lasted some 42 years.

Jeremiah in bonds and yokes upon his neck

¹ In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, came this word unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, — Jehoiakim reign from 609 to 598; so this is another relaying, with more details, of the same scenes we have gone through before.

²Thus saith the Lord to me: “Make thee bonds and yokes and put them upon thy neck, — thus saith the Lord to Jeremiah; make thee bonds and yokes; the yokes were made of wood, as appears from Jeremiah 28:13; and the bonds were strings or thongs, which bound the yoke together, that it might not slip off the neck;

³and send them to the king of Edom, and to the king of Moab, and to the king of the Ammonites, and to the king of Tyre, and to the king of Sidon by the hand of the messengers who come to Jerusalem unto Zedekiah king of Judah.

— all neighbouring kings and states: of Edom, of Moab and Ammon, Tyre and Sidon, to whom the wine cup of God’s wrath was to be sent, and they made to drink of it.

⁴And command them to say unto their masters, ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; thus shall ye say unto your masters: — and all nations shall serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and his son, and his son’s son; and many nations and great kings serve Nebuchadnezzar;

⁵ I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground by My great power and by My outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto Me. — even the beasts of the field also have God given to Nebuchadnezzar to serve him.

⁶ And now have I given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant; and the beasts of the field have I given him also to serve him. — and three times God describes Nebuchadnezzar as “my servant” Jeremiah 25:9,27:6,43:10;

— and now I have given to Nebuchadnezzar all these lands: land from Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, Sidon and Judea:

— into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, God’s servant; whom God used as a horsewhip in correcting and chastising the nations; and who obeyed his will, though he knew not; yet had the honour of being called his servant, and of being rewarded with a very large empire;

— and the beasts of the field have God given him also to serve him; and his armies for the invasion and taking the above countries; or the cattle found there, which belonged to these countries, and the inhabitants thereof, which would fall into his hands.

⁷ And all nations shall serve him and his son and his son’s son, until the very time of his land comes; and then many nations and great kings shall themselves be served by him. — and his son, and his son’s son; their Scripture names were Evilmerodach and Belshazzar, Jeremiah 52:31.

⁸ And it shall come to pass, that the nation and kingdom which will not serve the same Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, and that will not put their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, that nation will I punish, saith the Lord, with the sword and with the famine and with the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand.

— that nation disobeyed, that nation will I punish, saith the Lord, with the Sword, Famine and Pestilence; with one judgement after another; some will perish by the sword of the enemy, sallying out upon them, or endeavouring to make their escape;

— others by famine their provisions being spent through the length of the siege; and lastly by pestilence, or the plague, or by the hand of God: until I have consumed them by his hand; Nebuchadnezzar’s; by any means of him; by his sword and strait besieging them; or “into his hand”

— and so the Targum says, “until I have delivered them into his hand;” having consumed multitudes by the sword, famine and pestilence, will deliver the rest into his hands to be carried away as captives.

⁹ Therefore hearken not ye to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your dreamers, nor to your enchanters, nor to your sorcerers, who speak unto you, saying, “Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon.”

— which speak unto you, saying, ye shall not serve the king of Babylon; meaning, either that they ought not to become tributary to him; or they should not be brought into subjection by him: and so were stirred up to oppose him and not submit to him.

¹⁰ For they prophesy a lie unto you to remove you far from your land, and that I should drive you out and ye should perish. — from the Message Bible:

“‘So don’t for a minute listen to all your prophets and spiritualists and fortunetellers, who claim to know the future and who tell you not to give in to the king of Babylon.

They’re handing you a line of lies, barefaced lies, that will end up putting you in exile far from home. I myself will drive you out of your lands, and that’ll be the end of you.

But the nation that accepts the yoke of the king of Babylon and does what he says, I’ll let that nation stay right where it is, minding its own business.’” Jeremiah 27:9-11 MSG

¹¹ But the nations that bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, those will I let remain still in their own land, saith the Lord, and they shall till it and dwell therein.’” — but the nations that serve him; that readily submit unto him and pay him tribute, they will retain their territory and livelihood.

¹² I spoke also to Zedekiah king of Judah according to all these words, saying, “Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live.

— submit yourself to the king of Babylon; you, O king, your nobles, and your people. Zedekiah was set upon the throne by the king of Babylon, become a tributary to him and had took an oath to be faithful to him;

— but was meditating against him; consulting and entering into a confederacy with neighbouring nations to throw off the yoke and be independent from him.

¹³ Why will ye die, thou and thy people, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence, as the Lord hath spoken against the nation that will not serve the king of Babylon?

— why will ye die, thou and thy people; by the Sword, by Famine and by Pestilence; through a blockade of the Chaldean army, which would invade their land and besiege their city, upon a refusal to be subject to their yoke.

¹⁴ Therefore hearken not unto the words of the prophets who speak unto you, saying, ‘Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon,’ for they prophesy a lie unto you.

— therefore hearken not unto the words of these false prophets, as the Targum says; such bad kings always had them, to whom they listened, and which often brought forth bad and terrible consequences.

¹⁵ ‘For I have not sent them,’ saith the Lord, ‘yet they prophesy a lie in My name; that I might drive you out, and that ye might perish, ye and the prophets who prophesy unto you.’”

— ye, and the false prophets, as the Targum again calls them, that prophesy unto you; for it would end in the ruin and destruction of them; both their false prophets and those that listened to their prophecies; both would fall into the ditch.

¹⁶ Also I spoke to the priests and to all this people, saying, “Thus saith the Lord: Hearken not to the words of your prophets who prophesy unto you, saying, ‘Behold, the vessels of the Lord’S house shall now shortly be brought again from Babylon’; for they prophesy a lie unto you.

— also Jeremiah spoke to the priests, and to all this people, from the court of the Temple, and spoke to the priests that were ministering there, who had a special concern in what he had to say especially the vessels of the Temple;

— behold, your false prophets claimed the vessels of the Lord’s house shall now shortly be brought back from Babylon; which were carried there, both in the times of Jehoiakim, and Jeconiah, II Chronicles 36:7; these vessels carried off would be returned; that the king of Babylon, would send them back.

¹⁷Hearken not unto them: serve the king of Babylon, and live. Why should this city be laid waste?

¹⁸ But if they are prophets, and if the word of the Lord is with them, let them now make intercession to the Lord of hosts, that the vessels which are left in the house of the Lord and in the house of the king of Judah, and at Jerusalem go not to Babylon.

— that the vessels which are left in the house of the Lord, and in the palace of the king of Judah in Jerusalem, go not to Babylon; instead of prophesying about their return, let them pray for the preservation and continuance of what are left, that they do not go also; of which there was great danger of following the same route of being taken away to Babylon,

— yea, certainty, in case of non-submission to and rebellion against the king of Babylon; there were some vessels of the sanctuary as well as others in the king’s palace and in the houses of the noble and rich men in Jerusalem.

¹⁹ For thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the pillars, and concerning the sea, and concerning the bases, and concerning the residue of the vessels that remain in this city, — for thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the pillars of brass that stood in the Temple; the one called Boaz, and the other Jachin, 1 Kings 7:15;

— and concerning the sea of molten brass, which stood upon twelve oxen, 1 Kings 7:23; and concerning the bases: the ten bases, which also were made of brass, 1 Kings 7:27; and concerning the residue of the vessels that remain in this city; in the king’s palace, and in the houses of the noblemen and wealthy of Jerusalem.

²⁰ which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took not when he carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, from Jerusalem to Babylon, and all the nobles of Judah and Jerusalem”

— which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took not; for he seems only to have taken the vessels of gold and silver, and left the vessels of brass, as the above were; II Kings 24:13;

— when he carried away captive Jeconiah, the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, from Jerusalem to Babylon and all the nobles of Judah and Jerusalem; II Kings 24:12.

²¹ yea, thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning the vessels that remain in the house of the Lord, and in the house of the king of Judah and of Jerusalem:

²² ‘They shall be carried to Babylon, and there shall they be until the day that I visit them,’ saith the Lord. ‘Then will I bring them up, and restore them to this place.’” — they, too, shall be carried to Babylon; as they were; and with others, there is a particular account in II Kings 25:13;

— and there shall be until the day that I visit them, saith to the Lord; the Chaldeans in a way of wrath, and the Jews as captives and slaves; which was at the end of the seventy years’ captivity; and so long the vessels of the sanctuary continued there; here we read of them as in use the very night that Belshazzar was slain, and Babylon taken, Daniel 5:2;

— then will I bring them up, and restore them to this place; which was fulfilled when the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia to give leave to the Jews to return to their own land, and rebuild their Temple; and at the same time delivered into the hands of Sheshbazzar, to the prince of Judah, the vessels of the Temple, Ezra 1:1.

The Septuagint of this chapter 27 is very different; I’ll have it below for a seperate study:

¹The Word of the Lord which He spoke against Babylon.

²Proclaim ye among the Gentiles, and cause the tidings to be heard, and suppress them not: say ye, Babylon is taken, Belus is confounded; the fearless, the luxurious Mærodach is delivered up. ³For a nation has come up against her from the north, he shall utterly ravage her land, and there shall be none to dwell in it, neither man nor beast.

⁴In those days, and at that time, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Juda together; they shall proceed, weeping as they go, seeking the Lord their God. ⁵They shall ask the way till they come to Sion, for that way shall they set their face; and they shall come and flee for refuge to the Lord their God; for the everlasting covenant shall not be forgotten.

⁶My people have been lost sheep: their shepherds thrust them out, they caused them to wander on the mountains: they went from mountain to hill, they forgot their resting-place. ⁷All that found them consumed them: their enemies said, Let us not leave them alone, because they have sinned against the Lord: he that gathered their fathers had a pasture of righteousness.

⁸Flee ye out of the midst of Babylon, and from the land of the Chaldeans, and go forth, and be as serpents before sleep. ⁹For, behold, I stir up against Babylon the gatherings of nations out of the land of the north; and they shall set themselves in array against her: thence shall she be taken, as the dart of an expert warrior shall not return empty. ¹⁰And Chaldea shall be a spoil: all that spoil her shall be satisfied.

¹¹Because ye rejoiced, and boasted, while plundering mine heritage; because ye exulted as calves in the grass, and pushed with the horn as bulls. ¹²Your mother is greatly ashamed; your mother that bore you for prosperity is confounded: she is the last of the nations, desolate, ¹³by reason of the Lord’s anger: it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be all a desolation; and every one that passes through Babylon shall scowl, and they shall hiss at all her plague.

¹⁴Set yourselves in array against Babylon round about, all ye that bend the bow; shoot at her, spare not your arrows, ¹⁵and prevail against her: her hands are weakened, her bulwarks are fallen, and her wall is broken down: for it is vengeance from God: take vengeance upon her; as she has done, do to her. ¹⁶Utterly destroy seed out of Babylon, and him that holds a sickle in time of harvest: for fear of the Grecian sword, they shall return every one to his people, and every one shall flee to his own land.

¹⁷Israel is a wandering sheep; the lions have driven him out: the king of Assyria first devoured him, and afterward this king of Babylon has gnawed his bones. ¹⁸Therefore thus saith the Lord; Behold, I will take vengeance on the king of Babylon, and upon his land, as I took vengeance on the king of Assyria. ¹⁹And I will restore Israel to his pasture, and he shall feed on Carmel and on mount Ephraim and in Galaad, and his soul shall be satisfied. ²⁰In those days, and at that time, they shall seek for the iniquity of Israel, and there shall be none; and for the sins of Juda, and they shall not be found: for I will be merciful to them that are left ²¹on the land, saith the Lord.

Go up against it roughly, and against them that dwell on it: avenge, O sword, and destroy utterly, saith the Lord, and do according to all that I command thee. ²²A sound of war, and great destruction in the land of the Chaldeans! ²³How is the hammer of the whole earth broken and crushed! How is Babylon become a desolation among the nations! ²⁴They shall come upon thee, and thou shalt not know it, Babylon, that thou wilt even be taken captive: thou art found and taken, because thou didst resist the Lord.

²⁵The Lord has opened his treasury, and brought forth the weapons of his anger: for the Lord God has a work in the land of the Chaldeans. ²⁶For her times are come: open ye her storehouses: search her as a cave, and utterly destroy her: let there be no remnant of her. ²⁷Dry ye up all her fruits, and let them go down to the slaughter: woe to them! for their day is come, and the time of their retribution. ²⁸A voice of men fleeing and escaping from the land of Babylon, to declare to Sion the vengeance that comes from the Lord our God.

²⁹Summon many against Babylon, even every one that bends the bow: camp against her round about; let no one of her people escape: render to her according to her works; according to all that she has done, do to her: for she has resisted the Lord, the Holy God of Israel. ³⁰Therefore shall her young men fall in the streets, and all her warriors shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

³¹Behold, I am against thee the haughty one, saith the Lord: for thy day is come, and the time of thy retribution. ³²And thy pride shall fail, and fall, and there shall be no one to set it up again: and I will kindle a fire in her forest, and it shall devour all things round about her.

³³Thus saith the Lord; The children of Israel and the children of Juda have been oppressed: all they that have taken them captive have oppressed them together; for they would not let them go. ³⁴But their Redeemer is strong; the Lord Almighty is his name: he will enter into judgment with his adversaries, that he may destroy the earth; ³⁵and he will sharpen a sword against the Chaldeans, and against the inhabitants of Babylon, and upon her nobles and upon her wise men; ³⁶a sword upon her warriors, and they shall be weakened: a sword upon their horses, and upon their chariots: ³⁷a sword upon their warriors, and upon the mixed people in the midst of her; and they shall be as women: a sword upon the treasures, and they shall be scattered upon her water, ³⁸and they shall be ashamed: for it is a land of graven images; and in the islands, where they boasted. ³⁹Therefore shall idols dwell in the islands, and the young of monsters shall dwell in it: it shall not be inhabited any more for ever. ⁴⁰As God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities bordering upon them, saith the Lord: no man shall dwell there, and no son of man shall sojourn there.

⁴¹Behold, a people comes from the north, and a great nation, and many kings shall be stirred up from the end of the earth; holding bow and dagger: ⁴²the people is fierce, and will have no mercy: their voices shall sound as the sea, they shall ride upon horses, prepared for war, like fire, against thee, O daughter of Babylon. ⁴³The king of Babylon heard the sound of them, and his hands were enfeebled: anguish overcame him, pangs as of a woman in travail. ⁴⁴Behold, he shall come up as a lion from Jordan to Gæthan; for I will speedily drive them from her, and I will set all the youths against her: for who is like me? and who will resist me? and who is this shepherd who will stand before me?

⁴⁵Therefore hear ye the counsel of the Lord, which he has taken against Babylon; and his devices, which he has devised upon the Chaldeans inhabiting it: surely lambs of their flock shall be destroyed: surely pasture shall be cut off from them. ⁴⁶For at the sound of the taking of Babylon the earth shall quake, and a cry shall be heard among the nations.

Jeremiah 28

¹And it came to pass the same year, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year and in the fifth month, that Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet, who was of Gibeon, spoke unto me in the house of the Lord in the presence of the priests and of all the people, saying,

— since Zedekiah ruled for 12 years, his fourth could still be rendered the beginning of his reign, which would be around 594 BC;

— or; it was the fourth of Zedekiah’s reign, the same year in which he paid a visit to the king of Babylon, Jeremiah 51:59; there in Babylon, Zedekiah had his kingdom was confirmed to him, and was even enlarged, and was made king over five neighbouring kings; and so this, though the fourth of his reign over Judah, was the first of his enlarged dominions.

— Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet; the false prophet from Gibeon, as the Targum calls him; spoke unto him in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests, and of all the people; he came to the Temple where Jeremiah was to confront him; the priests and all the people being present;

— the land Gibeon was allocated to the tribe of Benjamin; but Gibeonite may not even be Israelites, but one of the Canaanites who deceived Joshua into making a covenant with them so they may live, and not wiped out; when Joshua found out he condemned them to be hewers of wood and a drawers of water (Joshua 9:21, 23).

²“Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying, ‘I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. — thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; pretending on using the language of the true prophets,

³ Within two full years will I bring back into this place all the vessels of the Lord’S house that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried them to Babylon. — within two full years; or as the Targum says, “In the span of two years,” or, at the end of two years;

— what the false prophets before had said would be done in a very little time; a very short time; in comparison of the seventy years that Jeremiah had spoken of, Jeremiah 25:11;

— will God bring again into this place all the vessels of the Temple that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place; where he was; namely, all such vessels as before this time had been taken by him, both in Jehoiakim’s reign and at the captivity of Jeconiah.

⁴ And I will bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, with all the captives of Judah who went into Babylon,’ saith the Lord; ‘for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’”

— and God will bring again to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah; this he knew would please the people, who looked upon Zedekiah only as a vessel to the king of Babylon, and not properly their king;

— with all the captives of Judah that went into Babylon, saith the Lord; the princes, officers and others that should be living at the time: for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon; weaken his power over other nations, and particularly deliver the king of Judah from his bondage.

⁵Then the prophet Jeremiah said unto the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and in the presence of all the people who stood in the house of the Lord,

⁶ even the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen. The Lord do so. The Lord perform thy words which thou hast prophesied, to bring back the vessels of the Lord’S house and all that is carried away captive from Babylon into this place.

— even the prophet Jeremiah said, Amen; or “so be it”- he wished it might be so as Hananiah had said, if it was the will of God; as a prophet he knew it could not be;

— to bring again the vessels of the Lord’s house from Babylon into this place, Jerusalem; as a priest, this must be very desirable to Jeremiah, and the Jews; being a priest, he should eat of the holy things; when Hananiah, being a Gibeonite, would be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to him (Joshua 9:21, 23).

⁷ Nevertheless hear thou now this word that I speak in thine ears and in the ears of all the people:

⁸ The prophets that have been before me and before thee of old prophesied both against many countries and against great kingdoms, of war and of evil and of pestilence.

— the prophets that have been before me and before thee, such as Isaiah, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and others: these prophesied both against many countries and against great kingdoms; as Egypt, Babylon, Syria, Ethiopia and Moab as Isaiah did.

⁹ The prophet who prophesieth of peace, when the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known that the Lord hath truly sent him.”

¹⁰Then Hananiah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah’s neck, and broke it. — the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah’s neck; which he wore as a symbol of the subjection of Judea and other nations to the king of Babylon;

— but now he took the prophet’s yoke from his neck; and broke it; being made of wood, as it afterwards appears and so might easily be broken.

¹¹ And Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the people, saying, “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years.’” And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

— thus saith the Lord where the Lord has not spoken; hence taking his name in vain; even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations, within the space of two years; the time he had fixed for the bringing back of the vessels of the sanctuary, Jeremiah 28:3;

— and Jeremiah went his way; showing his dissent from him, and his detestation of his lies and blasphemies; and prudently withdrawing to prevent riots and tumults; returning no answer till he had received one from the Lord himself.

¹² Then the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the prophet (after Hananiah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah), saying,

¹³ “Go and tell Hananiah, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Thou hast broken the yokes of wood, but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron. — thou hast broken the yokes of wood: or “bonds” or “the thongs” with which the yokes of wood were bound and fastened;

¹⁴ For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and they shall serve him; and I have given him the beasts of the field also.’”

— that they may serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and they shall serve him; directly contrary to what Hananiah had prophesied, and I have given him the beasts of the field also;

— as God had said he would, Jeremiah 27:6; and which is repeated, to show that the whole would be punctually fulfilled; that not only those nations, the men, the inhabitants of them, would be delivered to him; but even the very cattle, and all that belonged to them.

¹⁵ Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hananiah the prophet, “Hear now, Hananiah, the Lord hath not sent thee, but thou makest this people to trust in a lie.

¹⁶ Therefore thus saith the Lord: ‘Behold, I will cast thee from off the face of the earth. This year thou shalt die, because thou hast taught rebellion against the Lord.’” — behold, I will cast thee from off the face of the earth; with the utmost indignation and abhorrence,

— as not worthy to live upon it: it signifies that he should die, and that not a natural, but violent death, by the immediate hand of God, by some judgement upon him; and so be by force taken off the earth and buried in it and be no more seen on it;

— this year thou shalt die; within the same year, reckoning from this time; so that, had he died any time within twelve months from hence, it would have been sufficient to have verified the prophecy:

— because thou hast taught rebellion against the Lord; to despise his word by his prophet Jeremiah; to contradict his will; to refuse subjection to the king of Babylon; to neglect his instructions, directions and exhortations; and to believe a lie.

¹⁷ So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month. — in the seventh month: it was two months after he had prophesied; for it was in the fifth month that he prophesied and in the seventh he died.

The Septuagint of this chapter 28 is very different; I’ll have it below for a seperate study:

¹Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I stir up against Babylon, and against the Chaldeans dwelling therein, a deadly burning wind. ²And I will send forth against Babylon spoilers, and they shall spoil her, and shall ravage her land. Woe to Babylon round about her in the day of her affliction. ³Let the archer bend his bow, and him that has armour put it on: and spare ye not her young men, but destroy ye all her host. ⁴And slain men shall fall in the land of the Chaldeans, and men pierced through shall fall without it.

⁵For Israel and Juda have not been forsaken of their God, of the Lord Almighty; whereas their land was filled with iniquity against the holy things of Israel. ⁶Flee ye out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every one his soul: and be not overthrown in her iniquity; for it is the time of her retribution from the Lord; he is rendering to her a recompence. ⁷Babylon has been a golden cup in the Lord’s hand, causing all the earth to be drunken: the nations have drunk of her wine; therefore they were shaken. ⁸And Babylon is fallen suddenly, and is broken to pieces: lament for her; take balm for her deadly wound, if by any means she may be healed. ⁹We tried to heal Babylon, but she was not healed: let us forsake her, and depart every one to his own country: for her judgment has reached to the heaven, it has mounted up to the stars. ¹⁰The Lord has brought forth his judgment: come, and let us declare in Sion the works of the Lord our God.

¹¹Prepare the arrows; fill the quivers: the Lord has stirred up the spirit of the king of the Medes: for his wrath is against Babylon, to destroy it utterly; for it is the Lord’s vengeance, it is the vengeance of his people. ¹²Lift up a standard on the walls of Babylon, prepare the quivers, rouse the guards, prepare the weapons: for the Lord has taken the work in hand, and will execute what he has spoken against the inhabitants of Babylon, ¹³dwelling on many waters, and amidst the abundance of her treasures; thine end is come verily into thy bowels. ¹⁴For the Lord has sworn by his arm, saying, I will fill thee with men as with locusts; and they that come down shall cry against thee.

¹⁵The Lord made the earth by his power, preparing the world by his wisdom, by his understanding he stretched out the heaven. ¹⁶At his voice he makes a sound of water in the heaven, and brings up clouds from the extremity of the earth; he makes lightnings for rain, and brings light out of his treasures. ¹⁷Every man has completely lost understanding; every goldsmith is confounded because of his graven images: for they have cast false gods, there is no breath in them. ¹⁸They are vain works, objects of scorn; in the time of their visitation they shall perish. ¹⁹Not such is Jacob’s portion; for he that formed all things, he is his inheritance; the Lord is his name.

²⁰Thou scatterest for me the weapons of war: and I will scatter nations by thee, and will destroy kings by means of thee. ²¹And by thee I will scatter the horse and his rider; and by thee I will scatter chariots and them that ride in them. ²²And by thee I will scatter youth and maid; and by thee I will scatter man and woman. ²³And by thee I will scatter the shepherd and his flock; and by thee I will scatter the husbandman and his husbandry; and by thee I will scatter leaders and the captains. ²⁴And I will recompense to Babylon and to all the Chaldeans that dwell there all their mischiefs that they have done to Sion before your eyes, saith the Lord.

²⁵Behold, I am against thee, the ruined mountain, that destroys the whole earth; and I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and will roll thee down upon the rocks, and will make thee as a burnt mountain. ²⁶And they shall not take from thee a stone for a corner, nor a stone for a foundation: for thou shalt be a desolation for ever, saith the Lord.

²⁷Lift up a standard in the land, sound the trumpet among the nations, consecrate the nations against her, raise up kings against her by me, and that for the people of Achanaz; set against her engines of war; bring up against her horses as a multitude of locusts. ²⁸Bring up nations against her, even the king of the Medes and of the whole earth, his rulers, and all his captains. ²⁹The earth has quaked and been troubled, because the purpose of the Lord has risen up against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation, and uninhabitable.

³⁰The warrior of Babylon has failed to fight; they shall sit there in the siege; their power is broken; they are become like women; her tabernacles have been set on fire; her bars are broken. ³¹One shall rush, running to meet another runner, and one shall go with tidings to meet another with tidings, to bring tidings to the king of Babylon, that his city is taken. ³²At the end of his passages they were taken, and his cisterns they have burnt with fire, and his warriors are going forth.

³³For thus saith the Lord, The houses of the king of Babylon shall be threshed as a floor in the season; yet a little while, and her harvest shall come.

³⁴He has devoured me, he has torn me asunder, airy darkness has come upon me; Nabuchodonosor king of Babylon has swallowed me up, as a dragon has he filled his belly with my delicacies. ³⁵My troubles and my distresses have driven me out into Babylon, shall she that dwells in Sion say; and my blood shall be upon the Chaldeans dwelling there, shall Jerusalem say.

³⁶Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will judge thine adversary, and I will execute vengeance for thee; and I will waste her sea, and dry up her fountain. ³⁷And Babylon shall be a desolation, and shall not be inhabited. ³⁸For they rose up together as lions, and as lions’ whelps. ³⁹In their heat I will give them a draught, and make them drunk, that they may be stupified, and sleep an everlasting sleep, and not awake, saith the Lord. ⁴⁰And bring thou them down as lambs to the slaughter, and rams with kids.

⁴¹How has the beast of all the earth been taken and caught in a snare! how has Babylon become a desolation among the nations! ⁴²The sea has come up upon Babylon with the sound of its waves, and she is covered. ⁴³Her cities are become like a dry and trackless land; not so much as one man shall dwell in it, neither shall a son of man lodge in it. ⁴⁴And I will take vengeance on Babylon, and bring forth out of her mouth what she has swallowed down, and the nations shall no more be gathered to her: ⁴⁹and in Babylon the slain men of all the earth shall fall. ⁵⁰Go forth of the land, ye that escape, and stay not; ye that are afar off, remember the Lord, and let Jerusalem come into your mind. ⁵¹We are ashamed, because we have heard our reproach; disgrace has covered our face; aliens are come into our sanctuary, even into the house of the Lord.

⁵²Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will take vengeance upon her graven images: and slain men shall fall in all her land. ⁵³For though Babylon should go up as the heaven, and though she should strengthen her walls with her power, from me shall come they that shall destroy her, saith the Lord. ⁵⁴A sound of a cry in Babylon, and great destruction in the land of the Chaldeans: ⁵⁵for the Lord has utterly destroyed Babylon, and cut off from her the great voice sounding as many waters: he has consigned her voice to destruction. ⁵⁶For distress has come upon Babylon, her warriors are taken, their bows are useless: for God recompenses them. ⁵⁷The Lord recompenses, and will make her leaders and her wise men and her captains completely drunk, saith the King, the Lord Almighty is his name.

⁵⁸Thus saith the Lord, The wall of Babylon was made broad, but it shall be completely broken down, and her high gates shall be burnt with fire; and the peoples shall not labour in vain, nor the nations fail in their rule.

⁵⁹The Word which the Lord commanded the Prophet Jeremias to say to Saræas son of Nerias, son of Maasæas, when he went from Sedekias king of Juda to Babylon, in the fourth year of his reign. And Saræas was over the bounties. ⁶⁰And Jeremias wrote in a book all the evils which should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon. ⁶¹And Jeremias said to Saræas, When thou art come to Babylon, and shalt see and read all these words; ⁶²then thou shalt say, O Lord God, thou hast spoken against this place, to destroy it, and that there should be none to dwell in it, neither man nor beast; for it shall be a desolation for ever. ⁶³And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt cease from reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone upon it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates; ⁶⁴and shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and not rise, because of the evils which I bring upon it.

Posted in Jeremiah

Nobel Committee Sleeping or blind?

•October 17, 2025 • Leave a Comment

C’mon Nobel Committee, Zhu Rongji is 96, do the right thing! Or the economics prize has became a bullshit award?

If he dies without the prize in economics, the committee should just disband, having proven itself utterly irrelevant and inconsequential

Professor ZHU Rongji, Founding Dean of Tsinghua School of Economics and Management and former premier of China’s State Council

AsiaTimes • October 15, 2025

British economist John Ross impishly told one interviewer that if the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences were honest, the Nobel Prize in Economics would have been awarded to Chinese economists every year for the past four decades.

Objectively, he has a point. China’s real GDP is 50 times what it was since reform and opening up began in 1978, far outpacing growth rates in Japan and the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) during their miracle decades.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, a neat little math tool whose most primary use case is to match US and Canadian medical students with residency programs.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which, while clever, wasn’t necessary for options markets. Laureates Myron Scholes and Robert Merton did manage to blow up mega hedge fund LTCM in 1998, just a year after winning their Nobel Prize, when interest rates failed to follow their model.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, a self-congratulatory political theory on Western institutions, a theory surely belied by China’s spectacular growth and the West’s long malaise.

John Ross is now not alone. Economist Adam Tooze of Columbia University has suggested that the Nobel Prize in Economics be given to Chinese policy makers because China’s growth has been the most profound economic story of our lifetime.

Some would argue that the Nobel Prize in economics is for academic researchers, not practitioners. A fair point, perhaps, if such a rule existed. But in fact, we are unaware of such a rule and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Academy have a long history of arbitrarily changing the scope and definition of Nobel Prizes. Artificial intelligence for physics? What? Bob Dylan for literature? Huh?

The Nobel Prize in Economics has always been the bastard child of the Nobel litter. Not among the original five prizes established by Alfred Nobel (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace) upon his death in 1896, the economics prize was tacked on in 1969 by Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, as a “Prize in Economic Science dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Over the years, the Nobel Prize in economics has gone through 11 name changes from simplifying down to “Prize in Economic Science” to “Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel” to “Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences” to today’s unwieldy “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Sometimes it is “economic science.” Sometimes it is “economic sciences,” as in plural. Why? Who knows? The economics prize has never been comfortable in its own skin. Members of the Nobel family have voiced opposition to the prize, stating that Alfred Nobel had no intention of establishing an economics prize and the creation of one using the Nobel name is a dirty trick by economists to elevate their profession.

At the awards banquet in 1974, winner Friedrich Hayek criticized the award:

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.

To put it more succinctly, he was calling the economics prize a bullshit award. That award has gone through various revisions trying to remain relevant and consequential. The 1994 prize, given to mathematician John Nash, caused much internal consternation. The scope of the prize was subsequently expanded to social sciences in general, opening up the prize to political science, psychology and sociology. Political scientists, psychologists and economic historians have all become Nobel laureates.

The Nobel Committee often does a better job identifying impactful discoveries than anointing deserving laureates. While DNA structure, the polio vaccine, magnetic resonance imaging, CRISPR gene editing and quantum entanglement are all deserving fields, the naming of laureates garnered controversy, accusations and hurt feelings. Such are the hazards of bestowing honors by committee.

Great contributions have also gone unrecognized when candidates had the audacity to die before the Nobel Committee got around to reviewing their nominations. Mendeleev was not recognized for the periodic table. Leo Tolstoy was not recognized for War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 before the Nobel Foundation could honor him. He received, instead, a moment of silence from the Nobel Committee, which declared that there was “no suitable living candidate” for that year.

The living laureate has been a feature of the Nobel Prize since its inception. Alfred Nobel intended the prize to be aspirational in a human lifetime. While this has resulted in deserving cases going unrecognized, the honor it bestows on the living is meant to encourage aspirants.

China’s economic woes cry out for Zhu Rongji’s spirit of bold reform

Zhu Rongji, China’s premier from 1998 to 2003, is 96 years old. Time is running out. The first generation has already left us. Chen Yun, architect of China’s economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, died in 1995. Economist Yu Guangyuan, proponent of the socialist market-oriented economic system, died in 2013.

The China socialist market system is long overdue for its Nobel. And no greater living figure is more deserving than Zhu Rongji. As governor of the People’s Bank of China in the 1990’s, Zhu Rongji reined in runaway inflation with tough austerity measures. As premier, Zhu forced through painful but necessary restructuring of state owned enterprises. Zhu also shepherded China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization in 2001, extending China’s miracle growth for two more decades.

Most heroic of all, Zhu insisted on maintaining the Rmb peg during the Asian financial crisis, putting a net under the freefalling economies of China’s neighbors.

Zhu Rongji did all of the above while navigating the treacherous politics of taking cookies away from the powers that be. Zhu stared down hundreds, if not thousands, of officials who had knives drawn for him – figuratively certainty, literally probably – saying:

To fight corruption one must go after the tiger first, then the wolf. There will be absolutely no tolerance for the tiger. Prepare 100 caskets and leave one for me. I’m ready to perish together in this fight if it brings the nation long-term economic stability and the public’s trust in our government.

As a practitioner, Zhu Rongji understood, in ways academic Nobel laureates cannot, that there was only one economic policy that truly mattered. Zhu knew in his bones that corruption was a cancer that cannot be tolerated:

My only hope is that after I leave public service, the Chinese people will think of me in one way: that he was a clean official, not a corrupt one. I will be immensely satisfied with that judgment alone. But if they are feeling particularly generous and say that Zhu Rongji got some real things done while in office, then I’ll thank heaven and earth.

Most Chinese would judge Zhu Rongji’s service generously. His accomplishments and methods, as part of China’s socialist market system, are far more relevant for developing countries to study than the Black-Scholes model or airy-fairy theories on innovation.

If Zhu Rongji dies without a Nobel Prize in economics, the committee should just disband. They would have proven themselves to be utterly irrelevant and inconsequential. But hey, that math tool to match medical students with residencies is really really clever.

Posted in China

Jeremiah (Ch 25-26)

•October 16, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20;

In the “latter days” that is, in the then distant future, this could mean that only in our days, could we understand it clearly, viz. that the calamities which would have come upon us are the results of divine judgement upon our sins; then and only after experiencing them could we humans understand these things fully.

Jeremiah 25

The year in that Jeremiah began to prophesy, Jeremiah 1:2 in the thirteenth year of Josiah reign would be around 628 BC, and he preached for the last 19 years of Josiah’s life, until 609 BC when Josiah died. By the time Zedekiah’s reign ended in 586 BC by being exiled to Babylon, Jeremiah’s prophesying would have lasted some 42 years.

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (that was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), — the fourth year of Jehoiakim would be perhaps 606 BC or whereabout;

— before the prophet Jeremiah was sent to the shepherds, elders and kings of Judah only, Jeremiah 23 and 24; now his message is to all the people of Judah.

² which Jeremiah the prophet spoke unto all the people of Judah and to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying: — which Jeremiah the prophet spoke “unto all the people of Judah” perhaps during one of the three feasts: at Passover, Pentecost, or Tabernacles; at which all the males appeared in Jerusalem as commanded.

³ From the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, even unto this day (that is, the three and twentieth year), the word of the Lord hath come unto me, and I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye have not hearkened.

— from the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, even unto this day; the year in which Jeremiah began to prophesy, Jeremiah 1:2; which would be around 628 BC.

⁴ And the Lord hath sent unto you all His servants the prophets, rising early and sending them; but ye have not hearkened, nor inclined your ear to hear. — but ye have not hearkened; they remained stiffnecked; turned a deaf ear to God; however, did not obey or act as they were directed and exhorted to.

⁵ They said, “Turn ye again now every one from his evil way and from the evil of your doings, and dwell in the land that the Lord hath given unto you and to your fathers for ever and ever.

— turn ye again now everyone from his evil way, and from the evil of their doings; repent of sins; particularly their adulteries, lyings and idolatries (Jeremiah 23), to which they were prone to, and were often mentioned.

⁶ And go not after other gods to serve them and to worship them, and provoke Me not to anger with the works of your hands; and I will do you no hurt.

— by Sword, or Famine, or Pestilence or Captivity; provided they forsook their adulteries, lyings and idolatrous worship; God does not hurt his true worshippers; yea, he makes all things work together for their good; and God will do them no hurt;

⁷ Yet ye have not hearkened unto Me,” saith the Lord, “that ye might provoke Me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt.”

⁸ Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Because ye have not heard My words,

⁹ behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,” saith the Lord, “and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them and make them an astonishment and a hissing and perpetual desolations.

— one of the three times God describes Nebuchadnezzar as “my servant” Jeremiah 25:9,27:6,43:10;

— Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon is God’s servant! though a great king, he was a servant of the Lord of hosts; a pawn both as a creature of his make, and as a king that ruled under him; and as he was an instrument in his hand to chastise his people the Jews;

— and against all these nations round about; Egypt and others; partly so that the Jews could have no help from them; nor an alliance with them;

— and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, an hissing and perpetual desolations; both the Jews and their neighbours; who should be an astonishment to some and a hissing to others and remain desolate for a long time; even till the seventy years had ended.

¹⁰ Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the candle.

¹¹ And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. — and these other nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years;

— both the Jews, and other nations of Egypt, reckoning from the date of this prophecy, the fourth year of Jehoiakim’s reign, when Daniel and others were carried captive, Daniel 1:1; to the first year of Cyrus.

¹² And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,” saith the Lord, “for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations. — after captivity for seventy years;

— then God will punish the king of Babylon, and Babylon itself, for their iniquity; the king for his tyranny, and the nation for their lying, adultery and idolatry; and all for these and other sins they were guilty of.

¹³ And I will bring upon that land all My words which I have pronounced against it, even all that is written in this book, which Jeremiah hath prophesied against all the nations.

— even all that is written in this book, which Jeremiah hath prophesied against all the other nations: the Egyptians, Philistines, Lebanon (Phoenicians: Tyre and Sidon), Moabites, Edomites, Arabians, Persians, and also the Babylonians.

¹⁴ For many nations and great kings shall serve themselves by them also; and I will recompense them according to their deeds and according to the works of their own hands.”

— for many nations and great kings shall make them their servants; take their cities, seize their kingdoms, spoil them of their wealth and riches, and bring them into servitude:

— these “many nations” which should and did all this, first the Chaldaeans, then the Medes and Persians, and those that were subject to them or their allies in such expeditions; and the “great kings” were Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Darius.

¹⁵ For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me: “Take the wine cup of this fury at My hand, and cause all the nations to whom I send thee to drink it.

— take the wine cup of this fury at my hand; in a vision the Lord appeared to Jeremiah with a cup of wine in his hand, which he bid him take of him. It is usual in Scripture for the judgements of God on men to be signified by a cup of hot and intoxicating liquor:

“Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem, who hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury; thou hast drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out” Isaiah 51:17

¹⁶ And they shall drink and be moved, and be mad because of the sword that I will send among them.” — the evil and the good events of life are often represented in Scripture as cups;

— and they shall drink and be mad; the judgements foretold shall come upon all; which as intoxicating liquor has on drunken persons, will make them shake and tremble, and reel to and fro, and toss and tumble about, and behave like madmen.

¹⁷ Then took I the cup at the Lord’S hand, and made all the nations to drink, unto whom the Lord had sent me, — and made all the nations to drink, a hint of the endtime “all” unto whom, the Lord had sent me;

— as an emblem of what wrath would come upon them, and they should drink deep of; but this was done in vision, and also in prophecy; the prophet proclaiming the will of God, all his judgements upon the nations, and what would befall them.

¹⁸ to wit: Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, and the kings thereof and the princes thereof, to make them a desolation, an astonishment, a hissing and a curse, as it is this day;

— to make all nations a desolation, an hissing and a curse; to strip them of their crowns and kingdom, of their wealth and riche; so that they became an astonishment to some, to see the change that was made in them; and were hissed and cursed.

¹⁹ Pharaoh king of Egypt, and his servants, and his princes, and all his people; — Pharaoh king of Egypt; who is mentioned first after the kings of Judah; not only because the Jews were in alliance with Egypt, and trusted to them;

— and therefore this is to show the vanity of their confidence and dependence; because the judgements of God first took place on the king of Egypt; for in this very year, in which this prophecy was delivered, Pharaohnecho king of Egypt was smitten by Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah 46:2.

²⁰ and all the mingled people, and all the kings of the land of Uz, and all the kings of the land of the Philistines, and Ashkelon, and Gaza, and Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod.

The Septuagint on chapter 25:14-20 is different and end here for this chapter; I’ll have it here without comments:

¹⁴The Prophecies of Jeremias against the Nations of Ælam.

¹⁵Thus saith the Lord, The bow of Ælam is broken, even the chief of their power. ¹⁶And I will bring upon Ælam the four winds from the four corners of heaven, and I will disperse them toward all these winds; and there shall be no nation to which they shall not come—even the outcasts of Ælam. ¹⁷And I will put them in fear before their enemies that seek their life; and I will bring evils upon them according to my great anger; and I will send forth my sword after them, until I have utterly destroyed them. ¹⁸And I will set my throne in Ælam, and will send forth thence king and rulers. ¹⁹But it shall come to pass at the end of days, that I will turn the captivity of Ælam, saith the Lord.

²⁰In the beginning of the reign of king Sedekias, there came this word concerning Ælam.

²¹ Edom, and Moab, and the children of Ammon;

— the children of Edom, Moab and Ammon; all well known and implacable enemies of Israel; the Edomites descended from Esau; and the Moabites and Ammonites, the two descentants of Lot by his daughters. Their destruction is prophesied of in Jeremiah: chapters 48-49.

²² and all the kings of Tyre, and all the kings of Sidon, and the kings of the isles which are beyond the sea;

— and all the kings of Tyrus, and all the kings of Sidon; two very ancient cities in Phoenicia, frequently mentioned together, being near each other; their ruin were also foretold by prophet Ezekiel; chapters 26-28.

²³ Dedan, and Tema, and Buz, and all that are in the utmost corners;

²⁴ and all the kings of Arabia, and all the kings of the mingled people that dwell in the desert;

²⁵ and all the kings of Zimri, and all the kings of Elam, and all the kings of the Medes;

²⁶ and all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another, and all the kingdoms of the world which are upon the face of the earth; and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them.

— as the Targum says;

“And all the kings of the north, those near and far, one to another;”
“And all the kingdoms of the nations upon the face of the earth”
“And the king of Babylon shall drink after them” — a better translation might be “But the king of Babylon shall drink before them.”

²⁷ “Therefore thou shalt say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Drink ye and be drunken, and spew and fall, and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send among you.’ — drink ye, and be drunken, and spew, and fall, and rise no more;

— as is the case of drunken men; they drink till they are intoxicated; and they spew up what they have drunk; and fall; not only break their bones, but their necks, or fall into places where they are suffocated, where they could loose their lives.

²⁸ And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to drink, then shalt thou say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts: Ye shall certainly drink.

— then shalt thou say unto them, thus saith the Lord of hosts, ye shall certainly drink; those judgements shall certainly be inflicted; there will be no possibility of escaping, for the Lord does what he pleases with the armies of heaven over whom he has power and authority on earth.

²⁹ For lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by My name. And should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished, for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith the Lord of hosts.’

— judgement often begins at the house of God, for the correction of his people, and then to be a warning to others;

³⁰ “Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them: “‘The Lord shall roar from on high, and utter His voice from His holy habitation; He shall mightily roar upon His habitation; He shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth.

— the Lord shall roar from on high: from heaven, like a lion in violent claps of thunder; or in such dreadful dispensations of his providence, as will be very amazing and yet terrifying;

— he shall give a shout, as a thunder does, against all the inhabitants of the earth; or “answer a shout” give the onset for battle against the inhabitants of the earth, as the general of an army; which is accompanied with a shout, a thunder.

³¹ A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth, for the Lord hath a controversy with the nations. He will plead with all flesh; He will give them that are wicked to the sword,’” saith the Lord.

— a noise shall come to the ends of the earth; the report of these calamities and confusions shall reach the most distant countries; for the Lord hath a controversy with the nations God enters into judgement with men for their impieties (lack of piety or reverence for God).

³² Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth.” — thus saith the Lord of hosts, behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation; Rashi: whom I incite against one another; begin in one nation, and then go on to another;

— and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth; or “from the sides of it” that is, “from the ends of it” as the Targum paraphrases it, “Behold, evil goes forth from nation to nation, and great peoples shall come in the tumult of the sword upon the earth.”

³³ And the slain of the Lord shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth. They shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the ground.

— shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; and like Covid-19 not that this should be at one and the same time; for there never was such a time, that there was such a general slaughter in the world, that the slain should reach from one end to the other;

— something many times worse that Covid-19 would come again and should go to all nations, meant by “at that day” the slain of the Lord would be in all parts of the world; or that, according to his will, there would be a great slaughter everywhere as the cup went round, or the sword was sent, first ravaging one country and then another.

³⁴ Howl, ye shepherds, and cry; and wallow yourselves in the ashes, ye leaders of the flock; for the days of your slaughter and of your dispersions are accomplished, and ye shall fall like a pleasant vessel.

— howl; false prophets and false shepherd play a prominent role in God’s rebuke;

— the Targum says, “howl, ye kings, and cry” and the rulers, princes and governors of the nations before threatened with destruction are meant; who are here called upon to lamentation and mourning for the ruin and loss of their kingdoms.

³⁵ And the shepherds shall have no way to flee, nor the leaders of the flock to escape. — and false shepherds shall have no way to flee; Or “and flight shall perish from the shepherds” though they may attempt it, they shall not be able to accomplish it;

— neither the dignity of their princes or influential leaders, the greatness of their power, or the abundance of their riches, would make a way for them; their enemies being so numerous, powerful and watchful.

³⁶ A voice of the cry of the shepherds, and a howling of the leaders of the flock shall be heard; for the Lord hath despoiled their pasture. — a voice of the cry of their false shepherds; those great calamities indeed that strike such a terror upon great men, and put them into this mighty consternation;

— for the Lord hath spoiled their pastures; in which they fed themselves; the spoiling of this makes them cry out; the prophet Jeremiah indicates to their great fright into which shepherds are put when they hear a roaring lion coming toward them, and find that neither they nor their flocks can escape.

³⁷And the peaceable habitations are cut down because of the fierce anger of the Lord. — and the peaceable habitations are cut down; shall now be exposed to all the calamities of war, this dismantles entire systems of order and comfort.

³⁸ He hath forsaken His covert as the lion; for their land is desolate because of the fierceness of the Oppressor, and because of His fierce anger. — their king hath forsaken his covert as a lion; some understand of God leaving Jerusalem, or the Temple, where he dwelt;

— who, while he made it his residence, protected it; but when he forsook it, it became exposed to the enemy; that is true with the destruction of the first temple by Nebuchadnezzar; but also true with the destruction of the second temple; that is, by the Romans;

— because of the fierceness of the oppressor; the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, and later by Hadrian; or the “oppressing sword” as some supply it and so the Targum says, “from before the sword of the enemy.”

Jeremiah 26

¹ In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, came this word from the Lord, saying, — in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim; so the prophecy of this chapter were before the preceding chapter;

— this in the beginning of Jehoiakim’s reign; so here is another flashback. Josiah was dead, Jehoahaz his son reigned for three months, then deposed by Pharaohnecho king of Egypt; and this Jehoiakim, another son of Josiah, also called Eliakim, was set on the throne.

² “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Stand in the court of the Lord’S house, and speak unto all the cities of Judah, which come to worship in the Lord’S house, all the words that I command thee to speak unto them; diminish not a word.

— and speak to all the inhabitants of Judah; not only those that dwelt at Jerusalem but also to the smaller cities of Judah; for what he was to say concerned them all, they all have sinned and needed repentance; without which they would be involved in the general calamity of the nation:

— which come to worship in the Lord’s house; as they did three times in the year, at the feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles; and this could be the last of these, when this prophecy was to be delivered.

³ It may so be they will hearken and turn every man from his evil way, that I may repent Me of the evil which I purpose to do unto them because of the evil of their doings.’ — “because of the evil of their doings” ~ more specifically: their adulteries, lyings and idolatries;

⁴ And thou shalt say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord: If ye will not hearken to Me, to walk in My law which I have set before you,

⁵ to hearken to the words of My servants the prophets whom I sent unto you, both rising up early and sending them, but ye have not hearkened — to hearken to the words of my servants the prophets; the interpretations they give of the law;

— the teachings they deliver; the exhortations, cautions and reproofs given by them in the name of the Lord; and therefore should be hearkened to; hearkening to the Lord himself in whose name they speak, and whose message they deliver.

⁶ then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.’” — this house like Shiloh; where the ark was until it was taken by the Philistines; and then the Lord forsook his tabernacle there, Psalms 78:60; and so he threatens to do the like to the Temple at Jerusalem, should they continue in their disobedience;

— and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth; that is, the city of Jerusalem, which should be taken up, and used proverbially in all countries; who, when they would curse anyone, should say, the Lord make thee as Jerusalem, or do unto thee as he has done to Jerusalem.

⁷ So the priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the Lord. — heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the Lord; in the Temple; in the court of Israel; they heard him out, and did not interrupt him while he was speaking;

— and having heard him, they were angry with him and were witnesses against him; they did not hear him so as to obey his words, receive his instructions and follow his directions; but they heard him with indignation, and were determined to prosecute him unto death.

⁸ Now it came to pass, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak unto all the people, that the priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, “Thou shalt surely die!

— that the priests and the false prophets and all the people took him, “Thou shalt surely die!; the priests and prophets were the leading men in this action; they stirred up the people against him and through their instigation he was seized and laid hold on;

— saying, thou shall surely die; signifying that they would bring a death charge against him, and which by the law would be death; without judge or jury; and which they would have put in execution, had not the princes of the land or the great Sanhedrin heard of it.

⁹Why hast thou prophesied in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate without an inhabitant’?” And all the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the house of the Lord.

— and all the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the Temple; besides those that were around the Temple that heard him, others, upon a rumour that he was apprehended by the priests and prophets in the Temple, got together in a mob about him: or they were “gathered to” to hear what he had to say in his own defence; but it appears afterwards that the princes were on his side, Jeremiah 26:16.

¹⁰ When the princes of Judah heard these things, then they came up from the king’s house unto the house of the Lord, and sat down in the entry of the New Gate of the Lord’S house.

— and sat down in the entry of the new gate of the Lord’s house; as a court of judicature, to hear and try the cause between the false prophet and his accusers. This gate of the temple is thought to be the upper gate, which Jotham built, II Kings 15:35;

— Rashi explains the ‘new’ gate: When Jehoiachin went in exile with some of the vessels of the house of our God, Nebuchadnezzar’s army also breached the eastern gate, but Zedekiah subsequently repaired and renewed it, hence calling it ‘new.’

¹¹ Then spoke the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, “This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.” — to these priests and false prophets, to prophesy against Jerusalem is a sin;

— for he hath prophesied against this holy city; the city of Jerusalem; saying that it should be a curse to other nations; or as they interpreted it, that it should be utterly destroyed, and become desolate and none should inhabit it.

¹² Then spoke Jeremiah unto all the princes and to all the people, saying, “The Lord sent me to prophesy against this house and against this city all the words that ye have heard.

— the Lord sent me to prophesy against this house, and against this city, all the words that ye have heard; he does not deny but that he had prophesied against the city of Jerusalem and against the Temple, and that they should both come to ruin, unless the people repented;

— but then he urges that he was sent by the Lord and that every word that he had said was ordered by the Lord; and surely was not to be blamed for doing what the Lord commanded him to do.

¹³ Therefore now amend your ways and your doings, and obey the voice of the Lord your God; and the Lord will repent of the evil that He hath pronounced against you. — unless ye amend and repent; all the evils will come to you;

¹⁴ As for me, behold, I am in your hand: do with me as seemeth good and meet unto you.

— do with me as seemeth good unto you; Jeremiah submitted to their pleasure, and should patiently endure what they thought fit to inflict upon him; it gave him no great concern whether his life was taken from him;

¹⁵ But know ye for certain that if ye put me to death, ye shall surely bring innocent blood upon yourselves and upon this city, and upon the inhabitants thereof; for truly the Lord hath sent me unto you to speak all these words in your ears.”

¹⁶ Then said the princes and all the people unto the priests and to the prophets, “This man is not worthy to die, for he hath spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God!”

— hearing Jeremiah’s testimony for themselves, the princes and all the people said unto the priests and the false prophets; saying Jeremiah was justified in what he had said and done; hence they acquitted him; against he priests and false prophets;

— yet hearing what Jeremiah had testified for himself and also the judgement of the princes, they joined with the court in an address to the priests and false prophets, who were the chief accusers, and who would fain have had him brought in guilty of death;

— that this man is not worthy to die; or “the judgement of death is not for this man” we cannot give judgement against him; he is not guilty of any crime deserving death;

— for he hath spoken in the name of the Lord our God; not in his own name; but in the name of the Lord, and by his order; and therefore was not a false, but a true prophet: his integrity and firmness of mind; the plain marks of seriousness and humility, and a disinterested view, made them conclude in his favour.

¹⁷Then rose up certain of the elders of the land, and spoke to all the assembly of the people, saying,

¹⁸ “Micah the Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and spoke to all the people of Judah, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “‘Zion shall be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.’

¹⁹ “Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death? Did he not fear the Lord, and besought the Lord, and the Lord repented of the evil which He had pronounced against them? Thus might we procure great evil against our souls.”

— did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death? no, they did not: neither the king, by his own authority; nor the Sanhedrin, the great court of judicature; they never sought to take away his life, nor sat in council about it; they never arraigned him, and much less condemned him:

— did he not fear the Lord, and besought the Lord; that is, Hezekiah; he did, as knowing that Micah was a prophet of the Lord, and sent by him; wherefore he received his prophecy with great awe and reverence, as coming from the Lord, and made his supplications to him that he would avert the judgements threatened:

— and the Lord repented (or relented) of the evil which he had pronounced against them? the king and his people, the city and the Temple; and so the threatened evil came not upon them in their days.

²⁰ And there was also a man who prophesied in the name of the Lord, Urijah the son of Shemaiah of Kirjathjearim, who prophesied against this city and against this land according to all the words of Jeremiah. — this is prophet Urijah whom we seldom heard of; he heard it from Jeremiah, hence not a true prophet;

²¹ And when Jehoiakim the king, with all his mighty men and all the princes, heard his words, the king sought to put him to death; but when Urijah heard it, he was afraid and fled, and went into Egypt.

²²And Jehoiakim the king sent men into Egypt, namely, Elnathan the son of Achbor and certain men with him into Egypt.

²³ And they fetched forth Urijah out of Egypt and brought him unto Jehoiakim the king, who slew him with the sword and cast his dead body into the graves of the common people. — they, Jehoiakim the king and all his mighty warriors, caught Urijah out of Egypt; and slew him;

²⁴Nevertheless the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah, that they should not give him into the hand of the people to put him to death. — nevertheless, the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah;

— though this instance was urged as a precedent to go by, Ahikam was one of those whom King Josiah, when struck by the words of the book of the law, who had been one of Josiah’s counsellors, who stood by Jeremiah, and used all his power, authority, and influence in his favour:

— that they should not give Jeremiah into the hand of the people to put him to death; that the Sanhedrin should not; although might incline to it; but Ahikam, having several brothers, as well as other friends, that paid a regard to his arguments and solicitations; he prevailed upon them not to give leave to the people to put Jeremiah to death;

— his son, Gedaliah, followed in his father’s steps, so that he was chosen by the Babylonians as the one to whom they committed Jeremiah for safety after taking Jerusalem.

The Septuagint on chapter 26 is very different; I’ll have it below for a seperate study:

²For Egypt, against the Power of Pharao Nechao King of Egypt, who was by the river Euphrates in Charmis, whom Nabuchodonosor king of Babylon smote in the fourth year of Joakim king of Juda.

³Take up arms and spears, and draw nigh to battle; ⁴and harness the horses: mount, ye horsemen, and stand ready in your helmets; advance the spears, and put on your breast-plates.

⁵Why do they fear, and turn back? even because their mighty men shall be slain: they have utterly fled, and being hemmed in they have not rallied, saith the Lord. ⁶Let not the swift flee, and let not the mighty man escape to the north: the forces at Euphrates are become feeble, and they have fallen.

⁷Who is this that shall come up as a river, and as rivers roll their waves? ⁸The waters of Egypt shall come up like a river: and he said, I will go up, and will cover the earth, and will destroy the dwellers in it. ⁹Mount ye the horses, prepare the chariots; go forth, ye warriors of the Ethiopians, and Libyans armed with shields; and mount, ye Lydians, bend the bow. ¹⁰And that day shall be to the Lord our God a day of vengeance, to take vengeance on his enemies: and the sword of the Lord shall devour, and be glutted, and be drunken with their blood: for the Lord has a sacrifice from the land of the north at the river Euphrates.

¹¹Go up to Galaad, and take balm for the virgin daughter of Egypt: in vain hast thou multiplied thy medicines; there is no help in thee. ¹²The nations have heard thy voice, and the land has been filled with thy cry: for the warriors have fainted fighting one against another, and both are fallen together.

¹³The Words which the Lord spoke by Jeremias, concerning the coming of the king of Babylon to smite the land of Egypt.

¹⁴Proclaim it at Magdol, and declare it at Memphis: say ye, Stand up, and prepare; for the sword has devoured thy yew-tree.

¹⁵Wherefore has Apis fled from thee? thy choice calf has not remained; for the Lord has utterly weakened him. ¹⁶And thy multitude has fainted and fallen; and each one said to his neighbour, Let us arise, and return into our country to our people, from the Grecian sword. ¹⁷Call ye the name of Pharao Nechao king of Egypt, Saon esbeie moed. ¹⁸As I live, saith the Lord God, he shall come as Itabyrion among the mountains, and as Carmel that is on the sea. ¹⁹O daughter of Egypt dwelling at home, prepare thee stuff for removing: for Memphis shall be utterly desolate, and shall be called Woe, because there are no inhabitants in it.

²⁰Egypt is a fair heifer, but destruction from the north is come upon her. ²¹Also her hired soldiers in the midst of her are as fatted calves fed in her; for they also have turned, and fled with one accord: they stood not, for the day of destruction was come upon them, and the time of their retribution. ²²Their voice is as that of a hissing serpent, for they go upon the sand; they shall come upon Egypt with axes, as men that cut wood. ²³They shall cut down her forest, saith the Lord, for their number cannot at all be conjectured, for it exceeds the locust in multitude, and they are innumerable. ²⁴The daughter of Egypt is confounded; she is delivered into the hands of a people from the north.

²⁵Behold, I will avenge Ammon her son upon Pharao, and upon them that trust in him.

²⁷But fear not thou, my servant Jacob, neither be thou alarmed, Israel: for, behold, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from their captivity; and Jacob shall return, and be at ease, and sleep, and there shall be no one to trouble him. ²⁸Fear not thou, my servant Jacob, saith the Lord; for I am with thee: she that was without fear and in luxury, has been delivered up: for I will make a full end of every nation among whom I have thrust thee forth; but I will not cause thee to fail: yet will I chastise thee in the way of judgment, and will not hold thee entirely guiltless.

Posted in Jeremiah

Jeremiah (Ch 23-24)

•October 14, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint; and to dismiss it as another testimony for spiritual inspiration and understanding, as virtually all the endtime Churches do, is an absolute disgrace.

The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. That is, the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us today from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

Hence, for ignoring the Targum as an authority for Understanding and Truth, the endtime Churches of God is being discribed as wretches, blind and naked; and would be thus justifiably destined to be spewed out of God’s mouth!

Jeremiah 23

¹ “Woe be unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture!” saith the Lord. — woe be unto the shepherds “פַּרְנָסַיָא;” they are wolves like Sanballat and Tobiah; Or “O ye shepherds” or “governors” as the Targum says;

— the civil rulers and magistrates, kings and princes of the land of Judah; since ecclesiastical rulers, the priests and prophets, are mentioned as distinct from them in Jeremiah 23:9; whose business it was to rule and guide, protect and defend the people;

— that destroy and scatter the sheep; setting bad examples, led them into idolatry which were the cause of their ruin and of their being carried captive and scattered in other countries; inasmuch as these people were the Lord’s pasture sheep, whom he had committed them to the care and charge of these shepherds.

Wolves, like Sanballat and Tobiah, scattered and remained hidden!

² Therefore thus saith the Lord God of Israel against the shepherds that feed My people: “Ye have scattered My flock and driven them away, and have not visited them. Behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings,” saith the Lord.

— ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them; they had been driven out of their dwellings, and out of their own land, and being among the nations of the world, and took no thoughts for their return;

— behold, I will visit you for your evil deeds, saith the Lord; that is, punish them for their iniquities; since they visited not the flock in a way of justice and kindness, as the duty of their office required, the Lord would visit them in a way of judgement, and punish them according to their doings.

³ “And I will gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase.

— and I will gather the remnant of my flock, out of all countries; such of them as did not perish by the Sword, Famine and Pestilence, or died not in captivity, and chose not to remain in the kingdom where they were.

Wolves, on closer scrunity, could be found among the children of Israel, too.

⁴ And I will set up shepherds over them who shall feed them; and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking,” saith the Lord.

— and God will set shepherds over his sheep, who shall feed them; these are good shepherds, rulers and governors, that shall rule them with wholesome laws, and protect and defend them; such as Zerubbabel, Ezra, Nehemiah and others, after the captivity.

⁵ “Behold, the days come,” saith the Lord, “that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch; and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgement and justice in the earth.

— that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch; the Messiah; so it is explained by the Targum, which calls him the Messiah of the righteous; and by the ancient Jews also; who is spoken of frequently by the prophets as a branch, Isaiah 4:2.

⁶ In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is His name whereby He shall be called: The Lord Our Righteousness. — He shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness; here the Messiah is spoken of by a name, in a figure, which is used also by Isaiah and Zechariah.

⁷ “Therefore, behold, the days come,” saith the Lord, “that they shall no more say, ‘The Lord liveth who brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ — when God says it once, it’s important, but when He speaks it more than once, it has to be extremely significant; and this is repeated from Jeremiah 16:14;

— so severe shall be their bondage that their deliverance from it shall be a far greater Deliverance than that out of Egypt where they spent 210 years in slavery under their Egyptian taskmasters!

For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel Timeline – 190/40 Years

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

For more on the enemy from the South, see A Sword from the South!

⁸ but, ‘the Lord liveth who brought up and who led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them.’ And they shall dwell in their own land.”

— which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the North, and from all countries whither I had driven them: which respects not only the deliverance of the Jews from Babylon, which lay North of Judea; but the return of the ten tribes, and also the gathering of them together at the latter day, when they shall turn to the Lord, and return to their own land;

— notice the subtle change in this verse: from the house of Judah in verse 6 to the house of Israel here; that is, now it is the ten tribes; and second, not just from the North, but out of all the countries or nations, hence this is prophetic regarding the ten tribes and for the endtimes.

Like the original Exodus, fear and trepidation to accompany a Second Exodus

This Latter-Day Exodus from all countries that God had driven them is so great and expansive that they wouldn’t remember the first Exodus anymore!

⁹ Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets; all my bones shake. I am like a drunken man and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the Lord and because of the words of His holiness.

— mine heart within me is broken because of these false prophets, as the Targum interprets it, because of their false doctrines and wicked lives like Sanballat and Tobiah did; and because of the mischief they did the people, and the ruin they brought upon them and to themselves.

¹⁰ For the land is full of adulterers; for because of cursing the land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and their course is evil, and their force is not right.

¹¹ “For both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in My house have I found their wickedness,” saith the Lord. — for both prophet and priest are profane; being guilty of the mentioned sins;

— the Targum says, “the scribe and the priest;” and such were the false scribes and priests in the ‘Temple’ of God; they played “the hypocrite” as some render the word here; and are often charged with the sin of false doctrines and others called hypocrites.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint; and to dismiss it as another testimony, as many Churches do, is a disgrace.

The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

¹² “Therefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the darkness; they shall be driven on, and fall therein; for I will bring evil upon them, even the year of their visitation,” saith the Lord. — for I will bring evil upon them: the evil of punishment, which is from the Lord: as sword, famine, pestilence and captivity;

— “even the year of their visitation” could also mean a day of visitation at the latter days; Jeremiah 23:20, “The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly.”

¹³ “And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria: They prophesied in Baal and caused My people Israel to err. — and God have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria; the false prophets of the ten tribes of Israel; plenty now in the Anglosphere;

— among whom, in Ahab’s time there were many of Baal’s prophets, even four hundred and fifty; whose “folly” the Lord had formerly taken notice of; even their idolatry and impiety for giving into which the ten tribes had been carried captive years ago.

¹⁴ I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing: They commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness. They are all of them unto Me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.”

— I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing; or “so have I seen” as before observed even in the prophets of Jerusalem, where the Temple was, and where the pure worship of God was professed to be observed;

— and walk in lies; or “walking in lies” like Mike Pompeo does; constantly speaking lies in their common talk and conversation; so that they were not to be believed in anything they said; which was monstrous; and delivering out false doctrines in the name of the Lord, pretending they received them from him; which was worse than prophesying in the name of Baal.

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole,” former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on April 15, 2019 at a forum at Texas A&M University, TX.

“It was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

Interestingly, a Christian religious news broadcaster was the only media that seemed to pick up on Pompeo’s words and described it as follows: “that’s not the resume of the Secretary of State… that’s the resume of Satan.”

¹⁵ Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets: “Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall; for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the land.”

— therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets; concerning the false prophets, as the Targum says; their sin is before declared, and now their punishment: behold, I will feed them with wormwood; with some bitter affliction and calamity;

— so the Targum says, “behold, I will bring upon them distress bitter as wormwood;” and make them drink the water of gall: or “the juice of hemlock” or “poison” or “the savour of death,”

— as they poisoned the people with their false doctrines, they shall drink poison themselves; which is bitter and unpleasant and which is noxious and hurtful; not only a bitter potion, but a destructive one; the Targum says, “I will cause them to drink a cup of the curse, bad as the heads of serpent.”

¹⁶ Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you. They make you vain; they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. — they make you vain; they filled their heads with vain and empty things, and their hearts with vain hopes;

— they taught vain things, and made them vain and sinful in their lives and conversations; and therefore were not to be hearkened to; so the Targum says, “they lead you astray; they speak the wickedness of their own hearts, not from the word of the Lord;”

¹⁷ They say still unto them that despise Me, ‘The Lord hath said, “Ye shall have peace.”’ And they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, ‘No evil shall come upon you.’”

— they deceive people by by saying Lord hath said, ye shall have peace; all manner of prosperity; that they should have peace and not go into captivity, and enjoy the good things of it in peace and prosperity;

¹⁸ For who hath stood in the counsel of the Lord, and hath perceived and heard His word? Who hath marked His word and heard it? — had any of these false prophets stood in God’s Council?

¹⁹ Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord is gone forth in fury, even a grievous whirlwind; it shall fall grievously upon the head of the wicked. — behold, a whirlwind of the Lord is gone forth in fury; or “behold, a whirlwind of the Lord, of the fury is gone forth” which latter clause explains the former;

— by “the whirlwind of the Lord” is meant his “fury” or “wrath” which, like a whirlwind, would come suddenly and at an unawares and be very boisterous and powerful;

— and which was gone forth from the Lord and the Chaldean army would quickly appear and invade Judea and besiege Jerusalem, compared to a full and fanning wind, and its chariots to a whirlwind, Jeremiah 4:11.

²⁰ The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly. — in the “latter days” (Genesis 49:1; Numbers 24:14; Deuteronomy 4:30; Deuteronomy 31:29), that is, in the then distant future), in the then distant future — literally, the end of the days, the endtimes;

— in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly; when too late to avert it by repentance when all this shall be fulfilled, and the 190/40 years of captivity should be taking place;

— or, “in the end of days” in the latter part off time, when the house of Jacob seek the Lord their God, Hosea 3:5; then “shall they understand it with an understanding” as it may be rendered; when they shall have the veil removed from them, and turn to the Lord;

— in the latter days ye shall consider it perfectly; or rather, in the latter days ye shall understand it clearly, viz. that the calamities which will have come upon you are the divine judgement upon your sins;

— here and there the Scriptures hint the message is prophetic, into our time, the endtimes; hence one may read the rest of this chapter with the endtimes in mind, especially when there is a proliferation of false prophets around.

²¹ “I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran; I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. — God have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied; wherefore what they prophesied was not the word of the Lord, but what they themselves devised;

— as the Targum quoted by Gill adds “to do evil” it is a sad character of men when they speak in public neither by the will of God nor according to the word of God.

²² But if they had stood in My counsel and had caused My people to hear My words, then they should have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their doings.

— but if they had stood in my counsel and had caused my people to hear my words, proclaiming them as they were truly revealed, then they should have turned them from their evil way and stayed away from their evil deeds;

— in other words, they would preach repentance from idolatry instead of confirming with false shepherd, which has ever been a trick of such false messengers of the Lord.

²³ “Am I a God at hand,” saith the Lord, “and not a God afar off? — the Targum says, “I am God, Creator of the world from the beginning, says the Lord. I am God, and I will renew the world for the righteous.”

²⁴ Can any hide himself in secret places, that I shall not see him?” saith the Lord. “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” saith the Lord. — God knows everything, is omniscient; and, being omnipotent, is all powerful; and he sees lots of false shepherd around;

²⁵ “I have heard what the prophets said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed.’ — saying, I have dreamed, I have a vision; not a common dream, but a divine dream;

— this was one way in which the Lord formerly made known his mind and will to his servants, Numbers 12:6; wherefore these false prophets, in imitation of the true ones, and in order to gain credit from the people, pretended they had a dream from the Lord, in which such and such things were revealed to them;

— two such examples of “prophesy lies in My name” during the America’s Second Great “Awakening” are (a) false prophet Joseph Smith; who claimed the angel Moroni gave him a vision leading him to discover the Golden Plates from which they which revealed to Smith to write the longest and most complex of his “revelations” called the Book of Mormon; and

— (b) false prophetness, Ellen G White, who claimed to have received over 2,000 visions and dreams from God; far more than Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel combined; the common (like wine being grape juice); the peculiar (like the investigative judgement). So the Targum confirms the Masoretic text: “I have heard what the false prophets say, a word of prophecy has been revealed to me in a dream.”

Ellen G White claimed to have over 2,000 visions from God

²⁶ How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, — how long shall this be in the heart of the prophets or prophetess, like one called Jezebel, a prophetess that prophesy lies? (Revelation 2:20) to invent such lies, and deceive the people;

— and turn them away from the true worship of God; agreeably to the preceding and following verses: this shows this was a meditated and contrived it in their hearts, and they were resolute and bent upon it, and took much delight and pleasure in it.

²⁷ who think to cause My people to forget My name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbor, as their fathers have forgotten My name for Baal. — they cause my name Yehovah (YHVH) to be forgotten, and substituted it by false prophets and have used Baal as my name and the prophesying in such a name;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; (more on this at the end)

²⁸ The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath My word, let him speak My word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. — the prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; the Septuagint says, “let him tell his dream” let him tell it as his own, and not as a dream from the Lord;

— let him speak my word faithfully; or “truly” or “let him speak my word, truth” which is truth; or for it is truth; so this is a reason why it should be spoken freely, fully, publicly and boldly, because it is truth and nothing but truth: or “let him speak my word as truth;”

— why do ye mix the chaff with the wheat? the Targum interprets this of persons, paraphrasing the words thus, “behold, as one separates between the chaff and the wheat, so I separate between the righteous and the wicked, saith the Lord.”

²⁹ “Is not My word like as a fire?” saith the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? — is not my Word like as a fire? saith the Lord, devouring and destroying all the philosophy of men which will not stand the test of his eternal truth;

— and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? its power overcoming even the hardest and the strongest fabric of men’s imagination.

³⁰ “Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,” saith the Lord, “that steal My words every one from his neighbor. — therefore, because the false prophets were practicing deceit and seducing the people, behold, I am against them, that steal my words; which is a new form of deceit: plagiarism of prophecy

³¹ Behold, I am against the prophets,” saith the Lord, “that use their tongues and say, ‘He saith.’ — the Targum says, “who prophesy according to the will of their own hearts; therefore, behold, I send my fury against the false prophets.”

³² Behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams,” saith the Lord, “and do tell them, and cause My people to err by their lies and by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them. Therefore they shall not profit this people at all,” saith the Lord.

— behold, God is against them that prophesy false dreams, or the prophetess’ false visions, insisting that the fabric of their own thoughts was to be accepted as God’s revelation, and do tell them, and cause my people, as the Lord still calls them for the sake of the true believers in their midst;

— to err by their lies and by their boastful and wanton inventions; for I sent them not nor commanded them; therefore their activity would result in nothing but injury to the people.

³³ “And when this people or the prophet or a priest shall ask thee, saying, ‘What is the burden of the Lord?’ thou shalt then say unto them, ‘What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the Lord.’

— saying, what is the burden of the Lord? according to a custom by which the prophet was asked concerning any new revelations, which they purposely designated as an unpleasant burden, thou shalt then say unto them, What burden?

— or “Thou shalt tell them what the burden of God is,” namely, I will even forsake you, saith the Lord, an unloading of the burden, a rejecting of the people;

— some translations have it as ‘The oracle of the Lord!’ which is errorous and misleading: the wicked complaint of humans give the impression that some requirements or duties on our part: “load, burden, lifting, bearing, tribute” are burdensome; which is what the text implied.

³⁴ And as for the prophet and the priest and the people who shall say, ‘The burden of the Lord,’ I will even punish that man and his house. — I will even punish that man and his house, all the members of a man’s family who are guilty with him;

— this, in Israel today, could be the basis of a term known as “collective punishment,” when if a terrorist commits a terrorist act, his family home or apartment is bulldozed. Sometimes a whole village is punished, and on a broader term, even a whole region, such a Gaza.

³⁵ Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbor and every one to his brother, ‘What hath the Lord answered?’ and, ‘What hath the Lord spoken?’ — thus shall ye say, everyone to his neighbor and everyone to his brother, what hath the Lord answered? and what hath the Lord spoken? thus showing the proper respect for the prophecy of God.

³⁶ And the burden of the Lord shall ye mention no more, for every man’s word shall be his burden; for ye have perverted the words of the living God, of the Lord of hosts our God.

— and the burden of the Lord shall ye mention no more, no more toss this as a mockery; for everyman’s word shall be his burden, that is, this expression, if used in such a jeering sense, would become a burden to such a scorner, heavy enough to bear him down to the ground;

— for ye have perverted the words of the living God, whose majesty is emphatically declared, to give added weight to His proclamation.

³⁷ Thus shalt thou say to the prophet, ‘What hath the Lord answered thee?’ and, ‘What hath the Lord spoken?’ — what hath the Lord answered thee? and what hath the Lord spoken? this is repeated from Jeremiah 23:35; for the confirmation of it, and to show how much the Lord approved of such a way of behaving towards his prophet.

³⁸ But since ye say, ‘The burden of the Lord,’ therefore thus saith the Lord: Because ye say this word, ‘The burden of the Lord,’ and I have sent unto you, saying, ‘Ye shall not say: The burden of the Lord,’

— for the words of God were delivered with a salutary tendency, to warn sinners of the danger of their situation, and to call them to repentance. Those, therefore, who made a right use of them would have no cause to complain.

³⁹ therefore behold, I, even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you and the city that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of My presence. — and the city that I gave you and your fathers; the city of Jerusalem, which he had given to you to dwell in, and your children after you; but now all having sinned against him and provoked him;

— “I will crush and cast you out;” the Targum says, “I will remove you far away;” this signifies their going into captivity.

⁴⁰ And I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you, and a perpetual shame which shall not be forgotten.” — and I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you and a perpetual shame;

— the Targum says “And I will place upon you eternal disgrace, and you shall bear everlasting humiliation that will not cease.”

Jeremiah 24

¹ The Lord showed me, and behold, two baskets of figs were set before the temple of the Lord, after Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes of Judah, with the carpenters and smiths, from Jerusalem and had brought them to Babylon.

— now Jeremiah is probably in another vision; a riddle: two baskets of figs; set before the Temple; that is, set before God.

² One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe; and the other basket had very bad figs, which could not be eaten they were so bad. — one basket had very good figs, being full of very fine specimens of this fruit, even like the figs that are first ripe, which were considered special delicacies;

— and the other basket had very naughty figs, bad, unwholesome, rotten fruit which could not be eaten; they were so bad.

³ Then said the Lord unto me, “What seest thou, Jeremiah?” And I said, “Figs: the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that cannot be eaten they are so evil.” — then said the Lord unto me, What seest thou, Jeremiah?

— and Jeremiah replied, Figs; the good figs very good and the evil very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil; the purpose of the question was to impress the lesson upon Jeremiah’s mind, to call attention to the objects which were to symbolize his people.

⁴ Again the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

⁵ “Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good.

— thus saith the Lord, the God of the covenant to all who are Israelites; Like these good figs, so will he acknowledged them that are carried away captive of Judah, regarding them with favor, extending his pleasure to them;

— whom God have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good, to let them experience his blessings, to have them realize that his method of dealing with them was for their own benefit.

⁶ For I will set Mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them again to this land; and I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up.

— for God will set his eyes upon them for good, being most attentive to their wants in this respect, and God will bring them again to this land; and he will build them and not pull them down, as a building condemned to be wrecked;

— and led them to repentance in the land of their captivity, the result being that their condition was bettered; and God will bring them again to this land, and he will plant them and not pluck them up;

⁷ And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God; for they shall return unto Me with their whole heart.

— and God will give them an heart to know him, that I am the Lord, the punishment of the Babylonian captivity directing their minds to the one true God, who could thus carry out his threats, so that they likewise looked for mercy to him alone;

— and they shall be my people, and I will be their God, thus restoring the original relation, which had been so rudely disturbed and made impossible by their idolatry; for they shall return unto me with their whole heart, or, “I will be their God when they return to Me with their whole heart.”

⁸ “‘And as the evil figs, which cannot be eaten they are so evil’” — surely thus saith the Lord — “‘so will I deem Zedekiah the king of Judah, and his princes, and the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and them that dwell in the land of Egypt.

— and as the evil figs, which cannot be eaten they are so evil: surely thus saith the Lord, So will I give Zedekiah, the king of Judah, and his princes, all the rulers and nobles of the people;

— and the residue of Jerusalem that remain in this land, and them that dwell in the land of Egypt, the obstinate Jews, who refused to heed his warning and accept his advice to yield to the Chaldeans.

⁹ And I will deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for their hurt, to be a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse in all places whither I shall drive them.

— and God will deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for their hurt, literally, “I will give them for a shaking-up, for evil to all kingdoms of the earth,” so that abuse and misfortune would strike them everywhere,

— to be a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither God shall drive them, they would be the object of blasphemous derision on the part of all those with whom they would come into contact.

¹⁰ And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence among them till they be consumed from off the land that I gave unto them and to their fathers.’”

— and God will send the Sword, the Famine and the Pestilence, the great scourges of all times, among them, till they be consumed from off the land, exterminated, extirpated from the Land of Promise that God had gave unto them and to their fathers;

— thus the Lord predicts further invasions and repeated sackings of Jerusalem. Thus was his curse, as uttered in the Law, Deuteronomy 28:37, carried out upon all those who refused him obedience according to his demand, as a warning to men of all times.

~~ 16,24,33 ~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

His name Yehovah, is specifically stated, and should be used. Titles are okay, but sometimes He asked us pointedly to call on His name. The following verses with the LORD erred in translation. His name Yehovah should be used:

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Jeremiah

Guinea Export of Iron Ore

•October 13, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Guinea is set to become a significant player in the global iron ore market, with the Simandou project expected to begin exports by the end of 2025.

The Simandou mountains are the world’s largest known deposit of high-grade iron ore

Overview of Iron Ore Exports

Guinea is home to the Simandou project, which is considered the world’s largest untapped high-grade iron ore deposit. This project has the potential to reshape the global iron ore supply chain, with estimates suggesting it could produce up to 150 million tons of iron ore annually, accounting for about 7% of global production.

Current Developments

Simandou Project: The first iron ore exports from the Simandou project are now anticipated for 2026, contingent upon the completion of the necessary railway and port infrastructure. The TransGuinean railway, which is currently under construction, will connect the Simandou mine to the port of Morébaya, facilitating the export of iron ore. 2
Infrastructure Investment: The development of the Simandou project involves significant investments in infrastructure, including a 600 km railway and a new deep-water port, which are crucial for transporting iron ore to global markets. 2
Export Commitments: Guinea has committed to exporting the first batch of iron ore from the Simandou project by the end of 2025, with construction progress exceeding 50% as of now. 1
4 Sources

Economic Impact

The successful development of the Simandou project is expected to not only boost Guinea’s economy but also provide a new source of highgrade iron ore that could lower prices for steel manufacturers, particularly in China, which is the world’s largest consumer of iron ore.

In summary, Guinea’s iron ore exports are on the verge of significant growth, primarily driven by the Simandou project, which is poised to become a major contributor to the global iron ore supply chain in the coming years.

Posted in Africa, China

Jeremiah (Ch 21-22)

•October 12, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20; that is, in the distant future; or in the latter days ye shall understand it clearly. Only in the endtime would we be able to understand this perfectly.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those Jews from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Scriptures; that’s how authentic it is, as Ezra is being revered as a second Moses by the Jewish Orthodoxy.

Jeremiah 21

Rashi is the acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040 – 1105), a well respected medieval French rabbi and author of a comprehensive commentary on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; hence his opinion, together with the Targum, is often quoted here.

¹ The word which came unto Jeremiah from the Lord when King Zedekiah sent unto him Pashhur the son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, saying,

— Pashur, the son of Malchiah, was a priest, who was sent by king Zedekiah to Jeremiah to inquire of the Lord regarding the impending attack of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (Jeremiah 21:1). In Jeremiah 38:1-6, this Pashur was also one of four men who advised Zedekiah to put Jeremiah to death for his prophecies of doom but who ended up throwing him into a cistern (a closet, a dungeon).

— and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest; who was of the “twenty fourth” course; in Jeremiah 52:24, he is called the “second priests” like Pashhur; or “sagan” or deputies to the high priest.

Nebuchadnezzar – King of Babylon and Conqueror of Judah

² “Inquire, I pray thee, of the Lord for us (for Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon maketh war against us), if so it be that the Lord will deal with us according to all His wondrous works, that he may go up from us.” — for Nebuchadnezzar maketh war against us; who was on his way up to Jerusalem, and soon besieging it, as had been predicted;

— the Lord will deal with us according to his judgement; which God had done in times past; by bringing them out of Egypt; driving out the Canaanites before them; and particularly by destroying the Assyrian army in Hezekiah’s time, which was besieging the city of Jerusalem;

— that he may go up from us, Jeremiah prayed as he also hoped; namely, the king of Babylon; and causing their king to depart and flee in haste; and their present case being similar to that; that he may rise up, and raise the siege, and depart into his own country, as Sennacherib did.

³ Then said Jeremiah unto them, “Thus shall ye say to Zedekiah, — then said Jeremiah unto them; the two priests, Pashur and Zephaniah, after he had sought the Lord, and knew his mind: thus shall ye say to Zedekiah; by whom they were sent.

⁴ ‘Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, wherewith ye fight against the king of Babylon and against the Chaldeans, who besiege you outside the walls; and I will assemble them into the midst of this city.

— behold, God will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands; they shall hurt yourselves; so that they would not hurt their enemy, but recoil upon themselves; or like a boomerang;

— the meaning is, that they should be useless; that they should neither be defensive to them, nor offensive to their enemies; but rather hurtful to themselves. It seems to suggest their swords will destroy each other; that is, civil wars among themselves;

— wherewith ye fight against the king of Babylon and against the Chaldeans which besiege you outside the walls; by shooting arrows at them from outside; this shows that the Chaldean army under the command of the king of Babylon was now just outside the walls of Jerusalem, besieging it;

— and God will assemble them into the midst of this city; he himself will assemble the Chaldean army, and there slay them; or so that its defenders, would be compelled to take refuge in the center of the city, their weapons having proved powerless against the enemy.

⁵ And I Myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger and in fury and in great wrath. — and I, the Most High, will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, exhibiting a mighty power in punishing them, like the way he destroyed the Egyptian army;

— with an outstretched hand, and with a strong arm; such as he had used formerly in delivering Israel out of Egypt, but now in delivering them into the hands of their enemies; Exodus 6:6;

— even in anger and in fury and in great wrath; because of their sins and iniquities, this heap of words is used to show the depth of his indignation: the rebuke of an enemy in hot displeasure; a punishment inflicted in wrath by a righteous Judge, appearing in a warlike manner.

⁶ And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die of a great pestilence. — and I will, that is, God himself will smite the inhabitants of this city Jerusalem, both man and beast; the Chaldean army being his instrument.

⁷ And afterward, saith the Lord, I will deliver Zedekiah king of Judah, and his servants and the people and such as are left in this city from the pestilence, from the sword, and from the famine into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of those that seek their life. And he shall smite them with the edge of the sword; he shall not spare them, neither have pity nor have mercy.’

— God will deliver Zedekiah king of Judah, and his servants; the king himself shall not escape; though he shall not die by the pestilence or famine or sword, yet he shall fall into the hands of the Chaldeans, and “his servants” his courtiers and counsellors;

— he shall smite them with the edge of the sword; that is, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, or whoever the army under his command; for what was done by the one is ascribed to the other: this is to be understood of such that fell into their hands upon taking the city, and who endeavoured to make their escape; Jeremiah 39:4;

— he shall not spare them, neither have pity nor mercy; they had no regard to rank or figure, to age or sex; the sons of the king were slain before his eyes, and then his eyes were put out; princes were hanged up by the hand; and no compassion shown to old or young, man or maiden; Jeremiah 52:10.

⁸ “And unto this people thou shalt say, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death.

— behold, I set before you the way of life, and the way of death; and this seems to be to a phrase used by Moses, when he gave the law; obedience to which would issue in life, and disobedience in death, Deuteronomy 30:15: “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil.”

⁹ He that abideth in this city shall die by the sword and by the famine and by the pestilence; but he that goeth out and falleth to the Chaldeans who besiege you, he shall live, and his life shall be unto him as a prey.

— but he that goeth out, he shall live; that is, surrender themselves unto the Chaldeans; submit to them, so as to obey them, and ye shall live; else death awaits: by the Sword, by Famine and by Pestilence.

¹⁰ For I have set My face against this city for evil and not for good, saith the Lord. It shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire.’

— and he shall burn it with fire; as he did, both the house of the Lord in it, the Temple, the king’s house or palace, the stately houses of the princes and nobles, and even the houses of all the people; Jeremiah 52:13.

¹¹ “And concerning the house of the king of Judah, say, ‘Hear ye the word of the Lord,

¹² O house of David. Thus saith the Lord: “‘Execute judgement in the morning, and deliver him that is despoiled out of the hand of the oppressor, lest My fury go out like fire and burn, that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings. — addressing the house of David, whose descendants were still occupying the throne of Judah;

— execute judgement in the morning; and not in any other part of the day; and the case judged ought to be as clear as the morning; lest my fury go out like fire, and burn that none can quench it; or put a stop to it, by all their prayers and entreaties, or by all that they can say or do;

— because of the evil of your doings; it is a sad thing when princes set bad examples; it is highly provoking to God, whose deputies they are; and to lead the people on, or they cannot expect safety for themselves and their people.

¹³ Behold, I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley and rock of the plain, saith the Lord, who say, “Who shall come down against us? Or who shall enter into our habitations?”

— O inhabitant of the valley and rock of the plain; a description of Jerusalem; between the lower and higher part of which lay a valley, which divided the two hills, on which the city was built;

— which say, who shall come down against us? who shall enter into our habitations? who of our neighbours dare to make an attack upon us? they are so weak and would be foolish in any attempt to break through our fortifications, natural and artificial, and enter into our houses, and take away our possessions, and spoil us of our goods?

¹⁴ But I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord; and I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things round about it.’”

— and God will kindle a fire in the forest thereof; not in the forest of Lebanon, but from the South this time, towards the city of Jerusalem; whose houses stood as thick as trees in a forest, and which many of them, at least the most stately, might be built or ceiled with cedars from Lebanon;

— though some understand this of the cities and towns about Jerusalem; and so the Targum quoted by Gill renders it, “in its cities” and it shall devour all things round about it; the mountains and trees upon them, the cities and towns adjacent.

For detailed studies, see (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe

And a forest fire (4) The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 22

The list of kings of Judah towards the Captivity in Babylon; in successive reigns, as Josiah (reign 640–609 BC), Jehoahaz (reign 609 BC), Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC), Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597 BC), and Zedekiah (reign 597–586 BC).

¹ Thus saith the Lord: “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and speak there this word, — thus saith the Lord, go to the palace of Jehoiakim, who was the reigning king;

— during the reign of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah 22:18; if so this would be a flashback of about 20 years; but why is this a flashback, from king Zedekiah back to king Jehoiakim, to have a rerun? Perhaps relaying more details regarding their abominations?

² and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, who sittest upon the throne of David, thou and thy servants and thy people who enter in by these gates.

— the prophet Jeremiah was bid to go down to see Jehoiakim, because he was then upon the mountain of the house, or in the Temple, from whence to the king’s house there was a descent;

³ Thus saith the Lord: Execute ye judgement and righteousness, and deliver the despoiled out of the hand of the oppressor, and do no wrong. Do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place. — thus saith the Lord, execute judgement and righteousness; judge righteous Judgement;

— give the cause to whom it belongs, without respect of persons, and without a bribe or corruption; do no unrighteousness to any, by withholding from them what is due, which was what this prince was chargeable with, Jeremiah 22:13;

— and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow: whom God has a peculiar regard unto; and therefore they who are his deputies and vicegerents, as kings and civil magistrates are ought to protect such persons, and neither grieve and injure them, nor suffer others to do it;

— neither shed innocent blood in this place; to grieve and wrong the above persons is a very great evil, but to shed the blood of innocent per tons is greater still; and such heinous sins as these the present reigning king of Judah was guilty of; which is the reason of their being mentioned: Jeremiah 22:17.

⁴ For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, he and his servants and his people.

— the context here shows, that the prophecy is directed, not only to the king’s court, but likewise to the whole city of Jerusalem, one part of which was called the city of David; and the whole looked upon as a royal city, kings sitting upon the throne of David;

⁵ But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by Myself, saith the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation.’” — the Septuagint reaffirms, “by myself have I sworn:” that this house shall become a desolation; meaning not the Temple, nor the city, but the king’s palace.

⁶ For thus saith the Lord unto the king’s house of Judah: “Thou art Gilead unto Me, and the head of Lebanon; yet surely I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited. — thus saith the Lord unto the king’s palace;

— yet surely I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited; though as fruitful as Gilead, yet shall become like a barren desert; and though full of children, courtiers, princes and nobles, yet shall be like cities quite depopulated.

⁷ And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons; and they shall cut down thy choice cedars and cast them into the fire. — thy enemies shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire;

— that is, the sons of the king, the princes of the blood, the nobles of the land, and other persons of rank and distinction, comparable to the tall cedars of Lebanon;

— so the Targum says “and they shall slay your choice warriors as one cuts down forest trees and casts them into the fire;”

— or else the stately palaces of the king and his nobles, and other beautiful buildings, including the Temple; which were lined and ceiled with cedar, are here meant; and which the Chaldeans burnt with fire, Jeremiah 52:13.

⁸ “And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbor, ‘Why hath the Lord done thus unto this great city?’

— many nations! for during ancient time, it was only one nation, Babylon, now many nations; wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto another great city? so fortified and so full of people; the metropolis of the whole nation; the greatest city of the land;

— yea, the joy of the whole earth; a city peculiarly dear to the Lord; greatly honoured by him with his presence, worship, and ordinances, and yet now in ruins; how this can come to pass?

⁹ Then they shall answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God, and worshiped other gods and served them.’” — as the Targum quoted by Gill says; they left the true God, and worshipped other gods; and served stocks and stones.

¹⁰ Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him, but weep sore for him that goeth away; for he shall return no more, or see his native country. — weep ye not for the dead, Jeremiah admonished the people of Judah, neither bemoan him, namely, Josiah, the last good king, who had stayed the doom pronounced upon the reprobate people;

— but weep sore for him that goeth away, whose departure in this case is truly an occasion for great sorrow, for he shall return no more nor see his native country, being dragged into a shameful exile, from which there would be no deliverance.

¹¹ For thus saith the Lord concerning Shallum the son of Josiah king of Judah, who reigned instead of Josiah his father, who went forth out of this place: “He shall not return thither any more,

— for thus saith the Lord touching Shallum; he was Shallum the fourth son of Josiah, 1 Chronicles 3:15; for it was likely that he should immediately succeed his father Josiah, after he was shot by archers during the battle against Neco of Egypt, where died upon his arrival on Jerusalem;

— or, Josiah’s successor is Shallum indeed, the fourth son of Josiah; but that he was more commonly known as Jehoahaz; it seems probable that Shallum was his name before he ascended the throne, and that he changed it for Jehoahaz during his short reign;

¹² but he shall die in the place whither they have led him captive and shall see this land no more. — Shallum or Jehoahaz reigned only for 3 months before being deposed by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II and taken into Egyptian captivity and died there.

¹³ “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong, that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him nought for his work,

— woe unto him, so the Lord now proceeds to call out Jehoiakim, the next king, that buildeth his palace by deceits, by unjust measures, by impressing people into work without compensation, such as using his neighbor’s service without wages.

¹⁴ that saith, ‘I will build me a wide house and large chambers, and cutteth him out windows, and it is ceiled with cedar and painted with vermilion.’

¹⁵ Shalt thou reign because thou enclosest thyself in cedar? Did not thy father eat and drink, and do judgement and justice, and then it was well with him?

— shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar? making a show of wealth which he did not possess and had no right to parade. Did not thy father eat and drink, enjoying the ordinary comforts of life;

— and issue judgement and justice? exercising these two virtues according to the demands of the laws. And then it was well with him, the blessing of the Lord resting upon him for his upright behavior.

¹⁶ He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him. Was not this to know Me?” saith the Lord. — the Targum says, “is not this the knowledge with which I am well pleased? saith the Lord.”

¹⁷ “But thine eyes and thine heart are for nothing but thy covetousness and to shed innocent blood, and for oppression and for violence.” — but thine eyes and thine heart are for thy covetousness, being directed only to the gaining of his own advantage.

¹⁸Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: “They shall not lament for him, saying, ‘Ah, my brother!’ or, ‘Ah, sister!’ They shall not lament for him, saying, ‘Ah, lord!’ or, ‘Ah, his glory!’

— they shall not mourn for him; these words contrast the death of Jehoiakim with that of Josiah. For him there should be no lamentation such as was made for the righteous king (II Chronicles 35:25), therefore thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim;

— saying, ah my brother! or, ah sister! that is, “Alas, His Majesty!” a woman meeting her brother would not say to him, O my brother, what bad news is this! we have lost our king! nor he reply to her, O sister, it is so, the loss is great indeed!

¹⁹ He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.

²⁰ “Go up to Lebanon and cry, and lift up thy voice in Bashan, and cry from the Abarim; for all thy lovers are destroyed. — for all thy lovers are destroyed; their friends and allies, with whom they had not only entered into leagues,

— but had committed spiritual fornication with them; that is, idolatry, as the Egyptians and Assyrians; but these were now subdued by Nebuchadnezzar, and were at least so weakened and destroyed by him, that they could give no assistance to the Jews; II Kings 24:7.

²¹ I spoke unto thee in thy prosperity, but thou saidst, ‘I will not hear.’ This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not My voice. — this hath been thy manner from thy youth; from the time they came out of Egypt, while they were in the wilderness;

— or when first settled in the land of Canaan: this was the infancy of their state; and from that time it was their manner and custom to reject the word of the Lord and turn a deaf ear to him.

²² The wind shall eat up all thy shepherds, and thy lovers shall go into captivity; surely then shalt thou be ashamed and confounded for all thy wickedness. — the Targum says, “all thy governors shall be scattered to every wind;” and thy lovers shall go into captivity: the Assyrians and Egyptians, as before; Jeremiah 52:31.

²³ O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars, how gracious shalt thou be when pangs come upon thee, the pain as of a woman in travail?

— O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars, this picture being chosen because, as the birds of Lebanon make their nests in the cedars, so the princes of Judah built their homes from the cedars of Lebanon;

— how gracious shall thou be, rather, “how shalt thou moan,” when pangs come upon thee, the pain as of a woman in travail! After this digression with its warning to the people as a whole the prophet turns to the consideration of Jehoiachin’s fate.

²⁴ “As I live,” saith the Lord, “though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, were the signet upon My right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence;

— were the signet upon my right hand; ever so near to him, or ever so much valued by him, as he had been before, and so constantly cared for and regarded by him; as a ring, with anything respectable engraved on it, is constantly wore by persons, and greatly valued.

²⁵ and I will give thee into the hand of those who seek thy life, and into the hand of those whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans.

— and God will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life; cruel and bloodthirsty enemies, whom nothing would satisfy but his life; such were the persons following;

— and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest: being a terrible savage people, to be dreaded both for their number and their cruelty; even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.

²⁶ And I will cast thee out, and thy mother who bore thee, into another country where ye were not born, and there shall ye die. — and God will cast thee out; out of his palace, out of the city of Jerusalem, and out of the land of Judea.

²⁷ But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return.” — that is, they shall never come again to Jerusalem;

²⁸ Is this man Coniah a despised, broken idol? Is he a vessel wherein is no pleasure? Why are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not? — is Coniah a mere piece of common earthenware in which the potter has no pleasure, and therefore breaks it?

²⁹ O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord! — the expression, “O earth” is expressed seven times throughout the OT, here by Jeremiah, elsewhere by Moses, Job, Isaiah and Micah, empahsizing that God, too, has a message for the whole of humanity;

— hear the word of the Lord, O earth, earth, earth; to the inhabitants of the whole earth, not jus to the land of Israel; or rather the earth on which men dwell, is here called upon as a witness to what is after said;

— to rebuke the stupidity of the people and to quicken their attention to somewhat very remarkable and worthy of notice, and therefore the word is repeated three times; so the Targum says, “out of his own land they carried him captive into another land; O land of Israel, receive the words of the Lord.”

³⁰ Thus saith the Lord: “Write ye this man as childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days; for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah.”

— thus saith the Lord, write ye this man childless; that is, Coniah, or Jeconiah; who though he had children in the captivity, yet they died in it, or however never succeeded him in the throne;

— this speech is directed for the prophets to write; though the words may be rendered impersonally, “let this man be written childless” it may be written with a pen of iron, that he shall die without children, and have none to reign after him.

Posted in Jeremiah

Venezuela as America’s foreign policy disaster

•October 11, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Trump headed toward regime change by drift rather than design without an exit strategy or plan for what would come after

AsiaTimes • October 4, 2025

Is the Trump administration planning to bring down Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro? The short answer is: probably not deliberately, but it might stumble that way anyway—and that’s precisely the problem.

The recent escalation tells a familiar story. The administration is weighing military strikes against drug cartels operating inside Venezuela as part of a broader strategy aimed at weakening Maduro.

While President Donald Trump has not yet approved any action, with the US and Venezuela talking through Middle Eastern intermediaries, the pattern emerging is one of increasing pressure without a clear endgame.

The narco-terrorism frame

The Trump team has cleverly framed this as counternarcotics and counterterrorism rather than explicit regime change.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a driving force behind the hardline approach, views Venezuela through the prism of his Cuban-American background: Maduro’s regime is kept alive by Cuban intelligence, while Venezuelan oil keeps Cuba afloat. In this worldview, taking down Maduro is the “first phase of cleaning up the hemisphere.”

But here’s where reality intrudes on ideology. Trump himself has denied seeking regime change in Venezuela, even as he ordered a large military buildup off Venezuela’s coast. This contradiction isn’t mere diplomatic dissembling—it reflects genuine confusion about objectives.

Is the US trying to pressure Maduro into negotiating an exit? Hoping the military will stage a coup? Banking on economic collapse to spark a popular uprising? All of the above?

The unintended consequences

The problem with regime change—whether acknowledged or inadvertent—is what comes after. Venezuela isn’t Iraq or Libya, but it shares their curse: oil wealth combined with weak institutions.

The opposition, while legitimate in its electoral claims, remains fractured and largely exiled. The military brass is deeply complicit in narco-trafficking. Any transitional government would face immediate legitimacy challenges, economic chaos and likely violence.

More troubling still, the current approach may be achieving the opposite of its stated aims. Maduro is preparing to declare a state of emergency and mobilize civic-military forces, rallying nationalist sentiment against American threats.

Nothing strengthens an authoritarian like external pressure that can be framed as imperial aggression. We’ve seen this movie before—in Cuba, Iran, North Korea. It rarely ends well.

The migration paradox

Here’s the ultimate irony: Trump campaigned heavily on stemming immigration from Venezuela. His supporters cheered his promises to deport Venezuelan gang members and restore order.

But destabilizing Venezuela further—whether through military strikes, economic strangulation or facilitating regime collapse—will generate precisely the migration surge the administration aims to stop.

Venezuela has already produced over seven million refugees and migrants. A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?

Realism requires reality checks

A genuinely realist approach to Venezuela would acknowledge several uncomfortable truths. First, Maduro, while reprehensible, is not an imminent threat to US national security. His regime is brittle, corrupt and gradually hemorrhaging support, but it’s not on the verge of collapse without external intervention.

Second, the US has limited leverage. The administration has already moved to cancel sanctions waivers, setting a May 27 deadline for foreign oil companies to exit Venezuela. That’s maximum pressure territory. What’s left? Military action risks turning a manageable problem into a regional crisis.

Third, and most importantly, the Trump administration needs to ask: what’s America’s actual interest here? If it’s genuinely about narcotics trafficking, there are more effective ways to target cartels than bombing Venezuela, which would likely scatter operations and radicalize survivors.

If it’s about democracy promotion, history suggests military intervention tends to undermine rather than foster democratic development.

The real alternative

The administration faces a choice: It can continue down the path of escalating pressure, risking accidental regime change without planning for the aftermath. Or it could pivot toward a more transactional approach of targeted engagement focused on specific, achievable goals like counternarcotics cooperation, migration management and gradual economic normalization in exchange for verifiable concessions.

Is such engagement distasteful? Absolutely. Does it mean legitimizing an authoritarian regime? To some degree, yes. But realism has never been about choosing between good and evil—it’s about choosing between unpalatable options and catastrophic ones.

The tragedy is that the Trump administration seems to be headed toward regime change by drift rather than design. No one explicitly wants to own Venezuela’s reconstruction, but the cumulative effect of current policies may force that responsibility upon us anyway. That’s not strategy—it’s negligence dressed up as toughness.

If the Trump administration is serious about avoiding endless commitments abroad, it should resist the siren song of regime change in Caracas, no matter how it’s packaged. Venezuela’s people deserve better than Maduro. They also deserve better than becoming the next American foreign policy disaster.

To understanding this deep-rooted conflict, consider this rivalry between Esau and Jacob:

“And Esau harbored hatred in his heart against Jacob, his brother, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.

“And Esau said in his heart, ‘I will not do as Cain did, who killed Abel during their father’s lifetime and then their father had another son, Seth.

“Rather, I will wait until the days of mourning for my father have passed, and then I will kill Jacob my brother, and I will be the sole heir’” Genesis 27:42 Jonathan

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Posted in Latin Americas, Monroe Doctrine, US, Venezuela

Jeremiah (Ch 19-20)

•October 10, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Chapter 19 is foreshadowed, represented, and confirmed the destruction of Jerusalem, by the breaking of a potter’s vessel the prophet had in his hand; and by the place where he was bid to do this, and did it.

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall consider it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20; that is, in the distant future; or in the latter days ye shall understand it clearly. Only in the endtime would we be able to understand this perfectly.

For detailed studies, see (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

Esau, on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 19

¹ Thus saith the Lord: “Go and get a potter’s earthen bottle, and take some of the elders of the people and the elders of the priests. — the prophet Jeremiah was asked to get or buy a earthen bottle and take the elders and the priests;

— those who were the greatest and principal men of the city, which include members of the Sanhedrin, and to go with the prophet to be witnesses of what were said and done, and to see the bottle broke.

² And go forth unto the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the East Gate, and proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee, — which is by the entry of the East gate; the main gate into and out of Jerusalem, which lay through the east of the city;

— the Targum calls it “the dung gate” through which the filth of the city was carried out, and laid near it; this dung gate is situated near the southeast corner of the Old City, southwest of the Temple Mount;

— but the original ”Dung Gate” was, in the Bible (Neh 3:13-14), the name of a gate in the Jerusalem wall which was near the Pool of Siloam in the days of the Second Temple.

The “East Gate” a small or postern gate used for throwing out refuge and dung

³ and say, ‘Hear ye the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, of which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle.

— behold, God will bring evil upon Jerusalem; the punishment for the evil of sin; by the Sword, Famine and Captivity; meaning not on that spot of ground where the prophet with the elders were, but upon the city of Jerusalem and upon all the land of Judea.

⁴ Because they have forsaken Me and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known, and have filled this place with the blood of innocents.

— and have filled this place with the blood of innocents; young children sacrificed to idols in the valley of Hinnom, so that they were not only guilty of idolatry, but of murder; and of the murder even their own babes; cruelty which was shocking and unheard of!

⁵ They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not nor spoke it, neither came it into My mind.

— to burn their sons with fire unto Baal; from this as well as from some other places, it is plain that they slew and burned human victims to Baal as well as to Moloch; if these two names were not given, as some suppose they were, to one and the same idol.

⁶ Therefore behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Tophet, nor the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter. — that this place shall no more be called Tophet: nor the valley of the son of Hinnom;

— but the valley of slaughter; or “of the slain” as the Targum says; from the multitude of those that should be killed here, at the siege and taking of Jerusalem; or that should be brought hither to be buried.

Valley of Ben Hinnom, or the valley of slaughter as the Targum says

⁷ And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hands of them that seek their lives; and their carcasses will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth.

— and GodI will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place; the counsel which they took in this place and agreed to, in offering their sons and daughters to idols; and which they took with these idols and their priests;

— and he will cause them to fall by the Sword before their enemies: such as sallied out from the city, or attempted to make their escape; and by the hands of them that seek their lives; and so would not spare them, when they fell into them;

— and their carcasses will God give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth: signifying that they should have no burial, but their slain bodies should lie upon the earth and be fed upon by fowls and beasts.

⁸ And I will make this city desolate and a hissing. Every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss, because of all the plagues thereof.

— and God will make this city desolate, and an hissing to its enemies; an hissing because it was desolate; because of all the plagues thereof: by which it was brought to desolation, by the sword, famine, burning and captivity;

— everyone that passeth thereby shall be astonished, and hiss; surprised to see its desolation; that a city once so famous and flourishing should be reduced to such a miserable condition; and yet hiss by way of detestation and abhorrence of it, and others for joy at its ruin;

⁹And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straits with which their enemies and they that seek their lives shall straiten them.’

— and God will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons, and the flesh of their daughters; for want of food; the famine should be so great and pressing. Jeremiah, that foretells this, was a witness of it, and has left it on record, Lamentations 2:20;

— and they shall eat everyone the flesh of his friend; the Targum interprets it, the goods or substance of his neighbour; which is sometimes the sense of eating the flesh of another; as it is to be taken in a literal sense;

— in the siege by their enemies, they that seek their lives shall straiten them; the siege of Jerusalem would be so severe, that no provision could be carried into the city for the relief of its inhabitants;

— “women have cooked their own children” though this was fulfilled at the Babylonish captivity, yet more fully when Jerusalem was besieged by Vespasian and Titus, and in the times of Hadrian; Lamentations 4:10

¹⁰ “Then shalt thou break the bottle in the sight of the men that go with thee,

¹¹ and shalt say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord of hosts: Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel that cannot be made whole again; and they shall bury them in Tophet till there be no place to bury.

— and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place: where there should be such great numbers slain; or whither such multitudes of the slain should be brought out of the city to be buried there, that at length there would not be room to receive any more dead;

— or, as the Targum reaffirms it, “And they shall bury in Tophet because there will be no place left to bury,” in such a filthy, abominable, and accursed place shall their carcasses lie, where they were guilty of idolatry and sacrificed their innocent babes, there being no other place to bury them.

¹² Thus will I do unto this place, saith the Lord, and to the inhabitants thereof, and even make this city as Tophet.

— make this city as Tophet; as full of slaughtered men and women as that had been of the blood of innocent children; and as filthy, abominable and execrable a place as that; and to lose its name as that is foretold it should, Jeremiah 19:6; and as Jerusalem did, after the desolation of it by Hadrian.

¹³ And the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah shall be defiled as the place of Tophet, because of all the houses upon whose roofs they have burned incense unto all the host of heaven, and have poured out drink offerings unto other gods.’”

— and the houses of the kings of Judah; the palaces of the king, princes, and nobles of Judah, one as well as their relatives; shall be defiled in Tophet; as that was defiled with the bodies and bones of the slain;

— so the houses of great and small, high and low, should be defiled with the carcasses of the slain that should lie unburied there; their houses should be their graves and they buried in the ruins of them;

— or, “the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of the kings of Judah, which are defiled” with the idolatries after mentioned, shall be as Tophet, places of slaughter.

¹⁴ Then came Jeremiah from Tophet, whither the Lord had sent him to prophesy; and he stood in the court of the Lord’S house and said to all the people,

— and following instruction, Jeremiah stood in the court of the Lord’s house, and said to all the people; this was the court of the Temple, or the court of the Israelites, where all the people met;

— here the prophet placed himself, on purpose to deliver his prophecy to all the people; even the same as he had delivered at Tophet to the people and the priests.

¹⁵ “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Behold, I will bring upon this city and upon all her towns all the evil that I have pronounced against it, because they have hardened their necks, that they might not hear My words.’” — all the evil that I have pronounced against it; or decreed against it;

— as the Targum says; all that he had purposed, and all that he had threatened, or spoke of by Jeremiah, for whatever he has said he will do, and whatsoever he has solved upon, and declared he will do, God will assuredly bring to pass;

— because they have hardened their necks, that they might not hear his words; they turned their backs upon him, pulled away the shoulder, stopped their ears that they might not hear what was said by the prophets from the Lord; they neither inclined their ears to hearken to;

— but, on the contrary, as was their general character, a stiffnecked people and uncircumcised in heart and ears, obstinate and disobedient; and this was the cause of their ruin, by which it appeared to be just and righteous.

Jeremiah 20

Pashur, the son of Immer, was a captain, who was sent by king Zedekiah to Jeremiah to inquire of the Lord regarding the impending attack of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (Jeremiah 21:1). In Jeremiah 38:1-6, this Pashur was also one of four men who advised Zedekiah to put Jeremiah to death for his prophecies of doom but who ended up throwing him into a cistern.

¹Now Pashhur the son of Immer the priest, who was also chief governor in the house of the Lord, heard that Jeremiah prophesied these things.

— Pashur was not a high-priest, but only captain, or overseer of the Temple; in this capacity he had power to arrest and put in prison any deemed as false prophets and those who caused any disturbance in the Temple;

— Pashur was a distant son of the head of the course of Immer, the sixteenth course of the priests fell by lot of of 24 courses 1 Chronicles 24:14; this Pashur was the son of Malchiah Jeremiah 21:1;

— the Targum calls him the “sagan” of the priests; who was called the “sagan” or deputy to the high priest, who upon certain occasions acted for him; and some think that this man was in the same office; though others take him to be the same with the captain of the Temple, Acts 4:1.

² Then Pashhur smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the High Gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the Lord.

— then Pashur, by virtue of judicial power vested in him, smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks, a five-holed instrument of torture in which the neck, the two hands and the two feet were thrust;

— put him in stocks; מהפּכת, twisting, an instrument of torture by which the body was forced into a distorted unnatural posture; the culprit’s hands and feet were presumably bound, so as to keep the position in torture;

— Jeremiah the prophet; this official designation of Jeremiah is not found in chapters 1-19, but occurs here and frequently in succeeding chapters. It is used partly in contradistinction to the false prophets, Jeremiah 28:5-6, Jeremiah 28:10-12, Jeremiah 28:15, to the elders, priests and numerous false prophets.

Pashur smote Jeremiah and put him in stocks for his doom prophecies

³ And it came to pass on the morrow that Pashhur brought forth Jeremiah out of the stocks. Then said Jeremiah unto him, “The Lord hath not called thy name Pashhur, but Magormissabib [that is, Fear round about, or Terror all around].

— but Magormissabib; or “fear round about” signifying that terrors should be all around him and he should be in the utmost fright and consternation;

— the Targum says, “but there shall be gathered together against thee those that kill with the sword round about;” meaning the Chaldeans, which would make him a “Magormissabib” changing from place to place; that is, going into captivity; a stranger and wanderer.

⁴ For thus saith the Lord: ‘Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself and to all thy friends; and they shall fall by the sword of their enemies, and thine eyes shall behold it; and I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them captive into Babylon and shall slay them with the sword.

— for thus saith the Lord, behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself, and to all thy friends; this is an interpretation of the name given, “Magormissabib” and shows that it was not a mere name he had, but that he should be what that signifies: terrors;

— his conscience should be filled with terror at the judgements of God coming for him; and which he should be seized with much tremblings and shakings, and be such a spectacle of horror, that his own familiar friends, should shun and run away from him.

⁵ Moreover I will deliver all the strength of this city and all the labors thereof, and all the precious things thereof, and all the treasures of the kings of Judah will I give into the hand of their enemies, who shall despoil them and take them and carry them to Babylon.

— and all the precious things thereof; all their golden plate and jewels, the rich furniture of their houses, and whatsoever was laid up in their treasures as rare and valuable;

— and all the treasures of the kings of Judah will I give into the hand of their enemies; which they in successive reigns had been laying up in store for years together; see Isaiah 39:6.

⁶ And thou, Pashhur, and all that dwell in thine house shall go into captivity; and thou shalt come to Babylon, and there thou shalt die and shalt be buried there, thou and all thy friends to whom thou hast prophesied lies.’”

— and thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thine house, shall go into captivity; particularly he and his family should not escape;

— and thou shalt come to Babylon; though sore against thy will: and there thou shalt die and shalt be buried there; even in a defiled land and to be buried in such a land, al least not scattered to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air;

— to whom thou hast prophesied lies; not only because he had so ill used Jeremiah, a true prophet of the Lord; but because he was a false prophet, and his friends had hearkened to his lies and disbelieved those prophecies that came from the Lord himself.

⁷ O Lord, Thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; Thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed. I am in derision daily; every one mocketh me. — O Lord, thou hast deceived me, thought to have been said by the prophet, and I was deceived;

— what follows from hence to the end of the chapter is when in the stocks or in prison, and shows mixture of courage and weakness in him; a struggle between flesh and spirit, and the force of a temptation under which he laboured, arising from difficulties and discouragements in his work; and he not only complains to God, but of him; that he had deceived him;

— when God first called him to be a prophet, by telling him that he should be set over nations and kingdoms, to pull them down, Jeremiah 1:10; which he understood of foreign nations, but now found his own people were meant;

— or by giving him reason to expect honour and ease, whereas he met with nothing but disrespect and trouble; and that he should have divine protection and success against his opposers, Jeremiah 1:18; whereas he was now delivered into their hands; but be it so, this was all a mistake of the prophet, and no deception of God;

— I am in derision daily, everyone mocketh me; Jeremiah was the laughing stock of everyone of the people of Israel, from the highest to the lowest; princes, priests and people, all derided him and his prophecies, every day, and all the day long and especially when he was in the stocks.

⁸ For when I spoke, I cried out; I cried, “Violence and despoliation!” because the word of the Lord was made a reproach unto me and a derision daily. — because the word of the Lord was made a reproach unto me, and a derision daily; which is a reason either why he cried with grief and sorrow; or why he cried violence and spoil, ruin and destruction;

— or, “though the word of the Lord was” yet he went on proclaiming it; or “surely the word of the Lord was made a reproach” either because of the matter of it, it not being believed, or the manner in which it was delivered; or because it was not immediately fulfilled.

⁹ Then I said, “I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name.” But His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not hold back.

— then Jeremiah said, I will not mention him, nor in his name; not that he publicly said this before his enemies, or privately to friends; but he said it in his heart; he thought, nay, resolved, within himself, to prophesy no more;

— since no credit was given to him, but contempt cast on him; “there was in mine heart as a burning fire” which made him uneasy, and constrained him to break his former resolution: for the phrase, “his word” is not in the original text;

— though it is in like manner supplied by the Targum, “and his words became in mine heart as fire burning and overflowing my bones;” or “and the word of the Lord was in my heart as fire burning;” or Rashi says prophecy was as fire, to which it is compared, Jeremiah 23:29.

¹⁰ For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. “Report,” say they, “and we will report it!” All in my company watched for my halting, saying, “Perhaps he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him; and we shall take our revenge on him.”

— for Jeremiah heard the defaming of many, as they talked about him and his office in a derogatory manner: Fear on every side, or, “Terror all a round!” an attempt to deride the prophecy against Pashur;

— report, say they, that is, they want people to bring any sort of accusation against Jeremiah, and all his familiars, men whom he considered his friends, watched for his halting, for any indication of stumbling on his part;

— perhaps he will be enticed, be induced to commit some sin, and we shall prevail against him, getting the better of Jeremiah in this situation, and we shall take our revenge on him. Over against this behavior of his false friends the prophet states the firm conviction of his heart.

¹¹ But the Lord is with me as a mighty, fearsome one; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail. They shall be greatly ashamed, for they shall not prosper; their everlasting confusion shall never be forgotten. — but the Lord is with him as a mighty terrible one, as a mighty hero to defend him;

— therefore his persecutors shall stumble, come to grief in the very way in which they hoped to see the prophet humbled, and they shall not prevail, as they had hoped to; they shall be greatly ashamed, for they shall not prosper, have no success in their plotting and scheming against him;

¹² But, O Lord of hosts, who triest the righteous and seest the reins and the heart, let me see Thy vengeance on them, for unto Thee have I opened my cause. — let me see thy vengeance on them; his enemies and persecutors; he does not seek vengeance himself, but desires it of the Lord;

— Jeremiah does not ask to see his vengeance, but the Lord’s vengeance on them; he knew that vengeance belonged to the Lord, and therefore left it with him, and prayed for it from him; the Targum says, “let me see the vengeance of thy judgements on them.”

¹³ Sing unto the Lord, praise ye the Lord; for He hath delivered the soul of the poor from the hand of evildoers.

— for he hath delivered the soul of the poor from the hand of evil doers; or “the life of the poor” meaning himself, a poor destitute, few or none to stand by him but the Lord, who had delivered him out of the hand of Pashur and his accomplices.

¹⁴ Cursed be the day wherein I was born; let not the day wherein my mother bore me be blessed. — cursed be the day wherein I was born; — the day of his birth, typically a moment of joy and celebration, is now viewed as a source of sorrow and regret;

— and at this sudden change of the prophet’s discourse, when in great anguish of spirit; he expressed a very striking parallel in Job 3:3-12, “Let the day perish wherein I was born.”

¹⁵ Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, “A manchild is born unto thee,” making him very glad. — making him very glad; such memory, or rather the thought of that day, the joy of father and another when their child was born.

¹⁶ And let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew, and repented not; and let him hear the cry in the morning and the shouting at noontide,

— and let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew; whose sentence God never revoked: this was very severe and uncharitable, to wish for so sore a destruction upon an innocent person;

— and repented not; and were never recovered; to wish for so sore a destruction by divine wrath upon them; in his fury, as the Targum adds, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, who were utterly destroyed.

¹⁷ because he slew me not from the womb, or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me.

¹⁸ Why came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? — that my days should be consumed with shame? through the bad usage of him, the reproach that was cast upon him, and the contempt he had to carry for prophesying in the name of the Lord;

— all this shows that there are fragilities and vulnerabilities in the best of men, even God’s prophets; and what they are when left to themselves; how weak and fragile they could be;

— and Jeremiah recording all his weaknesses and failings is an argument of the uprightness and sincerity of the man himself; and of the truth and integrity of his records in the Scriptures.

Posted in Jeremiah

China’s Underwater Data Center

•October 9, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China to launch commercial underwater data center — facility expected to consume 90% less power for cooling

Tom’s Hardware • October 4, 2025 ~ Yahoo

Chinese company Highlander is building a server pod near Shanghai, where it will be submerged underwater to reduce the power consumption used by the facility for cooling. According to the South China Morning Post, Highlander is expected to sink the underwater pods in October. The servers will operate commercially, with state-owned institutions like China Telecom being among the first customers.

This isn’t the first underwater data center project; Microsoft concluded its own experiment off the coast of Scotland in 2024. Although Microsoft said that it has learned a lot from the project, it did not proceed with a commercial deployment of the system.

Chinese company Highlander is building a submerged server pod near Shanghai

On the other hand, China started its own underwater project in Hainan in 2023, and it is still active. The Shanghai project will be the second underwater center in the country, but it will be the first one to have clients.

The biggest benefit to using ocean water to cool data centers is the massive reduction in cooling costs. “Underwater operations have inherent advantages,” Highlander vice president Yang Ye told the Morning Post. Ye also said that it will reduce cooling energy consumption by around 90%. Highlander also said that 95% of its energy requirements will come from renewable sources, further reducing its carbon footprint.

There are also significant challenges that Highlander had to overcome. “The actual completion of the underwater data center involved greater construction challenges than initially expected,” said Engineer Zhou Jun, who worked at the Shanghai project.

Salt water and electronics do not mix well, so the company had to take special precautions to protect its systems. One technique Highlander uses involves a coating with glass flakes to protect the steel capsule from corrosion. It will also have an above-sea section that serves as an access point for maintenance crews.

Although placing data centers underwater will help reduce their power consumption, some experts are concerned about the effects of ocean warming due to continuous heat output. There hasn’t been enough research on this, University of Hull Marine Ecologies Andrew Want told SCMP.

Nevertheless, the Highlander claims that an independent assessment of its test project showed that temperature changes were still within acceptable limits. But as data centers expand and hit megawatt- and gigawatt-scales, thermal pollution will become an increasingly serious matter.

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26

Jeremiah (Ch 17-18)

•October 8, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Chapter 17 continues with more prophecies of the destruction of both the house of Judah and the house of Israel, their sins of idolatry, of Sabbaths breaking, both houses were notorious for their violations; of which they were sinners and both were send into captivity.

The most important issue in Chapter 17 is to observe the Sabbath!

“Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘Verily My Sabbaths ye shall keep; for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that ye may know that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you” Exodus 31:13

And the Sabbath commandment of God through Moses were reaffirmed by the Prophets:

“And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me,” saith the Lord” Isaiah 66:23

“But if ye will not hearken unto Me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched” Jeremiah 17:27

“Moreover also I gave them My Sabbaths to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctify them” Ezekiel 20:12

Jeremiah 17

¹ “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond. It is engraved upon the tablet of their heart and upon the horns of your altars, — a pen of iron; this is an allegory; that is to say that it is deeply engraved, and not easily erased when written with a iron pen and a diamond point;

— as expressed by Jeremiah, it’s called ‘an iron wall,’ and by Ezekiel, it was said (Ezekiel 3:9): “As a diamond, harder than flint have I made your forehead;”

— the Targum expresses it in the plural number, “the sins of the house of Judah;” though, if any particular sin is intended, its main one seems to be idolatry; but there is no need to limit the sin of Judah to idolatry, as it includes many other sins, like breaking the Sabbaths mentioned in the preamble above;

² whilst their children remember their altars and their wooden idols by the green trees upon the high hills. — their children remember their altars; which is a further proof of their continuance in idolatrous practices; who, when grown up imitated them and went on in the same evil ways.

³ O My mountain in the field, I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil, and thy high places for sin throughout all thy borders.

— O my mountain in the midst of the field; a poetic phrase for either the Temple, called the mountain of the house, and of the Lord’s house, Micah 3:12, or else Jerusalem, which stood on a hill in the midst of a plain, surrounded with fruitful fields and gardens; or in the midst of a land like a field;

— the Targum says, “because thou worshippest idols upon the mountains in the field;” God will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil; all the riches of the city and Temple to be the spoil and plunder of the enemy; and thy high places for sin, throughout all thy borders.

⁴ And thou, even thyself, shalt discontinue from thine heritage that I gave thee; and I will cause thee to serve thine enemies in the land which thou knowest not; for ye have kindled a fire in Mine anger which shall burn for ever.”

— God will cause Israel to serve their enemies in the land which thou knowest not; the Babylonians in Chaldea; or, later, the Romans;

— the Targum takes in the whole of the sense, “and I will bring an enemy [hatred or hostility] upon your land; and it shall be desolate in the year of punishment: and I will take vengeance of judgement upon you, until I remove you from your inheritance which I have given you.”

⁵ Thus saith the Lord: “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. — cursed be the man that trusteth in man, who places that confidence in the wisdom or power, the kindness or faithfulness of any man;

⁶ For he shall be like the heath (a tract of wasteland) in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. — the “heath” or other like shrubs standing alone in a barren land;

⁷ “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. — blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord; or as the Targum says, “trusteth in the Word of the Lord,”

⁸ For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be disquieted in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”

⁹ The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? — the truth is, the heart of man, in his corrupt and fallen state, is false and deceitful above all things: and it is a mistake to think own hearts any better than they really are;

¹⁰ “I, the Lord, search the heart; I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” — I the Lord search the heart; the inward parts of it, every ‘vessel’ and corner in it;

— and know the thoughts of it; all its intents, purposes, designs, contrivances and imaginations; all the secret motions and emotions of it, and any wickedness that is in it.

¹¹ As the partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not, so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool. — the partridge (a name for a medium-sized bird) sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not, or, a partridge hatching eggs which it has not laid;

— but not by his labour; thus the Targum says, “at his end he is called a wicked man;” because of the unjust manner in which he got his riches, and which appears by his end; every filthy rich is an abomination.

¹² A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. — Jeremiah’s thought of the throne of glory on high from the beginning, the place of our sanctuary, the hope of Israel, is in Yehovah.

¹³ O Lord, the hope of Israel, all that forsake Thee shall be ashamed. “And they that depart from Me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters.” — those who forsake thy law which thou hast given them, will sooner or later be ashamed.

¹⁴ Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved; for Thou art my praise.

¹⁵ Behold, they say unto me, “Where is the word of the Lord? Let it come now.” — speaking like scoffers, where is the fulfilment of the threats which thou didst utter from God? Mentioned by Peter, II Peter 3:4, mocking, Where is the promise of his coming?

¹⁶As for me, I have not hastened from being a shepherd to follow Thee; neither have I desired the woeful day, Thou knowest; that which came out of my lips was right before Thee.

— the Targum paraphrases it, “and the evil day which thou shall bring upon them, I have not desired:” that which came out of my lips was transparent and faithful before thee;

¹⁷ Be not a terror unto me; Thou art my hope in the day of evil. — a terror; namely, by deserting me, Jeremiah pleaded; all I fear is thine abandoning me; if thou art with me, I have no fear of evil from any enemies.

¹⁸ Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded; let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed. Bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction.

— bring thy punishment upon them the day of evil; which they put far away, and scoff at; though Jeremiah did not desire the woeful day to come upon his people, only upon his persecutors in particular.

¹⁹ Thus said the Lord unto me: “Go and stand in the gate of the children of the people, whereby the kings of Judah come in and by which they go out, and in all the gates of Jerusalem; — the gate is one within the city and leading to the palace, thus accounting for its use by both the rulers, and those who sought an audience from them;

— or a gate of the Temple rather than of the city, perhaps the special gate by which the kings and people of Judah entered into the enclosure of the Temple.

²⁰ and say unto them, ‘Hear ye the word of the Lord, ye kings of Judah and all Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem that enter in by these gates. — Jeremiah begins with the kings, as they ought to have repressed such a glaring profanation.

²¹Thus saith the Lord: Take heed for yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; — neither carry forth a burden on the Sabbath, neither do ye any work; servile work is also forbidden to be done upon all solemn festivals, Leviticus 23:8; Leviticus 23:35;

“Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘Verily My Sabbaths ye shall keep; for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that ye may know that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you” Exodus 31:13

— but hallow ye the sabbath days; as the sabbath was instituted as a sign or token of God’s covenant with his people. This is God’s true Sabbath, in contrast to the world’s pagan holidays, which they also call sabbaths! (more at the end);

²² neither carry forth a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day, neither do ye any work, but hallow ye the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers. — neither carry forth a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day; not of dirt and soil only, but of any ware or merchandise, in order to be sold in the city or elsewhere:

— neither do ye any work; any servile work, any kind of manufacture, either within doors or without; or exercise any kind of trade, or barter and merchandise, or do any sort of worldly business; nothing but what was of mere necessity for the preservation of life; see Exodus 20:10;

— the penalty for breaking the Sabbath is death; but the gift of observing it is the identification of being of his chosen ones (more at the end).

²³ But they obeyed not, neither inclined their ear, but made their neck stiff, that they might not hear nor receive instruction. — but made their neck stiff; or “hard” and would not bend it, to take upon them the yoke of the commandments: a metaphor taken from untamed oxen, that will not submit the neck to the yoke, but draw back from it.

²⁴ “‘And it shall come to pass, if ye diligently hearken unto Me, saith the Lord, to bring in no burden through the gates of this city on the Sabbath day, but hallow the Sabbath day to do no work therein,

— but hallow ye the Sabbath; or, “sanctify it” by separating it from all worldly business and devoting it to the worship of God in public and private, spending it wholly in acts of religion and piety:

— one part of the sanctification of the Sabbath lay in a cessation from all servile work; for unless they abstained from worldly business, they could not be at leisure to attend divine service;

— lighting a fire in ancient time was an elaborate process; unlike today, just a switch; thus kindled a fire on the Sabbath was profaned, it was that Jerusalem was destroyed and its people carried away as captives because they profaned the Sabbath;

²⁵ then shall there enter into the gates of this city kings and princes sitting upon the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and this city shall remain for ever.

²⁶ And they shall come from the cities of Judah, and from the places about Jerusalem, and from the land of Benjamin, and from the plain, and from the mountains, and from the South, bringing burnt offerings and sacrifices, and meat offerings and incense, and bringing sacrifices of praise unto the house of the Lord.

²⁷ But if ye will not hearken unto Me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched.’”

— the observance of the Sabbath was the distinguishing character of one santified by God, who also ordained the Sabbath day as a memorial of the creation. So that for the Jews to profane the Sabbath, was in effect to renounce their share in God’s creation;

— the Sabbath was instituted as a sign or token of God’s covenant with his people, Exodus 31:13; it was to identify the people to God “that ye may know that I am the Lord,” and God to his people “that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you.” It’s a two-way streets.

~~ v21-22 ~~

God’s Sabbaths contrast to the world’s pagan sabbaths; which “Christians” understand and practice as ‘your sabbaths’ are:

(a) her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun-keepers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof, II Kings 17:24;

(b) Christmas, which honor the Mithraism – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice; and

(c) Easters, a celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection.

“Arise and go down to the potter’s house”

Jeremiah 18

¹ The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, — the Word of prophecy, as the Targum says: this is a distinct prophecy from the former.

² “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear My words.”

— and there God will cause thee to hear his words; there the Lord would tell him what he had further to say to him, and what he should say to the people; and by sensible objects before him, he would cause him to understand more clearly what he will say to them.

³ Then I went down to the potter’s house, and behold, he wrought a work on the wheels.

— then Jeremiah went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels, literally, “on the disks,” for the potter’s lathe consisted of two horizontal wooden plates, the lower one larger than the upper, the clay being molded into shape on the upper disk.

⁴ And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make it. — meaning, God has authority and power to form and fashion kingdoms and nations as he pleases. He may dispose of us as he thinks fit;

⁵ Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying,

⁶ “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?” saith the Lord. “Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in Mine hand, O house of Israel. — the lower wheel was worked by the feet to give motion to the upper one;

— in previous chapters God’s words were usually directed against Jerusalem, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, their elders and priests, but here, it is to the house of Israel again;

— O house of Israel; since the house of Israel had been in exiled over a hundred years ago, so this renew warning must be prophetic, for the endtime; emphasis here is the house of Israel; but also include the house of Judah, for they committed the same sins and would certainly share the same punishments.

⁷ At the instant I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to pull down and to destroy it, — this could be speaking of the house of Judah; pluck up into Babylon, and later, Babylon was destroyed; but this could be another prophecy which parallels Ezekiel 17, a riddle of two eagles;

⁸ if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. — if that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil; as Nineveh did; then I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them;

⁹ And at the instant I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, — to build and to plant, the royal family of the house of David; which applied to the planting of Jewish princesses to Ireland;

— the destruction of Zedekiah’s Pharez line; to the planting of the Zarah line ruling in the British Isles! (for more see “Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright” by J.H. Allen).

¹⁰ if it do evil in My sight, that it obey not My voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them. — unless men and women repent and turn from their evil ways; and his promises of good must be understood with this condition.

¹¹ Now therefore go to speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I frame evil against you and devise a device against you. Return ye now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.’”

— behold, God would frame evil against you; as the potter frames his clay upon the wheel, to which the allusion is; which is to be understood of the evil of punishment, in the mind of God to bring upon them;

¹² And they said, “There is no hope; but we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.” — in our society today there is no hope of these three repentence:

(a) her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun-keepers were the Samaritans; (b) Christmas, which honor Mithraism; (c) Easters, a celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess.

— the only way we could repent is if God would give the world another Mt Sinai experience: “The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again” Isaiah 24:20

¹³ Therefore thus saith the Lord: “Ask ye now among the heathen: Who hath heard such things? The virgin of Israel hath done a very horrible thing.

— the naked people of Israel, ironically so called; have the most perversions; LGBTqia being the most prominent; so pervalent that even the Gentiles ask, why so? Such obduracy is unheard of even amongst the heathens!

¹⁴ Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock of the field? Or shall the cold flowing waters that come from another place be forsaken?

¹⁵ Because My people hath forgotten Me, they have burned incense to vanity; and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, on a road not cast up, — they have caused; to stumble, namely the false prophets and idolatrous teachers they have.

¹⁶ to make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished, and wag his head.

¹⁷ I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will show them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity.” — God will scatter them as with an east wind, a violent wind from the desert, before the enemy;

— he will show them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity, the metaphor is from the custom of kings and princes, which is, to turn their backs, that is, will not look upon them in a favourable way, nor hear their cries; but turn his back upon them, and a deaf ear unto them.

¹⁸ Then said they, “Come, and let us devise devices against Jeremiah; for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, and let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words.”

— then said they, come and let us devise devices against Jeremiah; being enraged at the warning messages threatening them, they propose to enter into a confederacy together, to think of ways and means to stop the mouth of the prophet, and even to take away his life;

— since he had told them that God had devised a device against them, they would scheme for devising devices against him; so that they might walk after their own devices, without being teased and tormented by this prophet:

— nor counsel from the wise; we have wise rulers and governors, and members of the Sanhedrin, and judges of all controversies, and who are capable of giving advice upon any occasion; our counsellors in the Temple and state affairs?

— and so the Targum says, “let us plot false witness against him;” or “let us smite him in the tongue” cut it out; or stop his mouth, and hinder him from speaking any more in this manner to the people; or, “let us testify against him with false witnesses.”

¹⁹Give heed to me, O Lord, and hearken to the voice of them that contend with me. — Jeremiah appeals to God to listen to the injustice and false accusations he has suffered.

²⁰ Shall evil be recompensed for good? For they have dug a pit for my soul. Remember that I stood before Thee to speak good for them, and to turn away Thy wrath from them.

— they have digged a pit for Jeremiah; that is, they have laid snares for him as for a wild beast; for pits are digged for wild beasts to fall into, that they may be taken;

²¹ Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children and be widows; and let their men be put to death; let their young men be slain by the sword in battle. — so wicked were they that God would deliver their children to the famine; and the sword;

— and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; let them have neither husbands nor children; which latter might be a comfort to them, when they are being stripped of these men and children, their affliction and distress would be much greater.

²² Let a cry be heard from their houses, when Thou shalt bring a troop suddenly upon them; for they have dug a pit to take me, and hid snares for my feet.

— let a cry be heard from their houses, as the attacking forces enter, when thou shalt bring a troop suddenly upon them, namely, the murderous hordes of the invaders; for they have digged a pit to take me and hid snares for my feet, as the fowler does for the bird.

²³ Yet, Lord, Thou knowest all their counsel against me to slay me; forgive not their iniquity, neither blot out their sin from Thy sight, but let them be overthrown before Thee; deal thus with them in the time of Thine anger.

— deal thus with them in the time of thine anger; the set time for thy wrath to come upon them to the uttermost; then do unto them according to all the imprecations or curses now being prepared; which the prophet foresaw, and believed he would do; and therefore thus spake.

~~~

More about keeping the Sabbaths:

“Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘Verily My Sabbaths ye shall keep; for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that ye may know that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you,” Exodus 31:13.

“Ye shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you. Every one who defileth it shall surely be put to death; for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people,” Exodus 31:14.

“Six days may work be done, but on the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord. Whosoever doeth any work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death,” Exodus 31:15.

And the Sabbath commandment of God through Moses were reaffirmed by the Prophets:

“And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me,” saith the Lord” Isaiah 66:23

“But if ye will not hearken unto Me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched” Jeremiah 17:27

“Moreover also I gave them My Sabbaths to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctify them” Ezekiel 20:12

Keeping the Sabbaths identify the people to God “that ye may know that I am the Lord,” and God to his people “that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you.” It’s a two-way streets.

Even in the New Testament, Jews and Gentiles converted to Christianity, called Nazarenes, were meeting in synagogues on the Sabbath (Mark 6:2; Luke 4:31; Luke 13:10–16; Acts 13:14, 27, 42–44; 15:21; 16:13; 17:2; 18:4). Obviously, with no work being done on the Sabbath day, the Sabbath day would be the ideal day to have organized worship services.

All the evidence show that early Christian believers believe that the Sabbath be the day of rest as well as a day of worship. Besides being a sign of identity, of affiliation, before God and his chosen ones, the Sabbath is also the fourth of the Ten Commandments; and the penalty for profaning its observance is death.

Posted in Jeremiah

SS #06 Leviticus 23: Feasts of the Lord

•October 7, 2025 • Leave a Comment

In the Bible we see that God has identified three different categories of days for religious purposes. To identify these three categories of days God has used three different Hebrew words. Each of these Hebrew words is used to identify one category of days.

Now the way God has used the other Hebrew word to identify three separate categories of days is as follows: When this other Hebrew word is used on its own, then it identifies one category of days, and when this other Hebrew word is used with the adjective for “holy,” then it identifies a different category of days.

In this way God has used three different Hebrew words to identify three different categories of days that God Himself has instituted. Often times they overlap which would be a compound concept, but sometimes they stand apart.

(1) (H4150 môʿēḏ) translated as appointed gathering, appointed time, appointed assembly; but doesn’t mean feast by itself, but it could be combined with a festival feast;

(2) (H2282 ḥāḡ) festival, feast, festival-gathering, pilgrim-feast;

(3) (H4744 miqrā’) a convocation, a sacred assembly, often preceded with holy, (H6944 qōḏeš).

Since all the feasts are recorded in Leviticus 23, we’ll begin by finding the most appropriate translation for each instance. I’ll take the initiative to identify each one and translate them into English as accurately as possible.

Leviticus 23

¹ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

²“Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: ‘Concerning the assemblies (H4150 môʿēḏ) of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations (H4744 miqrā’), even these are My appointed assemblyies (H4150 môʿēḏ).

— this preface means that all the followings are appointed assemblyies (H4150 môʿēḏ), even if it is Sabbath of rest, which is a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’); hence a weekly Sabbath is a composite command.

³“‘Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of rest, a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’). Ye shall do no work therein; it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings.

⁴“‘These are the appointed assemblies (H4150 môʿēḏ) of the Lord, even holy convocations (H4744 miqrā’), which ye shall proclaim in their seasons.

— these are the assemblies of the Lord; because the following are appointed by the Lord for assembling themselves before him,

⁵On the fourteenth day of the first month between the evenings is the Lord’S Passover. — “between the evenings” (hā·‘ar·bā·yim); no mention of the Passover (the sacrifice of the Pesach lamb) being a feast, nor the time being holy;

⁶And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Festival (H2282 ḥāḡ) of Unleavened Bread unto the Lord; seven days ye must eat unleavened bread. — the fifteenth day has the characters of the three: appointed assemblies; a holy convocation; and a pilgrim-festival;

— in fact, the days of Unleavened Bread and Passover are a composite Feast; the whole made a festival of eight days, called indifferently the Feast of the Passover, or the Feast of Unleavened Bread; hence those who thought they are two distinct feasts read the Gospel in the NT with much confusion.

⁷On the first day ye shall have a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’); ye shall do no servile work therein.

— the first day of unleavened bread, the 15th Abib, the emphasis is on the holy convocation where people assemble together.

⁸But ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord seven days. On the seventh day is a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’); ye shall do no servile work therein.’”

— in the seventh day is an holy convocation, ye shall do no servile work therein; where people assemble together as on the first day;

⁹And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

¹⁰“Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: ‘When ye come into the land which I give unto you and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.

¹¹And he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted for you; on the morrow after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it.

¹²And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf a helamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering unto the Lord.

¹³And the meat offering thereof shall be two-tenths part of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savor; and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, a fourth part of a hin.

¹⁴And ye shall eat neither bread nor parched corn nor green ears, until the selfsame day that ye have brought an offering unto your God; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

¹⁵“‘And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete.

¹⁶Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days, and ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.

¹⁷Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two-tenths part. They shall be of fine flour; they shall be baked with leaven; they are the firstfruits unto the Lord.

¹⁸And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish of the first year, and one young bullock and two rams; they shall be for a burnt offering unto the Lord, with their meat offering and their drink offerings, even an offering made by fire, of sweet savor unto the Lord.

¹⁹Then ye shall sacrifice one kid of the goats for a sin offering, and two lambs of the first year for a sacrifice of peace offerings.

²⁰And the priest shall wave them with the bread of the firstfruits for a wave offering before the Lord with the two lambs; they shall be holy to the Lord for the priest.

²¹And ye shall proclaim on the selfsame day that it may be a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’) unto you. Ye shall do no servile work therein; it shall be a statute for ever in all your dwellings throughout your generations.

— the feast of Weeks or day of Pentecost; is composite feast, a holy convocation and an appointed assembly;

²²“‘And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not rid cleanly the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleanings of thy harvest. Thou shalt leave them unto the poor and to the stranger: I am the Lord your God.’”

²³And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

²⁴“Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’).

— the day of Trumpet, Rosh Hashanah, is also a holy convocation and an appointed assembly;

²⁵Ye shall do no servile work therein, but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.’”

²⁶And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

²⁷“Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a Day of Atonement. It shall be a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’) unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.

— the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is also a holy convocation and an appointed assembly;

²⁸And ye shall do no work in that same day, for it is a Day of Atonement to make an atonement for you before the Lord your God.

²⁹For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people.

³⁰And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people.

³¹Ye shall do no manner of work; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

³²It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls. On the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening unto evening, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.”

³³And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

³⁴“Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the Feast (H2282 ḥāḡ) of Tabernacles for seven days unto the Lord.

— as a whole, the seven days of Tabernacles are both a pilgrim-feast and an appointed assemblies;

³⁵On the first day shall be a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’); ye shall do no servile work therein.

— on the first day, the emphasis is upon a holy convocation; but no mention of a feast;

³⁶Seven days ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. On the eighth day shall be a holy convocation (H4744 miqrā’) unto you, and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. It is a solemn assembly, and ye shall do no servile work therein.

— on the eighth day shall be an holy convocation unto you; as on the first day; it is a solemn assembly; of all the people, when they were gathered together before the Lord;

— Days 2-6 of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and Days 2-7 of the Feast of Tabernacles are identical have a sense that it is a celebration, a time of laughters and happiness.

³⁷“‘These are the appointed assemblies (H4150 môʿēḏ) of the Lord which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations (H4744 miqrā’), to offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord, a burnt offering and a meat offering, a sacrifice and drink offerings, every thing upon his day”

³⁸besides the Sabbaths of the Lord, and besides your gifts, and besides all your vows, and besides all your freewill offerings which ye give unto the Lord.

³⁹“‘Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast (H2282 ḥāḡ) unto the Lord seven days; on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath. — a feast in the sense that it is for rejoicing and a celebration

⁴⁰And ye shall take for yourselves on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.

⁴¹And ye shall keep it a feast (H2282 ḥāḡ) unto the Lord seven days in the year. It shall be a statute for ever in your generations; ye shall celebrate it in the seventh month.

— a pilgrim-feast; a feast in the sense that it is a celebration has an implied indication of a ‘wine and cheese’ party, plus a time of laughters and happiness.

⁴²Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths,

⁴³that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.’”

⁴⁴And Moses declared unto the children of Israel the appointed assemblies (H4150 môʿēḏ) of the Lord.

Posted in Scriptures Studies

Jeremiah (Ch 15-16)

•October 6, 2025 • Leave a Comment

In these chapters, God replies to the preceding supplications, the Lord’s answer to the prophet’s prayers, by declaring that not even the intercession of his favoured servants, Moses and Samuel, should divert him from executing his purpose of vengeance against Judah; which is denounced in terms of great severity to come.

The list of kings of Judah towards the end; in successive reigns, as Jehoahaz (reign 609 BC), Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC), Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597 BC), and Zedekiah (reign 597–586 BC).

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 15

¹ Then said the Lord unto me, “Though Moses and Samuel stood before Me, yet My mind could not be toward this people. Cast them out of My sight, and let them go forth.

— the meaning is, that even if Moses and Samuel were alive and made intercession for the people, their prayers would not be regarded; because their sins were so thick, so loathsome and abominable;

— for as God had forbidden Jeremiah before to intercede for them, even so if Moses and Samuel were alive and made intercession for them, God couldn’t have any delight in them; could not be reconciled to them, that the favours asked for should be granted or that they should continue in their own land;

— cast them out of my sight; as persons loathsome and abominable; God cannot look upon them, or have anything to say to them, in a favourable way; and now God had made up his mind.

² And it shall come to pass, if they say unto thee, ‘Whither shall we go forth?’ then thou shalt tell them, ‘Thus saith the Lord: “‘Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the captivity, to the captivity.’

— then thou shall tell them, thus saith the Lord, such as for death, to death; such as were appointed to death or to die by the pestilence, which is often signified by death; they shall go forth unto it; or it shall meet them and seize upon them and take them away:

— and such are for the Sword, to the Sword; who are appointed to die by the Sword of the enemy, into whose hands they should fall by attempting to escape out of the city, shall perish by it:

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

— and such are for famine, to famine; such are appointed to die by that, shall die of it in the city, where they shall be besieged, and not be able to get out to fetch in any provisions, and where none can be brought, because of the enemy:

— and such are for the captivity, to captivity; such are spared from the pestilence, Sword, and famine and are designed to be carried captive into a strange land, to which they are appointed of God; the latter of these is more grievous than the former; as the sword than death, and famine than the Sword, so captivity than them all.

³ “And I will appoint over them four kinds,” saith the Lord: “the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. — the Targum expounds on the “four evil punishments;”

— (1) the Sword to slay: the first and chief of the four families or punishments, which had a commission from the Lord to sheath itself in his people, the Jews; even the sword of the enemy, the Chaldeans, drawn against them by a divine order and appointment:

— (2) and the dogs to tear; the carcasses of those that are slain with the sword: or “to draw” as the word signifies; it being the usual way of dogs to draw and drag the flesh about they are feeding on;

— (3) and the fowls or birds of the heaven, and (4) the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy; or “to eat, and to corrupt” the bodies of those that are slain by the sword. The meaning is that such should not have a burial, but should be the food of fowls and wild beasts.

⁴ And I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth, because of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem. — King Manasseh invoked, a figure infamous in biblical history; but God will cause them to be removed into “all the kingdoms of the earth;”

— that is, not only into Babylon, but into “all other countries of the earth” indicates this could be prophetic, yet in the future, and not just the house of Judah but also the larger house of Israel.

⁵ “For who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem? Or who shall bemoan thee? Or who shall go aside to ask how thou doest? — a lamentation rendered against the city of Jerusalem, capturing the emotional and theological weight of divine abandonment.

⁶Thou hast forsaken Me,” saith the Lord, “thou art gone backward; therefore will I stretch out My hand against thee and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting. — thou art gone backward; they had set up idols and idol worship; and this was the cause of the Sword, pestilence, famine and captivity, and of all the evils that befell them:

— therefore will I stretch out mine hand against thee, and destroy thee; his hand of power and vengeance, which when stretched out and falls with weight, whether on particular persons or on a nation, brings inevitable ruin and destruction with it.

⁷ And I will winnow them with a fan in the gates of the land; I will bereave them of children; I will destroy My people, since they return not from their ways. — God will fan them with a fan in the gates of the land; either of their own land, the land of Judea; and so the Septuagint says, “in the gates of my people,”

— and by fanning is meant the dispersion of the Jews, and as the Targum paraphrases it; gates being put for them frequently; whither they should be scattered by the fan of the Lord; for what was done by the enemy, as an instrument, is ascribed to him:

— yet they return not from their ways; though fanned with the fan of affliction, bereaved of their children and threatened with destruction: it expresses their obstinate continuance in their evil ways and the reason of God’s dealing with them as above.

⁸ Their widows are increased to Me above the sand of the seas; I have brought upon them, against the mother of the young men, a despoiler at noonday; I have caused him to fall upon it suddenly, and terrors upon the city. — widows multiply “before Me” that is, God sees and acknowledges the grief, but it’s a consequence of justice;

— their widows are increased above the sand of the seas; their husbands slain; not only in the times of Ahaz, when a hundred and twenty thousand men were slain in one day in Judah, by Pekah the son of Remaliah, II Chronicles 28:6;

— but in the times of Zedekiah, at the siege of Jerusalem, and its capture, and during the Assyrian captivity before, the children of Israel were to be as the sand of the sea; and here the widows are said to be so too; their husbands being dead;

— mention is made of “seas” in the plural; there being many in or near Judea, as the Red sea, the sea of Galilee, and the Mediterranean sea; but could be prophetic for the endtime: all the seas around the world and throughout the five oceans.

¹⁰Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on usury, nor have men lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me. — woe is me, Jeremiah, and his mother,

— that she hast borne a man of strife to the whole earth! that is, one with whom the whole world, all men with whom he came into contact, were anxious to pick a quarrel for no other reason than for his faithful discharge of his office.

¹¹ The Lord said, “Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to deal with thee well in the time of evil and in the time of affliction. — the Lord promised, Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; the latter words of this verse expound the former:

— for by remnant or residue, is meant the remnant of days that Jeremiah had to live; for Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, begged him, “If it pleases you to come with me to Babylon:”

“And now behold, I loose thee this day from the chains which were upon thine hand. If it seem good unto thee to come with me into Babylon, come, and I will look well after thee; but if it seem ill unto thee to come with me into Babylon, forbear. Behold, all the land is before thee. Wherever it seemeth good and convenient for thee to go, thither go,” Jeremiah 40:4.

— or another explanation: it could be a remnant of Jeremiah’s close family; in obedience to God, he wasn’t known to have a wife (Jeremiah 16:2), thus may not have children; but the king’s daughters, who could be his nieces entrusted to him for care and protection.

¹²“Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel? — can iron break iron, especially that which comes from the North, which was harder than the common iron; or steel, the hardest of them all? though the Jews were as hard as iron, they could not prevail against and overcome those iron from the North.

¹³ Thy substance and thy treasures will I give as the spoil without price, and that for all thy sins, even in all thy borders. — God turns his speech from the prophet to the people:

— thy substance and thy treasures, all the Temple’s treasure, all the wealth of Judah, even all within thy borders, will I give to the spoil without price, they will be theirs, the Babylonians, to take away, and all because of thy sins.

¹⁴ And I will make thee to pass with thine enemies into a land which thou knowest not; for a fire is kindled in Mine anger, which shall burn upon you.” — for a fire is kindled in anger; meaning the wrath of God, compared to fire, which was kindled and excited by their sins, and which would continue upon them until it had destroyed them.

¹⁵ O Lord, Thou knowest; remember me and visit me, and avenge me on my persecutors. Take me not away in Thy longsuffering; know that for Thy sake I have suffered rebuke. — and visit me; in mercy for good; and the Targum adds, “do not delay my humiliation;” that is, pleading for swift justice, not prolonged suffering.

¹⁶ Thy words were found, and I ate them; and Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart; for I am called by Thy name, O Lord God of hosts.

— for Jeremiah was called by his name, O Lord God of hosts; it was revealed to the Prophet, he was called as a servant or messenger of his Word. He had, therefore, indicating to himself that his calling with all seriousness.

¹⁷ I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of Thy hand, for Thou hast filled me with indignation.

— filled Jeremiah with indignation; so Jeremiah 6:11, “full of the fury of the Lord” so full was he of the subject (God’s “indignation” against the ungodly) with which God had inspired him, hence Jeremiah was not able to contain himself from expressing it.

¹⁸ Why is my pain perpetual and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Wilt Thou be altogether unto me as a liar and as waters that fail? — these words are the words of Jeremiah and complaining of the hard task which God had put upon him, continually filling his mouth;

— pain and a wound, for which was no remedy but patience. Jeremiah, though a great prophet of the Lord, was (as Elijah) a man subject to like passions with other men;

— wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar and as waters that fail? These words express a bitter sense of Jeremiah’s failure and disappointment as humans do.

¹⁹ Therefore thus saith the Lord: “If thou return, then will I bring thee back, and thou shalt stand before Me; and if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as My mouth. Let them return unto thee, but return not thou unto them.

— let Israel return unto thee, but return not Jeremiah unto them; this is said of the people of Judah, to whom the prophet was sent; and the sense is, that he should not at all comply with them, or conform to their humours or flatter and sooth them in their sins, as the false prophets do.

²⁰ And I will make thee unto this people a fortified brazen wall, and they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee, for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee,” saith the Lord. — they will still continue their wickedness; and contradict his prophecies; or so as to take away his life, but they shall not prevail.

²¹ “And I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.” — and God will deliver Jeremiah out of the hand of the wicked; even from the wicked Zedekiah and his courtiers, who imprisoned him:

— the power of the terrible Chaldeans, into whose hands thou shalt come, but shalt be prevented from any harm by the workings of God’s providence in Jeremiah’s favour.

Jeremiah 16

¹ The word of the Lord came also unto me, saying, — the Targum say the Word of prophecy from the Lord: whether this is a new prophecy, or the former continued, is not certain;

² “Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place.” — thou, Jeremiah, shall not take a wife; because it was on account of the calamities and distresses which were coming upon the nation;

— which would be unbearable by him, if he had a wife and children; but he was put in charge of the king’s daughters, who could be his nieces like children entrusted to him for care and protection.

³ For thus saith the Lord concerning the sons and concerning the daughters who are born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers who begot them in this land: — the times were that for such calamities and distresses, it was wise for all to abstain from having children.

⁴“They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented, neither shall they be buried, but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth. And they shall be consumed by the sword and by famine, and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and for the beasts of the earth.”

— they shall die of grievous deaths, such as the Sword, Famine and Pestilence; and not be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth; lie and rot there; for their filthy and abominable actions committed in the land:

— the Targum particularly adds to famine, “deaths of diseases” indicating slow, agonizing death through plague and starvations; by which a man suffers slowly as by famine and is not snatched away at once; and are more grievous to bear.

⁵ For thus saith the Lord: “Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them; for I have taken away My peace from this people,” saith the Lord, “even lovingkindness and mercies.

— neither go to lament nor bemoan them; neither go to the house of mourning, or the mourning feast; to the houses of the deceased to express sorrow by shedding tears or shaking the head, or by any other gesture or ceremony as mentioned;

— for God have taken away his peace from this people; all peace or prosperity is of God, and therefore called his and which he can take away from a people when he pleases; and having determined to take it away from this people because of their sins.

⁶Both the great and the small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried, neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them. — both the nobles as well as the common people, high and low, rich and poor; none shall be exempted from the grievous deaths by the Sword, Famine and Pestilence.

⁷ Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning to comfort them for the dead; neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother.

— but now these mourning drinks should be omitted for the dead; the calamity would be so great and so universal that there wouldn’t be any time left to perform such ordinances.

⁸ Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting to sit with them to eat and to drink.” — thou shall not also go into the house of feasting; which was lawful to do and which the prophet doubtless had done at other times; but now a time of calamity coming on, it was not proper he should; and that he was to abstain from such places.

⁹ For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place, in your eyes and in your days, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.

¹⁰ “And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt show this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, ‘Why hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? Or what is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?’

— this question was answered to Habakkuk, as the prophet wonders why God would use a wicked nation to bring judgement on Judah; for a detailed study see Habakkuk

¹¹ Then shalt thou say unto them, ‘Because your fathers have forsaken Me,’ saith the Lord, ‘and have walked after other gods and have served them, and have worshiped them, and have forsaken Me, and have not kept My law.

— because you have walked after your father’s gods and have served them and have worshipped them; were guilty of gross idolatry, serving and worshipping these creatures than their Creator; even idols of gold, silver, brass, wood and stones;

— after other gods and have served them: Dagon, Chemosh, Molech, Bel, Astarte, Mithra (the Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th, which they christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; and you worship these earthly gods, Protestants or Catholics alike, even men from every nation of the earth.

¹² And ye have done worse than your fathers, for behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto Me. — and ye have done worse than your fathers; not only committed the same sins,

— but greater, or, however, attended with more aggravating circumstances; they were wilfully and impudently done, and obstinately persisted in; and therefore deserving of the great evil of punishment pronounced against them.

¹³ Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night, where I will not show you favor.’ — therefore will I call you out of this land; by force and against your wills, and with abhorrence and contempt:

— it is to be understood of their captivity, which was but a just punishment for the above sins; for since they had cast off the Lord and his worship, it was but just that they should be cast off by him and cast out of their land which they held by their obedience to him;

— the Targum reaffirms, “and there shall ye serve people that worship idols day and night” that as they had served idols, now they should serve the people, the worshippers of those idols; the former was their sin, the latter their punishment.

¹⁴“Therefore behold, the days come,” saith the Lord, “that it shall no more be said, ‘The Lord liveth who brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ — this is after another captivity in “Babylon;” in fact, the latter in a latter date will be more remarkable than the former, the former that was in Egypt led by Moses;

— so severe shall be their bondage that their deliverance from it shall be a far greater Deliverance than that out of Egypt where they spent 210 years in slavery under their Egyptian taskmasters!

For into another Captivity, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹⁵ but, ‘the Lord liveth who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither He had driven them.’ And I will bring them back into their land that I gave unto their fathers.

— the Targum says: “that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north” that is, from Babylon, which lay North of Judea.

¹⁶ “Behold, I will send for many fishers,” saith the Lord, “and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. — the “fishers,” as in Amos 4:2; Habakkuk 1:15, are the invading nations,

— others interpret this of the deliverance of the Jews by the Medes and Persians under Cyrus, who searched for them in all places, and sent them into their own land; or of Zerubbabel, and others with him, who used all means to persuade the Jews in the captivity to return to Judea and to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem.

¹⁷ For Mine eyes are upon all their ways. They are not hid from My face, neither is their iniquity hid from Mine eyes. — the context shows that the sins of Israel have not escaped the all-seeing eye of the Most High.

¹⁸ And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double, because they have defiled My land; they have filled Mine inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable things.”

— “because they have defiled My land” is indicative of defiling the land Sabbath; but when ye entered ye defiled my land by not giving them their Sabbath rest; where the commandment is given in Leviticus 25:4;

“Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of Rest unto the land, a Sabbath for the Lord; thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed; for it is a year of rest unto the land” Leviticus 25:3-5

The length of the house of Judah’s captivity of in Babylon was directly linked from the length of time they neglected to observe the land Sabbath according to II Chronicles 36:19-21:

And they burned the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all the palaces thereof with fire and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof. ²⁰ And those who had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia,

²¹ to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years, II Chronicles 36:19-21: “spoken by Jeremiah” this is a reference to the seventy years of captivity as spelt out in Jeremiah 25:11.

¹⁹ O Lord, my strength and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the nations shall come unto Thee from the ends of the earth and shall say, “Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.”

— and nations shall come; eventually, the nations will come to God and worship him of one accord, and they will say, “How did they make gods of woods and stones for themselves, as if they have no God?”

²⁰ Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?

²¹ “Therefore behold, I will this once cause them to know, I will cause them to know Mine hand and My might; and they shall know that My name is the Lord.

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century;

~~ 16,24,33 ~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

It wasn’t until 1524 that Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian, invented the letter ‘J’ that this new letter started to take a hold in the writings of western Europe, including our English language. Even in 1611 when the first edition English Bible, the King James was published, the prophet Jeremiah was known as Ieremiah. Similarly, the name Jehovah is a very late comer.

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Jeremiah

5786 – Timeline of Jewish History

•October 5, 2025 • Leave a Comment

On this day, September 23, 2025, using God’s solar-lunar calendar, the Biblical year 5786 begins.

On the race toward the beginning of the seventh millennium, the Western calendar is already off by 25 years whereas the Jewish Calendar has still 214 years to run. Thus giving rise to a difference of 239 year! The Question is, where are the discrepancies?

An attempt is made towards the end of this post.

And this year, according to the Chabad Calendar, is 5786.

Chabad: Timeline of Jewish History

Creation of Heaven and Earth, and Adam and Eve

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-3760	1	Creation of Adam and Eve
-3631	130	Seth (son of Adam) was born
-3526	235	Enosh (son of Seth) was born
-3436	325	Keynan (son of Enosh) was born
-3366	395	Mehalalel (son of Keynan) was born
-3301	460	Yered (son of Mehalalel) was born
-3139	622	Chanoch (son of Yered) was born
-3074	687	Metushelach (son of Chanoch) was born
-2887	874	Lemech II (son of Metushelach) was born
-2831	930	Adam died
-2705	1056	Noah (son of Lemech II) was born
-2225	1536	Noah began the construction of the ark
-2205	1556	Yaphet (son of Noah) was born
-2204	1557	Cham (son of Noah) was born
-2203	1558	Shem (son of Noah) was born
-2105	1656	Metushelach died
-2105	1656	The Great Flood covered the earth
-2103	1658	Arpachshad (son of Shem) was born
-2068	1693	Shelach (son of Arpachshad) born
-2038	1723	Eber (son of Shelach) was born
-2004	1757	Peleg (son of Eber) was born
-1974	1787	Re’u (son of Peleg) was born
-1942	1819	Serug (son of Re’u) was born
-1912	1849	Nachor I (son of Serug) was born
-1883	1878	Terah (son of Nachor I) was born

The Forefathers

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-1813	1948	Abraham (son of Terah) was born
-1803	1958	Sarah (daughter of Haran) was born
-1788	1973	Abraham married Sarah
-1765	1996	Dispersion from Babel after building the tower
-1761	2000	Terah left Ur Kasdim with his family
-1755	2006	Noah died
-1743	2018	The covenant (Brit Bein Habetarim) with Abraham
-1738	2023	Abraham settled in Canaan
-1727	2034	Ishmael (son of Abraham) was born
-1713	2048	Abraham circumcised himself and Ishmael
-1713	2048	Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed
-1713	2048	Isaac (son of Abraham) was born
-1677	2084	The Akeda: Isaac brought on the altar by Abraham
-1677	2084	Sarah died
-1653	2108	Jacob and Esau were born
-1638	2123	Abraham died
-1603	2158	Shem (son of Noah) died
-1590	2171	Isaac blessed Jacob instead of Esau
-1576	2185	Jacob went to Haran
-1574	2187	Eber (great-grandson of Shem) died
-1569	2192	Jacob married Leah and Rachel
-1566	2195	Levi (son of Jacob and Leah) was born
-1562	2199	Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, was born
-1556	2205	Jacob left Haran
-1553	2208	Benjamin was born
-1545	2216	Joseph was sold
-1533	2228	Isaac died
-1532	2229	Joseph became viceroy of Egypt
-1526	2235	Kehot (son of Levi) was born
-1523	2238	Jacob (and his family) went to Egypt

Living in Egypt

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-1506	2255	Jacob died
-1429	2332	After Levi died, the enslavement in Egypt began
-1393	2368	Moses was born
-1355	2406	Joshua was born
-1314	2447	Moses encountered the burning bush
-1313	2448	The Jewish nation left Egypt

Traveling Through the Desert

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-1313	2448	The Jewish nation crossed the Red Sea
-1313	2448	At Mount Sinai and the giving of the Torah
-1313	2448	Moses broke the Tablets
-1312	2449	Moshe came down Mount Sinai with the second Tablets
-1312	2449	The Tabernacle was erected
-1312	2449	The spies returned from Canaan with bad news
-1274	2487	Aharon and Miriam died
-1273	2488	Moses died

Judges and Early Prophets

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-1273	2488	The Jews crossed the Jordan into Canaan
-1258	2503	The partition of the Land of Israel completed
-1245	2516	Joshua died
-1228	2533	Rule of Judges began with Othniel ben Kenaz
-1188	2573	Ehud ben Gerah became leader
-1107	2654	Shamgar ben Anath died
-1107	2654	Deborah became leader
-1067	2694	Gideon became leader
-1027	2734	Abimelech, son of Gideon, became leader
-1024	2737	Tola, son of Pua, became leader
-1003	2758	Jair, the Gileadite, became leader
-982	2779	Jephtah (HaGil’adi) became leader
-969	2792	Elon (HaZevuloni) became leader
-959	2802	Abdon ben Hillel became leader
-951	2810	Samson became leader
-931	2830	Eli the Kohen became leader
-907	2854	David was born
-890	2871	Samuel became leader

Kings and the First Holy Temple

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-879	2882	Saul was appointed king
-877	2884	David became king of Judah in Hebron
-869	2892	David became king of Israel in Jerusalem
-837	2924	Solomon became king
-833	2928	The building of the first First Temple commenced
-827	2935	The First Temple was completed
-797	2964	Solomon died and his kingdom was divided
-797	2964	Rehabeam (son of Solomon) became king of Judah
-797	2964	Jeroboam ben Nevat became king over Israel
-718	3043	Elijah went up in a chariot of fire
-677	3084	Joash renovated the First Temple
-619	3142	Isaiah began his prophecies
-574	3187	The first two of the Ten Tribes were exiled
-566	3195	Another two of the Ten Tribes were exiled
-562	3199	Hezekiah became king of Judah
-556	3205	The last of the Ten Tribes were exiled
-548	3213	Sennacherib invaded the Land of Judah and retreated
-533	3228	Manasseh (son of Hezekiah) became king of Judah
-463	3298	Jeremiah began his prophecies
-458	3303	Josiah renovated the First Temple
-442	3319	Jerusalem conquered and Joiakim (Yehoyakim) exiled
-440	3321	Joiakim burned the Book of Lamentations by Jeremiah
-434	3327	Jerusalem conquered again and Jehoiachin exiled
-430	3331	Jeremiah persisted in prophesying calamity
-429	3332	Ezekiel prophesied in exile
-425	3336	The final Babylonian siege of Jerusalem
-423	3338	The walls of Jerusalem were penetrated
-423	3338	The sacrifices ceased in the First Temple
-423	3338	The first First Temple was destroyed

Exile in Babylon

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-423	3339	Gedalyah ben Achikam was killed
-421	3340	Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar dream
-410	3352	Ezekiel prophesied the future Temple
-372	3389	Daniel read the writing on the wall
-372	3389	Daniel was thrown into the lion’s den
-371	3390	Zerubabel led the return to the Land of Israel
-370	3391	Building of Second Temple commenced
-366	3395	Achashverosh II made his great banquet
-362	3399	Esther was taken to the palace
-357	3404	Esther took action against Haman’s decree
-355	3406	Mordechai proclaimed the celebration of Purim
-353	3408	Building of the Second Temple resumed
-349	3412	The Second Temple was completed

Building of the Second Holy Temple

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-348	3413	Ezra led the second return to the Land of Israel
-335	3426	Nehemiah returned to rebuild walls of Jerusalem
-313	3448	Ezra died
-313	3448	Simon the Tzaddik met Alexander the Great
-313	3449	The Minyan Shtarot began

Greek Cultural Domination

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-273	3488	Simon the Tzaddik died
-246	3515	72 Elders translated the Torah into Greek (Septuagint)
-140	3621	The revolt of Mattityahu the Chashmona’i

Kingdom of Judea: Dynasty of the Chashmona’im

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-139	3622	Judah the Maccabee ruled
-139	3622	The Second Temple was re-dedicated
-138	3623	Hannukah was declared a festival
-133	3628	Judah the Maccabee was killed in battle
-133	3628	Yonatan (son of Mattityahu) ruled
-127	3634	Shimon (son of Mattityahu) ruled
-119	3642	Yohanan Hyrkanos (son of Shimon) ruled
-93	3668	Judah Aristoblus (son of Yochanan Hyrkanos) ruled
-91	3670	Alexander Yannai (son of Yochanan Hyrkanos) ruled
-73	3688	Salome Alexandra, wife of Alexander Yannai, ruled
-65	3696	Aristoblus II (son of Alexander Yannai) ruled
-61	3700	The Romans gained control of Judea
-61	3700	Hyrkanos II (son of Alexander Yannai) ruled
-40	3721	Antigonus (son of Aristoblus II) ruled

Roman Client Kings and Rulers: The Herodian Dynasty

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
-36	3725	Herod I ruled, killing all the Chashmona’im
-33	3728	Hillel became the leader of the Torah scholars
-19	3742	Herod I rebuilding the Second Temple
-11	3750	Renovation of Second Temple completed
1	3761	Archelaus (son of Herod I) ruled
8	3768	Hillel died
10	3770	Archelaus was deposed by the Roman Emperor
21	3781	Agrippa I (grandson of Herod I) ruled
28	3788	Sanhedrin moved from the Second Temple
44	3804	Agrippa II (son of Agrippa I) ruled
50	3810	Rabban Gamliel I, grandson of Hillel, died
66	3826	Vespasian arrived in Judea to reassert Roman rule
69	3829	The Second Temple was destroyed

The Talmudic Era: The Mishnah

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
74	3834	R Yohanan ben Zakkai died
86	3846	Sanhedrin moved from place to place, R Gamliel II
133	3893	Betar fell and Bar Kochba revolt ended in tragedy
134	3894	Judaism was banned, and R Akiva was imprisoned
189	3949	R Judah Hanassi completed the Mishnah

The Talmudic Era: The Gemara

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
219	3979	Rav left the Land of Israel and settled in Bablyonia
247	4007	Shmuel was the Talmudic authority in Bablyonia
254	4014	R Yohanan was the leading Talmudic authority
290	4050	R Huna was the leading Talmudic authority
298	4058	R Yehudah was the leading Talmudic authority
300	4060	R Chisda was the leading Talmudic authority
309	4069	Rabbah was the leading Talmudic authority
321	4081	R Yosef was the leading Talmudic authority
325	4085	Abayey was the leading Talmudic authority
338	4098	Rava was the leading Talmudic authority
359	4119	Hillel II (the calendar) became Nassi
392	4152	R Ashi was the leading Talmudic authority
427	4187	R Ashi died after the compilation of the Gemara
475	4235	The Talmud was complete when Ravina II died

The Rabbanan

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
551	4311	Mar Zutra proclaimed Jewish self-rule in Babylonia

The Geonim

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
589	4349	The talmudic academy of Pumpedita was reconstituted
609	4369	The talmudic academy of Sura was reconstituted
614	4374	The Persians conquered the Land of Israel
614	4374	The Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem
629	4389	The Byzantine Empire reconquered the Land of Israel
636	4396	R Yitzchak was the last gaon of Neharde’a
637	4397	The Arabs conquered the Land of Israel
645	4405	One of the “Takkkanot Hage’onim” enacted at this time
755	4515	R Achai Gaon left Iraq for the Land of Israel
759	4519	R Yehuda became gaon of Sura
759	4519	The Halachot Gedolot (BaHag) was written at this time
788	4548	Another of “Takkanot Hage’onim” enacted at this time
858	4618	R Amram (who wrote the Siddur) became gaon of Sura
928	4688	Rabbeinu Saadya was appointed gaon of Sura
955	4715	“Four Captives” were ransomed at around this time
968	4728	R Sherira became gaon of Pumpedita
997	4757	R Hai became (the last) gaon of Pumpedita
1038	4798	R Hai died, and the academies of Babylon declined

The Early Rishonim: The Crusade Massacres

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1040	4800	Rabbeinu Gersom Me’or Hagola died
1088	4848	The Rif arrived in Spain from Morocco
1096	4856	The Crusaders destroyed Jewish communities
1099	4859	Jerusalem was captured by the Crusaders
1103	4863	The Rif died
1105	4865	Rashi died, and the era of the Tosaphot began
1135	4895	The Rambam (Maimonides) was born
1144	4904	The first (recorded) blood libel took place
1147	4907	The Crusaders attacked Jewish communities
1147	4907	Rabbeinu Tam was captured by the Crusaders
1148	4908	The Rambam’s and the Radak’s families left Cordova
1165	4925	The Rambam visited the Land of Israel
1171	4931	Rabbeinu Tam died
1175	4935	The Rashbam died
1184	4944	The young son of the Ri was killed
1187	4948	Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem
1189	4949	R Yaakov D’Orleans was killed in London
1190	4950	Jews were massacred in England in the third Crusade
1191	4951	Rabbi David Kimchi, or “Radak” wrote his commentary
1194	4954	The Ramban (Nachmanides) was born
1198	4959	The Ra’avad died
1204	4965	The Rambam died
1236	4996	Rampaging mobs massacred Jews in France
1242	5002	A massive burning of the Talmud took place in Paris
1244	5004	Jerusalem was sacked by Egyptians and Turks
1252	5012	The Inquisition began to use torture
1267	5027	The Ramban left Spain and settled in the Land of Israel
1270	5030	The Ramban died
1286	5046	The Maharam MeRothenburg was imprisoned
1290	5050	New works advanced the study of Kabbalah
1290	5050	The era of the Tosaphot concluded at around this time

Later Rishonim: Persecutions and Expulsions

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1290	5050	All Jews were expelled from England
1293	5053	The Maharam MeRothenburg died in prison
1298	5058	The Rindfleisch massacres began
1298	5058	Author of ‘Mordechai’ and Maimoniyot killed
1305	5065	The Rashba placed a limited ban on philosophy
1305	5065	The Rosh and his son, the Tur, arrived in Spain
1306	5066	All Jews were expelled from France
1310	5070	The Rashba died
1320	5080	Jews were massacred by the Pastoureaux Crusaders
1327	5088	The Rosh died
1336	5096	German Jews were massacred by the Armleder bands
1338	5098	The Ralbag wrote his commentary on the Bible
1349	5109	The Black Death massacres swept across Europe
1367	5127	Ran, Rivash, and other scholars in Spain imprisoned
1391	5151	Spanish Jews massacred — many forced to convert
1391	5151	The Rivash and Rashbatz left Spain
1394	5155	The Final expulsion of Jews from France
1413	5173	R Yosef Albo was in a forced debate with Christians
1421	5181	Jews in Austria were massacred in the Wiener Gezera
1475	5235	The invention of printing was used for Jewish books
1481	5241	The Inquisition was established in Spain
1488	5248	R Ovadiah De Bertinoro settled in Jerusalem
1491	5251	Columbus consulted R. Avraham Zacuto for his travels
1492	5252	All Jews were expelled from Spain and Sicily

The Great Scholars of the Shulchan Aruch and Torah Consolidation

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1493	5253	R Yitzchak Abarbanel arrived in Naples, from Spain
1496	5257	All Jews were expelled from Portugal
1516	5276	The Ein Yaakov was printed
1516	5276	The Turks (Ottoman Empire) conquered Eretz Yisrael
1525	5285	R Yosef Yoselman saved many Jews during Peasants’ War
1553	5314	A mass burning of Jewish books took place in Rome
1563	5323	The Shulchan Aruch was completed by R Yosef Karo
1570	5330	Shulchan Aruch with supplements was published
1572	5332	The Arizal died in Tzfat
1573	5333	The Maharal came to Prague
1573	5334	The Maharshal died
1575	5335	R Yosef Karo died in Tzefat
1599	5359	The Maharal returned to Prague again
1614	5374	The Maharsha became rabbi in Lublin
1616	5377	The Tosaphot Yom Tov commentary was concluded
1621	5382	The Shaloh arrived in the Land of Israel
1629	5389	R Yom Tov Lipman Heller was imprisoned in Prague
1640	5400	R Yoel Sirkes, the Bach, died
1646	5406	The Shach and Taz (on Shulchan Aruch) were printed
1648	5408	Jews were massacred by Chmielnicki’s forces

Early Acharonim and East European Massacres

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1654	5414	The first Jews settled in New Amsterdam (New York)
1655	5415	Jews killed in Russian and Swedish invasions of Poland
1656	5416	Jews were permitted to live in England
1656	5416	Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated
1673	5433	The Magen Avraham (on Shulchan Aruch) was completed
1676	5437	Shabtai Tzvi died as a Muslim
1689	5449	The Beit Shmuel (on the Shulchan Aruch) was printed
1698	5458	The Baal Shem Tov was born
1702	5463	The Pnei Yehoshua’s family was killed in an explosion
1712	5472	The Siftei Chachamim was arrested
1724	5484	R Yaakov Culi (Me’am Lo’ez) arrived in Constantinople
1727	5487	The Mishneh LeMelech died
1734	5494	Jews were massacred by the Haidamack bands

Acharonim and Early Chassidim

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1741	5501	The Or HaChayim arrived in the Land of Israel
1747	5507	R Moshe Chaim Luzzatto died in Acco (Acre)
1750	5510	R Jonathan Eybeschutz became Rabbi in Hamburg
1754	5515	R Yechezkel Landau became Rabbi in Prague
1757	5518	The Frankists instigated mass burnings of the Talmud
1759	5519	Frankists supported blood libel charges in a ‘debate’
1760	5520	The Baal Shem Tov died
1764	5524	The Council of Four Lands was discontinued
1768	5528	Despite resistance, Haidamacks massacre thousands
1772	5532	The Maggid of Mezeritsch died
1782	5542	R Adler and Chatam Sofer visited the Noda BiYehuda
1786	5546	R Elimelech of Lizensk died
1791	5551	The Pale of Settlement was established in Russia
1793	5553	Jews suffered in reign of terror of French Revolution
1797	5558	The Vilna Gaon died
1798	5559	Ba’al HaTanya was released from first imprisonment
1799	5559	Napoleon led an army through the Land of Israel
1806	5566	The Chida (R Chaim Yosef David Azulai) died
1806	5566	The Chatam Sofer became rabbi in Pressburg
1809	5570	R Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev died
1810	5571	R Nachman of Breslov died
1814	5574	R Akiva Eger became rabbi in Posen
1814	5575	Kozhnitzer Maggid and Yehudi of Peshischa, died
1815	5575	Chozeh of Lublin and R. Mendel of Rymanov, died
1819	5579	Anti Jewish riots spread throughout Germany
1827	5587	Russia began conscripting Jewish children to the army
1840	5600	R Yisrael of Ruzhin was released from imprisonment

Later Acharonim and the Changing Society

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1843	5603	Tzemach Tzedek of Lubavitch was arrested in Russia
1846	5606	Sir Moshe Montefiore visited Russia to help local Jews
1848	5609	R Yisrael Salanter left Vilna
1851	5611	R Shimshon Hirsch became rabbi in Frankfort am Main
1859	5619	R Menachem Mendel of Kotzk died
1864	5624	Malbim imprisoned, and then expelled from Rumania
1866	5626	Chidushei HaRim, Tzemach Tzedek, died
1873	5633	The Chafetz Chaim was published
1874	5634	The Minchat Chinuch died
1878	5638	Petah Tikvah agricultural settlement was established
1881	5641	Jews began leaving Russia after a wave of pogroms
1886	5646	R Shlomo Ganzfried died
1892	5652	R Chaim (Brisker) became Rabbi in Brisk
1905	5665	The Sfat Emet died
1905	5665	Many Jews were killed in (official) Russian pogroms
1911	5671	Chazon Ish was published
1914	5674	Over 500,000 Jewish soldiers fought in World War I
1918	5678	Over 60,000 Jews killed during the Russian Revolution
1923	5684	The Daf HaYomi study cycle commenced
1927	5687	Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe released from Soviet prison
1938	5699	Jews were attacked in the Kristallnacht (Germany)

The Holocaust

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1939	5699	Germany started World War II, and mass killing of Jews
1941	5701	Nazi Germany unexpectedly invaded Russia
1941	5701	200,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar and Ponary
1942	5702	400,000 Jews of Warsaw were sent to death camps
1943	5703	Nazis’ massive losses in the battle of Stalingrad
1943	5703	Remaining Jews in Warsaw staged a massive uprising
1943	5703	Jewish uprisings at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bialystock
1943	5703	The Danish quietly rescued 93% of their Jews to safety
1944	5704	300,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in 3 months
1944	5705	Uprising in Auschwitz death camp just before freedom
1945	5705	Nazi Germany was conquered, and World War II ended
1945	5705	6,000,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis during the war

The Modern State of Israel

SECULAR YEAR	JEWISH YEAR	EVENT IN HISTORY
1947	5707	Publication of the Talmud Encyclopedia was commenced
1947	5708	The United Nations divided Israel
1947	5708	Arabs attacked Israel to gain territory
1948	5708	The State of Israel was established
1948	5708	Israel was invaded by many Arab countries
1949	5709	The “War of Independence” in Israel ended
1950	5710	All Jews left the ancient Jewish community of Iraq
1950	5710	Almost all Jews of Yemen emigrated to Israel
1951	5711	The Lubavitcher Rebbe accepts the mantle of leadership
1956	5717	Jewish forces invaded Egypt and conquered the Sinai Desert
1967	5727	The Lubavitcher Rebbe established the Tefillin Campaign
1967	5727	Jerusalem re-united under Jewish rule in the Six Day War
1973	5734	2,500 Jewish soldiers were killed in the Yom Kippur War
1974	5734	Lubavitcher Rebbe established the Shabbat Candle Campaign
1982	5742	Massive enemy arsenals were discovered in Lebanon
1987	5746	First international conference of Chabad Lubavitch emissaries
1993	5753	A secret agreement signed in Oslo
1994	5754	The Lubavitcher Rebbe passed away
2008	5767	Deadly attack at Chabad House in Mumbai, India, kills six
2020	5780	Israel signed “Abraham Accords,” normalizing relations with UAE and Bahrain, soon followed by Sudan and Morocco.

Caveat

All Orthodox groups accept the traditional Jewish calendar as established by rabbinic calculations (from Seder Olam Rabbah, 160 CE; contrast this to Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656) who spent years calculating the calendar only from the early 1600s, a difference of something like 1500 years.

And these are the key Similarities Across Jewish Orthodox Sects: this year 5786 AM is understood as the number of years since the creation of Adam and Eve, not necessarily the entire universe.

They follow the Masoretic Text of the Torah, which provides the genealogical basis for calculating 5786 years from creation of Adam and Eve to the present.

Reconciling 5786 AM (Hebrew) with 2025 CE (Gregorian)

This counts years from what is considered the creation of Adam and Eve, dated to 3760 BCE (Year 1 AM). The current Hebrew year 5786 AM corresponds to 2025–2026 CE in the Gregorian calendar, giving a gap of 239 to 240 years.

Where Does the “240-Year” Difference Come From? Key Issue: the Persian Period

The idea of a 240-year discrepancy comes from a debate over missing years in the Jewish calendar. Some scholars argue that rabbinic calculations in Seder Olam Rabbah omitted about 165–240 years, especially regarding the Persian period (538–323 BCE).

Secular historical records (Greek, Persian, and archaeological sources) state that the Persian period (from Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE to Alexander the Great’s conquest in c 330 BCE) lasted about 208–209 years — thus omitting 156 years from Jewish chronology.

Seder Olam Rabbah, however, records only about 52 years for the Persian period, drastically shortening it, critics claim.

If we add at least those missing 156 years to the current Jewish year (5786 AM), we get: 5786 + 156 = 5942. This means this year should be at least 5942 AM, if this is the only mistake.

But it is known that the Masoretic Text has an error in Exodus 12:40-41, the MT says Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, while the LXX/SP clarify that this includes time in Canaan and Egypt.

If this timeline is corrected, then the true Jewish year would be 5942 – 210 = 5732 AM

This would mean we still have 268 years to go before we arrive at the year 6000 AM.

But then again, Jewish figures maybe right

(A) The Persian empire may reign from Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE to Alexander the Great’s conquest in c 330 BCE, which lasted about 208–209 years — but Cyrus decreed an order to allow the Jews to return to Judea during his reign, and not at the end of the Persian empire.

The first 52 years of the Persian period overlap with this timeframe (Cyrus’s decree, return of the exiles, and Temple reconstruction). While the Persian Empire continued to exist for another 156 years (until 331 BCE), Jewish scribes might not have recorded this period in detail because it was not as relevant to their religious history. So incorporating just 52 years for the Persian period should be legitimate.

Second, the error in Exodus 12:40-41 might be just the omission of Canaan in the verse, while the figures for the rest of genealogy continue uninterrupted.

The Targum says the Israelites in Egypt were only 210 years; and in Exodus 12 it explains why this differs from the Masoretic version of 429 years:

And the days of the dwelling of the sons of Israel in Mizraim were thirty weeks of years, (thirty times seven years,) which is the sum of two hundred and ten years. But the number of four hundred and thirty years (had passed away since) the Lord spake to Abraham, in the hour that He spake with him on the fifteenth of Nisan, between the divided parts, until the day that they went out of Mizraim. Exodus 12:40 Jonathan

Should the above two apparent misconceptions be viewed in their right perspectives, then the Jewish year of 5786 since the creation of Adam and Eve for this year should be closer to the truth than not.

(B) There is another possibility that some Jewish Chronologists manipulated the Calendar by shortening the Persian period by some 240 years but offsettin by lengthening similar number of years through an earlier period or periods, hence leaving the year number (5786 for this year) intact. We couldn’t know for sure, but there is always a possibility of such manipulation as the Lord prophesied there is such as thing as “the lying pen of the scribes” Jeremiah 8:8.

Posted in Calendar, Ezekiel Timeline, Judiasm

Jeremiah (Ch 13-14)

•October 4, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Years could have passed before Jeremiah was asked to prophecy again, probably in the year 602 BC during the reign of Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC).

This chapter contains a single and distinct prophecy, which, under two symbols, a linen girdle left to rot, and all vessels being filled with wine, foretells the utter destruction that was destined to fall upon the whole Jewish nation, including the individuals of every rank and denomination.

But starting verse 11, the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah are both included in the narratives.

More on (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 13

¹ Thus saith the Lord unto me, “Go and get thee a linen girdle, and put it upon thy loins, and put it not in water.” — go and get thee a linen gird; the prophet was commanded not to put the girdle in water, that is, not to wash it, this girdle represents the people of Judah with their corruption;

— but to leave it in that state of filthiness which it had contracted in wearing it; when they were a people near unto the Lord, when they cleaved unto him, and served him: “and put it upon thy loins” near the reins, the seat of affection and that it might be visible and ornamental.

² So I got a girdle according to the word of the Lord and put it on my loins. — so Jeremiah do as being asked by God, even where he has no clue what’s coming; according to the word of the Lord; according to God’s command.

³ And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, — and the word of the Lord; the Targum says, “the word of prophecy from before the Lord.”

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

⁴ “Take the girdle that thou hast got, which is upon thy loins, and arise, go to the Euphrates and hide it there in a hole of the rock.” — arise and go to Euphrates; the Euphrates is specified as being near Babylon, the Jews place of exile; and hide it there in a hole of the rock; by the river side;

— this signifies the carrying of the Jews captive to Babylon, by which city the river Euphrates ran, and the obscure state and condition they would be in there; and where all their pride and glory would be marred, as afterwards declared.

⁵ So I went and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. — so Jeremiah went and hid it by Euphrates; or “in” it; in a hole of the rock, upon the banks of it.

⁶ And it came to pass after many days, that the Lord said unto me, “Arise, go to the Euphrates and take the girdle from thence, which I commanded thee to hide there.” — and the Lord said unto me, arise, go to Euphrates, and take the girdle from thence, which God had commanded thee to hide;

— which may indicate the return of these people from captivity, according to the prophecy of Jeremiah; to express the wretched state and condition these people were in; especially before the captivity, which was the chief cause for their captivity.

⁷ Then I went to the Euphrates and dug, and took the girdle from the place where I had hid it; and behold, the girdle was marred (rotten); it was profitable for nothing. — and, behold, the girdle was marred; or “corrupted” it become rotten by the washing of the water over it, and its long continuance in such a place:

— it was profitable for nothing; it could not be put upon a man’s loins, or be wore any more; nor was it fit for any other use, it was so sadly spoiled and so thoroughly rotten. It was not fit for anything.

⁸ Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

⁹ “Thus saith the Lord: ‘In this manner will I mar (destroy) the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. — will God destroy the pride of Judah, and the strength of Jerusalem?

— or their glory, or excellency; that which they were proud of; their city which was burnt, and their Temple which was destroyed by the Chaldeans; their king, princes and nobles, who were carried captive into Babylon, stripped of all their grandeur, honour and glory;

— the Targum says, “so will I ruin the pride of the men of Judah, and the strength of the inhabitants of Jerusalem;” meaning the proud men of Jerusalem would be destroyed.

¹⁰ This evil people, who refuse to hear My words, who walk in the stubbornness of their heart, and walk after other gods to serve them and to worship them, shall even be as this girdle which is good for nothing. — this evil people, which refuse to hear my words; sent by the prophets, to whom they turned a deaf ear;

— shall even be as this girdle, which is good for nothing: as they were corrupt; so they would be carried captive into a foreign country, where they would be inglorious or shameful, and unprofitable, uncomfortable in themselves and of no use to one another.

¹¹ For as the girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man, so have I caused to cleave unto Me the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah,’ saith the Lord, ‘that they might be unto Me as a people, and as a name, and as praise, and as glory; but they would not hear.’

— so have God caused the whole house of Israel, and the whole house of Judah to cleave unto him; whom he had chosen above all people to dwell in his courts; whom he favoured with his presence and cleave to him; so that they were a people near unto him as a man’s girdle is to his loins;

— but they would not hear the words of the Lord, nor obey his voice; but served other gods, departed from the Lord, to whom they should have cleaved, and so became like his rotten girdle.

¹² “Therefore thou shalt speak unto them this word: ‘Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Every bottle shall be filled with wine.’ And they shall say unto thee, ‘Do we not certainly know that every bottle shall be filled with wine?’

— every bottle shall be filled with wine; God’s judgements are often represented under the figure of a cup full of intoxicating liquor: see this metaphor pursued at large, Jeremiah 25:15.

¹³ Then shalt thou say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land — even the kings that sit upon David’s throne, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem — with drunkenness.

— behold, God will fill all the inhabitants with drunkenness; there is a wine of astonishment and confusion, Psalms 60:3; with that wine, saith God, I will fill all orders of persons, kings, priests, prophets and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; giddy, stupid, unable to help themselves or to advise one another;

— as wine brings on a state of intoxication, so the effect of God’s wrath and judgements upon the entire nation would be to reduce all its members to a state of helpless distraction, which would cause them to rush to their own ruin, with tribulation;

¹⁴ And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together,’ saith the Lord. ‘I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but shall destroy them.’”

— and God will dash them one against another; he will permit an evil spirit of civil strife to arise among them, as Judges 9:23, so that they shall be set one against another, fathers against sons, and sons against fathers, and family against family;

— God will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them: everything was according to his will; he would not prevent the enemy’s invading, besieging, and taking them, nor hinder themselves from destroying one another; but suffer from one calamity to another.

¹⁵ Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud, for the Lord hath spoken. — speaking to the “whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah” verse 11 above.

¹⁶ Give glory to the Lord your God before He cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look for light, He turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness. — and before your feet stumble; before the time come when ye shall be forced to flee by night unto the mountains for fear of your enemies;

— or, more generally, before you find yourselves overtaken by the pursuing judgements of God, notwithstanding all your endeavours to outrun and escape from them;

— the Targum says, “before tribulation comes upon you, and your feet stumble on the mountains of gloom.”

¹⁷ But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears, because the Lord’s flock is carried away captive.

— Jeremiah shall weep in secret places for their pride; their haughtiness, stubbornness and vain confidence; and his eye shall weep sore; because the Lord’s flock, his people, the sheep of his pasture, are carried away captive.

¹⁸ Say unto the king and to the queen, “Humble yourselves, sit down; for your principalities shall come down, even the crown of your glory.” — humble yourselves, come down from your thrones, and sit in the dust; humble yourselves before the Lord for your own sins, and the sins of the people;

— in times of general corruption and which threatens a nation with ruin, it becomes kings and princes to set an example of humiliation and repentance; and be in a low and abject condition, than an exhortation to what was their usual dominance;

— even the crown of their glory; or glorious crown which should fall from their heads or be taken from them when they should be no more served or treated as crowned heads.

¹⁹ The cities of the South shall be shut up, and none shall open them. Judah shall be carried away captive, all of it; it shall be wholly carried away captive. — the cities of the South shall be shut up, and the walls of their cities shall close even before those coming upon them from the North because of their fear of Nebuchadnezzar.

²⁰ Lift up your eyes, and behold them that come from the north. Where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock? — the state and whole body of the people being called upon to observe the Chaldean army, which came from the North; and is on the march, just at hand to invade, besiege, take, and carry them captive;

— the Septuagint renders it, “lift up thine eyes, O Jerusalem” where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?” that is, the people, which were committed to the care and charge of the king,

— as sheep into the hands of a shepherd; and were a fine body of people, chosen of God; a precious and distinguished above all others by their righteous laws and statutes, with special privileges;

— a people who were to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, and a peculiar people, the glory and a light to the whole earth; but now carried or about to be carried away as captives.

²¹ What wilt thou say when He shall punish thee? For thou hast taught them to be captains, and as chief over thee. Shall not sorrows take thee, as a woman in travail? — or “when he shall visit on thee thy sin;” when God shall punish thee for thy sins;

— for thou hast taught them to be captains, and as chief over thee; some Jews showed the Chaldeans the way into their country, and taught them how to conquer them, and be masters over them; or “hast taught them against thee” to thy hurt and detriment;

— king Hezekiah, a foolish king, had earlier even showed the emissaries of Merodachbaladan of the Chaldeans his entire treasure house:

And Hezekiah was glad with them, and showed them the house of his precious things — the silver and the gold, and the spices and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armor, and all that was found in his treasures. There was nothing in his house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah showed them not; Isaiah 39:2;

And Hezekiah hearkened unto them, and showed them all the house of his precious things: the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armor, and all that was found in his treasuries. There was nothing in his house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah showed them not, II Kings 20:13.

— shall not sorrows take thee as a woman in travail? indicating the suddenness of their calamities; the sharpness and severity of them; and that they would be inevitable, even all the treasures of the temple to be carried away.

²² And if thou say in thine heart, “Why come these things upon me?”—for the greatness of thine iniquity are thy skirts uncovered, and thy heels made bare. — the Targum says, “because thy sins are multiplied, thy confusion is revealed, thy shame is exposed;”

— are thy skirts uncovered, and thy heels made bare; being obliged to walk naked and barefoot, their buttocks uncovered, and their legs and feet naked, without stockings or shoes, as captives used to be led, to their great shame and disgrace; see Isaiah 20:2.

²³ Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil. — can the Ethiopian change his skin, turning it to a white color, or the leopard his spots, characteristic as they have become of him?

— then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil; the one was practically as impossible as the other; they were entirely given over to wickedness.

²⁴ “Therefore will I scatter them as the stubble that passeth away by the wind of the wilderness. — by the wind of the wilderness; which blows freely and strongly; so the Chaldean army is as a dry wind of the wilderness, even a full wind that should scatter and destroy, Jeremiah 4:11;

— or “to the wind of the wilderness” and may indicate the wilderness of the people, or the land of Babylon, whither they should be carried captive, and from whence the wind should come that should bring them.

²⁵ This is thy lot, the portion of thy measures from Me,” saith the Lord; “because thou hast forgotten Me, and trusted in falsehood.

²⁶ Therefore will I uncover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy shame may appear. — the Targum says, “and I also will reveal the confusion of thy sin upon thy face, and thy shame shall be seen;” that their sins might appear to themselves and others, of which they had reason to be ashamed.

²⁷ I have seen thine adulteries and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem! Wilt thou not be made clean? When shall it once be?”

— wilt thou not be made clean? When shall it once be? The Lord is still stretching out arms of mercy to an apostate nation, a proof of the greatness of his love and patience for sinners.

Jeremiah 14

¹ The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the dearth: — dearth, a severe drought; literally, bad tidings of the drought, when the showers were restrained; when the heaven was shut up.

² “Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground, and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up. — these mourned because of the drought and famine that were upon the land:

— they are black unto the ground; that is, the inhabitants of the cities, and those that sit in the gates, their faces are black through famine; see Lamentations 4:8, so the Targum says “their faces are covered with blackness, they are black as a pot.”

³ And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters; they came to the pits and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.

— their menial servants came to the pits and found no water; according to order to the pools and cisterns, or to the deep wells, and to such places where there used to be a great confluence of water, and plenty of it, but now they could find none.

⁴ Because the ground is chapped, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed; they covered their heads. — and covered their heads; the extremest sign of a grief as persons ashamed or as mourners used to do, being full of anguish and distress because of the drought.

5 Yea, the hind also calved in the field and forsook it, because there was no grass. — because there was no grass; for the hind (the female of the red deer) famed for her affection to her young, abandons them.

⁶ And the wild asses stood in the high places; they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes failed, because there was no grass.”

⁷ O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do Thou it for Thy name’s sake; for our backslidings are many; we have sinned against Thee. — Jeremiah applies himself to God, who alone could remove it, confessing that their many great sins and backslidings had well deserved to be thus severely scourged.

⁸ O the Hope of Israel, the Savior thereof in time of trouble, why shouldest Thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night?

— why shouldest thou be as a stranger in the land; or a “sojourner” who abides but for a while; and it not being his native place, is not so solicitous for the welfare of it.

⁹ Why shouldest Thou be as a man amazed, as a mighty man that cannot save? Yet Thou, O Lord, art in the midst of us, and we are called by Thy name; leave us not. — yet thou, O Lord, art in the midst of us; having his residence and dwelling in the Temple at Jerusalem; and therefore was not a stranger and foreigner among us.

¹⁰ Thus saith the Lord unto this people: “Thus have they loved to wander; they have not restrained their feet. Therefore the Lord doth not accept them; He will now remember their iniquity and visit their sins.”

— God will now remember their iniquity, and visit their sins; but by punishment for their sins, he will let them know that as he hath seen and taken notice of, so he hath not forgot what they have done.

¹¹Then said the Lord unto me, “Pray not for this people for their good. — do not pray for this people to do well; for rain, that the famine might cease; and for deliverance from their enemies, that they might not go into captivity; for these things were already determined by the Lord.

¹² When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer burnt offering and an oblation, I will not accept them; but I will consume them by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence.” — and God will his judgement by the sword, by famine and by pestilence;

— the Lord not only determines the continuance of the famine, notwithstanding the prayers of the prophet; but adds two other judgements, the sword and pestilence; and therefore it was to no purpose to pray to him on their behalf, he was inexorable, unrelenting.

¹³ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, the prophets say unto them, ‘Ye shall not see the sword, neither shall ye have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.’” — behold, the prophets say unto them; that is, the false prophets, who were influencing the people for evil.

¹⁴ Then the Lord said unto me, “The prophets prophesy lies in My name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spoke unto them. They prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought and the deceit of their heart.

— the prophets prophesy lies in my name; it is a wicked thing to tell lies; it is more so to foretell them, and that in the name of the Lord; pretending they have his authority, and are under the influence and guidance of his Spirit;

— and it was sinful for the people to give credit to them, and the more so in that they were forewarned of these prophets and their lies, and had the reverse told them by a true prophet of the Lord, and therefore were inexcusable.

¹⁵ Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that prophesy in My name, whom I sent not, yet they say, ‘Sword and famine shall not be in this land’: By sword and famine shall those prophets be consumed.

— yet they say, sword and famine shall come in the land; though the Lord by his true prophet had said there should be both; which proves that they were not sent by the Lord, since what they said was in direct opposition to the word of the Lord; wherefore their doom in righteous judgement follows:

— by sword and famine shall these prophets be consumed; they should be among the first, if not the first that should perish by these calamities; and show that their lies could neither secure themselves nor others from the judgements which the Lord had said should come upon them.

Falling water level at Lake Mead shows a phenomenon called the “bathtub ring.”

¹⁶ And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword; and they shall have none to bury them — them, their wives, nor their sons, nor their daughters — for I will pour their wickedness upon them.

— shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem, because of the famine and the sword; they die of the famine and of the sword, their carcasses should be cast out of their houses into the open streets, and there lie unburied, as a punishment for disbelieving the words of the Lord, and giving heed to the lies of the false prophets:

— them: their wives, their sons, their daughters; or rather, “they” – their wives, and their sons, and their daughters ~ these shall die by the famine and the sword, and shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem.

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹⁷ “Therefore thou shalt say this word unto them: ‘Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease; for the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous blow. — the Septuagint, “bring down upon your eyes tears night and day, and let them not cease;”

— for the virgins of my people is broken with a great breach; cities are called virgins, which were never taken; and so Jerusalem have never been taken since it was in the hands of the people of Judah; nor were its inhabitants, but now together with the famine and the sword by which many should perish resulting in sorrows and mournings.

¹⁸ If I go forth into the field, then behold, the slain with the sword! And if I enter into the city, then behold, them that are sick with famine! Yea, both the prophet and the priest go about into a land that they know not.’”

— then they that are sick with the famine just want to die, being starved for want of provisions; their multitudes dead and their carcasses lying in the streets unburied; the prophet does not make mention of the dead indeed, only of the sick with famine.

¹⁹ Hast Thou utterly rejected Judah? Hath Thy soul loathed Zion? Why hast Thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us? We looked for peace, and there is no good; and for the time of healing, and behold, trouble!

— the prophet, though forbidden, proceeds to prayers, hast thou utterly rejected Judah? on account of this people, of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin: or “in rejecting hast thou rejected Judah?” from being a nation? hast thou cast them away, and wilt thou suffer them to go into captivity as the ten tribes?

²⁰ We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness and the iniquity of our fathers; for we have sinned against Thee. — we acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers; this is said by Jeremiah in the name of the few faithful that were among this people, who were sensible of their own sins;

— the sins of their ancestors and which they confess; their fathers had sinned, and they had imitated them; and continued in the same, and therefore might justly expect the displeasure of the Lord, and his controversy with them; for we have sinned against thee; Jeremiah 14:7.

²¹ Do not abhor us, for Thy name’s sake; do not disgrace the throne of Thy glory; remember, break not Thy covenant with us. — do not abhor us, for thy name’s sake; which was called upon them, and which they called upon; they deserved to be abhorred;

— they had done those things which might justly render them abominable, being what was abhorrent to him; and they deprecate this, not, for their own sake, who were unworthy of any favour, but for his own sake, for the sake of his honour and glory, which, as it is dear to the Lord, so to his people.

²² Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain? Or can the heavens give showers? Art not Thou He, O Lord our God? Therefore we will wait upon Thee, for Thou hast made all these things. — the challenge to “the Gentiles” should be to all the nations (Goyim); any of the (seventy) nations upon the earth.

— art not thou he, O Lord, our God? Since he had sent the dreadful droughts under whose hardships the land was groaning, therefore he alone could provide relief.

Posted in Jeremiah

Why is early John 7:53-8:11 missing?

•October 3, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Question: How truthful is this analysis and conclusion?

Bible Hub • John 7:53-8:11: Why is this passage missing in the earliest manuscripts, and how does that affect its authenticity?

John 7:53-8:11: Historical Context, Manuscript Evidence, and Authenticity

Overview of the Passage

John 7:53-8:11 (often referred to as the account of the woman caught in adultery) is a well-known segment that depicts religious leaders bringing a woman before Jesus, accusing her of adultery, and seeking His judgment on her sin. According to the Berean Standard Bible, this passage includes Jesus’ words in which He famously says, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). While beloved and widely taught, this passage poses questions about its origins due to its absence in some of the earliest known Greek manuscripts.

Earliest Manuscript Witnesses and Omissions

Over the centuries, many manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have been discovered, providing robust evidence for the text of Scripture. Codex Sinaiticus (4th century) and Codex Vaticanus (4th century), along with papyri such as Papyrus 66 (mid-2nd century) and Papyrus 75 (late 2nd/early 3rd century), do not include John 7:53-8:11 in their text of the Gospel of John. In these ancient witnesses, the text flows directly from John 7:52 to John 8:12 without mention of the woman caught in adultery.

Additional evidence in later manuscript traditions shows that some scribes relocated this passage to other sections, such as after Luke 21:38, or inserted it at a later point in John 7. The variation in placement and its absence in earlier copy traditions indicate it was a floating text for a time in the manuscript record.

Patristic and Early Church Considerations

Though omitted in some of the earliest Greek manuscripts, several later church fathers and early Christian writers appear aware of the story. Some references seem to have circulated through oral tradition or alternative manuscript traditions. For instance, Jerome in the 4th century included this passage in the Latin Vulgate. Augustine (late 4th-early 5th century) also referenced the account, explaining that certain scribes might have removed it out of concern that Jesus’ mercy could be interpreted as endorsing adultery. Chrysostom and other earlier Greek fathers did not include commentary on it, which many scholars ascribe to the lack of this passage in the manuscripts they used.

Possible Reasons for Omission

1. Manuscript Variation: Some scribes passing on the Gospel of John may not have had access to the tradition containing this passage. This would naturally lead to differences in later copied manuscripts.

2. Concern About Misinterpretation: As Augustine suggested, there may have been apprehension that Jesus’ response would embolden the sin of adultery. In some regions, scribes might have judged it prudent to omit or relocate the passage to avoid such misunderstandings.

3. Later Insertion: Other textual critics propose that the passage, though an authentic historical account, was not in John’s original Gospel but was known through a separate oral or written tradition. It may have been inserted in various places of John (or Luke) by well-meaning scribes who regarded its content as trustworthy and worth preserving.

Authenticity and Historical Credibility

1. Consistency with Jesus’ Character: The teaching in this passage closely aligns with Jesus’ known approach to sin and holiness. Jesus displays both compassion for repentant sinners and calls them to leave their sin behind (John 8:10-11: “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and sin no more.”). This theme resonates with the rest of the Gospels.

2. Widespread Acceptance: While not present in the earliest manuscripts, this account became widely accepted and included in the major printed editions of Scripture over the centuries. Early church acceptance, reflected in Latin manuscripts and repeated throughout church history, suggests its broad doctrinal consistency with the message of John.

3. Doctrinal Implications: Even if a reader concludes that it was not part of the original text of John’s Gospel, the narrative’s contents do not contradict anything taught elsewhere in Scripture. Every reliable principle in this account can be found in other teachings of Jesus: compassion, admonition against hypocrisy, and the command to pursue righteous living.

Impact on the Reliability of Scripture

In discussions of manuscript integrity, the presence or absence of this passage does not undermine the doctrinal soundness or historical reliability of the New Testament. Unquestionably, the New Testament boasts substantial manuscript support-countless Greek manuscripts, early translations in diverse languages, and quotations by church fathers corroborate its essential text.

When passages like John 7:53-8:11 are found to vary among manuscripts, textual critics carefully weigh the external manuscript evidence and internal linguistic features. Because these critical methods are transparent and thorough, it is possible to identify passages whose origins are under question while still recognizing the faithful transmission of Scripture as a whole.

Exegetical and Pastoral Considerations

1. Moral and Spiritual Instruction: This passage, whenever included in teaching, underscores a powerful message of repentance, humility, and divine mercy. Its application in sermons or Bible studies calls believers and unbelievers alike to reflection on both justice and mercy.

2. Caution in Application: Those who preach and teach from John 7:53-8:11 often note the textual questions. However, they also affirm that it faithfully conveys truths found throughout Scripture, such as divine grace extended to sinners and the call to live uprightly.

3. Scripture’s Unity: Across the Gospels, Jesus demonstrates authority and compassion. The events of the Gospels consistently present Him forgiving repentant sinners, rebuking hypocrisy (compare Luke 7:36-50 for a similar example of forgiveness and understanding), and fulfilling the righteous requirements of God’s law (Matthew 5:17).

Conclusion

John 7:53-8:11 is missing from some of the earliest known Greek manuscripts, which raises questions about its original placement. Nevertheless, there is strong testimony that the account was recognized in various traditions throughout early church history, with many post-4th-century manuscripts including it and major theologians referring to it. Its content is doctrinally consistent with the rest of Scripture, attesting to the character of Jesus as merciful toward sinners and uncompromising against sin.

While this passage may prompt questions about textual history, it does not jeopardize the overall reliability of the New Testament text. Through meticulous study of manuscripts-along with early witness citations, translations, and patristic commentary-one can appreciate how carefully Scripture was preserved and transmitted. The message of divine mercy and human accountability remains clear, and this account stands with the larger scriptural witness to the transforming grace and truth found in Jesus Christ.

Question: How truthful is this analysis and conclusion?

Posted in US

Jeremiah (Ch 11-12)

•October 2, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Jeremiah’s message were written about a hundred years after the house of Israel had been exiled to Assyria, when God called upon Jeremiah to deliver his message against the elders of Jerusalem of an enemy coming out from the North and an impending exile to follow if they continue with their wickedness and idolatries.

But as in mnumerous cases show, Jeremiah’s message is also make reference specifically for the northern house of Israel, which could only be rendered at the endtime, but as was before, they don’t hear and so our societies have ended with so much troubles:

“‘Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen’” Deuteronomy 27:26

Therefore thus saith the Lord: “Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto Me, I will not hearken unto them” Jeremiah 11:11

More on (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

More on the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 11

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

² “Hear ye the words of this covenant, and speak unto the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem; — here begins the prophecy against the house of Judah; but in verses 10 and 17 below, it includes the northern house of Israel;

³ and say thou unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant, — here begins a series of direct references to word of Moses in Deuteronomy:

— Cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant; which Moses, who would have in his hands, the book of the law and held it forth unto Israel, said to them as in Deuteronomy 27:26; and the people responded, saying, Amen, testifying their assent.

⁴ which I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt from the iron furnace, saying, “Obey My voice, and do them, according to all which I command you; so shall ye be My people and I will be your God,”

— according to all that God command them; everything was to be done that was commanded, and a perfect and uniform obedience is to be yielded to the law, in order to enjoy the blessing, or a penalty is incurred.

⁵ that I may perform the oath which I have sworn unto your fathers to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day.’” Then answered I, and said, “So be it, O Lord.” — that God may perform the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, the special promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Deuteronomy 7:8;

— to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day, this beautiful and rich land being still in the possession of the children of Israel.

⁶ Then the Lord said unto me, “Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Hear ye the words of this covenant and do them. — proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: with a loud voice, and openly, that all may hear.

⁷ For I earnestly protested unto your fathers in the day that I brought them up out of the land of Egypt, even unto this day, rising early and protesting, saying, “Obey My voice.”

⁸ Yet they obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but walked every one in the imagination of their evil heart. Therefore I will bring upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did them not.’”

⁹ And the Lord said unto me, “A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

¹⁰ They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers, who refused to hear My words, and they went after other gods to serve them. The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken My covenant which I made with their fathers.

— in previous verses God’s words were usually directed against Jerusalem, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, their elders and priests, but here, it also includes the lost house of Israel.

¹¹ Therefore thus saith the Lord: ‘Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto Me, I will not hearken unto them.

— and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them: because their prayers were hypocritical, and not attended true repentance; otherwise, when men cry to God, under a sense of sin, being truly sorry for it, he hears them, and delivers them;

— many prayers are offered today, but God wouldn’t hear them; these would be concerned only for the evils that would come upon them, and not the evils they needed to be repented of; and such sinners, when they pray to him, the Lord hears not;

— the Targum says, “and they shall cry out before me, but I will not accept their prayers.” Thus evils shall pour upon them which they shall not be able to escape.

¹² Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense; but they shall not save them at all in the time of their trouble.

— go and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense; Baal; to Astarte, the queen of heaven; to a Christianised Mithra, the Persian sun-god, who was born on December 25th, on the winter solstice; to the moon, planets, and other hosts of heaven.

— a parallel Scripture in Amos for reflection:

“Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” Amos 3:6

¹³ For according to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up altars to that shameful thing, even altars to burn incense unto Baal.’

— for according to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O Judah, practically a different idol for every city; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up altars, a different one for every open place;

— to that shameful thing, to the idol which is the essence of all that is shameful and even altars to burn incense unto Baal. The Lord, having thus set forth the wickedness of Judah, turns to his punishment upon the apostate nation.

“Go and cry unto the gods unto whom you offer incense,” says the Lord

¹⁴ “Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up a cry or prayer for them; for I will not hear them in the time that they cry unto Me for their trouble. — neither their prayers nor the prophet’s for them would be acceptable to God; he being determined to bring evil upon them.

— the Targum understands this of the prayers of Jeremiah the prophet for them, paraphrasing the words thus, “for there is no acceptance before me (or it is not pleasing to me) when thou shall pray for them before me, in the time of their evil.”

¹⁵ What hath My beloved to do in Mine house, seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many, and the holy flesh is passed from thee? When thou doest evil, then thou rejoicest. — when thou commit evil, thou rejoices; thou glorify in wickedness;

— or, at a time when thou offend against my laws, thou rejoices and celebrated as if thou didst every thing that is right.

¹⁶The Lord called thy name, ‘A Green Olive Tree,’ fair and of goodly fruit. With the noise of a great tumult He hath kindled fire upon it, and the branches of it are broken.

— the Targum interprets it this way.:

“Behold, like a beautiful olive tree with fine branches and pleasing appearance, whose foliage is mingled among the trees—so did the Lord call your name among the nations. But when you transgressed the Torah, mighty nations like fire will come upon you and attach themselves to your branches.”

¹⁷ For the Lord of hosts, who planted thee, hath pronounced evil against thee for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done against themselves to provoke Me to anger in offering incense unto Baal.”

— for the evil of the house of Israel; the lost ten tribes, who had committed sin, and for which the evil pronounced had been executed on them already, being some time ago carried away as captives:

— this message includes the house of Israel (who were already exiled and beyond Jeremiah’s message then) again; this reminder could be historic but more probably, it is prophetic: the evil of whose heinous sins shall be met with dreadful punishments.

¹⁸ And the Lord hath given me knowledge of it, and I know it; then Thou showed me their doings. — Jeremiah knows that a general conspiracy or a special plot against him was revealed to him by God.

¹⁹ But I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter; and I knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, “Let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered.” — the pronoun ‘I’ was Jeremiah, but prophetic also for the Messiah;

— like a lamb or an ox; some translate it “as a choice lamb;” that is brought to the slaughter; to be sacrificed or killed by the butcher; so ignorant was the prophet of the designs of his townsmen against him, and not at all jealous that they wished him ill; since he meant none to them, but sought their good:

— the Targum says it as:

“But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter, and I did not know that they had plotted evil against me, saying, ‘Let us put poison in his food and cut him off from the land of Israel, so that his name will no longer be remembered.’”

²⁰ But, O Lord of hosts, who judgest righteously, who triest the reins and the heart, let me see Thy vengeance on them, for unto Thee have I revealed my cause. — but Jeremiah cried out, O Lord of hosts, that judges righteously;

— as the Judge of the whole earth, who will do right; he found there was no justice to be done him among men; he therefore has recourse to God, who he knew judged righteous judgement:

— let me see thy vengeance on them; the Targum says “I shall see the vengeance of thy judgement on them;” for unto thee have I revealed my cause; as a client to his patron, told his whole case and left it with him, believing he would execute justice for him.

²¹ “Therefore thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who seek thy life, saying, ‘Prophesy not in the name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hand’ — saying, prophesy not in the name of the Lord; without their leave, and such hard things as he did, unless he would prophesy smooth things, and then he might go on, otherwise he must expect to die:

— that thou die not by our hand; they intimate that should he persist in prophesying, they should not stay to carry on a judicial process against him, before a judge or the Sanhedrin, but should do as those called zealots did in later times; lay violence upon him.

²² therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts: ‘Behold, I will punish them: the young men shall die by the sword, their sons and their daughters shall die by famine. — their young men shall die by the sword, being cut down by the enemy in battle, their sons and their daughters shall die by famine, the result of the unmerciful siege begun by the enemies.

²³ And there shall be no remnant of them; for I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation.’” — and there shall be no remnant left, the Lord being determined to carry out his sentence of extermination on them;

— this seems more prophetic than historical; for during their historical moment their remnants were carried off to either Assyria for the house of Israel; or to Babylon for the house of Judah; so if there was no remnant left then it has to be prophetic, into our time;

— but in the book of Ezekiel more details were given about putting an end to even the remnants. Ezekiel 11:13 And it came to pass when I prophesied, that Pelatiah the son of Benaiah died. Then fell I down upon my face, and cried with a loud voice and said, “Ah, Lord God! Wilt Thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?”

— the conditions around Israel would be so bad that those few, if any, who survive would ask, “Would God make a full end to the remnant of Israel?”

Jeremiah 12

¹ Righteous art Thou, O Lord, when I plead with Thee; yet let me talk with Thee of Thy judgements: Why doth the way of the wicked prosper? Why are all they happy that deal very treacherously? — yet let me, Jeremiah, talk with thee of thy judgements; of his laws, statutes, word, and ordinances;

— why doth the way of the wicked prosper? The prosperity of the wicked hath in all times been a riddle, and a sore temptation to the best of God’s people; Why is it that they seem to be fortunate in all their dealings? Why are their designs and projects successful?

— why are they all happy that deal very treacherously? How may the fact be explained that the very ones who are guilty of the worst crimes, who practice hideous sins, live in peace: their families increase, their trade flourishes, their flocks and herds grow large and numerous, and they have plenty of all outward blessings?

— the Targum says,

“You are righteous, O Lord, and I accept Your words. Yet I will ask a question of justice before You: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who deal in lies live in peace?”

²Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root; they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit. Thou art near in their mouth, but far from their reins. — thou art near in their mouth; they often made use of the name of God, either in swearing by it, or praying to him in an external manner;

— they called themselves the Lord’s people and boasted of being his priests, and employed in his service; they took his covenant, and the words of his law, into their mouths, and taught them the people, and yet had no sincere regard for these things;

— and far from their reins; from the affections of their hearts and the desires of their souls; they had no true love for God, nor fear of him, nor keep his laws. The Targum says, “near are the words of thy law in their mouth, and far is their fear from their hearts.”

³ But Thou, O Lord, knowest me; Thou hast seen me and tried mine heart toward Thee. Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter. — prepare them for the day of slaughter; or “sanctify them” set them apart: this, doubtless, refers to the time of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Chaldeans.

⁴ How long shall the land mourn and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein? The beasts are consumed, and the birds, because they said, “He shall not see our last end.” — how much longer shall the land mourn and the herbs of every field wither before we see judgement? Or maybe we’ll never see one?

⁵ “If thou hast run with the footmen and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace, wherein thou trusted, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of the Jordan?

— if you couldn’t cope with small things how could you cope with big issues? if crossing the Jordan already wearied you, wait till you come cross the Euphrates?

⁶ For even thy brethren and the house of thy father, even they have dealt treacherously with thee; yea, they have called a multitude after thee; believe them not, though they speak fair words unto thee.

⁷ “I have forsaken Mine house, I have left Mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of My soul into the hand of her enemies. — God have forsaken his house; the Temple; the Targum says, “I have forsaken the house of my sanctuary;”

— this was fulfilled in the first Temple, when it was destroyed by the Chaldeans; and more fully in the second, when that voice was heard in it, a little before the destruction of Jerusalem, as Josephus relates, “let us go hence.”

⁸ Mine heritage is unto Me as a lion in the forest: it crieth out against Me; therefore have I hated it. — as a lion which roars in the forest, and terrifies passerby and which rends and tears in pieces all it meets with; it expresses the clamours of these people against God and their rage, fierce and cruel, terrifies everyone; including Jeremiah himself.

⁹ Mine heritage is unto Me as a speckled bird: the birds round about are against her. Come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field; come to devour. — speckled bird, some translate, “a ravenous beast, the hyena.”

¹⁰ Many shepherds have destroyed My vineyard, they have trodden My portion under foot, they have made My pleasant portion a desolate wilderness. — many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard; shepherds that destroyed them are from with their own pastors, elders, ministers, princes or governors, civil or religious.

¹¹ They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto Me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.

¹² The despoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness; for the sword of the Lord shall devour from the one end of the land even to the other end of the land. No flesh shall have peace.

— the spoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness; of Judea; or which lay between Chaldea and Judea, through which the Chaldean army came; called the “spoilers” here, because they spoiled and plundered all places where they came;

— for the Sword of the Lord shall devour from the one end; of the land even the other end of the land; the Sword of the Chaldeans is called the Sword of the Lord, because it was drawn by his order and appointment, and by him to do execution, and the calamity thereof;

— no flesh shall have peace; no inhabitant of Judea (and Israel) shall be in safety, but be exposed to the Sword, or to captivity.

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau, see Obadiah

And for more, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹³ They have sown wheat, but shall reap thorns; they have put themselves to pain, but shall not profit; and they shall be ashamed of your produce because of the fierce anger of the Lord. — the earth’s bringing forth thorns and thistles was part of the curse for the first transgression of man, Genesis 3:18.

¹⁴ “Thus saith the Lord against all Mine evil neighbours, who touch the inheritance which I have caused My people Israel to inherit: Behold, I will pluck them out of their land, and pluck out the house of Judah from among them.

— evil neighbours: Egyptians, Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Tyre and Sidon; because they were near the Land of Promise, his presence and where the Temple was in which he took up his residence; and his “evil” neighbours, because they perverted and afflicted his people with idolatries;

— for example: Jezebel, a Phoenician (from Sidon) princess whom king Ahab married, defiled Israel with her idolatrous practices; amd in Revelation 2:20, a new Jezebel who calleth herself a prophetess would follow suit; no other church group has a better fit than one among the Seventh-day Adventists, a Ellen G White, who fulfils this prophecy to a T;

for more, see (4) The Thyatira Era of Revelation 2-3

— God will pluck them (and their children) out of their land; cause them to be carried captive into other lands, or be destroyed; and pluck out the house of Judah from among them; such of the Jews they had formerly carried captive, or who had fled to them upon the Chaldean invasion.

¹⁵ And it shall come to pass after I have plucked them out, I will return and have compassion on them, and will bring them back, every man to his heritage and every man to his land. — and will bring them again every man to his heritage; thus, after God had threatened severe judgements upon several countries;

— he promises of their return from their captivity in the latter days; which probably relates chiefly to their conversion to indicate the conversion of the Gentiles in the latter day, when the fullness of them shall be brought in.

¹⁶And it shall come to pass, if they will diligently learn the ways of My people, to swear by My name, ‘The Lord liveth,’ as they taught My people to swear by Baal, then shall they be built in the midst of My people.

— then shall they be built in the midst of my people; become part of the building of God’s physical and spiritual government; being laid upon the same foundation of the patriarchs, the prophets and the apostles;

— the Targum says, “and they [Goyim] shall be established in the midst of my people.”

¹⁷ But if they will not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation,” saith the Lord. — God will utterly pluck up and destroy that Gentile nation: root it up from being a nation, strip it of all its privileges and enjoyments, and destroy it with an everlasting destruction.

Posted in Jeremiah

No missing bolts in China’s C919 5G factory

•October 1, 2025 • Leave a Comment

No missing bolts: a glimpse into China’s C919 smart factory

Shanghai mega factory creates real-time tracking system to monitor all plane parts, tools and technicians, ensuring top-notch safety checks

SCMP • September 22, 2025

Following several high-profile aeronautical production quality lapses in recent years, including a door falling off mid-flight and tooling left inside aircraft, the last thing any plane manufacturer wants is a missing bolt or any oversight that slips through manual checks.

Enter the futuristic assembly line of C919, China’s first domestically developed large passenger jet.

Leveraging a groundbreaking 5G-enabled industrial network system, the C919 smart mega factory in Shanghai is setting a new standard for aircraft manufacturing integrity, ensuring that all the parts, tools and technicians are monitored in real time.

At the heart of this powerful surveillance system is a “field-level” industrial network developed by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in collaboration with Comac (Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China).

This network integrates 5G wireless connectivity with time-sensitive networking to create a hybrid communication backbone that connects every sensor, robot, tool and worker across the final assembly line, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Automatica Sinica in August.

Unlike conventional factory networks that separate data collection, communication and control, the Chinese system unifies them into a single, intelligent loop – a concept known as sensing-transmission-control integration.

This allows for millisecond-level responsiveness and ensures that any deviation from standard procedures is detected and flagged immediately.

“It is a world first,” wrote the team led by Professor Guan Xinping of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

One of the most critical applications of this system is in tool and parts tracking. In traditional aircraft assembly, tools can be misplaced, often due to human error or fatigue.

This follows a terrifying mid-air incident in 2024 in which a door plug on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 MAX blew out mid-flight due to missing bolts, just minutes after the California-bound jet took off from Portland, Oregon.

It caused depressurisation of the aircraft, with items being sucked out of the cabin. Several passengers were injured and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing.

After the incident, investigators found that manual inspection logs did not match the actual work performed.

The C919 factory combats this with a network of wireless sensors and smart tool cabinets.

Using 5G’s ultra-reliable low-latency communication or uRLLC, the system tracks each tool’s location throughout the assembly process. If a technician fails to follow the book, the system triggers an alert.

With the support of the new network architecture, industrial devices on the shop floor are now highly interconnected, creating a tightly linked “sense-transmit-control” closed-loop system, according to Guan and his colleagues.

But this brings two major challenges.

“Rapidly changing production tasks cause sudden shifts in resource needs, but the available communication and computing resources are fixed and inflexible, leading to a mismatch,” Guan’s team wrote.

“The data coming from different sources vary greatly in timing and space, making it difficult to accurately estimate the overall system state.

“We have constructed a systematic solution through theoretical innovation, technological breakthroughs and real-life applications,” the researchers added.

Their solution is high-fidelity digital twin technology. A virtual replica of the aircraft and its assembly environment is continuously updated with live data from the production floor.

As workers assemble the plane, their actions are mirrored in the digital twin. Cameras and motion sensors track their movements and tool usage, while wireless sensors such as angle sensors, gyroscopes and laser rangefinders monitor the plane’s conditions.

This not only reduces quality issues but also speeds up the assembly process significantly, according to the researchers.

For example, when testing flight control systems, the digital twin compares the pilot’s input in the cockpit with the actual movement of the ailerons or elevators.

Any mismatch – say, a surface that does not respond correctly – is instantly flagged, allowing engineers to diagnose and fix issues before they cause a serious delay.

Moreover, the 5G network supports real-time video analytics from hundreds of cameras around the factory. AI algorithms scan footage for unsafe behaviours, such as unsecured equipment or improper protective gear, and alert supervisors instantly.

Looking ahead, the research team said they were integrating more AI-driven optimisation into the network.

“The deep integration of industrial networks and AI large models could lead to a new paradigm of knowledge-driven autonomous collaborative optimisation,” the team wrote.

“With the continuous advancement of China’s large aircraft strategy, the civil aviation industry is accelerating its transition into a new stage of independent and controllable high-quality development.

“The C919 embodies not only cutting-edge technologies such as advanced manufacturing, intelligent assembly and networked collaboration but also represents a significant leap forward in China’s capabilities for integrating complex systems and managing large-scale engineering projects,” they added.

China’s civil aviation industry is still in its infancy. Only about 50 C919 jets are expected to be produced this year, while Boeing delivered 348 commercial aircraft in 2024.

Posted in China, Comac, Tech Race '25-26

Jeremiah (Ch 9-10)

•September 30, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Jeremiah sympathizes with the calamities of his people, that they should humble themselves before God. It begins with an exhortation to hear the word of the Lord, and not to learn the way of the heathens which is against the true worship of God.

The list of kings of Judah leading towards the end; in successive reigns, as Jehoahaz (reign 609 BC), Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC), Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597 BC), and Zedekiah (reign 597–586 BC).

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau, see Obadiah

And for more, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 9

¹ Oh, that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! — Oh that my head were waters of tears! the prophet Jeremiah sympathizes with the calamities of his people; he wept much, yet wished he could weep more;

— the daughter of my people; such was God’s sympathy for his countrymen, his people in distress, whom he affectionately calls the daughter of his people;

² Oh, that I had in the wilderness a lodging place for wayfaring men, that I might leave my people, and go from them! For they are all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men.

— a lodging place of wayfaring men; a place of shelter from his treacherous enemies, “adulterers,” both literal or figurative; the latter being full of idolatrous practices.

Sundays, about the first lie that this is the Sabbath; where the original Sun-worshippers were the Samaritans; today, worldwide

³ “And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies, but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not Me,” saith the Lord. — the words may be rendered, “they bend their tongues, their bow is a lie” either deceitful, or carries a lie in it, and shoots one out of it for a kill;

— like chronic liars, their tongues were like bows, and their lying words like arrows that injure or kill; see Psalms 64:3, or “like their deceitful bow” to which the Targum says, “they teach their tongues words of falsehood, they are like to a deceitful bow.”

— today we have four Great Lies permeating our societies resulting in four Great Deceptions that could get us horsewhipped in a Great Judgement ahead on schedule:

(a) Easters, a celebration of the Queen of heaven: Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection; Jeremiah 7:18 the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of heaven; in Egypt, Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25, this is Ishtar: pronounced ‘Easter.’

(b) Christmas; Ezekiel 8:16 five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple; their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east; Christmas, which honor Mithraism, birthday on December 25th – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice;

(c) Sundays; her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun-worshippers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof, II Kings 17:24;

(d) Holy Ghost or holy ghost in the Trinity? – Revelation 4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices. And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God; if the Spirit is a Being or an independent Personage; there would be seven Holy Spirits.

⁴ “Take ye heed every one of his neighbor, and trust ye not in any brother; for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbor will walk with slanders. — take heed of one’s neighbor; being vigilant always, since they are given to lies and deceit; so be ready to stay away from them; else your thoughts might be supplanted;

⁵ And they will deceive every one his neighbor, and will not speak the truth. They have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary themselves to commit iniquity. — Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, God says, and the house of Israel with deceits; Hosea 11:12;

— they have taught their tongue to speak lies; the tongue, as it were, being almost compelled, as though unable to become recognize much wickedness, and become so accustomed to lying that they cannot do otherwise; it is as if it were natural to them:

— Ephraim is prone to telling lies; or Ephraim is a chronic liar, full of deceits; Hosea 11:12; (more at the end)

⁶ Thine habitation is in the midst of deceit; through deceit they refuse to know Me,” saith the Lord. — the words not of the habitation of the prophet, but of the people, as if “they sit in the house of their own congregation, and talk of their iniquities deceitfully.”

— if they are given to deceits; mentioned in the four above (a to d), it means, if you wouldn’t want to keep God’s Sabbaths nor his feasts as spelt out in Leviticus 23! then the chances of knowing God is zero: “they refuse to know Me.”

⁷ Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Behold, I will melt them and try them; for how else shall I do for the daughter of My people? — calls the daughter of my people; such was God’s compassion for his countrymen, his people in distress, whom he addresses affectionately;

— “I will melt them” by afflicting them with heatwaves in some areas while freezing them with chilling blizzards in others; “to try them” by having droughts in one place while torrential rains and floods in another; and ask, Do they cry to me? If not what else shall I do? if still no repentance, into Captivity again?

— the Targum says in their verse 6:

“Therefore, thus says the Lord of Hosts: Behold, I am bringing upon them affliction and refining them. And after them, what else can I do because of the sins of the congregation of My people?”

⁸ Their tongue is as an arrow shot out; it speaketh deceit: one speaketh peaceably to his neighbor with his mouth, but in heart he lieth in wait. — before, Jeremiah 9:3, their tongue was compared to a bow; now, it is as an arrow; that is, it’s meant to kill;

— that is, already prepared, and furnished with a purpose contriving their wickedness, Psalm 11:2; and here as an arrow shot out, it is to kill, executing what they have being designed to do;

— deceits – “The US is the World’s biggest terrorist,” Noam Chomsky said in multiple forums over the years; and now the US is behind the Nord Stream sabotage, NYT journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh has added.

⁹ Shall I not visit them for these things?” saith the Lord. “Shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this?” — Shall I not visit them for these things? the previous use of the same warning in Jeremiah 5:9; Jeremiah 5:29 gives these words the emphasis of iteration. The Targum asks (in v8), “Shall I not be stirred to bring evil upon them?”

¹⁰ For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the habitations of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none can pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast have fled; they are gone.

— Jeremiah intent to weep on the mountains alone, a lamentation in the dwellings of the wilderness; for they are desolate, because there is no travellers; nor is the voice of cattle heard in them; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast have fled.

¹¹ “And I will make Jerusalem heaps and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.” — to extract confession, to refine them, God will add more weight to the winepress; so that more juice could be pressed out;

— and after serving King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, the house of Judah produced such diamonds as Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego; Queen Esther; Zerubbabel, Haggai, Ezra and Nehemiah among others.

¹² Who is the wise man that may understand this? And who is he to whom the mouth of the Lord hath spoken, that he may declare it? For why has the land perished and burned up like a wilderness, that none passeth through? — nobody seems to understand the various symbols and riddles in these prophetic books to put all the puzzles into a coherent picture;

— Jews couldn’t understand what or how the house of Israel could have any relevance since the days they went into exile; Christians mislead themselves that they have already replaced the Israelites and God’s promises of eternity are now theirs! Hence neither could understand the meaning of “The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet” Isaiah 28:3.

¹³ And the Lord saith, “Because they have forsaken My law which I set before them, and have not obeyed My voice, neither walked therein, — they have forsaken my laws, statutes and ordinances, Deuteronomy 6:1, Leviticus 26:46; replacing them with apostasy and idols;

¹⁴ but have walked after the imagination of their own heart, and after the Baalim, which their fathers taught them.” — they walk after Baalim; one is the Queen of heaven: Ishtar; and, second, after the Sun-Goddess Mithra on the darkest night of the year so that each day thereafter it grow longer until the Summer solstice;

— which their fathers taught them; it was not the sin of one generation alone that brought upon them down: it was a sin accumulative, which had been handed down from fathers to sons, generation to generation.

¹⁵ Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will feed them, even this people, with wormwood and give them water of gall to drink. — the word rendered wormwood here, it seems, signifying an herb which is not only bitter and nauseous but noxious;

— and give them water of gall to drink; meaning either of the entrails of a beast so called, or of the juice of the herb hemlock, as the word is rendered in Hosea 10:4, as poison of a serpent, signifying that their punishment would be very severe;

— hence the Targum says (v14),

“Therefore, thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing affliction upon this people, bitter like tendons, and I will make them drink the cup of curse to the heads of serpents.”

¹⁶ I will scatter them also among the nations, whom neither they nor their fathers have known; and I will send a sword after them till I have consumed them.” — this new enemy is coming from the SOUTH: a different enemy, one “whom neither they nor their fathers have known!” hence not Babylon, and “a Sword after them!” till I have consumed them!

— more details of an Enemy from the South given by Prophet Ezekiel!

Ezekiel 20:45 Moreover the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
⁴⁶ “Son of man, set thy face toward the South, and drop thy word toward the South, and prophesy against the forest of the Southland.
⁴⁷ And say to the forest of the South: ‘Hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee and every dry tree. The flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the South to the North shall be burned therein.
⁴⁸ And all flesh shall see that I, the Lord, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched.’”
⁴⁹ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! They say of me, ‘Doth he not speak parables?’”

Ezekiel 21: And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
² “Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem, and drop thy word toward the holy places, and prophesy against the land of Israel;
³ and say to the land of Israel, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I am against thee, and will draw forth My Sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked.
⁴ Seeing then that I will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked, therefore shall My Sword go forth out of his sheath against all flesh from the South to the North,
⁵ that all flesh may know that I, the Lord, have drawn forth My Sword out of his sheath. It shall not return any more.’

⁶ Sigh therefore, thou son of man, with the breaking of thy loins, and with bitterness sigh before their eyes.
⁷ And it shall be, when they say unto thee, ‘Why sighest thou?’ that thou shalt answer, ‘For the tidings, because it cometh; and every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit shall faint, and all knees shall be weak as water.’ Behold, it cometh, and shall be brought to pass, saith the Lord God. Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7

Q: Who is this enemy from the SOUTH, and it warns “My Sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked” and should we be curious how such scenarios would be played out?

For more on the enemy from the South, see A Sword from the South!
For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

¹⁷ Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Consider ye, and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for skillful women, that they may come. — mourning women; funeral mourners hired for the purpose; chiefly women, their hair disheveled; so that their sorrows appear more authentic giving vent to their grief going about through the streets;

¹⁸ And let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids gush out with waters. — our eyelids gush out with waters: this to bewail the heights of their sorrows, setting forth their miseries and distresses to express the prophet’s lamentation, Jeremiah 9:1.

¹⁹ For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion: ‘How are we despoiled! We are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land, because our dwellings have cast us out.’” — because “we have forsaken the land,” that is, forsaken how the land should be maintained;

— but they defiled their land by not giving them their needed Sabbath rest; where the commandment is given in Leviticus 25:4;

“Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of Rest unto the land, a Sabbath for the Lord; thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard” Leviticus 25:1-7

— “have cast us out” that is, the reason for Judah’s captivity, cast out, in Babylon was directly linked from the defilement and length of time they neglected to observe the land Sabbath, which is more explicitly expressed in II Chronicles 36:19-21;

“to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years” II Chronicles 36:21

²⁰ Yet hear the word of the Lord, O ye women, and let your ear receive the word of His mouth, and teach your daughters wailing, and every one her neighbor lamentation. — teach your daughters wailing; the thought of Jeremiah 9:9 continues here;

— the expression rests upon the idea that wailing would continue, from generation to generation; its cries and tones skillfully adapted to the special sorrows which is coming; so be ready, “O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”

²¹ For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets. — death would be coming; so terribly “into our windows” that the demand for mourners would be greater than the supply;

— entered into our palaces; the homes of our royalties, which are well built and greatly fortified, these could not keep out the enemy: and death spares none, not just the low and poor, but the high, the rich and the mighty;

²² Speak, “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Even the carcasses of men shall fall as dung upon the open field, and as the handful after the harvestman, and none shall gather them.’” — the carcass of a man, noting here and there a scattered carcass;

— shall fall as dung upon the open field; as Jezebel was, II Kings 9:37, “And the carcass of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel, so that they shall not say, “This is Jezebel.”’

²³ Thus saith the Lord: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might; let not the rich man glory in his riches. — thus saith the Lord, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, not in his intellect or knowledge of things: this is often but an appearance of wisdom, but not a true knowledge of God;

— the Targum paraphrases them (v22), “Thus says the Lord: Let not Solomon son of David boast in his wisdom, nor Samson son of Manoah boast in his strength, nor Ahab son of Omri boast in his wealth.”

²⁴ But let him that glorieth glory in this: that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord who exercise loving kindness, judgement, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight,” saith the Lord.

— true Wisdom; it is not a reliance on one’s own wisdom and strength that brings glory, but the knowledge of the Lord and of his dealings with his subject in judgement, mercy and righteousness.

²⁵ “Behold, the days come,” saith the Lord, “that I will punish all them that are circumcised with the uncircumcised— that is, the “circumcised” principally the house of Judah together with the house of Israel; in mentioning the heathen nations whom he would punish, he places those circumcised among the uncircumcised.

²⁶Egypt, and Judah, and Edom, and the children of Ammon, and Moab, and all that are in the utmost corners, that dwell in the wilderness. For all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart.”

— the house of Judah and the house of Israel are the circumcised, but God lump them with the uncircumcised, that is, the circumcised are lump among the heathens and all are considered as the “uncircumcised;” to be refined or punished together.

Jeremiah 10

¹ Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto you, O house of Israel. — in previous chapters, God’s words were usually directed against Jerusalem, the elders of Judah and priests, but popup here, it is to the O house of Israel;

— but other chapters are also directed at Israel: “Hear ye the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel,” (Jeremiah 2:4,26); so the book of Jeremiah should be read in this context.

² Thus saith the Lord: “Learn not the way of the heathens, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.

— of the nations around, particularly the Chaldeans, whom the Jews were destined to live in captivity; meaning their religious ways, their superstition and idolatry, and they shouldn’t learn from them: from the Samaritans to the Chaldeans;

— the Chaldeans were addicted to astrology; this naturally tended to beget a religious dread and awe of those objects: the sun, moon and planets are believed to be the firmament for signs; from the eclipse of the sun to the eclipse of the moon; which yield a considerable influence over human affairs; but be not dismayed at their idolatries.

³ For the customs of the people are vain; for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. — “one cutteth a tree out of the forest” that is, the start of the Christmas tree;

— while it is true that many ancient pagans started with just a palm tree and progressed to any associated evergreen with decorating their homes with cuttings from them, it is also clear that further association of evergreen trees with the wintry holiday is a continuous development from the very simple into our sophisticated modern era;

— “which their fathers taught them” Jeremiah 9:14; that is, from one generation to the next, accumulative in their pagan collections: in toys, in madeups and in fantasies.

⁴They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. — the prophet Jeremiah shows the glory of Israel’s God, and exposes the folly of idolaters.

⁵ They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not; they must be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.”

— according to History.com,

“Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes. Some built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce.

It is a widely held belief that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. Walking toward his home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of stars twinkling amidst evergreens.

To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in the main room and wired its branches with lighted candles,” History of Christmas Trees

— today, we worship Mithra or Mitra (an ancient Iranian deity, a Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th which we christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the God of heaven; and men shall worship these earthly gods, acknowledging their supremacy, everyone, Protestants or Catholics alike;

The Persian god Mithra on the left, with beams of light like the Sun emanating from his head in all directions

— thus saith the Lord: “Learn not the way of the heathens,” verse 2 above; his wrath and subsequent judgement is the central theme of Jeremiah’s message against idolatrous worship!

“Learn not the way of the heathens, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them,” Jeremiah 10:2

⁶ Inasmuch as there is none like unto Thee, O Lord—Thou art great, and Thy name is great in might” — Jeremiah cried, “O Lord, thou art great, so that there is none like unto thee, and thy name is great, because of thy might. Who would not fear thee?”

⁷ who would not fear Thee, O King of nations? For to Thee doth it appertain, inasmuch as among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is none like unto Thee. — the Targum reaffirms Him as “King of all nations;”

— among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is none like unto thee; no matter where a person searches for a god who might stand a comparison with Yehovah, the quest will be useless: He, and he the Most High, alone, is the only Being worthy of worship.

⁸ But they are altogether brutish and foolish; the stock is a doctrine of vanities. — thus they believe in doctrines of vanities, of fantasies; of bunnies and eggs, or a Santa ho-ho-ho, or praying to a non existent holy ghost with their foreheads.

⁹ Silver beaten into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman and of the hands of the founder. Blue and purple is their clothing; they are all the work of skillful men. — from Tarshish; probably the city of Tarsus in Cilicia, in south-central Turkey; where the best gold, silver, iron, tin and lead came from, Ezekiel 27:12,

¹⁰ But the Lord is the true God; He is the living God and an everlasting King. At His wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide His indignation. — at his wrath the earth shall tremble, shrinking back in terror before his wrath as the children of Israel had experienced at Mount Sinai;

— and the nations shall not be able to withstand his indignation; none being able to stop it or bear it, the wicked will not be able to stand in judgement, Psalm 1:5, Psalm 76:7;

¹¹ “Thus shall ye say unto them: ‘The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens.’” — this verse is, unlike the rest of the chapter, written in Aramaic (presumely to those already exiled);

— the gods that have not made the heavens and the earth; shall perish from the earth and from under heavens; which the Targum paraphrases, “they and their worshippers shall perish from the earth, and shall be consumed from under these heavens.”

— the Targum Gill prefaces it thus,

“This is the copy of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent to the rest of the elders of the exile in Babylon: If the Chaldeans say to you, ‘Serve idols, O house of Israel,’ then you shall answer them, ‘The gods that you ask us to worship are worthless—they cannot bring rain from the heavens or produce fruit from the earth. They will perish from the earth and be destroyed from under the heavens.’”

¹² He hath made the earth by His power; He hath established the world by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His discretion. — he hath made the earth by his power; the Targum considers these words as a continuation of the answer of the Jews to the Chaldeans;

— paraphrasing them thus, “and so shall ye say unto them, `we worship him who hath made the earth by his power,”’ who stands in contrast to their gods, made of stones and woods, that made neither the heavens nor the earth.

¹³ When He uttereth His voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens; and He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. He maketh lightning with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of His treasuries.

— when he uttereth his voice; the rushing downpour of torrential rain following his thunders; causing much floodings and deaths; but the house of Jacob ignores the thunders;

— he maketh lightnings with rain: though fire and water be contrary, yet it opens the clouds to make way for the rain and is produced in the midst of waters, all of which are spectacular.

¹⁴ Every man is brutish in his knowledge; every founder is confounded by the graven image; for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. — in contrast, the idols of man are useless; for his molten image is falsehood;

— it is a lie, when it is said to be a god where there is no breath in them; thus a time will come when God will execute vengeance upon idolaters, and utterly destroy their idols.

¹⁵ They are vanity and the work of errors; in the time of their visitation they shall perish. — and the work of errors, of deceit and mockery, causing their worshipers to be mocked and derided when the nothingness of the idols becomes evident;

— in the time of their visitation they shall perish, that is, when God shall punish the idol-worshippers, the idols themselves shall likewise perish.

¹⁶ The portion of Jacob is not like them, for He is the Former of all things; and Israel is the rod of His inheritance; the Lord of hosts is His name. — the portion of Jacob; the true God of Jacob, Deuteronomy 32:9; he is not like gods made by a carpenter and goldsmith;

— Israel is the stock of his inheritance, that is, the house of Jacob, Isaiah 41:8; which belongs to him as a peculiar possession; the servant of the Lord.

¹⁷Gather up thy wares out of the land, O inhabitant of the fortress. — “inhabitant of the fortress” it is rather therefore directed to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, that being the chief place of security in Judea; be prepared to flee with their ware, if they can.

¹⁸ For thus saith the Lord: “Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land this once, and will distress them, that they may find it so.” — I will sling out; the same bold metaphor, though not the same word, for violent expulsions found in the prophecy of the fate of Shebna; Isaiah 22:18.

¹⁹ Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous; but I said, “Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it.” — Jeremiah bewails his own calamity: my wound is grievous; causes grief, is very painful and hard to struggle with or endure.

²⁰ My tabernacle is despoiled, and all my cords are broken; my children are gone forth from me, and they are no more; there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains. — tabernacle; my “tent” Jerusalem laments that her sanctuary is plundered and her children carried into exile, and so “are no more,” are silently dead.

²¹ For the pastors are become brutish, and have not sought the Lord; therefore they shall not prosper, and all their flocks shall be scattered. — their pastors, their shepherds, meaning the governors, both civil and ecclesiastical, are brutish (brutal, barbarous); acting like brute beasts,

— and therefore they shall not prosper; or because they have not done wisely; hence all their faithfuls or flocks shall be scattered; all that have been committed to their care shall be carried into captivity, and divers of them dispersed abroad into several countries for their sakes.

²² Behold, the noise of the clamor is come, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons. — a den of dragons; or rather, a den of evil jackals;

— here in Jeremiah, the house of Judah had been constantly warned of an enemy coming out from the North, but in Ezekiel 20-21, the house of Israel had been warned of a yet ‘unknown’ enemy of the future coming from the opposite direction, the South.

²³ O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. — O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself; even such mighty warrior as Nebuchadnezzar, whose way was not in himself, and was not master of his own destiny, but was under the influence and direction of divine Providence;

— the same is said about Prophet Jeremiah; because it is by divine appointment;

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” Jeremiah 1:5.

²⁴ O Lord, correct me, but with judgement, not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing. — O Lord, correct me: seeing thou wilt bring the Chaldeans upon us to punish us for our sins, let it be a correction only, not a destruction and utter ruin.

²⁵ Pour out Thy fury upon the nations that know Thee not, and upon the families that call not on Thy name; for they have eaten up Jacob, and devoured him and consumed him, and have made his habitation desolate.

— pour out thine indignation upon the heathen that know thee not; let thy justice be made known by bringing an exemplary punishment upon the Chaldeans and their allies.

~~~

Ephraim is prone to telling lies; full of deceits: Jeremiah 9:5

Below are some classic examples of lying and deceits in the house of Ephraim for reflection:

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a perceived confrontation that led to the United States engaging in the Vietnam War. It involved a falsely claimed clash between ships of North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for an attack on the USS Maddox, but the Pentagon Papers, the memoirs of Robert McNamara, and NSA publications from 2005, proved that the US government lied to justify a war against Vietnam.

The outcome of this deception was the passage by US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon Johnson the authority and justification for deploying US forces against “communist aggression.”

“But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never,” Bill Clinton testified before the nation, Jan. 26, 1998. For his deceit, Clinton became the second president in American history impeached by the House of Representatives.

In an August 2002 speech that kicked off the Bush White House administration’s campaign for war against Iraq, Cheney asserted, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

In October 2002, the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had “bullet-proof” evidence that Saddam was tied to Osama bin Laden. And a National Intelligence Estimate said Iraq had “continued its weapons of mass destruction program.”

“However, there is no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat not just to the region, but to the wider world.” – Tony Blair, House of Commons, 10 April 2002.

Prime Minister Tony Blair defended himself in 2005: “I have never told a lie. No. I don’t intend to go telling lies to people. I did not lie over Iraq.”

Colin Powell, the former and late Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on June 7, 2020, called Donald Trump a chronic liar. “The one word I have to use with respect to what he’s been doing for the last several years is the word I would never have used before, never would have used with any of the four presidents I worked for, he lies,” said Colin Powell. “He lies about things. And he gets away with it because people will not hold him accountable.”

For an enemy from the South, a prophecy of Esau, see Obadiah

And for more, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Posted in Jeremiah

Could the US be headed for a national divorce?

•September 29, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene has been calling for the United States to be separated by red and blue states since early 2023. Could the United States be headed for a national split?

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been Calling For United States to Be Split Up

Chatham House • February 24, 2024

There is a growing divide in US society and politics along old civil war battle lines – and the election could make things worse.

The American Civil War (1861-65) was fought over slavery and, to a lesser extent, states’ rights and the future of the economy. In the run-up to the 2024 US elections, there is talk of another civil war brewing over the country’s future.

While there is no imminent threat of armies clashing on the battlefield, increasing hyperbolic insurrectionist sentiment is a product of a growing realization that the US is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s.

The US is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s.

An increasingly Balkanized US is likely to be even more inward-looking, preoccupied with internal divisions over immigration, race, inequality, and sexual and gender identity issues. Such self-absorption is already manifesting itself in isolationism and protectionism at the expense of the security and economic alliances that have greatly benefitted the US and the world for decades.

Half (54 per cent) of self-described strong Republicans in America now think it is very or somewhat likely there will be a US civil war within the next decade. Four in ten (40 per cent) strong Democrats agree.

Rep Majorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Republican from Georgia, has called for a ‘national divorce.’ ‘We need to separate by red states and blue states.’ And one in four (23 per cent) Americans support their state seceding from the Union.

This split could be seen in the 2020 election between the blue states that voted for Joe Biden and the red states that voted for Donald Trump, with many of the Trump states among those that seceded from the Union in 1861.

But the emergent two Americas can also be seen across a range of divisive social issues that reflect deeper divisions than those that merely manifest themselves at the ballot box.

Of the 15 US states with the most restrictive abortion laws, all voted for Trump in 2020 and seven were originally in the Confederacy.

The emergent two Americas can also be seen across a range of divisive social issues that reflect deeper divisions than those that merely manifest themselves at the ballot box.

Of the 21 states with the most permissive gun laws in 2023, 19 voted for Trump, and six were in the Confederacy.

Of the 19 states that enacted laws in 2022 making it harder to vote, 14 voted for Trump and seven were in the Confederacy.

And of the 23 states that enacted legislation in 2023 imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care, transgender participation in school sports, school instruction touching on LBGTQ issues and related matters, 22 voted for Trump and nine were in the Confederacy.

Map suggesting how the US could be split into four different regions

Moreover, these civil war era divisions have now emerged in a constitutional confrontation over immigration. In January, the US Supreme Court ordered Texas to remove razor wire it had put up along the Rio Grande river to stop migrants from crossing. Texas Governor Greg Abbot refused to comply, claiming the compact between the states and the United States had been broken by President Biden’s failure to halt illegal immigration.

Abbot’s suggestion that the US Constitution is a mere compact that states may ignore at their discretion is reminiscent of the Confederacy’s rationale for being able to leave the Union in 1861.

Compounding such divisions are the growing differences in public opinion and voting preferences between rural and urban areas.

In terms of public opinion, nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of urban Americans believe immigration strengthens society, while a majority (57 per cent) of rural Americans say it threatens traditional American customs and values. Seven in ten (70 per cent) urban Americans hold the view that government should do more to solve problems. Half (49 per cent)of those in rural areas think that the government is doing too many things best left to businesses and individuals.

In terms of voting preferences, of the half dozen most urbanized states, only one voted for Trump and it was also in the Confederacy. Of the half dozen least urbanized states, four voted for Trump and two were in the Confederacy.

These growing divisions in American society are mirrored in a growing partisanship in many attitudes towards the US role in the world and pressing international issues.

70 per cent of Republicans who support Trump believe that Ukraine aid has not been worth the cost, compared with 69 per cent of Democrats who say it has been worth it. On the Israel-Hamas war, six in ten (61 per cent) liberal Democrats believe Israel is going too far in its military operation against Hamas, but only 8 per cent of conservative Republicans agree.

The deep divisions in the American electorate manifest themselves in early projections of the possible outcome of the 2024 presidential election. At this stage, Biden is judged by the highly respected Cook Political Report to have 226 out of the necessary 270 votes in the electoral college, with the majority (116) coming from former Union states. Trump has 235 votes, with a majority (135) coming from former states in the Confederacy. The continuing legacy of the civil war remains.

The outcome of the 2024 US election is unlikely to resolve these differences. In fact, it may deepen them, whoever becomes president. Just as southerners never fully accepted the outcome of the civil war, Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen are unlikely to gracefully accept a loss in 2024, presaging more resentment and possible renewed violence. And if Trump wins, Biden supporters may attribute it to Republican election subversion, further alienating Democrats from their fellow Americans.

America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States.

America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States. There are effectively two Americas – and they are at war. They are fighting over social, political and constitutional issues, and over what role the US should play in the world. The 2024 US election is just another battle in this war.

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” Isaiah 28:1

“The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet” Isaiah 28:3

Posted in Civil War, US

Jeremiah (Ch 7-8)

•September 28, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Rosh Hashanah. We are now into the sacred year 5786; that is, there are still another 214 to reach the year 6000! A lot are going to happen during the next two hundred years, most spelt out in the prophecies of Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah, but most so-call pastors or ministers couldn’t understand what they are, so they are silent about these prophets wrote.

We have read of the house of Israel and the house of Judah both have idolatries, but who are they? Perhaps, the following chapters could shed further light giving us more details about what walking after other gods means.

Astarte, the Queen of heaven; from whence comes Easter

(1) Astarte, the queen of heaven; from whom Easter is derived
(2) Christmas honors Mithraism, birthday on the Winter solstice
(3) Sunday, worshipping of heavenly bodies, especially the Sun

Hence professing Christians have shifted from God’s festivals to man’s festivals, and from the Sabbath on Saturday to Sunday by outlawing the keeping of the true Sabbath.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible.

Jeremiah 7

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying:

² “Stand in the gate of the Lord’S house, and proclaim there this word and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah, who enter in at these gates to worship the Lord!

— stand in the gate of the Lord’s house in Jerusalem, the Temple and the court outside. This gate is believed to be the eastern gate, which was the principal gate of all; see Jeremiah 26:2:

— and proclaim there this word, and say as follows: hear ye the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah; which came to the Temple to worship; very probably it was a feast day, either the Passover, Pentecost or feast of Tabernacles when all the males in Israel appeared in court.

³ Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.

⁴ Trust ye not in lying words, saying, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these.” — these were the lying words uttering at the temple on which they trusted, the trusting in human lying in which God through Isaiah solemnly cautions them;

— trust ye not in lying words; not the words of the lying prophets, as the Targum says, “Do not trust in the words of false prophets who says before the temple of the Lord;” that is, verifying everything even where they seems to speak from a place of authority!

— the three-fold repetition of the words, the Temple of the Lord, was, perhaps every Jew was obliged to visit the Temple thrice a year. But it seems more likely that they are thus repeated, to express the importance of the Temple where the Most High dwells;

⁵ For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, if ye thoroughly execute judgement between a man and his neighbor, — a major shift in outlook and lifestyle is needed to “thoroughly amend your ways and your doings.”

⁶ if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt, — our civil courts are filled of such problems; but the spiritual court of judgement will soon follows;

— “the stranger” documented or undocumented, these are immigrants, refugees, trying to benefit from the leftover of the gleaning of a harvest; these are jobs that nobody wants;

ICE up for a riot against farm workers, who live on jobs nobody wants

⁷ then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever. — could God have seen things differently, “if you expelled these strangers, I’ll expel you!?”

“For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. As thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head,” Obadiah 1:15

“The US is the World’s biggest terrorist,” Noam Chomsky

⁸ “‘Behold, ye trust in lying words that cannot profit. — today we have four Great Lies or four Great Deceptions permeating our societies:

(a) Easters, a celebration of the Queen of heaven: Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection; Jeremiah 7:18 the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of heaven; in Egypt, Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25, this is Ishtar: pronounced ‘Easter.’

(b) Christmas; Ezekiel 8:16 five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple; their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east; Christmas, which honor Mithraism, birthday on December 25th – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice;

(c) Sundays; her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun- worshippers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof, II Kings 17:24;

(d) Holy Ghost or holy ghost in the Trinity? – Revelation 4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices. And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God; if the Spirit is a Being or an independent Personage; there would be seven Holy Spirits.

⁹ Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not, — worshipping baals and burn incense to other gods are all mentioned above; the Egyptian Ishtar, the Babylon Mithra, the Samaritan Sun god and the fallen angel, Satan, whom the Romans call Lucifer!

¹⁰ and come and stand before Me in this house which is called by My name, and say, “We are delivered” — to do all these abominations? — which is called by his name; the Temple of God, where his name, Yehovah, is to be called upon.

¹¹ Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the Lord. — the Temple is the place God dwell with man, which is to be called by his name; יהוה (YHVH), and is to be called upon; hence its importance.

¹² “‘But go ye now unto My place which was in Shiloh, where I set My name at the first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel. — but go ye now unto my place, which was in Shiloh, a city in the tribe of Ephraim, on the north of Bethel, and not far from Shechem;

— here lies the tabernacle, the ark and altar of the Lord, and the sacrifices; and therefore the tabernacle is called the tabernacle of Shiloh; and here the Lord calls it his place; the place of the house of his Shekinah.

¹³ And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the Lord, and I spoke unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not, and I called you, but ye answered not, — speaking, but ye hear not; would not listen to the words of the prophets or the Lord; but turned a deaf ear, which aggravates their stubbornness, obstinacy and wickedness.

¹⁴ therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by My name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. — for since the Lord has seen how they have profaned his Temple, he would also destroy it as the sanctuary at Shiloh was destroyed.

¹⁵ And I will cast you out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.’ — as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim; or as the Targum says,

“And I will exile you from the land of My sanctuary, just as I exiled all your brothers—the entire seed of Israel;”

— as Ephraim were carried captive off into Assyria, so would the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin; who could not expect to fare better than their brethren, who were more numerous than they; but both were guilty of the same sins.

¹⁶ Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to Me; for I will not hear thee. — once their wickedness have reach a certain threshold, God forbids his prophets to pray for them in any kind by any cry or intercession.

¹⁷ “Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? — and in the streets of Jerusalem? these words, with what is said next, show the reason why the prophet was forbidden to pray for this people, and the Lord was so provoked with them as to cast them out of his sight;

— and he appeals to the prophet, and to what he saw; for what was done was done not in secret, but openly in the very streets of the city; by which he might be sufficiently convinced it was what God wanted to do and what he determined to do with them.

¹⁸ The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger. — the queen of heaven; the female goddess Ashtoreth, or Astarte;

— to make cakes to the queen of heaven, the counterpart of the male idol Baal, in whose honor the cakes, made of honey, fine flour, and other ingredients, bore a round, flat surface to resemble the disk of the moon;

— and to pour out drink-offerings, the libations made as sacrifices, unto other gods that they may provoke me to anger, the expression implying design on their part, the deliberate intention to arouse his wrath;

— from the queen of heaven, Astarte; and their worshipping thereof, to Easter today (more at the end)

¹⁹ Do they provoke Me to anger? saith the Lord. Do they not provoke themselves to the confusion of their own faces? — because of their provocation, for worshipping the queen of heaven, Astarte; the wrath of the Lord will be poured over the land in a consuming fire.

²⁰ Therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold, Mine anger and My fury shall be poured out upon this place — upon man and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn and shall not be quenched.

— behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place; as the flood of waters was poured upon the old world or the shower of fire and brimstone upon Sodom.

²² For I spoke not unto your fathers nor commanded them, in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.

— for God spake not unto your fathers; not Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but Moses, Aaron and others; showing that it was more than his purpose and intent that they should offer sacrifices;

— in the context that the people’s belief that temple rituals and sacrifices guarantee divine favor; but no, because their ongoing moral corruption: idolatry, injustice, and violence are worse; obedience “Obey My voice,” was always the foundation of the covenant—not ritual alone.

²³ But this thing commanded I them, saying, “Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be My people; and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you.” — sacrifice may not be the final outcome of the covenant, it is always obedience; but by offering sacrifices God knows who is obedient.

²⁴ But they hearkened not nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward. — and went backward, and not forward; but walked back into idolatry. The Targum says, “they turned the back in my worship, and did not put my fear before them.”

²⁵ Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day, I have even sent unto you all My servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them. — his servants the prophets, who rose early in the morning, indicating their care and diligence in conveying God’s message so that they don’t have to face adverse consequences.

²⁶Yet they hearkened not unto Me nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck; they did worse than their fathers.’ — but my people hardened their neck; and so became stiffnecked, and would not submit to bear the yoke of the law.

²⁷“Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them, but they will not hearken to thee; thou shalt also call unto them, but they will not answer thee. — but they will not hearken to thee: this must be a trial to the prophet, that he is assured that he shall speak to them in vain; so that he would not be discouraged at the end result.

²⁸ But thou shalt say unto them, ‘This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction. Truth has perished and is cut off from their mouth. — but thou shalt say unto them, this is a nation, being obstinate, obeyeth not the voice of the Lord, not want to be instructed;

— nor receiveth correction, hardened to the point that all rebukes make no impression upon them; truth is perished, all reliability, all fidelity is lost, and is cut off from their mouth; for the Jews and Christians alike confessed the Lord with their mouths only, and not with their hands and hearts.

²⁹“‘Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of His wrath. — Jeremiah addresses Jerusalem under the figure of a woman, who, in grief for her lost children, deprives her head of its chief ornament and goes up to the hills to mourn;

— the Targum says, “pluck off the hair for thy great ones who will be exiled, and take up a lamentation for the princes.”

³⁰ “‘For the children of Judah have done evil in My sight, saith the Lord. They have set their abominations in the house which is called by My name, to pollute it. — God’s house which is called by my name; this abomination had been committed by Ahaz (II Chronicles 28:2);

— and after the Temple had been cleansed by Hezekiah (II Chronicles 29:5) this abomination had been repeated by Manasseh (II Chronicles 33:3-7). Josiah’s revival checked the fall back into idolatry (II Chronicles 34:3); but the pendulum swung back again until they all went into captivity.

³¹ And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I commanded them not, neither came it into My heart.

— the high places of Tophet is where the idol Moloch was; that the parents of the children that were burnt might not hear the cry of them: which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom; a valley near Jerusalem, and lay to the south of it.

³² Therefore behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter; for they shall bury in Tophet till there be no place.

— valley of slaughter; so named because of the great slaughter of the Jews, slain by the Chaldeans, to take place at Jerusalem: a just retribution of their sin in slaying their children to Moloch in Tophet.

³³ And the carcasses of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall frighten them away. — the birds and beasts of prey shall feed on them, being exposed to open view for want of interment;

— another parallel Scripture in Jeremiah:

“And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hands of them that seek their lives; and their carcasses will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth” Jeremiah 19:7.

³⁴ Then will I cause to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride; for the land shall be desolate. — while the likes of Paris Hilton’s wild partying shall cease, silence and desolation are destined to settle upon the whole land.

~~~~

More on making cakes to the queen of heaven (v18), Astarte, Easter:

Easter (which is how you pronounce Ishtar) is originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, in its entry “Easter,” states:

“The term ‘Easter’ is not of Christian origin. It is another form of Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven. The festival of Pasch [Passover] held by Christians in post-apostolic times was a continuation of the Jewish feast . . . From this Pasch the pagan festival of ‘Easter’ was quite distinct and was introduced into the apostate Western religion, as part of the attempt to adapt pagan festivals to Christianity” (W.E. Vine, 1985).

Ishtar was an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility, and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. Her worship involved animal sacrifices; objects made of her sacred stone, lapis lazuli; and temple prostitution.

Superimposed over an image of Ishtar are these words: “This is Ishtar: pronounced ‘Easter.’ From Ishtar the name Easter was derived. It’s well known that Easter was originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and the bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols.

Back at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Constantine read out the letter that he would subsequently send to churches everywhere: “When the question arose concerning the most holy day of Easter it was decreed by common consent to be expedient, that this festival should be celebrated on the same day by all, in every place… Let us then have nothing in common with … the Jews” sums up one of the key movement for the establishment of Easter to be celebrated in the Church today.

After Constantine decided to Christianize the Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus. And everything Jewish were understood to be totally incompatible with Christianity. But at its roots, Easter is outwardly all about celebrating fertility and sex but inwardly it’s paying homage to a Mesopotamian goddess, the queen of heaven, Ishtar.

Women making cakes for the queen of heaven (v18), Astarte, Easter

Jeremiah 8

¹ “‘At that time, saith the Lord, they shall bring out the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem out of their graves.

— the first three verses of this chapter should belong to the preceding; at that time; there is no break in the discourse and the time is therefore that of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldæans and of the burial of the slain;

— the motives of this desecration of the sepulchres might be either the wanton ferocity of barbarian conquerors, bent, after the manner of savage warfare, on the mutilation of the dead, or the greed of gain and the expectation of finding concealed treasures.

² And they shall spread them before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped. They shall not be gathered nor be buried: they shall be for dung upon the face of the earth.

— worshipping of heavenly bodies are forbidden according to God’s commandments give to Moses, Deuteronomy 17:3-5, whose penalty is death;

³and hath gone and served other gods and worshiped them, either the sun or moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded,

⁴and it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it and inquired diligently, and behold, it be true and the thing certain that such abomination is wrought in Israel,

⁵ “then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman who has committed that wicked thing unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die.”Deuteronomy 17:3-5,

— a parallel Scripture is in Ezekiel 8:16 “And He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’S house, and behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east,” thus they worshipped the sun;

³ And death shall be chosen rather than life by all the residue of them that remain of this evil family, who remain in all the places whither I have driven them, saith the Lord of hosts.’ — the residue of them that remain, that is, “the remnant of a remnant,”

— and death shall be chosen rather than life; a description of the unexpressibleness of their misery, as that death would be more eligible to them than life since every kind of hardship in exile and imprisonment amongst the heathen is awaiting them.

⁴ “Moreover thou shalt say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord: “‘Shall they fall and not arise? Shall he turn away and not return? — it is a natural instinct, that if one falls, he rises again; but no man needing repentance, asks, What have I done?

— none of them did so much as take the first step toward repentance; “What should I do?” they did not even examine their conduct, and call themselves to an account for their actions.

⁵ Why then has this people of Jerusalem slidden back by a perpetual backsliding? They hold fast deceit, they refuse to return. — they hold fast to deceits; being obstinate they refuse to return;

— today we have four Great Deceits hiding behind four Great Lies:

(a) Easters, a celebration of the Queen of heaven: Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection; Jeremiah 7:18 the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of heaven; in Egypt, Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25, this is Ishtar: pronounced ‘Easter.’

(b) Christmas; Ezekiel 8:16 five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple; their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east; Christmas, which honor Mithraism, birthday on December 25th – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice;

(c) Sundays; her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun-worshippers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof, II Kings 17:24;

(d) Holy Ghost or holy ghost in the Trinity? – Revelation 4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices. And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God; if the Spirit is a Being or an independent Personage; there would be seven Holy Spirits.

⁶ I hearkened and heard, but they spoke not aright; no man repented of his wickedness, saying, “What have I done?” Every one turned to his course, as the horse rusheth into the battle. — hearkened and heard; God, before passing sentence, carefully listens to the words of the people, but none repented as they rushed into wars and battles.

⁷ Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but My people know not the judgement of the Lord. — they knoweth not her appointed times; as was true in those days, and so much more true today;

— Jews and Christians alike don’t know the the significance of the events leading to the 70 AD inferno in Jerusalem; why did the Sadducees and Essenes died in the inferno while the Pharisees and Nazarenes escaped?

— Christians don’t know what are the Oracles of God; what the components are; some claim, “we don’t need the oral law” is this true?

— Jews don’t know that the Messiah they look so much for had came, but he went off and will come again; and they will morn for him one day as one morns for his firstborn; from Sabbath to Sabbath, they read the Scriptures diligently but couldn’t identify the second Being, the one sitting on the right side of the Most High, in Psalm 110:1-5;

— no body seems to understand the various symbols and riddles in the book of Ezekiel to put all the puzzles into a big picture; Jews couldn’t neither do Christians!

— nobody knows who Ephraim is, neither anyone knows about the United States; and who or where her enemy will come from and what her destination is. All are written in encrypted codes by Ezekiel; hence God says “but My people know not the judgement of the Lord.”

For more on Ephraim and Manasseh, or the Ox without the Unicorn.

For more on the enemy from the South, see A Sword from the South!

For more about the Calendar, see Is there a Calendar Omen?

⁸ “‘How do ye say, “We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us”? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain. — How do you say, “We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us”? Certainly the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie (MEV and many other translations);

— the Targum says,

“How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the Torah of the Lord is with us’? But behold, the scribe has made it into a lie—his pen is false and deceitful.”

Examples of such lying pen of the scribes to falsify the Masoretic Text are:

(1) Isaiah 7:14 – a “virgin” shall conceive and bear a Son – changed to a young woman which renders the text meaningless as any young woman could have a child;

(2) Isaiah 9:6 “the Everlasting Father” – the Son has never been known as the father; this lying pen is just to run contrary to the characteristic of the Son; who would be the Messiah in the name of Yeshua which the Orthodox have confused themselves in a maze.

⁹ The wise men are ashamed; they are dismayed and taken. Lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord: and what wisdom is in them?

— their wise men are ashamed; they trusted to their refuge of lies, but when God shall bring them judgement, the wisest will find that they shall be confounded, not sure what to do with all their wisdom.

¹⁰ Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them. For every one from the least even unto the greatest is given to covetousness; from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.

— everyone is given to covetousness; so greedy after their own private gain, that they took no care of equity or justice.

¹¹ For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightingly, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. — these verses are almost identical with Jeremiah 6:12-15, both offering a false sense of security.

¹² Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush. Therefore shall they fall among them that fall; in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

¹³ “‘I will surely consume them, saith the Lord. There shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade; and the things that I have given them shall pass away from them.’”

— God will surely consume them; or he will gather them together into their several cities to be besieged, that it shall be no hard matter to destroy them.

¹⁴ Why do we sit still? Assemble yourselves, and let us enter into the fortified cities, and let us be silent there. For the Lord our God hath put us to silence, and given us water of gall to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. — God hath put us to silence, just listen but let us be silent; stay still and be reflective. Selah! For our sins are numerous!

¹⁵ We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold, trouble! — instead of peace and safety hoped for, there come calamity and terror.

¹⁶ The snorting of His horses was heard from Dan; the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of His strong ones. For they have come and have devoured the land and all that is in it, the city and those that dwell therein.

— heard from Dan; as the invasion by war chariots and an army from the North would be a special terror to Israelites even as far North as the northern boundary at Dan.

¹⁷ “For behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you,” saith the Lord.

— the Targum says, “For behold, I am sending you against deadly nations, like venomous serpents that cannot be charmed, and they shall kill you, says the Lord.” And they shall bite you, or kill you; for the bite of a serpent is deadly.

¹⁸ When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint within me. — this takes them to the words of the prophet Jeremiah, the Targum paraphrasing them, “for them, saith the prophet, my heart grieves.”

¹⁹ Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people, because of them that dwell in a far country: “Is not the Lord in Zion? Is not her King in her?” “Why have they provoked Me to anger with their graven images and with strange vanities?”

— behold, the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people; such was God’s sympathy for his countrymen, his people in distress, whom he affectionately calls the daughter of his people;

— “Is not the Lord in Zion? If they return to God, he will allow himself to be found by them;

— the Targum says “lo, the voice of the cry of the congregation of my people from a far country,” the cry of them that dwell in a far country; perhaps this could be a reference to those of the Assyrian exiles, of the northern house of Israel? Or prophetic from a distant land!

²⁰ “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!” — “The harvest is past,” and there has been no crop for the people to harvest.

— the house of Judah had expected the Egyptians to come to their relief; but now the summer were past, yet there was no appearance of deliverance as expected; the Targum says, “the congregation of Israel said, the time is passed, the end is up, and we are not redeemed.”

²¹ For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me. — for the hurt; now the prophet Jeremiah again speaks from his own perspective; he is crushed to see the crushing of his people. His face is darkened, in pain, as one that mourns; (Joel 2:6)

²² Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? — don’t they not have any righteous men from whom to learn from so that they should improve their ways? Are there no means of healing, no healer to apply them, for the spiritual wounds of Israel?

~~~~

Facing the East, worshipping the Sun:

— the worship of heavenly bodies was against God’s will which Moses had warned the people (Deuteronomy 4:19, 17:3, whose penalty is to be stoned to death, Deuteronomy 17:5 ’till they die). Those 25 men in Ezekiel 8:16 corrupted themselves by worshipping the sun; and so the Targum renders it, “and, lo, they corrupted themselves, worshipping facing the east the sun; their backs toward the temple of the Lord” — they turned their backs against the most holy place; which is an aggravation of their impiety; casting the utmost contempt for God:

Moses’ warnings in Deuteronomy 17

³ And [if you] hath gone and served other gods and worshipped them, either the sun or moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded, ⁴ and it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it and inquired diligently, and behold, it be true and the thing certain that such abomination is wrought in Israel, ⁵ then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman who has committed that wicked thing unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die. Deuteronomy 17:3-5

The following quotation show that the first Christians understood the Sabbath but were made forbidden and gathered for worship on Sunday: “Christians should not Judaize and should not be idle on the Sabbath, but should work on that day; they should, however, particularly reverence the Lord’s day and, if possible, not work on it, because they were Christians” (Canon 29 AD 360);

— also, Days of the Week Names: “Sunday” is the Sun’s day and “Monday” is the Moon’s day. “Tuesday” is Tiw’s day; Tiw is an Anglo-Saxon god of war. “Wednesday” comes from Woden, the Anglo-Saxon king of the gods; in Saxon the name is Wodnesdaeg. “Thursday” is Thursdaeg, Thor’s day; Thor is a Norse god of thunder, lightning and storms. “Friday” is Frigedaeg, Frigga’s day; Frigg is a Norse goddess of home, marriage and fertility. “Saturday” is Saeterndaeg, Saturn’s day; Saturn is an ancient Roman god of fun and feasting;

— Months of the Year Names: January (derived from the Latin Januarius) is to honor their Roman gods Janus; and March, named for Mars, is the Roman mighty god of war; February is derived from the Februa festival or its eponymous februa (“purifications, expiatory offerings”); April relates to what the Romans called the month Aprilis; from a word meaning “to open” and further back from Aphrodite, the Greek name for the goddess of love. May – named for Maia, is the Roman goddess of spring and growth;

— June is a name attributed to Juno, the female mighty wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology. She is also called the “Queen of Heaven” and “Queen of Mighty Ones.” July is to honor Julius Caesar; the Roman Senate named it “Julius” in honor of Roman emperor Julius Caesar. August honor Julius Caesar’s successor, the emperor Augustus; and the months September, October, November, and December are archaic adjectives derived from the ordinal numbers 7 to 10;

— today, more than 98.5 percent of Christians are honouring the Sun by observing Sunday worship. They have “their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the SUN toward the east; whose Godly penalty is to be stoned to death – ’till they die.

— also, following the SUN-worshipping Samaritans, most Church of God Communities are showing their contempt for God by having their “wavesheaf offering” and Pentecost on a Sunday; always on a Sunday. And these are supposedly in God’s Sanctuary, but God says He is a jealous God, so these pretentious Christians could be spewed out of His mouth! A death penalty – ’till they die!

Posted in Jeremiah

The Jewish Sacred Year 5786

•September 27, 2025 • Leave a Comment

I came across this greeting card online and found it quite insightful. I was intrigued and curious to know who the artist behind this creation is, so I decided to ask ChatGPT.

And ChatGPT replied me:

Sorry, I can’t tell who drew or created this image.

What I can describe is what’s shown: it depicts fiery Hebrew letters spelling פשת, the Jewish year 5786, and the phrase “Prophetic Year.” Below, there’s a glowing Jerusalem scene with the Dome of the Rock, and on the sides the US flag and the flag of Israel, plus a Torah scroll. The style is digital, painterly, and dramatic, but the creator isn’t identified in the image itself.

I said the creator is pretty insightful, and it is because the significance of the two flags are going to play a major role in the years ahead, and on the Temple Mount, where the Father is very passionate about, Jeremiah 3:17!

“At that time they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem; neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart.”

Copilot also couldn’t identify the sourse, but provide some analysis:

That image appears to be rich in religious and symbolic themes—melding Hebrew numerology, prophetic messaging, and national iconography from both the United States and Israel. However, without a visible watermark, signature, or metadata, it’s difficult to definitively identify the creator or pinpoint its original source.

Hebrew Letter Symbolism in 5786

Hebrew Letter	Symbolic Meaning	Prophetic Interpretation
Tav (ת)	Covenant, completion	A season of fulfilled promises and divine closure
Shin (ש)	Fire, transformation	Refining through trials; purification and passion
Peh (פ)	Mouth, speech	Power of proclamation; speaking truth boldly
Vav (ו)	Hook, connection	Linking heaven and earth; divine alignment

Together, these letters suggest a year of:

🔗 Divine connections—what has been declared in prayer may begin to manifest.
🔥 Refining fire—a time of purification, both personally and globally.
🗣️ Bold speech—a call to speak truth, especially in the face of deception.
📜 Covenantal fulfillment—long-awaited promises coming to pass.

🌍 Prophetic Themes for 5786

According to several prophetic voices and ministries (source 1, source 2, source 3):

A September to Remember: The year begins at sundown on September 22, 2025, with Rosh Hashanah (Feast of Trumpets), marking a spiritual reset.
The Decade of Peh: We’re still in the 5780s, a decade focused on the mouth—what we speak has spiritual weight.
Vav as a Connector: This year emphasizes divine alignments—relationships, ministries, and nations being joined for God’s purposes.
Spiritual Warfare & Discernment: Expect both deception and revelation. The Hebrew number 5786 also relates to “a film over the eyes” (Strong’s Concordance), suggesting spiritual blindness—but also the lifting of veils.

🇺🇸🇮🇱 Imagery in the Picture You Shared

US and Israeli Flags: Symbolize geopolitical and spiritual ties—many prophetic voices see these nations as central to end-times events.
Dome of the Rock: A focal point of tension and prophecy in Jerusalem.
Open Torah Scroll: Represents divine wisdom, revelation, and the unfolding of God’s Word.
Fiery Atmosphere: Echoes the refining fire of Shin and the urgency of prophetic times.

Grok also couldn’t identify its scource, but provided the following

Analysis of the Image

The image you provided appears to be a digitally created graphic or AI-generated artwork (likely using tools like Midjourney or DALL-E, given the stylized fiery effects and composite elements). It features:

Fiery Hebrew text reading “שנת נבואה” (Shnat Nevu’ah, translating to “Year of Prophecy” or “Prophetic Year”).
The number “5786” (the Hebrew calendar year beginning September 2025).
American and Israeli flags in the foreground.
A dramatic sunset landscape with the Dome of the Rock (a key Islamic shrine on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount) in the background.
An open ancient scroll (evoking Torah or prophetic writings) at the bottom.

This design blends Jewish prophetic themes, US-Israel alliance symbolism, and Jerusalem’s contested holy sites, suggesting it’s promotional or inspirational content aimed at a religious Zionist or evangelical Christian audience. The fiery motif symbolizes divine revelation (eg, “pillar of fire” from Exodus), tying into end-times or messianic expectations for 5786.

Creator and Origin

Despite extensive searches across web sources, X (Twitter) posts, and semantic queries (focusing on keywords like “5786 Prophetic Year image,” “שנת נבואה 5786 fiery,” and descriptions of the elements), no definitive creator or exact first origin could be identified. Here’s what the investigation revealed:

No direct matches: The specific combination of elements doesn’t appear in public databases, stock photo sites (eg, iStock, Unsplash, Freepik), or historical archives. Related searches surfaced general Jewish/Israeli flag art, Dome of the Rock photos, and Hebrew year graphics, but nothing identical.
Thematic context: 5786 is frequently discussed in Jewish and Christian prophetic circles as a potentially significant year (eg, tied to biblical cycles like 70-year “generations” from Israel’s founding in 1948). Articles mention it in end-times speculation, but no linked images match yours.
Likely creation method: The polished, surreal style points to recent digital generation (post-2023, aligning with AI art boom). It may have originated on social media or a private ministry site around Rosh Hashanah 5785 (September 2024), circulating informally before 5786 began.
Possible sources:
- Social media circulation: X searches for similar images yielded unrelated posts about Israel flags, Temple Mount history, and US-Israel ties (eg, George Washington’s letters referencing the Exodus). No post embedded this exact graphic.
- Religious communities: It resembles content from US evangelical groups (eg, Christians United for Israel) or Jewish prophetic ministries, but no attribution found. The US flag inclusion suggests an American creator or audience.
- Stock/art sites: Sites like Freepik have Hebrew-themed flag vectors, but none with the full composition.

Concluding Thought

“At that time they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem; neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart” Jeremiah 3:17

ChatGPT, Grok, and Copilot all failed to identify the image creator or its original source! It makes me think the image creator isn’t just insightful but probably close to a Genius!

But who then is that insightful Genius?

Posted in Israel, US, Zionism

Just Delete US’s Nvidia!

•September 27, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China is banning Nvidia chips in an unexpected second order effect of the US tech embargo

The Unz Review by Hua Bin • September 18, 2025

Since Trump and Biden launched the tech and trade wars with China, I have written several essays arguing that Beijing should pursue a full decoupling with the US for national security and economic competitiveness reasons.

It seems that is happening right now. Beijing just banned its big tech companies from buying the Nvidia H20 and RTX 6000D chips. Nvidia developed these two GPU AI accelerator chips specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with the US ban of advanced AI chips to China.

Beijing just threw back the trade embargo playbook in Washington’s face. This is a textbook example of how an ill-conceived coercive policy blows up in the face of the perpetrator. And another case study of how the far more intelligent technocrats in Beijing have outsmarted the short-sighted political functionaries in Washington.

Let’s examine what happened.

Starting in Trump’s first term, the US regime has upped the antes in containing China’s technological rise. It first banned US chip sales to Huawei in an effort to destroy the telecom and mobile phone giant. That failed miserably but as expected, Washington’s default option when faced with failure is to double down.

During Biden’s time in office, he further escalated the tech war by banning AI chips, software, and even lithography machines to the Chinese market as a whole. The explicit aim of the tech bans is to stop China from reaching the US level of AI development.

Since China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors, the Biden regime wanted to keep making money from China while impeding China’s tech progress. The solution was to allow the sales of chips one or two generations behind the cutting edge.

Nvidia, the effective global AI chip monopoly, designed the H20 chip specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with the Biden export control. Nvidia’s strategy was to continue to profit from the Chinese demand and tie Chinese AI developers to its CUDA software ecosystem without selling China the latest AI chips.

However, when a little-known Chinese AI firm, DeepSeek, shocked the tech world with the launch of its DeepSeek R1 large language model in January 2025, the world suddenly realized Chinese AI engineers were able to develop world-class AI models even with the much less powerful accelerator chips.

DeepSeek achieved the breakthrough by using reinforcement learning to allow its LLM to develop reasoning abilities through self-evolution. The innovative training method didn’t require as much compute as similar models in the US and successfully circumvented the chip moat Nvidia tried to build around its most sophisticated products.

As a reaction, the second Trump regime immediately banned even the sales of the watered-down H20 chips to Chinese tech firms. Nvidia was forced to write off $5.5 billion worth of unsold H20 chips in its inventory.

With no access to advanced western AI chips, Beijing realized the only way to develop the AI industry in China is total self-reliance in every step of the semiconductor value chain.

Chinese tech companies started to invest heavily in the AI chip stack from design, manufacturing, to software architecture. Huawei, Cambricon, and Alibaba have all recently announced production of AI accelerator chips that are only one generation behind Nvidia’s most powerful chips.

In effect, Trump’s H20 ban has left a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, that used to be monopolized by Nividia, wide open for Chinese domestic producers.

Realizing the US is at the risk of losing the biggest single chip market to its Chinese competitors, Jensen Huang and David Sachs, Trump’s “AI Czar,” lobbied the Trump White House to loosen the ban and return to the Chinese market. They both stated it is in the US’s best interest to keep Chinese tech companies on the hook of Nvidia products, just not the best ones.

Subsequently, Trump did lift the ban and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, even went on to CNBC to boast that “we’ll have the Chinese chip market but sell them chips that are not our best, not our second best, not even our third best.” [“the H20 is only Nvidia’s “fourth-best” AI chip”] where [some US lawmakers have called for advanced chips exported abroad to be equipped with ‘tracking and positioning’ functions]

The ex-Wall Street financier was so arrogant that he actually thought he was clever enough to let Nvidia continue dominating the Chinese market even with a castrated second rate product.

Beijing, led by a leadership trained as engineers rather than bankers and lawyers as the US, saw right through the little ploy. Instead of letting H20 back to the Chinese market, Beijing started an investigation on potential security issues with the H20 chips by raising concerns over possible back doors and remote shutdown kill-switches.

Again, here Washington itself supplied the ammunition for China’s suspicion. In public Congressional hearings, US congressmen openly requested US chip producers to embed geo-fencing functions in their chips. One can only speculate what other “functions” are planted in those Trojan horses.

In Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide, he described in great detail how CIA installed backdoor software in Cisco servers shipped to China as disclosed by the Edward Snowden files.

Over the last week, the Cyber Administration of China officially requested Chinese tech firms such as Tencent and ByteDance to stop testing of the Nvidia new China-only RTX 6000D chips and cancel any orders.

In addition, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce has launched an anti-monopoly investigation against Nvidia due to its failure to comply with the agreement with Chinese regulators when Beijing approved its 2020 acquisition of the Israeli company Mellanox Technologies.

It is clear Beijing has decided it will do without Nvidia and China will build its AI industry completely in separation from US technologies.

In 2018, Huawei launched a top secret inhouse project called “Delete America” when the company was targeted for destruction by the first Trump regime and had to rid itself of every American technology for self protection.

Now China is embracing a full-spectrum nationwide “Delete USA” from its technological development.

At the technical level, local Chinese AI chip makers such as Huawei and Cambricon have already developed accelerator chips that have reached performance parity with Nvidia’s China-specific chips.

Through superior networking, Huawei has built more powerful AI compute super-nodes such as CloudMatrix 384 based on Ascend 910C than the state-of-art Nvidia GB200 NVL 72 compute rack based on its most advanced Blackwell chips.

As Jensen Huang himself pointed out, AI is a parallel computing issue. Rather than competing on the performance of each individual AI chip, Huawei is changing the game by linking more chips to build greater scale and deliver better performance at the rack level.

With China’s far superior power generation capacity, China can afford to outbuild the electricity-hungry AI data centers than the US, giving it the ultimate competitive advantage in the AI war.

As I wrote before, Beijing is also investing heavily in next generation semiconductor technologies from photonic chips to third-generation semiconductors such as those based on indium selenide (InSe), a 2D material that has shown significant potential to outperform traditional silicon chips.

Researchers at the Peking University and Remin University just announced breakthroughs in the production of InSe wafers, a move that could potentially disrupt the silicon chip altogether. I intend to write on this in a future piece.

The original Nvidia AI strategy was brilliant. Nvidia achieved market dominance not just through its superior AI accelerator chips but also its CUDA software ecosystem that has locked in AI developers. It is a model that is extremely difficult to break. Just ask AMD if you don’t believe it.

Competitors like Huawei cannot hope to break the stranglehold as Nvidia enjoys a flywheel of market dominance and high profit margins that will finance further R&D and expand its lead.

Five years ago, there was little prospect of Chinese tech firms breaking free from Nvidia’s technological control over the AI sector (this is why Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company).

However, the malicious move by the US regime to chokehold China’s technological development has inadvertently broken the chokehold. No Chinese tech company is immune from US sanctions and chip bans. Now they are all incentivized to find alternatives to reduce their dependency on US tech.

Chips that don’t match Nvidia’s best are better than no chips at all. As companies such as Huawei and Cambricon now provide options for AI accelerators, they are also breaking developers away from Nvidia’s CUDA software network. Huawei has launched the open-source CANN architecture.

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, numerous new entrants are joining in the race, further eroding Nvidia’s dominance in the long run. One outcome is certain – Nvidia will be locked out of the Chinese chip market, the largest in the world, and Chinese companies will have the market for itself.

China is set to build a completely separate and parallel AI system from the US. The China system may still lag in compute performance for now but has zero dependence on the US.

Once the system scales and matures at the application level, we can expect Chinese AI will compete with the best AI players from the US in the global markets. Much like the EV industry today.

The short-sighted belligerence of the US regime has successfully undermined the dominance of its own tech champion, very much the opposite story of how Beijing has groomed China’s dominance in the rare earth industry.

Washington has found its belligerence against China blown up in its face repeatedly –

After the US congress passed the Wolf Act to block China from the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011, China built its own Tiangong Space Station, which is expanding and upgrading while the ISS is clocked to retire in a few years with no replacement in sight
After the US shut down GPS signal to harass China’s Yinhe cargo ship in 1993 in the Red Sea, it spurred Beijing to build the Beidou satellite navigation system, which is now more advanced than the aging GPS system
After the US intervened in the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996, China decided to develop a full A2AD strategy with focus on anti-ship hypersonic missiles that can keep US ships from Chinese shores. Now the DF and YJ families of hypersonic missiles can “sink the entire US carrier fleets in 20 minutes” (quote from Hegseth)

As the US regime pursues a zero-sum adversarial relationship with China, Beijing is implementing a full speed “Delete USA” strategy to decouple completely –

Pursuing full tech self sufficiency, especially in AI
Winding down trade relationship – cutting off all purchase of US farm products and energy products such as coal and LNG
Selling off US debt
Making US education less attractive to Chinese students – more and more jobs in government departments, state-owned businesses, and even private tech firms are off limits to students with a US degree
More US businesses operating in China such as Starbucks and Nike are facing consumer pushback

It takes two to tango. The arrogant and ignorant Washington operatives have always assumed their belligerence is never reciprocated and no one dares to punch back at the bully. Maybe they are right when it comes to its subservient vassals in Europe, Japan, South Korea and the 5 eyes Anglo sphere.

But they have met their rival. China won’t succumb to Washington’s coercion or Trump’s “charm”. Instead, it will hit the delete button.

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26, US

Jeremiah (Ch 5-6)

•September 26, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The chapters below were written around 628 BC, which is about a hundred years after the house of Israel had been exiled to Assyria, when God called upon Jeremiah to deliver his message against the elders of Jerusalem of an enemy coming out from the north and an impending exile to follow if they continue with all their wickedness and idolatries.

Jeremiah 5

¹ “Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now and know, and seek in the broad places thereof if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgement, that seeketh the truth, and I will pardon it.

— run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem; to go through the whole city, in the wider streets and intersections; there were not ten righteous men found in Sodom (Genesis 18:32); but could there be one in Jerusalem that administers justice?

— if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgement, carrying out justice and righteousness; one that seeketh the truth of doctrine and worship; if you could find one righteous, God will grant a pardon to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem;

— in “broad places” a man; as the pious Baruch and Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem at that time, God must mean one in public office, one for the mass of the people; the righteous, if any, most probably would have gone into hiding, fear of the “wild men of Sodom”

— king Josiah, in public office, died early; Zephaniah and other prophets, if they live in Jerusalem, probably would have just make brief appearance and faded away like Elijah did, even though he didn’t live in Jerusalem. Most prophets were herders or farmers that lived off the land; or just living with a low profile!

² And though they say, ‘The Lord liveth,’ surely they swear falsely.”

³ O Lord, are not Thine eyes upon the truth? Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; Thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction. They have made their faces harder than a rock; they have refused to return.

⁴ Therefore I said, “Surely these are poor, they are foolish; for they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgement of their God. — therefore God said, Surely these are poor, their shepherds are interrupting themselves to voice an objection to the Lord; they are foolish, acting foolishly on account of their ignorance;

— for they know not the way of the Lord nor the judgement of their God. The elites assume that only the untaught poor are guilty of such depravity, and that a better state of affairs may be expected in the higher ranks of society;

— and the on-going of today’s stories of Jeffrey Epstein, Virginia Giuffre, Ghislaine Maxwell, UK royals Prince Andrew, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with scandles after scandles with other royals; and those hovering around in Epstein’s private airplane: ex-presidents Clinton and Trump; the Epstein’s files, how are they going to face judgement from the Most High?

How are they going to face judgement from the Most High?

⁵ I will get me unto the great men, and will speak unto them; for they have known the way of the Lord, and the judgement of their God.” But these have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds.

— Jeremiah will get acquainted with the great men, and speak unto them, the princes, nobles and judges, the elders of the people, the scribes and doctors of the law: for they should have known the way of the Lord, and his judgement;

— it might be reasonably expected that they had, having had a good education and being at leisure from worldly business to attend to the law and the knowledge of it, and whatsoever God had revealed in his word, both in a way of doctrine and duty.

⁶ Therefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall despoil them; a leopard shall watch over their cities. Every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces, because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.

— wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities, lurking for his prey nearby, the most ravenous and the swiftest of the beasts being chosen as types to represent the formidable character of the Babylonian invaders;

— everyone that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces, because their transgressions are many and their backslidings are increased, their acts of rebellion against God had become a great multitude. That is the feature which ever makes sin so reprehensible: it always amounts to a rebellion against God, the Father of all mankind.

⁷ “How shall I pardon thee for this? Thy children have forsaken Me, and sworn by them that are no gods. When I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses.

— how shall God pardon thee for this? It would be inconsistent with God’s holiness to overlook the transgressions of Israel, to let their wickedness go unpunished. Thy children have forsaken me and sworn by them that are no gods, or more emphatic, “by that which is no god,” worshipping a creature of their own imagination;

— when God had fed them to the full in distributing the blessings of his bounty, or “I bound them by the oath of allegiance and loyalty,” but they then committed adultery in the most flagrant manner, probably in connection with the idolatrous customs which they accepted,

— and assembled themselves with troops in the harlots’ houses, rushing forward in companies in their eagerness to commit this beastly sin.

⁸ They were as fed horses in the morning; every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.

⁹ Shall I not visit for these things?” saith the Lord. “And shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this? — shall God ignore these things, punishing the guilty ones to the limit, and shall not God avenge on such a nation as this?

— how could his anger be withheld under such circumstances? The Lord therefore turns to the Chaldeans, calling upon them to carry out his punishment upon Israel.

¹⁰ “Go ye up upon her walls and destroy, but make not a full end; take away her battlements, for they are not the Lord’S.

¹¹ For the house of Israel and the house of Judah have dealt very treacherously against Me,” saith the Lord.

— for the house of both Israel and Judah, the entire nation of God’s chosen people, have dealt treacherously against me, saith the Lord, their faithlessness being the Lord’s chief reason for complaint.

¹² They have belied the Lord, and said, “It is not He; neither shall evil come upon us, neither shall we see sword nor famine. — they have belied the Lord, denying Jehovah, the God of the covenant, and said, It is not He, insisting that He was not the true and only God;

— neither shall evil come upon us, neither shall we see sword nor famine, thus both denying and challenging the threat of the Lord regarding the punishment which he had threatened for their apostasy.

¹³ And the prophets shall become wind, and the word is not in them; thus shall it be done unto them.”

¹⁴ Therefore, thus saith the Lord God of hosts: “Because ye speak this word, behold, I will make My words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood, and it shall devour them.

— wherefore, thus saith the Lord God, because ye speak this word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire; Jeremiah being given a sharp and scathing message to the rebellious people whom the Lord put in him;

— and this people wood, fuel which is easily kindled, and it shall devour them, they would be consumed as a consequence of the denunciation which Jeremiah would make by God’s command.

¹⁵ Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from afar, O house of Israel,” saith the Lord. “It is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.

— O house of Israel; this saying seems a bit late, since the house of Israel had been in exiled over a hundred years ago, so this renew warning must be prophetic, for the endtime.

¹⁶ Their quiver is as an open sepulcher; they are all mighty men.

¹⁷ And they shall eat up thine harvest and thy bread, which thy sons and thy daughters should eat; they shall eat up thy flocks and thine herds; they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig trees. They shall impoverish thy fortified cities, wherein thou trusted, with the sword.

— and they shall eat up thine harvest, the standing grain, and thy bread which thy sons and thy daughters should eat, which was intended for their food;

— they shall eat up thy flocks and thine herds; they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig-trees, everything that in any manner yielded food; they shall impoverish thy fenced cities, destroying all of Israel’s proud fortresses, wherein thou trustedst with the sword.

¹⁸ “Nevertheless in those days,” saith the Lord, “I will not make a full end with you. — nevertheless, despite their sins, I will not make a full end with you; this seems futuristic, a prophecy that when this severe punishment strikes the nation, a remnant will remains, saith the Lord,

¹⁹ And it shall come to pass when ye shall say, ‘Why doeth the Lord our God all these things unto us?’ Then shalt thou answer them, ‘As ye have forsaken Me and served strange gods in your land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land that is not yours.’

²⁰ “Declare this in the house of Jacob, and publish it in Judah, saying: — this warning is prophetic; it is meant for our time; for the lost ten tribes;

— it could be for those who were carried captive into Assyria before this prophecy; it could also be meant for the house of Israel today, yet it also has a message for the Jews, now in the land of Judea;

²¹ Hear now this, O foolish people and without understanding, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not: — which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not; like the idols they served, Psalms 115:4;

— it is upbraiding of them with their folly and stupidity, their want of common sense, their blindness and ignorance; notwithstanding they had the means of light and knowledge, the law and the prophets.

²² Fear ye not Me?” saith the Lord. “Will ye not tremble at My presence, who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?

²³ But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they have revolted and gone.

²⁴ Neither say they in their heart, ‘Let us now fear the Lord our God, who giveth rain, both the former and the latter in his season; He reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.’ — fear God and give him glory is the first angel’s message of Revelation 14:

⁶And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred, and tongue and people,

⁷saying with a loud voice, “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His Judgment is come. Worship Him that made heaven and earth, and the sea and the fountains of waters.” Revelation 14:6-7

²⁵ Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withheld good things from you.

²⁶ For among My people are found wicked men; they lie in wait as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men.

— they lay wait as he that setteth snares; or “they look about” that is, every man looks in the ways to see if a man passed by, that he might rob him; as a man that lays snares or sets a trap to catch birds.

²⁷ As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit; therefore they have become great and have waxed rich.

— the Targum renders it, “Like a fattening cage full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit; therefore they have become great and wealthy.”

— the Septuagint version renders it, “a snare which has been set is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit” which agrees with what goes before. It seems to intend a decoy, in which many birds are put to allure others; and, what with them, and those that are drawn in by them;

— “their houses full of deceit” four examples of their deceits are the followings:

(a) Easters, a celebration of the Queen of heaven: Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection; Jeremiah 7:18 the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of heaven; in Egypt, Jeremiah 44:17-19, 25, this is Ishtar: pronounced ‘Easter.’

(b) Christmas; Ezekiel 8:16 five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple; their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east; Christmas, which honor Mithraism, birthday on December 25th – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice.

(c) Sundays; her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original Sun- worshippers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof, II Kings 17:24;

(d) Holy Ghost or holy ghost in the Trinity? – Revelation 4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices. And there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God; if the Spirit is a Being or an independent Personage; there would be seven Holy Spirits.

²⁸ They have waxed fat, they shine; yea, they surpass the deeds of the wicked; they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge. — they surpass the deeds of the wicked;

²⁹ Shall I not visit for these things?” saith the Lord. “Shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this? — if they are given to deceits; mentioned any of the three above (a,b and c), how would God judge them? “Shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this?

³⁰ “An astonishing and horrible thing is committed in the land: — “Such is an horrible act!” God said, “An astonishing and horrible thing is committed in the land.”

³¹ The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and My people love to have it so. And what will ye do in the end thereof?

— their prophets prophesied falsely; not only proclaiming lies, but enhancing them; that the people would have peace and prosperity under Grace, and not be carried captive into Babylon, as Jeremiah and other prophets had predicted:

— these messages are for both houses of Jacob: the house of Israel and the house of Judah, who has returned to dwell in the land of Judea, now named the state of Israel.

Jeremiah 6

¹ “O ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves to flee out of the midst of Jerusalem! And blow the trumpet in Tekoa, and set up a sign of fire in Bethhaccerem! For evil appeareth out of the north, and great destruction.

— O ye children of Benjamin, who was with the tribe of Judah, and Jerusalem at least part of it was in the tribe of Benjamin and particularly Anathoth, which was Jeremiah’s birth place, and this could be a reason why the children of Benjamin are so distinctly addressed;

— today, Tekoa is an Israeli settlement located 20 km northeast of Hebron, 16 km south of Jerusalem; and Bethhaccerem (a township between Bethlehem and Jerusalem); this place lay between Jerusalem and Tekoa;

Why blow the trumpet in the south if the enemy is coming from the north?

— the trumpets be blown, that it might be heard far and near; so the warning is generally to the inhabitants of Jerusalem;

— during Jeremiah’s time, he warned of an enemy coming from the North, but Ezekiel waned of a subtle shift of an enemy coming from the South; so what is it? (more at the end);

for an indepth study, The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

² I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman. — the daughter of Zion is a comely; a delicate woman that dwells at home and lives in peace and quietness, in ease and security, in no fear of enemies, or apprehension of danger; and so it describes the secure state of Israel.

³ The shepherds with their flocks shall come unto her; they shall pitch their tents against her round about; they shall feed every one in his place.”

— the Targum replaces the shepherds and their flocks with “kings and their forces,” making the threat more explicit and regal in scale; the sense is, kings or their general shall lay a grim and calculated siege of Jerusalem, and against other cities and another, until they have subdued the whole land.

⁴ “Prepare ye war against her! Arise, and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! For the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out.

⁵ Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her palaces.”

⁶ For thus hath the Lord of hosts said: “Hew ye down trees, and cast a mound against Jerusalem. This is the city to be visited; she is wholly oppression in the midst of her.

— hew ye down trees and cast a mount against Jerusalem: the reason is because there were ditches around the city; and into these they poured in stones, dirt, trees, pieces of wood and so filled them up, and cast up a mount on which they could raise their batteries, and demolish the walls, making Jerusalem defenseless.

⁷ As a fountain casteth out her waters, so she casteth out her wickedness. Violence and spoil are heard in her; before Me continually are grief and wounds. — a sense of judgement in the making as Jerusalem was literally overflowing with wickedness.

⁸ Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest My soul depart from thee; lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.” — be thou instructed, that is, be thou chastised: learn the lesson which chastisement is intended to teach thee.

⁹ Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “They shall thoroughly glean the remnant of Israel as a vine; turn back thine hand as a grape gatherer into the baskets.” — the Chaldeans shall glean, contrary to the law Leviticus 19:10, for gathering the vintage fully.

¹⁰ To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear? Behold, their ear is uncircumcised and they cannot hearken; behold, the word of the Lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it. — even their prophets wouldn’t want to hear; they prophesied falsely;

— not only proclaiming lies, but enhancing those lies already told; their ears are uncircumcised and they cannot hear; that their people would have salvation under Grace, claiming they are now under a Covenant of Grace; and they frown upon the thought that they are going into another captivity, as Ezekiel and other prophets had prophesied.

¹¹ Therefore I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding in. “I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together; for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.

— God was weary with holding on, restraint was no longer a virtue; he will pour it out his fury upon his children, those playing in the streets and lanes; and upon the assembly of young men together; for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged, the one who is just growing old, with him that is full of days;

— thus the sentence of the Lord would strike all classes of people and every age without exception, the whole nation being included in the outpouring of his wrath.

¹² And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together; for I will stretch out My hand upon the inhabitants of the land,” saith the Lord.

— their houses shall be turned unto others; that is, their houses and their lands, and “their fields and wives” shall be devolved and turned over to strangers, Jeremiah 8:10, even that land which they thought had been entailed upon them.

¹³ “For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them, every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest, every one dealeth falsely.

— from the prophet unto the priest everyone deal falsely; their false prophet, as the Septuagint and other versions; the priest of Baal, both acted deceitfully; the one in prophesying lies to the people, the other in drawing them off from the pure worship of God;

— the Targum says, “from the scribe to the priest” from the lowest order of teachers to the highest in ecclesiastical office; the whole shows a most general and dreadful corruption.

¹⁴ They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of My people slightingly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. — such was God’s sympathy for his countrymen, his people in distress, whom he affectionately calls the daughter of my people.

¹⁵ Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush. Therefore they shall fall among them that fall; at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down,” saith the Lord.

— when they committed idolatry, or any other sin, and led the people into the same by their doctrine and example, yet, when reproved for it, were not ashamed, being given up to a judicial hardness of heart.

¹⁶ Thus saith the Lord: “Stand ye in the highways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way; and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk therein.’ — the sense is: God’s prophet has declared that a great national calamity is at hand.

¹⁷Also I set watchmen over you, saying, ‘Hearken to the sound of the trumpet!’ But they said, ‘We will not hearken.’ — watchmen—prophets, whose duty it was to announce impending calamities, so as to lead the people to repentance, but they would not hearken; more of their obstinacy.

¹⁸ Therefore hear, ye nations, and know, O congregation, what is among them. — hear, ye nations (Goyim); the heathen are called upon to take notice of these warnings of God’s wrath against both the Israelites and the Jews,

— what sins were among them; what transgressions. are committed by them; which were the cause of the Lord’s threatening them with judgements, and bringing consequences upon them; so the Targum says “and let the congregation of Israel know their sins.”

¹⁹ Hear, O earth: Behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto My words nor to My law, but rejected it.

— the expression, “O earth” is expressed seven times throughout the OT, here by Jeremiah, elsewhere by Moses, Job, Isaiah and Micah, empahsizing that God, too, has a message for the whole of humanity;

— even the fruit of their thoughts; the Targum renders it, “the retribution or reward of their works.”

²⁰ To what purpose cometh there to Me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto Me.” — Sheba, Isaiah 60:6; Ezekiel 27:22, the land that had a proverbial fame both for gold and frankincense;

— your burnt offerings are not acceptable nor your sacrifices sweet unto me; because your offerings offered at Dan and Bethel where the Lord have not designated those places; and at Jerusalem, they were offered with idols and idolatry in their midst.

²¹ Therefore thus saith the Lord: “Behold, I will lay stumbling blocks before this people, and the fathers and the sons together shall fall upon them; the neighbor and his friend shall perish.”

— stumbling blocks before this people; by which God meant his judgements upon them, raising up enemies against Israel, and suffering them as they invaded their land;

²² Thus saith the Lord: “Behold, a people cometh from the north country, and a great nation shall be raised from the sides of the earth.

— and a great nation shall be raised; that is, by the Lord, who would stir them up to this undertaking; the Targum says, “many people shall come openly from the ends of the earth;” Babylon wasn’t from the end of the earth, hence this would be another great nation;

— during Jeremiah’s time, God warned of an enemy coming from the North, but more relevant for us today, Ezekiel waned of an enemy coming from the South; so what is it? (more at the end) or see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Israel’s future Enemy is the Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

²³ They shall lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel and have no mercy. Their voice roareth like the sea; and they ride upon horses set in array as men for war against thee, O daughter of Zion.”

— such was God’s sympathy for his countrymen, his people in distress, whom he affectionately calls the daughter of Zion, which is my people Israel;

— they shall lay hold on bow and spear; that is, everyone of them should be furnished with both these pieces of armour, that they might be able to fight near and afar off; they had bows to shoot arrows at a distance, and spears to strike with when near.

²⁴ We have heard the fame thereof; our hands wax feeble. Anguish hath taken hold of us, and pain as of a woman in travail.

— and pain as of Israel in travail; which comes suddenly, and is very sharp; and this indicates that their destruction would come suddenly upon them, before they were aware, and be very severe.

²⁵ Go not forth into the field nor walk by the way, for the sword of the enemy and fear is on every side. — and fear is on every side;

— all round the city of Jerusalem, being encompassed by a Babylon army from the North: or the enemy’s sword from the South, as “is fear on every side” causes fear in all parts round the city;

— the Targum says, “Do not go out to the field, and do not walk on the road, for the sword of the enemy brings death—it strikes down those who gather from every direction;” or on every side.

²⁶ O daughter of my people, gird thee with sackcloth, and wallow thyself in ashes. Make thee mourning, as for an only son, most bitter lamentation; for the despoiler shall suddenly come upon us.

— and wallow thyself in ashes; or roll thyself in them, as the Targum says, “gird yourselves with sackcloth and cover your heads with ashes.”

²⁷ “I have set thee as a tower and a fortress among My people, that thou mayest know and try their way. — that is, God tells the prophet that he hath placed him as a watchman in a high tower to take an account of the people’s behaviour, and to warn them accordingly.

²⁸ They are all grievous revolters, walking with slanders; they are brass and iron; they are all corrupters. — revolters, the greatest sinners and transgressors, the most stubborn and disobedient;

— the Targum says “All their nobles are rebellious, walking in deceit, like one who mixes a serpent with iron—they are all destroyers.”

²⁹ The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed by the fire; the founder melteth in vain, for the wicked are not plucked away. — the bellows are burned, worn out by continual blowing; the prophet has exhausted all his efforts;

— the founder melteth in vain; let the artist use his greatest skill and industry, yet all is in vain: their wickedness and filthiness are not removed.

³⁰ Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them.” — reprobate silver; so full of alloy as to be utterly worthless; because God, who knew their hypocrisy in boasting of themselves, had rejected them.

~~~

More on a prophecy of an “enemy” coming from the SOUTH:

Ezekiel 20:45 Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
⁴⁶ “Son of man, set thy face toward the South, and drop thy word toward the South, and prophesy against the forest of the Southland.
⁴⁷ And say to the forest of the South: ‘Hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee and every dry tree. The flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the South to the North shall be burned therein.
⁴⁸ And all flesh shall see that I, the Lord, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched.’”
⁴⁹ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! They say of me, ‘Doth he not speak parables?’”

Ezekiel 21:1 And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
² “Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem, and drop thy word toward the holy places, and prophesy against the land of Israel;
³ and say to the land of Israel, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I am against thee, and will draw forth My Sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked.
⁴ Seeing then that I will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked, therefore shall My sword go forth out of his sheath against all flesh from the South to the North,
⁵ that all flesh may know that I, the Lord, have drawn forth My sword out of his sheath. It shall not return any more.’

⁶ Sigh therefore, thou son of man, with the breaking of thy loins, and with bitterness sigh before their eyes.
⁷ And it shall be, when they say unto thee, ‘Why sighest thou?’ that thou shalt answer, ‘For the tidings, because it cometh; and every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit shall faint, and all knees shall be weak as water.’ Behold, it cometh, and shall be brought to pass, saith the Lord God.

Q: Who is this enemy from the SOUTH, and it warns “My sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked” and should we be curious how such scenarios would be played out?

For more, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Posted in Jeremiah

Jeremiah (Ch 3-4)

•September 25, 2025 • Leave a Comment

In Chapter 2, God’s words were directed against Jerusalem, the elders of Judah and priests (Jeremiah 2:2): “Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem,” but later in the chapter it was also directed at Israel (Jeremiah 2:4,26): “Hear ye the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel,” so Chapter 3 continues in this context.

“The whole city shall flee for the noise of the horsemen and bowmen; they shall go into thickets and climb up upon the rocks; every city shall be forsaken.”

Rashi is the acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, a well respected medieval French rabbi and author of a comprehensive commentary on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; hence his opinion is often quoted here.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible.

Jeremiah 3

¹ “They say, ‘If a man put away his wife, and she go from him and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? Shall not that land be greatly polluted?’ But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to Me,” saith the Lord.

— but the house of Jacob hast played the harlot with many lovers, none of them her husband; yet, in spite of the fact that it is not in accordance with legal regulations, she returns to me, saith the Lord;

² “Lift up thine eyes unto the high places, and see where hast thou not been lain with. By the wayside hast thou sat for them, as the Arabian in the wilderness; and thou hast polluted the land with thy whoredoms and with thy wickedness.

— see if there is a hill or mountain or any high place, where thou hast not committed idolatry; and see where thou hast not been lien with;

— their harlotry was so notorious and the facts and instances so many, there was no denying it; every hill and mountain witnessed to their idolatry;

— to which the Targum says, “see where thou hast not joined thyself to worship idols,” in the ways hast thou sat for them; for the idolaters, waiting for them, to join in their idolatries as harlots used to sit by the wayside to solicit their lovers.

But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? –Baals as Baalzephon, Baalpeor, Baalzebub. Let them arise if they can save thee, Jeremiah 2:28

³ Therefore the showers have been withheld, and there hath been no latter rain. And thou had a whore’s forehead; thou refused to be ashamed. — the showers have been withdrawn according to God’s warning, Leviticus 26:19; Deuteronomy 28:23-24; that is, droughts were sent upon their land as a punishment as a judgement against her.

⁴ Wilt thou not from this time cry unto Me, ‘My Father, Thou art the guide of my youth? — Rashi: will you not from now: if only you repent of your evil and call me “My Father.” If you do so, will your Lord bear a grudge forever for what you have sinned? Will He keep it to eternity? He will not keep it;

— thou art the Guide of my youth? She uses the endearing term “Companion of my youth,” in speaking to the Lord as though to win him back.

⁵ Will He reserve His anger for ever? Will He keep it to the end?’ Behold, thou hast spoken, and done evil things as thou couldest.” — the Targum says, “is it possible that thy sins should be kept for thee for ever, or the stroke (of punishment) be strengthened upon thee to the end?”

⁶ The Lord said also unto me in the days of Josiah the king: “Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? She hath gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot. — so Jeremiah was a contemporary of King Josiah;

— hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? the ten tribes; that is, hast thou not heard? or dost thou not know the idolatry of the ten tribes, which was the cause of their captivity?

— for the facts or the idolatrous actions of the ten tribes were not done in Jeremiah’s time; for they were carried captive in the sixth year of Hezekiah and therefore the house of Judah should have taken note, as a warning and stopped following the path that the house of Israel had taken, least they should also be taken into captivity.

⁷ And I said after she had done all these things, ‘Return thou unto Me.’ But she returned not, and her treacherous sister Judah saw it.

— and God said after she had done all these things, turn thou unto me, but the northern kingdom consistently rejecting the Lord’s call; and though her sister Judah saw it, she also treacherously rejected any return.

⁸ And I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also. — the Targum says, “I caused them to go into captivity as those that give a bill of divorce (to their wives) and dismiss them:”

— yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not: committed idolatry and offended the Lord, nor stood in awe of his judgements; but went and played the harlot; committed idolatry, as the ten tribes did, taking no warning by what befell them.

⁹ And it came to pass, because she made so light of her whoredom, that she defiled the land and committed adultery with stones and with stocks. — and committed adultery with stones and stocks; that is, with images made of stone and wood;

— which they served and worshipped as gods; and is the adultery or idolatry they are charged with and by which the land was defiled; the Targum says, “she erred or committed idolatry with the worshippers of stone and wood.”

¹⁰ And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned unto Me with her whole heart, but feignedly,” saith the Lord. — there was some repentance in Josiah’s time, but it was but a outward show; there was no hearty turn around for the sin of idolatry, only a feigned one;

— Rashi: Josiah’s generation would show themselves as righteous although the others were wicked. They would make forms of pagan deities on the inside of their doors, half on this door and half on this one, and when the destroyers of idols would inspect, the door would be open, and they would not notice it.

Rashi is the acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, a well respected medieval French rabbi and author of a comprehensive commentary on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

¹¹ And the Lord said unto me, “The backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah. — the backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah; that is, was comparatively more righteous of the two; though neither of them could vindicate their conduct, or justify themselves before God;

— Judah was more to blame because after Israel committed idolatry and was carried captive, Judah took no warning, but fell into the same trap; and in Manasseh’s time committed greater idolatries than ever Israel did; and more than even the Amorites or other heathen nations had done, II Kings 21:6;

¹² Go and proclaim these words toward the north, and say: “‘Return, thou backsliding Israel,’ saith the Lord, ‘and I will not cause Mine anger to fall upon you; for I am merciful,’ saith the Lord, ‘and I will not keep anger for ever.

— and I will not cause Mine anger to fall upon you, not continue to frown upon them in wrath and displeasure; for I am merciful, saith the Lord, preferring to show grace and mercy rather than indignation.

¹³ Only acknowledge thine iniquity: that thou hast transgressed against the Lord thy God, and hast scattered thy ways to the strangers under every green tree, and ye have not obeyed My voice,’ saith the Lord.

— only acknowledge thine iniquity, freely confessing her transgressions and her guilt, that thou hast transgressed against the Lord, thy God, against whom in the last analysis every sin is directed;

— Rashi: and you have scattered your ways. This is an expression of harlotry, spreading the legs to the woman’s private parts.

¹⁴ ‘Turn, O backsliding children,’ saith the Lord, ‘for I am married unto you; and I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.

— backsliding children; the Targum says, “for I am well pleased with you;” to which Rashi adds “and you are called by My name, that I am your Master, and it is not honorable for Me to leave you in the hands of My enemies.”

¹⁵ And I will give you pastors according to Mine heart, who shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.’

— and during the Millennium, God will give you good shepherds, leaders in both the spiritual and the civil domain, as Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, according to his own heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.

¹⁶ “And it shall come to pass when ye be multiplied and increased in the land, in those days,” saith the Lord, “they shall say no more, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ Neither shall it come to mind, neither shall they remember it; neither shall they visit it, neither shall that be done any more.

— Rashi: they will no longer say, “The ark of the Lord’s covenant.” For your entire assembly will be holy, and I will dwell therein as though it were an ark;

— neither shall that be done any more; the Targum paraphrases the last clause, “neither shall they make war with it any more.”

¹⁷ At that time they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem; neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart.

— this during the Millennium, Jerusalem shall no longer be just a city; but it shall become the center of divine presence, “the place of the Shekhinah,” when they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord; that is, even the Father would move down from heaven and dwell among men;

Jerusalem shall host the Throne of the Lord so that all nations shall be able to worship Him; and not after the imagination of their evil heart Jeremiah 3:17

— the Targum says:

“At that time, they will call Jerusalem the place of the dwelling of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) of the Lord, and all nations will come to worship there in the name of the Lord in Jerusalem. They will no longer follow the evil thoughts of their hearts.” Jeremiah 3:17 Jonathan

¹⁸ In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north to the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers.

— in those days the two houses of Israel shall walk together, all true Israelites being united in the land of Israel, the Land of Promise, the Land between the great rivers.

— and they shall come together out of the land of the North, from all the countries of the dispersion, to the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers, to enjoy their blessings together.

¹⁹ “But I said, ‘How shall I put thee among the children and give thee a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations?’ And I said, ‘Thou shalt call Me “My Father,” and shalt not turn away from Me.’

— but God asked, how shall I put thee among the host of other children, and give thee a pleasant land, a goodly heritage compared to all the other hosts of nations?

— and he replied, thou shall call me, my Father, returning once more to the true God; and shall not turn away from me, fully restored to the favor of the Most high, Yehovah is his name.

²⁰ Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with Me, O house of Israel,” saith the Lord. — surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband,

— emphasis here is the full house of Israel, the lost ten tribes; but also include the house of Judah, for they committed the same sins and share the same destination.

— forsaking the companion of her youth, so have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the Lord. Upon this final accusation of the Lord the sorrow of the people and their confession of sins is brought out with dramatic intensity;

²¹ A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel; for they have perverted their way, and they have forgotten the Lord their God. — again, the emphasis here is the house of Israel, who have perverted their ways, went into captivity and now known as the lost ten tribes;

— here at least of a contrast to the house of Judah who had always remember the Sabbath, thus always known as God’s people to the outside world (Exodus 31:13), and were never considered lost; but the ten tribes house of Israel is confused today and totally lost.

²² “Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings.” “Behold, we come unto Thee, for Thou art the Lord our God. — the Targum says, “I will forgive you when ye return;”

— and I will heal your backslidings; that is, God will forgive your sins; sins are the breaking of his commandments and the wounds that resulted from it; and pardoning them is healing them.

²³ Truly in vain is salvation hoped for from the hills and from the multitude of mountains. Truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel. — truly, in vain they awaited salvation from the hills and the mountains where they worshipped idols there,

— but it is a delusion and a snare to expect help from them; for truly, in the Lord our God, is the salvation of Israel; he alone can bring about the deliverance of His people.

²⁴ For shame hath devoured the labor of our fathers from our youth — their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters.

— the idolatry with which they occupied themselves and had turned themselves into a shameful thing from the days of their fathers in their youth; the idols, whose worship brought shame and disgrace upon themselves;

— because of the iniquity of idols worship, their toil of the flocks and herds were pillaged, or as a steady stream of sacrifices, but their worship also brought down by which their children were torn from them; or that evils have befallen upon their sons and daughters.

²⁵ We lie down in our shame, and our confusion covereth us; for we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.”

— their consciences for the sins against God have surrounded them and filled them with shame, from the days of their fathers, from their youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord, the Most High;

— a full and unequivocal confession of sins, a complete acknowledgement of guilt, is the first step in true repentance; he that covereth his sins shall not prosper; but whosoever confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.

Jeremiah 4

The first two verses of this chapter seem to be closely connected with the preceding chapter, being directed at Israel, the ten tribes, by way of reply to their compliance with God’s call, encouraging them to keep and execute their resolution. The rest of the chapter concerns Judah and Jerusalem.

¹ “If thou wilt return, O Israel,” saith the Lord, “return unto Me; and if thou wilt put away thine abominations out of My sight, then shalt thou not be removed.

— if you return to me, O Israel, you shall not be exiled; and if you remove your detestable things, you will return to your former glory and greatness.

² And thou shalt swear, ‘The Lord liveth,’ in truth, in judgement, and in righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in Him, and in Him shall they glory.” — and thou shalt swear, the Lord liveth, in truth, not in hypocrisy; but in righteousness, in a just cause and with genuine uprightness of heart;

— and the nations under the influence of this confession shall bless the Most High, and in him shall they be glorified, thereby becoming partakers of the blessings which were promised to the patriarchs.

³ For thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem: “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. — unless the fallow ground is broken up, it will be no better than sowing among thorns;

— and unless the hearts of men are opened to God, they will not attend to the things that are spoken; preaching and eating the word will be like sowing among thorns; the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, are comparable to thorns.

⁴ Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, lest My fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

— lest God’s come forth like fire; to which his wrath is sometimes compared, Nahum 1:6 and is sometimes signified by a furnace and lake of fire, even his eternal wrath and vengeance.

⁵ “Declare ye in Judah and publish in Jerusalem, and say, ‘Blow ye the trumpet in the land!’ Cry, gather together and say, ‘Assemble yourselves, and let us go into the fortified cities!’ — declare ye in Judah, Blow ye the trumpet in the land, as a signal calling the inhabitants to arms;

— Cry aloud, gather together, and say, rather, “cry fully,” that is, with a loud voice, shouting; assemble yourselves and let them go into the fortified cities behind their strongest fortresses.

⁶Set up the standard toward Zion. Retire, stay not! For I will bring evil from the north, and a great destruction.” — set up the standard toward Zion, raising their banners as a signal to make the city of God their refuge; retire, stay not, but flee, do not try to make a stand;

— for God will bring evil from the North, from Babylon, followed by a great destruction.

⁷ The lion has come up from his thicket (thick wood), and the destroyer of the nations is on his way. He has gone forth from his place to make thy land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an inhabitant.

— the lion is come up from his thicket; meaning Nebuchadnezzar from Babylon who is compared to a lion for his strength, fierceness and cruelty; see Jeremiah 50:17;

— he is gone forth from his place, to make thy land desolate; from Babylon, where his royal palace was, in order to lay waste the land of Judea; and he is represented as being on the road to strike the inhabitants of Judea with great terror, their destruction being determined and certain.

⁸ For this, gird you with sackcloth, lament and howl; for the fierce anger of the Lord is not turned back from us. — for the fierce anger of the Lord; although Josiah repented wholeheartedly, others were not (II Kings 23:26) “the Lord did not turn back from his great wrath, because of all the provocations that Manasseh had provoked Him.”

⁹ “And it shall come to pass at that day,” saith the Lord, “that the heart of the king shall perish, and the heart of the princes; and the priests shall be astonished, and the prophets shall wonder.”

— that the heart of the king shall perish; meaning Zedekiah king of Judah, who should be in the utmost fright and consternation, not knowing what to do, being devoid both of wisdom and courage; see Jeremiah 39:4;

— and the heart of the princes; who being seized with the same panic, and at their wits’ end, would not be able to give any advice and counsel to the king; so that the people would have no help from the king and his nobles, in whom they put their confidence.

— Rashi: and it shall be on that day:

On the day of Josiah they will wonder why so much befell him, for they do not know that his generation did not repent properly. When he came to abolish idolatry, what did the scorners of the generation do? They would engrave an image of a pagan deity on their doors, half of it on this door and half of it on this door. When he would open it, it was not discernible, and when he went away from there, he would close it, and it would join together;

¹⁰ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! Surely Thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘Ye shall have peace,’ whereas the sword reacheth unto the soul.” — then said Jeremiah, Ah, Lord God! The Hebrew word, Aha, is a word expressive both of admiration and lamentation;

¹¹ At that time shall it be said to this people and to Jerusalem: “A dry wind of the high places in the wilderness toward the daughter of My people — a dry wind toward the daughter of My people, the children of God’s chosen nation, both to fan or to cleanse, a scorching wind which carried off the chaff as the threshed grain was winnowed;

— the Targum says, “as the south wind upon the heads of floods of water in the wilderness, so is the way of the congregation of my people;” a south wind and not the north wind as designed; since this scorching wind intends Nebuchadnezzar and his army, which should come from Babylon, from the north;

— but in Gill’s commentary, quoting the Targum, this scorching wind is from the South; perhaps see,

The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹² even a full wind from those places shall come unto Me. Now also will I give sentence against them.” — a scorching wind full of those punishments which God had warned, and determined to bring upon this people, and would not turn from, nor repent of.

¹³ Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a whirlwind. His horses are swifter than eagles! Woe unto us, for we are despoiled! — the metaphor indicates the swiftness of the lion, a new Nebuchadnezzar’s coming as a type, and the multitudes he should come with, and that darkness and distress he should bring with him upon the house of Israel.

¹⁴ O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee? — O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, for a mere outward change of behavior is not sufficient; heart and mind and soul must undergo a complete transformation,

— that thou may be saved, for only he who truly repents may partake of the Lord’s deliverance. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee? It was high time for all sinful thoughts to be dismissed.

¹⁵ For a voice declareth from Dan, and publisheth affliction from Mount Ephraim: — and publish affliction from Mount Ephraim: which lay on the border of the tribe of Benjamin, and near to Jerusalem; and this publication represents the enemy as advancing nearer, and being just at hand;

— the word for “affliction” signifies iniquity and indicates that the affliction spoken of is the destruction of the house of Israel as a consequence of their sins. Some think that Dan and Ephraim are mentioned, because of the calves that were worshipped in Dan and in Bethel, which was in the tribe of Ephraim;

— thus the Targum paraphrases the words, “for the voice of the prophets that prophesied against them that go into captivity, because they worshipped the calf, which is at Dan; and they that bring evil tidings, shall come upon them, because they served the image which Jeroboam set up in the mount of the house of Ephraim.”

— Q: who was Ephraim or is Ephraim? Wasn’t he Jeroboam? Perhaps Jeroboam set the altars in Dan and Bethel, but later false prophets came and set up other idols in some of the mountains of Ephraim, hence Mount Ephraim?

For more, see Ephraim and Manasseh, or the Ox without the Unicorn.

¹⁶ “Make ye mention to the nations. Behold, publish against Jerusalem that watchers come from a far country and give out their voice against the cities of Judah.

— the Targum says, “the armies of invading nations are coming swiftly like harvesters from a distant land, and they will encamp around the borders of Judah and raise their voices against her.”

— and give out their voice against the cities of Judah; threaten the ruin of them; Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, the alarm of war; to give the orders to besiege Judah.

¹⁷ As keepers of a field are they against her round about, because she hath been rebellious against Me,” saith the Lord.

¹⁸ “Thy way and thy doings have procured these things unto thee: this is thy wickedness, because it is bitter, because it reacheth unto thine heart.”

¹⁹ My heart, my heart! I am pained at my very heart! My heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. — I, Jeremiah, writhe in pain; an expression suffering and shuddering;

— my heart makes a noise in me; palpitates, beats and throbs, being filled with fears and dread, with sorrow and concern, at what was coming on; it represents an aching heart, all in disorder and confusion;

— the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war, the shout of battle, as the enemy advances to subdue the land of Israel.

²⁰ Destruction upon destruction is cried, for the whole land is despoiled; suddenly are my tents despoiled, and my curtains in a moment. — suddenly Jeremiah’s tents spoiled, and his curtains in a moment were destroyed; or the cities, towns and habitations of his countrymen which he compares to tents as being easily overthrown;

— ‘my curtains’ the prophet seems to indicate that this destruction would reach Anathoth, where his tent; cottage, and curtains were; so sudden destruction sometimes comes when men are crying “Peace, Peace.”

²¹ How long shall I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet?

²² “For My people are foolish, they have not known Me; they are sottish children, and they have no understanding. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge.” — my people are wise to do evil; cunning inventors of evil things, crafty schemers that way, may be full of all wicked subtlety,

— and expert at over reaching and defrauding their brethren; when professors of religion especially ought to be wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil;

²³ I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. — God reflects to the time He created the earth;

²⁴ I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. — God beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, because the very foundations of the earth were shaken,

— and all the hills moved, as heavy bodies which shake with the slightest disturbance.

²⁵ I beheld, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens had fled. — at the sound of the trumpet, all birds of the heavens fled; at the alarm of war; at the blackness of the heavens, filled with smoke; at the barrenness of the earth;

— there being no seed sown; and the earth as at the first creation, having no herb, nor trees bearing fruit and so no food for birds; and therefore they went elsewhere, both wild and tame.

²⁶ I beheld, and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord and by His fierce anger. — and behold, the fruitful field: the land, planted with all good like a forest has become like a desert.

²⁷ For thus hath the Lord said: “The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end. — yet will God not make a full end of Israel; he would not bring about a total annihilation at them.

²⁸ For this shall the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black, because I have spoken it; I have purposed it and will not repent, neither will I turn back from it.

²⁹ The whole city shall flee for the noise of the horsemen and bowmen; they shall go into thickets and climb up upon the rocks; every city shall be forsaken, and not a man dwell therein. — the whole city, or “every city,” all the cities of the land, shall flee for the noise of the horsemen and bowmen as the invading army draws near;

— they shall go into thickets, their hiding-places, and climb up upon the rocks, seeking refuge before the attacking hordes; every city shall be forsaken and not a man dwell therein.

³⁰ And when thou art despoiled, what wilt thou do? Though thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornaments of gold, though thou rendest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair. Thy lovers will despise thee; they will seek thy life.

— though thou clothest thyself with crimson, the garments of the most expensive material, though thou deckest thee with ornaments of gold, in decking herself for the purpose of coquetting with heathen nations;

— though thou rentest thy face with painting, applying antimony black to the eyelids, in order to increase the luster of the eyes, yet thy lovers will despise thee, no longer attracted by such artifices, they will seek thy life.

³¹ For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying, ‘Woe is me now, for my soul is wearied because of murderers!’

— for God have heard a voice as of a woman in travail and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, heartrending wails and moans, the voice of the daughter of Zion that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, panting in her agony;

— Woe is me! for my soul is as one who yields to murderers, unable to withstand any longer. Such is the usual fate of men who disregard the warnings and pleadings of the Lord: when it is too late, they begin to mourn and lament, bewailing their fate.

Posted in Jeremiah

China’s Global Reach with DF-5C

•September 24, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China’s DF-5C: The Missile That Can Hit Any City on Earth

Interesting Engineering • September 18, 2025 ~ IE

How China’s ‘doomsday’ nuclear missile stays launch-ready with global reach

China’s DF-5C intercontinental ballistic missile is more than just a weapon, it’s a statement. With a range of up to 20,000 kilometers and the ability to unleash up to a dozen nuclear warheads at once, this missile gives Beijing true global reach. Hardened silos, MIRV technology, and precision guidance make it nearly unstoppable, capable of overwhelming even the most advanced defenses. Its debut wasn’t just military, it was geopolitical theater, signaling China’s arrival as a full-fledged nuclear superpower. The DF-5C doesn’t just extend China’s arsenal, it rewrites the balance of nuclear deterrence.

“The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle” Psalm 78:9

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26

Jeremiah (Ch 1-2)

•September 23, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Around 629 BC, which is about a hundred years after the house of Israel had been exiled to Assyria, the words of the Lord came to Jeremiah (650 – 570 BC), the son of Hilkiah; hence Jeremiah recompenses the general title of this prophecy and includes all his discourses and sermons; and designs not just Jeremiah’s own words, but the words of the Lord which were put into his mouth, as he delivered under divine inspiration.

The Septuagint version renders it, “the word of God;” the Targum, “the words of the prophecy of Jeremiah” who is described by his descent and parentage, “the son of Hilkiah.” This Hilkiah could be the same high priest, who in the days of king Josiah, of the southern house of Judah, found the book of the law.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those Jews from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Scriptures; that’s how authentic it is, as Ezra is being revered as a second Moses by the Jewish Orthodoxy.

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20; “In latter days you will understand it fully,” that is, it means as a whole, “we wouldn’t fully understand these prophecies until we are living in the latter days after God had executed his judgement in anger and performed the thoughts of his heart!”

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

Like Ezekiel and Isaiah, Jeremiah’s primary mission was first to the house of Judah, then the house of Israel, and also unto the nations: to both neighbouring and outlying Gentile nations. This was the similar characteristic of Jeremiah’s work; like other major prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, were sent to Israel and Judah, with occasional references of prophecies that affected the Gentiles.

As a mission was unto the nations, the Goyim (goyim), the Gentiles, Jeremiah was one designated and chosen to deliver God’s difficult messages—often warnings and judgements—to the nations.

But in the context that Jeremiah, himself hailing from a priestly family, and was in direct dealing mainly with the Jews of the house of Judah, those of the nations could incorporate those of the house of Israel, who were already lost and living in exile as if they were among the nations, the Goyim.

Jeremiah 1

¹ The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, — the calling of Jeremiah was of a priestly family; also a Levite, but he lived in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin; Jerusalem was designated to Benjamin, not Judah, which is further south, centred around Bethlehem;

— to be more specific, Anathoth was a city about three miles north of Jerusalem in the tribe of Benjamin, but designated by God to the children of Aaron, chosen to be priests serving in the sanctuary, and later, in the Temple, Joshua 21:13,18.

² to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. — in the thirteenth year of Josiah’s reign: in the twenty first of his age;

— for Josiah began to reign when he was eight years old, and he reigned eighteen years after, and at the thirteenth year of his he reign, of all thirty one years; and it was five years after this that the book of the law was found by Hilkiah the high priest;

— king Josiah was said to have reigned 640–609 BC; so the thirteenth year of his reign would be around 628 BC.

³ It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, unto the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah the son of Josiah, king of Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month.

— and it came also in the days of Jehoiakim (reign: 609–598 BC), the son of Josiah, king of Judah; in the beginning of his reign, and in the fourth year of his reign; see Jeremiah 25:1.

⁴ Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

⁵ “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

— how many years before where God had designated Jeremiah was born wasn’t given; but only that Jeremiah was chosen before his conception and birth;

— unto the nations (Goyim); to the outlying Gentile nations; this was the distinguishing characteristic of Jeremiah’s work: other major prophets, like Ezekiel and Isaiah, were sent to Israel and Judah, with occasional parentheses of prophecies that affected the Gentiles.

⁶ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.” — then said I, Ah, Lord God! the word אהה, “Ah” is used in distress and grief, showing that the prophet was troubled and uneasy at his call, and would gladly have been excused on the following account;

— behold, I cannot speak; or “I know not how to speak” properly, politely or eloquently, especially before great personages, kings and princes, and the citizens of Jerusalem; a similar excuse Moses made, Exodus 4:10;

— the Targum says, “I do not know how to prophesy: for I am a youth” ~ emphasizes his young age, suggesting immaturity or lack of authority; meaning either in knowledge and understanding, or in years; a mere child, or even a junior.

The Targum is another source of the Bible, much like the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Targum was started by Ezra for those returning from the Babylon exile and for these returnees they could only understand the Scriptures in Aramaic. Hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the Hebrew Bible quoted.

⁷ But the Lord said unto me, “Say not, ‘I am a child,’ for thou shalt go to all whom I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. — for thou shall go to all that I shall send thee; either to “every place” as the Targum paraphrases: “For wherever I send you, you shall go;”

— or as the Septuagint renders the words “to whomsoever I shall send thee;” the sense is, that he should go everywhere, to every person and with any message he should be sent unto and with.

⁸ Be not afraid of their faces, for I am with thee to deliver thee,” saith the Lord. — be not afraid of their faces; their stern looks, their frowning brows, or angry countenances, which would threaten him with fear of pains and death;

— for I am with thee, to deliver thee, saith the Lord; out of their hands when in the most imminent danger.

⁹ Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, “Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth. — behold, I have put my words in thy mouth;

— by the hearing of these words, Jeremiah could not but be assured that he should be able to speak in the proper language of a prophet.

¹⁰ See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant.”

— as a tree or plant that is plucked up by the roots; and that such an one should be pulled, and thrown down and destroyed as may be understood of the destruction of the house of David by Nebuchadnezzar, and of their temple, city and nation;

— to build and to plant the royal family of the house of David; which applied to the planting of Jewish princesses to the isles of Ireland;

— the destruction of Zedekiah’s Pharez line; to the planting of the Zarah line ruling in the British Isles! (for more, see “Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright” by J.H. Allen).

¹¹ Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, “Jeremiah, what seest thou?” And I said, “I see a rod of an almond tree.”

— “What do you see, Jeremiah?” and I said, I see a rod of an almond tree; a dry stick, without leaves or fruit upon it, and yet he knew it to be an almond tree stick; though some think it had leaves and fruit on it, by which it was known;

— the almond-tree, off springs forth a rod, represents the speedy approach of judgments; the Targum says, “and I said, a king hastening to do evil I see;” meaning Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, hastening to bring destruction upon the house of Judah.

¹² Then said the Lord unto me, “Thou hast well seen, for I will hasten My word to perform it.” — for l will hasten my word to perform it; the name of the almond tree; which is so called because it is quick and early,

— and hastens to bring forth its flowers, leaves and fruit; in like manner the Lord says he would hasten to perform what he had said or should say by him concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, and the captivity of the people.

¹³ And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, “What seest thou?” And I said, “I see a seething pot, and the face thereof is toward the north.”

— after the first vision (the almond rod), God now presents a more ominous image; the Targum paraphrases the words as, “and I see a boiling cauldron;” Jeremiah sees a pot bubbling violently—symbolizing unrest, judgment and divine wrath;

— a boiling pot or a boiling cauldron denoting Judea or Jerusalem, expressed by same figure, Ezekiel 11:3; 11:7; 24:3.

— and in the latter days, much like the four angel asked to let loose the river of Euphrates, for the 200 million on horseback to ride over in Revelation 9:15-16 to slay a third part of men.

¹⁴Then the Lord said unto me, “Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land. — out of the North an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land; that is, out of Babylon, which lay North;

— and so northeast to the land of Israel; from hence came Nebuchadnezzar and his army, which are meant by “the evil” that should break forth, or be opened and let loosed, which before were bound and hindered by the providence of God;

— here in this prophecy, the house of Judah had been constantly warned of an enemy coming out from the NORTH, but in Ezekiel 20-21, the house of Israel had been warned of a yet ‘unknown’ enemy of the future coming from the SOUTH (more at the end).

¹⁵ For lo, I will call all the families of the kingdoms of the north,” saith the Lord; “and they shall come and they shall set every one his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem, and against all the walls thereof round about, and against all the cities of Judah.

— and against all the walls thereof round about, and against all the cities of Judah; not only besiege Jerusalem, and take that, but also all the rest of the cities of the land.

— historically, an enemy to appear from the NORTH, but in the latter days, an enemy from the SOUTH;

¹⁶ And I will utter My judgements against them concerning all their wickedness, who have forsaken Me, and have burned incense unto other gods, and worshipped the works of their own hands.

— and God will utter his judgements against them; not against the kingdoms of the North, but against the people of the house of Judah; the sense is, that God would enter into judgement with this people and pass sentence upon them and execute it;

— for they worshipped the works of their own hands: idols of gold, silver, brass and wood, which their own hands formed and carved, and which argued great stupidity and ignorance.

¹⁷ Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise and speak unto them all that I command thee. Be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them. — and arise; and go from Anathoth to Jerusalem; and arise and speak unto them all that God command thee,

— the fact of his being the Lord’s messenger and envoy once more being stressed; be not dismayed at their faces, shrinking back before them, lest God confound thee before them so that he would be rejected, crushed and overcome before them.

¹⁸ For behold, I have made thee this day a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls against the whole land — against the kings of Judah, against their princes, against their priests and against the people of the land;

— against the whole land of Judea, against all its inhabitants and the kings of Judah; in successive reigns, as Jehoahaz (reign 609 BC), Jehoiakim (reign 609–598 BC), Jehoiachin or Jechonias (reign 598–597 BC), and Zedekiah (reign 597–586 BC);

— against the priests who all of them dealt falsely and were given to covetousness, Jeremiah 8:10; and against the people of the land; who were grievously addicted to idolatry and all manner of wickedness.

¹⁹ And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee, for I am with thee,” saith the Lord, “to deliver thee.” — and they shall fight against thee; the Targum adds, “that they may hide the words of thy prophecy;” or “to suppress the words of your prophecy;”

— for I am with thee, saith the Lord to deliver thee; as he did; he hid him when they sought for him, and delivered him out of the dungeon and bonds into which he was cast by them.

~~~

More on a prophecy of an “enemy” coming from the SOUTH:

Ezekiel 20:45-21:7

⁴⁵Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

⁴⁶“Son of man, set thy face toward the South, and drop thy word toward the South, and prophesy against the forest of the Southland.

⁴⁷And say to the forest of the South: ‘Hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee and every dry tree. The flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the South to the North shall be burned therein.

⁴⁸And all flesh shall see that I, the Lord, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched.’”

⁴⁹Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! They say of me, ‘Doth he not speak parables?’”

21 And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

²“Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem, and drop thy word toward the holy places, and prophesy against the land of Israel;

³and say to the land of Israel, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I am against thee, and will draw forth My Sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked.

⁴Seeing then that I will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked, therefore shall My sword go forth out of his sheath against all flesh from the South to the North,

⁵that all flesh may know that I, the Lord, have drawn forth My sword out of his sheath. It shall not return any more.’

⁶Sigh therefore, thou son of man, with the breaking of thy loins, and with bitterness sigh before their eyes.

⁷And it shall be, when they say unto thee, ‘Why sighest thou?’ that thou shalt answer, ‘For the tidings, because it cometh; and every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit shall faint, and all knees shall be weak as water.’ Behold, it cometh, and shall be brought to pass, saith the Lord God.”

Q: Who is this enemy from the SOUTH, and how would such scenarios be played out?

For a possible answer, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Jeremiah 2

¹ Moreover the word of the Lord came to me, saying, — the Targum says, “the word of prophecy from the Lord.”

² “Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus saith the Lord: “‘I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. — God commands Jeremiah to deliver a message directly to the inhabitants of Jerusalem;

— the Targum says, “and they walked after my two messengers, Moses and Aaron, in the wilderness forty years without food, in a land that was not sown;” during the Exodus in the wilderness; where you passed through many difficulties;

— and lived upon the providence of God, which, in a wonderful manner, supported them with the necessaries of life, which otherwise they could have died.

³ Israel was holiness unto the Lord, and the firstfruits of His increase. All that devour him shall offend; evil shall come upon them,’” saith the Lord.

— evil shall come upon them, saith the Lord; his punishment upon the Amalekites, the Amorites, and upon all other nations that interfered with his plans for his chosen people. Such were the manifestations of God’s kindness to Israel and therefore his rebuke certainly came with good reason.

⁴ Hear ye the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. — this in respects the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and the ten tribes had long been carried away captives to Assyria.

⁵ Thus saith the Lord: “What iniquity have your fathers found in Me, that they are gone far from Me, and have walked after vanity, and have become vain? — the Targum asks, “what falsehood have your fathers found in my word?” None at all; God is a covenant keeping God.

⁶ Neither said they, ‘Where is the Lord that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through and where no man dwelt?’

— the Lord that brought them out through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death; where there were scorpions, fiery serpents, drought,

— and no water, and so very dangerous as well as uncomfortable travelling; and yet through all these obstacles they were led and wonderfully supplied and preserved.

⁷ And I brought you into a plentiful country to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled My land and made Mine heritage an abomination.

— “ye defiled My land” but when ye entered ye defiled my land by not giving them their Sabbath rest; the land with wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates and olives; in a land flowing with milk and honey, Deuteronomy 8:8; where the land sabbath commandment is given in Leviticus 25:4;

“Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of Rest unto the land, a Sabbath for the Lord; thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard” Leviticus 25:3-6;

The length of the house of Judah’s captivity of in Babylon was directly linked from the length of time they neglected to observe the land Sabbath according to II Chronicles 36:19-21:

And they burned the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all the palaces thereof with fire and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.²⁰ And those who had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia,
²¹ to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years, II Chronicles 36:19-21: “spoken by Jeremiah” this is a reference to the seventy years of captivity as spelt out in Jeremiah 25:11;

— to God, the violation of land Sabbath is a serious matter, and from the above, it could be established that the length of captivity has something to do with Israel’s neglect in their observance of the land Sabbath; for more on understanding the coming 190 years of Israel’s captivity and 40 years for Judah, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

⁸ The priests said not, ‘Where is the Lord?’ And they that handle the law knew Me not; the pastors also transgressed against Me; and the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit.

— and they that handle the law knew me not; and according to Rashi, the Sanhedrin, the rulers and kings, the lawyers and scribes, the rabbis and doctors of the law, whose business it was to read and explain it; these they did not understand;

— and the prophets and pastors prophesied by Baal; in his name; pretending to be inspired by God, but it was their idols, and to receive the false spirit of prophecy from them.

⁹ “Therefore I will yet plead with you,” saith the Lord, “and with your children’s children will I plead. — wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the Lord; either verbally, by reasoning with them and reproving them for their ignorance, stupidity and idolatry; or by deeds, inflicting punishment upon them;

— so the Targum says, “therefore I will take vengeance on you, or punish you, saith the Lord;” even your children’s children.

¹⁰ For pass over to the isles of Chittim and see; and send unto Kedar and consider diligently, and see if there be such a thing. — and send unto Kedar; which was in Arabia, and lay to the east, as Chittim to the west; and so the Targum paraphrases it, “send to the provinces of the Arabians.”

¹¹ Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? But My people have changed their Glory for that which doth not profit. — hath a nation changed their gods, which are of no gods? In spite of the fact that their gods were false idols, the heathen at least had the pride and the decency of clinging to their gods;

— but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit, exchanging their possession of their true God for vain idols, with less consistency than that shown by their ignorant heathens.

¹² Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid; be ye very desolate,” saith the Lord. — in astonishment and horror the Lord cries out: Be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate,” saith the Lord; all which may be signified by storms and tempests, by thunder and lightning and by the sun’s withdrawing its light.

¹³ “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn them out cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.

— for my people have committed two evils, thus exceeding even the heathen with their one transgression of foolish idolatry: (1) they have forsaken me, the Fountain of living waters, the only true and living God,

— and (2) hewed them out cisterns, whose waters lack the freshness and the sparkle of spring- or well-water, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Putting aside the one and only Source of spiritual life and power, they placed their trust in gods which belied even the outward appearance that men had given them.

¹⁴ “Is Israel a servant? Is he a home born slave? Why is he despoiled? — is Israel a servant? that he does not abide in the house, in his own land, but is carried captive, becomes subject to others and is used as a slave.

¹⁵ The young lions roared at him and yelled, and they made his land waste; his cities are burned without inhabitant.

— the young lions roared upon him, and yelled; or “gave out their voice” meaning the kings of the nations; and are to be understood of the kings of Assyria and Babylon, and particularly of Nebuchadnezzar; see Jeremiah 50:17.

¹⁶ Also the children of Noph and Tahpanhes have broken the crown of thy head. — Memphis and Tahpanhes;” these are Egyptian cities: Memphis (a major ancient capital) and Tahpanhes (a frontier city in the eastern Nile Delta); their mention signals Egypt’s involvement in Israel’s downfall.

— they will kill your warriors: this line depicts military defeat. Israel’s strong men—its defenders—are struck down by Egyptian forces.

¹⁷ Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God when He led thee by the way?

— hast thou not procured this unto thyself, the Israelites having brought this calamity upon themselves, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord, thy God, when he led thee by the way? on the good path of his will, on the road of righteousness.

¹⁸ And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? Or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river? — Or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria; to send to them for help; for this was the usual method of first the house of Israel and later the house of Judah;

— when the Assyrians oppressed them, then they sent to Egypt for help; and when the Egyptians were upon them, then they applied to the Assyrians; and in both cases acted wrong, for they ought to have sought the Lord their God only.

¹⁹ Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee. Know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and that the fear of Me is not in thee,” saith the Lord God of hosts.

— their own wickedness shall correct thee; that is, either their wickedness in going to Egypt and Assyria, and the ill success they had in so doing might be an instruction to them to act otherwise, and a correction of their sin and folly; or that their wickedness was a reason and a very just one, why they were chastened and corrected by the Lord.

²⁰ “For of olden time I have broken thy yoke and burst thy bonds; and thou saidst, ‘I will not transgress,’ when upon every high hill and under every green tree thou wanderest, playing the harlot.

— upon every high hill and under every green tree, thou wanderest, playing the harlot; that is, committing spiritual whoredom or idolatry with idols, set on high hills and mountains and under green trees, groves and shady places; going from one idol to another as harlots go from one stew to another; or as whoremongers go from harlot to harlot.

²¹ Yet I had planted thee, a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto Me? — yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed; it is usual to compare the children of Israel to a vineyard, and to vines; and their settlement in the land of Canaan to the planting of vines in a vineyard; see Isaiah 5:1.

²² For though thou wash thee with soda and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before Me,” saith the Lord God. — the sense is, let this backsliding and degenerate people take whatever methods they need to cleanse themselves from their sins;

— as by their ceremonial ablutions and sacrifices; yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God; or “will retain its spots” these remain; the filth are not washed away; their iniquities are not hidden and covered;

²³ “How canst thou say, ‘I am not polluted; I have not gone after the Baalim’? See thy way in the valley; know what thou hast done. Thou art a swift dromedary traversing her ways,

— God have not gone after Baalim? or “the Baalim” the idols of the people; for there were many Baals, as Baalzephon, Baalpeor, Baalzebub and others.

²⁴ a wild ass used to the wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure. In her need who can turn her away? All they that seek her will not weary themselves; in her month they shall find her.

²⁵ Withhold thy foot from being unshod, and thy throat from thirst. But thou saidst, ‘There is no hope; no, for I have loved strangers, and after them will I go.’

²⁶ “As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so is the house of Israel ashamed—they, their kings, their princes, and their priests and their prophets,

— as the thief is only ashamed when he is caught, put to shame by the evidences in front of the public, so will the house of Israel be ashamed; they, their kings, their princes and their priests, and their prophets, be exposed in like manner.

²⁷ saying to a stock, ‘Thou art my father,’ and to a stone, ‘Thou hast brought me forth.’ For they have turned their back unto Me, and not their face; but in the time of their trouble they will say, ‘Arise, and save us!’

²⁸ But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? Let them arise if they can save thee in the time of thy trouble; for according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah.

— but where are thy gods –Baals, as Baalzephon, Baalpeor, Baalzebub and others– that thou hast made? Let them save thee in times of thy troubles, O Judah! Idolaters of all times and places have the same experience, namely, that idols of any kind cannot deliver them from trouble, no matter how great their numbers.

²⁹ “Why will ye plead with Me? Ye all have transgressed against Me,” saith the Lord. — ye all have transgressed against me, saith the Lord; high and low, rich and poor, great and small;

— men of all ranks, degrees, and character; kings, priests and prophets; and therefore ought not to contend with God, and charge him with injustice or unkindness, but themselves with folly and wickedness.

³⁰ “In vain have I smitten your children; they received no correction. Your own sword hath devoured your prophets like a destroying lion. — the rod of chastisement was used in vain; the afflictions that came upon them had no effect on them to amend and reform them; they were never the better for them;

— your own sword hath devoured your prophets, like Isaiah, who were sent to them to reprove and correct them, but they were so far from receiving their correction, that they put many to death.

³¹ O generation, see ye the word of the Lord! Have I been a wilderness unto Israel? A land of darkness? Why say My people, ‘We are lords; we will come no more unto Thee’?

³² Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet My people have forgotten Me days without number. — yet my people have forgotten me; which shows great stupidity and ingratitude; the Lord not being so much to them, from whom they had received so many favours, as the ornaments of a maid and the attire of a bride, are to them.

³³ Why readiest thou thy way to seek love? Therefore hast thou also taught the wicked ones thy ways. — the Targum says: “why dost thou make thy way beautiful, to procure loves (or lovers) to be joined to the nations?”

— or the sense is, why art thou so diligent and industrious to make thy way, by sacrifices and ceremonies, oblations and ablutions, in order to seek and obtain love and favors from the nations, which are all in vain?

³⁴ Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents; I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these. — in thy skirts is found the blood of poor innocents, of holy men and prophets who dared to reprove Israel for her sins;

— God have not found it by secret search, such a careful scrutiny was not necessary in this case, but upon all these, on account of the sin of wickedness and idolatry.

³⁵ Yet thou sayest, ‘Because I am innocent, surely His anger shall turn from me.’ Behold, I will plead with thee because thou sayest, ‘I have not sinned.’

— surely his anger shall turn from me, Jeremiah; the anger of God, since innocent; or as the Septuagint says; “let his wrath be turned away from me” pleading for the removing of judgements;

³⁶Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? Thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt as thou wast ashamed of Assyria. — sometimes going one way, and sometimes another; sometimes to Egypt, and then to Assyria; always seeking some one for help;

— why change thy way? in forming alliances with her heathen neighbors. Thou also shall be ashamed of Egypt, whose vassal Israel was for a while as thou wast ashamed of Assyria, after King Ahaz had sent there for help, but ultimately ended up being their captives.

³⁷Yea, thou shalt go forth from him with thine hands upon thine head; for the Lord hath rejected thy confidences, and thou shalt not prosper in them.

— and thine hands upon thine head; plucking and dishevelling the hair as women in distress; so Tamar, when abused by her brother, laid her hand on her head, and went out crying, II Samuel 13:19.

Posted in Jeremiah

Is the United States to be Split Up?

•September 22, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls For United States to Be Split Up, Declares Country ‘No Longer Safe’ For Anyone

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Country ‘No Longer Safe’ For Anyone

Mediaite • September 16, 2025 ~ X Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) revived her calls for a “national divorce” on Monday, ominously warning that the American right and left have “nothing left to talk about.”

Greene sparked controversy in February of 2023, when she wrote on X, “We need a national divorce.”

“We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done,” Greene added.

Greene was quickly denounced at the time. Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) slammed Greene’s call to split the country as “evil,” and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) added that “Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”

Greene’s post on Monday included much of the same sentiment as her previous comment, although this time she clarified she wants the dissolution of the union to be “peaceful.”

“There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us,” Greene wrote on X, adding:

They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them peacefully debating ideas.

Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead.

To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce.

Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.

“What will come from Charlie Kirk being martyred is already happening. It is a spiritual revival building the kingdom for Christ. But it will happen on the outside, not within the halls of our government. Democrats are hardened in their beliefs and will flip the switch back as soon as they have power,” she added in her lengthy post.

United Colors of America: A Vibrant Exploration of Red and Blue States

She went on the hammer the leaders in her own party for not doing enough. “And, if you are expecting Republicans to fight against evil, with the power they currently possess, and end this once and for all, you are going to be extremely disappointed,” she continued, concluding:

This week Congress will be voting on another CR – Biden’s budget that FUNDS TRANSGENDER POLICIES, NOT our own Trump policy budget that funds what you voted for.

We had 9 months to get it done, but for reasons I don’t understand or agree with, it wasn’t the priority.

Government is not answer, God is.

Turn your full faith and trust to our Almighty God and our Savior Jesus.

Tighten your circle around your family and protect them at all times.

I will pray for the left, but personally I want nothing to do with them.

Another Map suggesting how the US could be split into four different regions

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” Isaiah 28:1

“The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet” Isaiah 28:3

Posted in Civil War, US

A Study Index of Isaiah

•September 21, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

— Hear, O heavens and earth! For the Lord hath spoken
— the Ox and the Ass know its owner, but not Israel
— Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire
— strangers devour your country, land and cities
— Oh Sodom and Gomorrah, your sacrifices My soul hates

~ Chapter 2

— “Come ye, and let us go up to the God of Jacob
— And He shall judge among the nations
— swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks
— men shall go into the holes and caves of the earth
— when the Lord arises to shake the earth terribly”

A Study of Chapters 1 and 2 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 3

— for Jerusalem is ruined and Judah is fallen
— children to be their princes and babes rule over them
— “Woe unto the wicked! It shall be ill with him
— the Lord shall uncover their secret parts
— thy men shall fall by the sword, thy mighty in war”

~ Chapter 4

— in that day seven women shall take hold of a man
— the Branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious
— a remnant that remains in Jerusalem shall be called holy
— the Lord shall wash away the filth of the daughters of Zion

A Study of Chapters 3 and 4 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 5

— Isaiah sing to his well-Beloved a song
— Woe unto them that join house to house
— Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning
— they may pursue strong drink; till wine inflame them!
— Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil

~ Chapter 6

— “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts
— the whole earth is full of His glory”
— “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
— then said Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me!”
— Go tell this people: Hear ye but understand not
— and see ye indeed but perceive not

A Study of Chapters 5 and 6 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 7

— “Syria is confederate with Ephraim”
— “Let us go up against Judah and vex it
— and the head of Ephraim is Samaria
— within sixty-five years Ephraim shall be broken
— behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son”

~ Chapter 8

— behold, the Lord bringeth up the king of Assyria
— many among them shall stumble, fall and be broken
— and be snared and be taken
— to the law and to the testimony
— if they speak not according to this word
— it is because there is no light in them

A Study of Chapters 7 and 8 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 9

— beyond the Jordan, in Galilee of the nations
— people that walk in darkness have seen a great light
— the Everlasting Father: the Orthodoxy with lying pen
— bricks are fallen but we will build with hewn stones
— the prophets that teach lies, they are the tails
— Manasseh, Ephraim; and Ephraim, Manasseh

~ Chapter 10

— “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees
— “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of Mine anger
— a consuming, even determined, in the midst of Israel
— yet a remnant of them shall return
— the Assyrian army shall cut down thickets of the forest”

A Study of Chapters 9 and 10 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 11

— a Rod out of the stem of Jesse
— the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord
— He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth
— the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb
— and He shall assemble the outcasts of Israel
— and Judah from the four corners of the earth

~ Chapter 12

— behold, my God Is my Salvation
— for the Lord Yehovah is my Strength
— “Praise the Lord! Call upon His name!”
— God’s name in Hebrew is יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah

A Study of Chapters 11 and 12 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 13

— the burden of Babylon, they come from afar
— Howl ye, those multitudes could be Russia and China!
— it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty
— behold, the day of the Lord cometh
— therefore I will shake the heavens
— and the earth shall remove out of her place

~ Chapter 14

— for the Lord will have mercy on Jacob
— “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer”
— “I will ascend into heaven
— I will be like the Most High”
— His hand shall stretch out upon all the nations

A Study of Chapters 13 and 14 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 15

— the burden of Moab
— they shall gird themselves with sackcloth
— everyone shall howl, weeping abundantly
— rejoice thou not, Palestina
— because the rod that smote thee is not broken

~ Chapter 16

— the burden from Sela to the wilderness
— Let Mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab
— Moab shall howl for Moab, everyone shall howl
— the remnant of Moab shall remain small and feeble

A Study of Chapters 15 and 16 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 17

— the burden of Damascus, Syria
— the glory of Jacob shall be made thin
— yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it
— the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief

~ Chapter 18

— Woe to the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia
— the Lord said unto me: “I will take My rest”
— “they shall be left together for the fowls of the mountains
— the beasts of the earth; the fowls shall summer upon them
— and the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them”

A Study of Chapters 17 and 18 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 19

— the burden of Egypt
— the princes of Zoan “we are the sons of wise men”
— Gypsies in Hebrew, their name from the city of Zoan
— the princes of Zoan are become fools
— the Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit
— in the midst of the princes of Zoan

~ Chapter 20

— the burden of Egypt and Ethiopia
— Isaiah called to walk naked and barefooted
— “if the mighty could not delivered their souls
— how shall we, the weak, be delivered?”

A Study of Chapters 19 and 20 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 21

— the burden of Babylon, Edom and Arabia
— the pain as the pangs of a woman that travails
— watch in the watchtower, eat, drink; arise
— a chariot of asses and a chariot of camels
— the whole army of the Medes and Persians

~ Chapter 22

— the burden of the Valley of Vision
— Elam, the Persians; and Kir, the Medes
— Medes and Persians; a composite army
— and He will uncover the covering of Judah
— “Surely this iniquity shall not
— be purged from you till ye die”
— Shebna, the fallen one; Eliakim, My servant

A Study of Chapters 21 and 22 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 23

— the burden of Tyre and Sidon
— a report concerning Egypt and the Nile
— ye ships of Tarshish is laid waste!
— “after the end of seventy years
— that the Lord will visit Tyre”

~ Chapter 24

— “the Lord makes the earth empty
— and turns it upside down”
— and few men are left; laughter into mourning
— “Woe unto me!”
— the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard

A Study of Chapters 23 and 24 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 25

— I will praise Thy name
— God’s name is יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah
— Thou hast made of a fortified city a ruin
— Thou hast been a strength to the needy in distress
— and He will cast away the veil over all nations

~ Chapter 26

— a song be sung in the land of Judah
— a righteous nation that keeps the truth
— Thy name to the remembrance of Thee
— they are dead, they shall not live
— awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust

A Study of Chapters 25 and 26 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 27

— the Leviathan that is in the sea
— “A vineyard of red wine!”
— Fury is not in Me
— He smote those that smote him
— the great trumpet shall be blown

~ Chapter 28

— “Woe to the crown of pride
— to the drunkards of Ephraim
— whose glorious beauty is a fading flower”
— “Whom shall he teach knowledge?
— And whom shall he make to understand doctrine?”
— for precept must be upon precept
— We have made a covenant with death and hell

A Study of Chapters 27 and 28 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 29

— Woe to Ariel, to Ariel: “the lion of God”
— a multitude of nations will fight against Ariel
— Cry ye out, they are drunken, but not with wine
— they stagger, but not with strong drink
— the words of a book that is sealed

~ Chapter 30

— Woe to the rebellious children that add sin to sin
— the strength of Pharaoh and princes be your shame
— for they were at Zoan, “the royal city of the Pharaohs”
— a remnant as a beacon and an ensign on a hill
— the moon shall be as the light of the sun
— the light of the sun shall as the light of seven suns

A Study of Chapters 29 and 30 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 31

— Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help
— yet God also is wise, and will bring evil
— everyman shall cast off his idols of silver and gold
— then shall the Assyrian fall by the sword,
— but not of a mighty man; nor of a lowly man

~ Chapter 32

— a King shall reign in righteousness
— and princes shall rule in judgement
— the rash shall understand knowledge
— and the stammerers shall speak plainly
— rise up, ye women that are at ease

A Study of Chapters 31 and 32 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 33

— Woe to those that spoils
— your spoil shall be the gathering of caterpillar
— the earth mourns and languishes
— thine heart shall meditate terror
— the Lord is our judge, our lawgiver, our king

~ Chapter 34

— Come near, ye nations, to hear and hearken
— the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations
— and His fury upon all their armies
— for My sword shall be bathed in heaven
— the unicorns shall come down with the bulls
— And God hath cast lot and divide for them

A Study of Chapters 33 and 34 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 35

— the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad
— the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose
— Say to them that are of a fearful heart
— “Be strong, fear not”

~ Chapter 36

— king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh to Jerusalem
— then came Eliakim, who was over the house
— and Shebna the scribe
— they exhort and insinuate each other

A Study of Chapters 35 and 36 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 37

— King Hezekiah covered himself with sackcloth
— and went into the house of the Lord
— but Rabshakeh continues insinuating Hezekiah
— but his commandment was, “Answer him not”

~ Chapter 38

— Hezekiah was sick unto death
— “Remember now, O Lord, I beseech Thee”
— the sun returned ten degrees backward
— a writing of king Hezekiah’s confession
— the Lord was ready to save me

A Study of Chapters 37 and 38 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 39

— Hezekiah to show them his precious things
— the silver and the gold, the spices and ointment
— and all the house of his armor and all his treasures
— thy sons thou shalt beget shall be taken away
— and they shall be eunuchs for the king of Babylon

~ Chapter 40

— “Comfort ye, comfort ye My people”
— a voice of him that cries in the wilderness
— every valley shall be exalted
— and every mountain shall be made low
— He that sits upon the circle of the earth
— and the inhabitants as grasshoppers

A Study of Chapters 39 and 40 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 41

— “Keep silence before Me, O islands
— “But thou, Israel, art My servant
— “Fear not; I will help thee
— “I, the God of Israel, will not forsake thee”

~ Chapter 42

— “Behold My Servant, whom I uphold
— Mine Elect, in whom My soul delight
— He shall not fail nor be discouraged
— till He hath set judgement in the earth
— and the isles shall wait for His law”

A Study of Chapters 41 and 42 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 43

— “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee
— “For I have created him for My glory
— “Let all the nations be gathered together
— and let the people be assembled
— “Ye are My witnesses”

~ Chapter 44

— “Yet now hear, O Jacob My servant
— Is there a God besides Me?
— the Lord, thy Redeemer, that makes all things
— that stretches forth the heavens alone
— Cyrus, he is My shepherd and My pleasure

A Study of Chapters 43 and 44 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 45

— the Lord saith to His anointed, to Cyrus
— and make the crooked places straight
— I have called thee by thy name and surnamed thee
— though thou hast not known Me
— Woe unto him that strive with his Maker!

~ Chapter 46

— “Hearken unto Me, O house of Jacob
— and all the remnant of the house of Israel
— Remember the former things of old; for I am God
— and there is none other
— I am God, and there is none like Me”

A Study of Chapters 45 and 46 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 47

— O virgin daughter of Babylon
— O daughter of the Chaldeans
— Thy nakedness shall be uncovered
— yea, thy shame shall be seen
— sorceries, astrologers and soothsayers

~ Chapter 48

— Hear ye, O house of Jacob
— not in truth nor in righteousness
— Hearken unto Me, O Jacob and Israel
— I am the First, I am also the Last
— All ye, assemble yourselves and hear

A Study of Chapters 47 and 48 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 49

— Listen, O isles, unto Me, and hearken
— ye people from afar; the land of Sinim
— Sing, O heavens, and be joyful
— “Can a woman forget her sucking child
— “Behold, I will lift up Mine hand to the Gentiles”

~ Chapter 50

— “Where is the bill of your mother’s divorce
— I clothe the heavens with blackness
— and I make sackcloth their covering
— “Who among you fear the Lord
— that obey the voice of His Servant?”

A Study of Chapters 49 and 50 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 51

— “Hearken to Me, ye that seek the Lord
— Lift up your eyes to the heavens
— ye that know righteousness, whose heart is My law
— Awake, awake, O arm of the Lord
— “Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem
— who hast drunk the cup of His fury”

~ Chapter 52

A Study of Chapters 51 and 52 HERE ~ —— ~

— Awake, awake! Put on thy strength
— My people shall know My name
— the Lord hath hath redeemed Jerusalem
— “Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper”

Chapter 53

— He is despised and rejected of men
— He borne our griefs and carried our sorrows
— He was wounded for our transgressions
— by His stripes we are healed
— He was bruised for our iniquities
— He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter

~ Chapter 54

— “Sing, O Jerusalem, that didst not bear!
— Enlarge the place of thy tent
— the Lord of hosts is thy Redeemer
— In a little wrath I hid My face from thee
— Behold, they shall gather against thee”

A Study of Chapters 53 and 54 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 55

— “Ho, every one that thirst
— Hearken diligently unto Me
— Incline your ear, and come unto Me; hear
— Seek ye the Lord while He may be found
— “For My thoughts are not your thoughts
— neither are your ways My ways”

~ Chapter 56

— Blessed is the man who keeps the Sabbath
— the sons of strangers that join to serve the Lord
— my house a house of prayer for all people
— their watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant
— they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark

A Study of Chapters 55 and 56 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 57

— The righteous perish, rest into peace
— ye sons of the sorceress
— Are ye not a seed of falsehood
— inflaming yourselves with idols
— behind the doors also and the posts
— the wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest

~ Chapter 58

— “Cry aloud, spare not; lift up thy voice like a trumpet!
— and show My people their transgression
— and the house of Jacob their sins”
— ‘Why have we fasted and Thou seest not?
— why have we afflict our soul and thou take no note?’

A Study of Chapters 57 and 58 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 59

— Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened
— For your hands are defiled with blood
— and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies
— your tongue hath muttered perverseness
— We grope for the wall like the blind
— and we grope as if we had no eyes

~ Chapter 60

— Arise, shine, for thy light is come
— and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee
— And the Gentiles shall come to thy light
— for in My wrath I smote thee
— I the Lord, am thy Savior and thy Redeemer

A Study of Chapters 59 and 60 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 61

— “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me
— He hath anointed Me to preach the good tidings
— to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord
— and the day of vengeance of our God
— “For I, the Lord, love judgement
— I hate robbery for burnt offering”

~ Chapter 62

— the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness
— and all kings thy glory
— “I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem
— who shall never hold their peace day nor night”
— the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world

A Study of Chapters 61 and 62 HERE ~ —— ~

Chapter 63

— Who is this that cometh from Edom
— with dyed garments from Bozrah
— Why art thou red in Thine apparel
— And I will tread down the people in Mine anger
— and make them drunk in My fury

~ Chapter 64

— But we are all as an unclean thing
— and all our righteousness are as filthy rags
— Thou art our Father; we are the clay
— and Thou our potter
— and we all are the work of Thy hand

A Study of Chapters 63 and 64 HERE~ —— ~

Chapter 65

— I spread out my hands unto a rebellious people
— Behold, it is written: I will not keep silence
— Therefore will I number you to the sword
— and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter
— because when I called, ye did not answer
— when I spoke, ye did not hear, but did evils

~ Chapter 66

— “The heaven is My throne
— and the earth is My footstool
— Hear the word of the Lord, and tremble at His word
— For behold, the Lord will come with fire
— and with His chariots like a whirlwind
— “from one new moon and one Sabbath to another
— shall all flesh come to worship before Me”

A Study of Chapters 65 and 66 HERE ~ —— ~

Posted in Isaiah

CHINA’S QUANTUM RADAR!

•September 20, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China claims new anti-stealth radars can detect US F-35s, nuclear submarines, drones.

The radar technology at the World Radar Expo shows that China is investing in countering one of the US military’s biggest advantages: stealth.

China’s latest quantum radar won’t just track stealth bombers, but ballistic missiles in space too

Interesting Engineering • May 19, 2025 ~ AsiaTimes

China has taken a major step in countering the technological edge of US stealth platforms by unveiling next-generation anti-stealth radar systems.

These systems were showcased at the 11th World Radio Detection and Ranging Expo (World Radar Expo), which opened on Saturday in Hefei, Anhui Province.

The expo highlighted radar technologies that pose significant threats to US stealth fighter jets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and even nuclear-powered submarines, platforms long considered the cornerstone of American strategic dominance.

Anti-stealth radars

The JY-27V high-mobility meter-wave air surveillance radar was at the forefront of the exhibition.

The state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) developer describes the system as a “master artist” in detecting stealth targets.

Utilizing a low-frequency band, high-power aperture, and intelligent signal-processing algorithms, the JY-27V can pierce through the cloaking measures of stealth aircraft, China’s state-run Global Times reported.

It can effectively render platforms such as the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning II, and B-2 Spirit bomber vulnerable to detection and targeting.

The JY-27V’s design includes a large antenna array with a significant spread-retract ratio, allowing for rapid setup and withdrawal within ten minutes, enhancing battlefield survivability and responsiveness.

According to CETC, this system can track stealth aircraft that usually avoid higher-frequency radars. This means a threat that was hard to detect can now be tracked.

2D phased scanning

The YLC-8E is an advanced radar that can detect stealth technology. It was highlighted at the event and raises important concerns for military analysts in the West.

Operating on the UHF band, the YLC-8E is mounted on a single vehicle and features a fully digital phased array system.

It’s 2D phased scanning and directional mechanical scanning, along with high-efficiency digital transmit-receive modules, provide long-range early warning against stealth platforms.

The YLC-8E’s design emphasizes mobility, resistance to jamming, and high operational reliability, qualities that increase its operational utility in fixed and mobile defense networks.

CETC claims that the radar significantly enhances China’s ability to detect and track stealth fighters and UAVs within and beyond its airspace.

Challenging US stealth

Another notable system on display was the SLC-7, a fourth-generation multifunctional radar dubbed the “all-around champion.”

It features adaptive anti-jamming capabilities and simultaneous multi-target tracking, which are critical in high-intensity conflict zones.

The SLC-7 can identify and track stealth and conventional aircraft, helicopters, drones, artillery shells, and even short-range ballistic projectiles.

Of particular interest to Western defense observers is the radar’s potential to detect stealth drones, such as the RQ-170 Sentinel, and maritime stealth platforms, including US nuclear submarines operating near the surface or deploying UAVs.

New systems like the SLC-7 use high data rates and advanced signal processing, which may undermine the invisibility of US naval and air assets in areas like the South China Sea and Western Pacific.

The radar technology at the World Radar Expo shows that China is investing in countering one of the US military’s biggest advantages: stealth.

These new systems could change the balance of air power and control at sea in future conflicts.

As US forces depend on stealth technology for their strategic reach, China’s expanding network of anti-stealth radar poses a serious challenge on today’s battlefield.

“The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle” Psalm 78:9

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26, US

Isaiah (Ch 65-66)

•September 19, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The last two chapters of Isaiah seem like a supplement to The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7! They seem to offer the reasons why events are to go off the way they were being prophesied.

Remember, the Scriptures are often shrouded in cryptic languages and our challenge is to de-crypt them, especially as it relates to the latter days, our days.

Here a reason is given here, “I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them, because when I called, ye did not answer; when I spoke, ye did not hear” Isaiah 66:4.

Or, more emphatic from the Message Bible,

“Well, I choose to expose your nonsense and let you realize your worst fears, Because when I invited you, you ignored me; when I spoke to you, you brushed me off. You did the very things I exposed as evil, you chose what I hate” Isaiah 66:4 MSG

Such prophesied fear could be incorporated within the Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

Isaiah 65

¹ “I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name.

— God isn’t sought of the Gentiles, nation that was not called by my name; that asked not for him; this is a prophecy of the calling and conversion of the Gentiles is not to be doubted;

— God said, behold me, behold unto a nation that was not called by God’s name; which describes the Gentiles, who formerly were not called the people of God, even those who now are, Hosea 2:23.

² I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts;

— God has spread out his hands all the day unto a rebellious people; meaning both the house of Israel and the house of Judah;

— which walketh in a way that was in their own way, of their own devising, choosing and approving and which was only but wickedness; and after their own imaginations and inventions; after their own doctrines and their own dogmas.

³ A people that provoketh Me to anger continually to My face, that sacrificeth in gardens and burneth incense upon altars of brick;

— that sacrifice in gardens; to idols placed there as the Targum says as they were under every green tree; or in groves, where idols were worshipped; sometimes this refers to their having their sepulchers in their gardens, where they consulted their deadly spirits.

⁴ who remain among the graves and lodge in the monuments, which eat swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their vessels;

— they remained among the graves, either there expecting revelations by dreams or there consulting with devils, who were thought to delight in such places; or to practice necromancy, all which were forbidden, Deuteronomy 18:11, Isaiah 8:19.

— and broth of abominable things is in their vessels; or “pots” – broth made of swine’s flesh and of other sorts of flesh which were unclean by the law. The Targum paraphrases both clauses, “who dwell in houses built of the dust of graves and lodge with broth of abominable things is in their vessels.”

⁵ who say, ‘Stand by thyself; come not near to me, for I am holier than thou!’ These are a smoke in My nose, a fire that burneth all the day.

— smoke in my nose, a fire that burn all day: very offensive to the Divine Being, as smoke is to the eyes and nostrils; and kindled the fire of his anger, which was continually exercised on them; see Luke 16:15. The Targum says, “their recompense shall be in hell, where the fire burns all the day.”

⁶ Behold, it is written before Me: I will not keep silence, but will recompense—even recompense into their bosom”

— behold, it is written; this account of their sins; it was in his sight and constant remembrance and punishment for them was determined by him, written in the book of his decrees:

— God will not keep silence; but threaten with destruction and also execute; plead against them really, as well as verbally, with sore judgements: but will recompense, even recompense into their bosom; full and just recompense of punishment for all their transgressions;

— the Targum says, “I will recompense to them the vengeance of their sins, and deliver their bodies to the second death.” So the Targum recognizes the concept of “the second death.”

⁷ your iniquities and the iniquities of your fathers together,” saith the Lord, “who have burned incense upon the mountains and blasphemed Me upon the hills; therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom.”

— both your iniquities and of your fathers together, saith the Lord; that is, the punishment for both; these being alike and continued from father to son by one generation after another till the measure was filled up;

— and then the recompense of reward is given for all of them together at once: which have burnt incense upon the mountains and blasphemed me upon the hills; where they offered incense and other sacrifices to idols which was interpreted by the Lord as a blaspheming and reproaching of him; see Isaiah 57:7,

— therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom; punish them for their former sins as well as their latter ones and both together.

⁸ Thus saith the Lord, “As the new wine is found in the cluster, and one saith, ‘Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it,’ so will I do for my servants’ sakes, that I may not destroy them all.

— will I do for my servants’ sake, that I may not destroy them all; namely, for the sake of my servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I will bring a seed out of Jacob; a small number which shall be as a seed from whence others shall spring and out of Judah;

— the Targum says, “As Noah was found righteous in the generation of the deluge, and I said that I would not destroy him, for the purpose that I might raise up the world by him.”

⁹ And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Judah an inheritor of My mountains; and Mine elect shall inherit it, and My servants shall dwell there. — called the seed of the woman, the seed of Abraham, most probably a reference of the Messiah here;

— God will bring forth a seed out of Jacob; the Messiah, a seed bears a proportion to the tree or plant that it produces but in comparison with that is very little; its blessings and promises, which is as a mountain, firm and immovable.

¹⁰ And Sharon shall be a fold of flocks, and the Valley of Achor a place for the herds to lie down in, for My people that have sought Me.

— Sharon, the rich plain stretching along the coast from Joppa to the foot of Carmel, was a place of great fruitfulness for pastures. David’s herds were kept there, 1 Chronicles 27:29. It was become like a wilderness, Isaiah 33:9.

¹¹ “But ye are they that forsake the Lord, that forget My holy mountain, that prepare a table for that Gad [the Babylonian god of fortune], and that furnish the drink offering unto that Meni [the god of fate].

— you are those that had forsaken the Lord; the Targum says,

“But ye, O house of Israel, ye have forsaken the worship of the Lord, ye have forgotten the worship of my holy mountain, that prepare tables for the idols, and mix goblets for their gods.”

¹² Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter; because when I called, ye did not answer; when I spoke, ye did not hear, but did evil before Mine eyes and did choose that wherein I delighted not.”

— therefore will I reduce you to the sword; alluding to Meni, idol worshipping, they furnished a drink offering for or trusted in; and since they did, God would number them or appoint a number of them to the sword;

— and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter; or suffer them to be slain in great numbers, even from one end of their land to another, Jeremiah 12:12; none of them should escape the sword of the Romans, and ye shall all bow down to the slaughter; be obliged to submit to the conqueror and lay down your necks to be sacrificed;

— the Targum says,

“Therefore will I deliver them to the sword, yea, all of you shall be delivered to the slaughter; because I sent my prophets, and ye repented’ not; they prophesied, and ye did not receive them; but did evil before me, and delighted yourselves in that I would not.”

— these passages seem like another version of The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! Or, could this also tie in with Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline? Here a reason is given, “because when I called, ye did not answer; when I spoke, ye did not hear.”

¹³ Therefore thus saith the Lord God, “Behold, My servants shall eat, but ye shall be hungry; behold, My servants shall drink, but ye shall be thirsty: behold, My servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be ashamed.

— behold, My servants shall be protected, but ye shall be ashamed; of your vain confidence; of your trust in their own righteousness;

— indulging in idolatry; worshipping Astarte; but call Easter, and Mithra or Mitra which they Christianize as Christmas where the drunks celebrate on December 25th; which are all our own righteousness.

¹⁴ Behold, My servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit.

— but ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit; under the sore judgements of God upon them, the sword and famine;

— and more especially during the siege of Jerusalem, and when God’s wrath came upon them at a latter time, in the destruction of our cities and nations, and they fell into the hands of invaders, who carried them captive by the Sword and dispersed them in four directions.

¹⁵ And ye shall leave your name for a curse unto My chosen, for the Lord God shall slay thee and call His servants by another name,

— for the Lord God shall slay them; by the Sword of Edom and Idumea, and by his judgements, which continue upon them; the Targum says, with the second death:

— these passages seem like an addition to The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹⁶ that he who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of truth, and he that sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God of truth, because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hid from Mine eyes.

— God of truth, or the God of truth; not indulging in the fictitious deities from their neighbouring Gentiles, such as worshipping Astarte call Easter, and Mithra or Mitra which they call Christmas;

— worshipping God the Father, or God the Son, the only God as the Source of blessing; or swearing by that God who hath approved his truth and faithfulness by saving and delivering his people.

Worshipping Mithra or Mitra which they christianised as Christmas

¹⁷ “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.

— during the Millennium the entire existing state of things is to pass away. God will create a new heaven and a new earth and place his people therein; and the old conditions will all be changed and the old grounds of complaint disappear.

¹⁸ But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.

— God create Jerusalem; from the prophet’s viewpoint as elsewhere, the earthly city, transformed and transfigured, occupies the central place in the new creation; then after the Millennium the transfer of the promise to the new eternal city, a New Jerusalem, which is from above.

¹⁹ And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in My people; and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.

— in the new Jerusalem there will be no sorrow, neither “weeping” nor “crying.”

²⁰ There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days; for the child shall die a hundred years old; but the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.

— life will be greatly prolonged to a hundred years for everyone; and the sinner that dies a hundred years old without repentance shall be accursed, or cut off by the justice of God for his crime

²¹ And they shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them.

— during the Millennium, people shall plant vineyards and eat their fruits; they shall both live to dwell in their houses when built, and till their vineyards bring forth fruit and eat them;

— and they shall be preserved from enemies breaking in upon them and wasting their plantations; men will always enjoy the fruit of their labours and see their children grow up.

²² They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

— and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands; the blessing of long life is carried on with the promises of all other instances of outward happiness.

²³ They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.

— nor bring forth for trouble; for death, as the Targum says; or for a curse, as in the Septuagint: the tense is they shall not beget and bring forth children that shall immediately die by some distemper or another or be taken off by famine, sword or pestilence;

— to the great grief and trouble of their parents; but these shall live, and outlive their parents, so that their death will never be a trouble to them.

²⁴ And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.

— and during the Millennium, while they are yet speaking, I will hear; while they are praying to him, he hears and answers, and grants their requests, and more, as he did Daniel.

— this shows the readiness of the Lord to help and assist his people in any time of trouble, or when they may fear an enemy; and is a great encouragement to attend constantly before the throne of God.

²⁵ The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,” saith the Lord.”

— and during the Millennium, all around will peace and harmony prevail, even in the animal world itself. “Wolf and lamb then feed together, and the lion eats chopped straw like the ox, and the serpent-dust is its bread.

Isaiah 66

¹ Thus saith the Lord, “The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house that ye build unto Me? And where is the place of My rest?

— the heaven is God’s throne; having his seat or throne there; he speaks as a king; heaven is the place where he holds his court, from where he dispenses his commands, and from where he surveys all his works;

— but where is the house that ye build unto me? who can encompass the heavens and the earth with a house? Where is the place of my rest? or where is the place wherein I can be said to rest in a proper sense?

² For all those things hath Mine hand made, and all those things have been,” saith the Lord. “But to this man will I look: even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word.

— for all those things hath mine hand made; the heavens and the earth which are his throne and footstool; and since he is the Creator of all things he must be immense, omnipresent, omnipotent and cannot be included in any space or place:

— speaking of the Son, he trembles at the Word of God; both at the wrath of any disobedience and have a holy reverence for the Word of the Father and receive it, not as the word of man, but as the Word of God;

— and to such the Lord looks; he looks on these poor ones, and feeds those afflicted ones, sympathizes with them; on these contrite ones and delights in their sacrifices and dwells with and among them.

³ “He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he cut off a dog’s neck; he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood; he that burneth incense, as if he blessed an idol— yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations.

— he that kills an ox is as if he slew a man; or ‘He that slayeth an ox, killeth a man.’

— or ‘He who sacrifices an ox is as if he slew a man.’ The Septuagint, renders it, ‘The wicked man who sacrifices a calf, is as he who kills a dog; and he who offers to me fine flour, it is as the blood of swine.’

⁴ I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them, because when I called, none did answer, when I spoke, they did not hear; but they did evil before Mine eyes and chose that in which I delighted not.”

— God also will choose their delusions; will punish them in their own way and set those over them as teachers who shall govern them by their traditions instead of my word;

— Or in the NT era, false Christs and false prophets to deceive them, Matthew 24:24; John 5:43.

— and will bring upon them fears; such as the sword, famine and pestilence; and into the latter days into another captivity, an enemy who, they will feared, would come and take away their place and nation;

— this “will bring their fears upon them” appears like a parallel text where the ‘Sword of the Lord’ is mentioned. Could this be a clear connection to The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7?

⁵ Hear the word of the Lord, ye that tremble at His word: “Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for My name’s sake, said, ‘Let the Lord be glorified, when He shall appear to your joy’; and they shall be ashamed.”

— your brethren that hated you; could be Esau or the Edomites;

“And Esau harbored hatred in his heart against Jacob, his brother, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.

“And Esau said in his heart, ‘I will not do as Cain did, who killed Abel during their father’s lifetime and then their father had another son, Seth.

“Rather, I will wait until the days of mourning for my father have passed, and then I will kill Jacob my brother, and I will be the sole heir.’” Genesis 27:42 Jonathan; for more, see Obadiah;

— others; could also include the Samaritan community, like Sanballat and Tobiah (Nehemiah 2:10), but might be largely mean men of doubtful Israelitish descent, the Sadducees and in part, probably other Jews who had been spared in the general deportation of the people.

⁶ A voice of noise from the city, a voice from the temple, a voice of the Lord that rendereth recompense to His enemies.

— a voice of noise from the city; from the city of Jerusalem, as the Targum says; so that in the days of the Messiah shall go out of Jerusalem the voice from the Temple, a voice of the Lord.

⁷ “Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child.

— she was delivered of a man child; this is speaking of the Messiah; the Targum says, “before distress comes upon her, she shall be redeemed; and before trembling comes upon her, her King shall be revealed.”

⁸ Who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? Or shall a nation be born at once? For as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

— or shall a nation be born so sudden? Such an event never has occurred; a nation is brought into existence by degrees; its institutions are matured gradually, and usually by the long process of years.

⁹ Shall I bring to birth and not cease to bring forth?” saith the Lord. “Shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb?” saith thy God.

— shall I bring to the birth unfinished? It is that God would certainly accomplish what he had decreed and for which he had made ample arrangements and preparations; he would not commence the work and then abandon it.

¹⁰ “Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that love her; rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her;

— rejoice ye with Jerusalem; the holy city is still thought of as a mother rejoicing in her new-born child; friends and neighbours, nations friendly to Israel who had shown pity for her sufferings are now invited to participate in her joy.

¹¹ that ye may suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations; that ye may milk out, and be delighted with the abundance of her glory.”

— Jerusalem is here set out as the mother of us all, as indeed she was; for out of Zion went forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, Isaiah 2:3.

¹² For thus saith the Lord, “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream; then shall ye suck, ye shall be borne upon her sides, and be dandled upon her knees.

— for thus saith the Lord, behold, I will extend peace to her like a river; the Targum says as the river Euphrates;

— or as the Nile, which overflowed Egypt, and made it fruitful; or as any flowing river, large and spreading, continuing to flow and brings blessings with it where it comes; and so denotes the abundance of this peace, the perpetuity of it and its blessed effects.

¹³ As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

— the Targum says, “my Word shall comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”

¹⁴ And when ye see this, your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like an herb; and the hand of the Lord shall be known toward His servants, and His indignation toward His enemies.

— your heart shall rejoice during the Millennium; for nothing can be matter of greater joy than these; these cause an inward, hearty and sincere joy and not mere outward expressions:

— and your bones shall flourish like an herb; in a well watered garden, or on which the dew lies; which revives, lifts up its head, and is green and flourishing: so the hearts of God’s people are comforted and filled with joy, it renews their spiritual strength;

— the bones that were dried up with sorrow become fat and flourishing and like a garden of herbs, whose springs fail not.

¹⁵ For behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with His chariots like a whirlwind, to render His anger with fury and His rebuke with flames of fire.

— for a flashback, behold, the Lord will come with fire, either with material fire, with which mystical Babylon or Rome shall be burnt, Revelation 18:8, or with indignation and wrath, which shall be poured out like fire and be as intolerable and consuming as that:

— and with his chariots like a whirlwind; making a great noise and striking great terror; alluding to chariots in which men used formerly to fight:

— to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire; a heap of words to show the fierceness of his wrath and how severe his rebuke of enemies will be; which will be not a rebuke in love as of his own people but in a way of vindictive wrath;

— these passages seem like just before the onset of the Millennium, another version of The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! Here it is described as “the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind.”

— and if so, could this also tie in with Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline?

¹⁶ For by fire and by His sword will the Lord plead with all flesh; and the slain of the Lord shall be many.

— before the Millennium the Lord will plead by fire and by his sword; the sword is an instrument by which punishment is executed; and the slain of the Lord shall be many; that is, those that will be slain by the Lord the number shall be immense.

¹⁷ “They that sanctify themselves and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh and the abomination and the mouse, shall be consumed together,” saith the Lord.

— eating swine’s flesh and the abomination, and the mouse; the eating of swine’s flesh and the mouse, were forbidden by the law of Moses, Leviticus 11:7.

¹⁸ “For I know their works and their thoughts. It shall come that I will gather all nations and tongues, and they shall come and see My glory.

— for God know their thoughts, that is, their evil works and designs, which are known to God the intents of their heart, whose eyes are as a flame of fire to pierce and penetrate into them.

¹⁹ And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those of them who escape unto the nations: to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud who draw the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off who have not heard My fame, neither have seen My glory; and they shall declare My glory among the Gentiles.

— Tarshish, Pul, Lud, Tubal and Javan are all sons of Japheth and perhaps, Ham; they are non-Israelites;

— this verse regarding a sign seems a bit odd coming toward the end of Isaiah; could it be that it is a sign that God will send the house of Jacob to the countries mentioned above? Especially after he had send a Sword from the South into Israel?

— it seems possible, perhaps Jacob’s posterity could be a suffering servant (Isaiah 52:13) as the Orthodoxy believes; or sharing the load of a suffering servant as the Messiah as identified earlier in the Targum (Isa 52:13); we’ll have to wait and see.

²⁰ And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the Lord out of all nations, upon horses and in chariots and in litters, and upon mules and upon swift beasts, to My holy mountain Jerusalem,” saith the Lord, “as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord.

— during the Millennium, they; that is, the Gentiles out of all nations; the truth shall be proclaimed in all lands, and a vast accession shall be made from all parts of the world to the true teachings of God.

²¹ And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites,” saith the Lord.

— God will also take of them for priests; that is, even Gentile converts could be enrolled among the priests and Levites in the Temple of the new Jerusalem;

— non-Levites have been proven to be inducted into the priesthood as shown by the example of Samuel by adoption, who was most probably an Ephraimite, but certainly not from the Aaron priesthood where high priests were supposed to be drawn from.

²² “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me,” saith the Lord, “so shall your seed and your name remain.

— for as the new heavens and the new earth; that is, during the Millennium; although a great mass of some nations may perish; but the seed and name of Israel, shall continues for ever.

²³ And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me,” saith the Lord.

— that keep one Sacred Sabbath to another; that means, from week to week, every Sabbath;

— a parallel prophecy of other Sabbaths occurs in Zechariah 14:16 : ‘And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came up against Jerusalem, shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles.’

— these assemblies “from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another” are the holy convocations on the seventh-day Sabbath, at the feasts of Passover, Pentecost, at the blowing of the Trumpets, on the day of Atonement and Tabernacles: Leviticus 23.

²⁴ “And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me; “for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.”

— and they shall go forth; this verse evidently is that the pious and converted worshippers of God shall see the punishment which he will execute on his and their foes, or shall see them finally destroyed;

— this refers to the time when the kingdom of God shall be finally established and when all the mighty enemies of that kingdom shall be subdued and punished;

— the image is probably taken from a scene where a people whose lands have been desolated by mighty armies are permitted to go forth after a decisive battle to walk over the fields of the slain, and to see the dead and the bodies of their once formidable enemies.

~~~ THE END ~~~

Posted in Isaiah

SS #05 A Challenge from God

•September 18, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Our God is a Almighty God; that is, He is Almighty in every way. He formulates His Plan and it was done. He declared the end from the beginning, and again it was done.

Background: both the house of Israel and the house of Judah were much embroiled in idolatry throughout much of the times of the Judges and Kings. Briefly Israel returned to God under king David and the early days of king Solomon; then under king Jeroboam and king Rehoboam, they drifted into idolatry and pagan worships.

Then house of Israel went into exile, whereas the house of Judah had good kings from time to time. Even where Josiah tried to abolished idolatry, many Jews adhered to idol worship. When inspectors from Josiah came in search of idols, the inhabitants hid them behind doors or false walls.

Thus, God issues a Challenge to their idols as to who qualify to be God through prophet Isaiah:

²¹ “Produce your cause,” saith the Lord; “bring forth your strong reasons,” saith the King of Jacob.

²² “Let them bring them forth and show us what shall happen; let them show the former things, what they be, that we may consider them and know the latter end of them; or declare us things to come.

²³Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed and behold it together.

²⁴Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought; an abomination is he that chooseth you. Isaiah 41:21-24

— bring forth your strong reasons, challenged the King of Jacob; who acknowledge the Lord as their King and their God and whom he rules over, protects and defends;

— and this title is to assure their comfort, that though he is King over all the nations of the world, yet in an eminent and peculiar sense he does not style himself the God of Jacob, but as their King.

— the God of Jacob claims that the power of predicting the future is his own inalienable prerogative; let them, that is, their idols, or the worshippers of idols, the heathens, their gods,

— thus God is offering a challenge of whoever that claim to be God, if he predict an event in the future and could bring that event to fulfilment; let them show us what they could predict and bring them into fulfilment; that would bring forth the evidences of their divine nature and power; and thus worthy of being God;

— the God of Jacob defies the idol-gods and their votaries to give any clear prediction of future events; no doubt the claim to possess the power was made very generally among the idolatrous nations who almost universally practiced based upon frauds and cunning deceits.

The Message Bible says

“Set out your case for your gods,” says God.
    “Bring your evidence,” says the King of Jacob.
“Take the stand on behalf of your idols, offer arguments,
    assemble reasons.
Spread out the facts before us
    so that we can assess them ourselves.
Ask them, ‘If you are gods, explain what the past means—
    or, failing that, tell us what will happen in the future.
Can’t do that?
    How about doing something—anything!
Good or bad—whatever.
    Can you hurt us or help us? Do we need to be afraid?’
They say nothing, because they are nothing—
    sham gods, no-gods, fool-making gods. Isaiah 41:21-24 MSG

— Or put it another way: Can any of your gods do as I did, throw an event in the future and bring it to fulfilment?

(A) Seventy Years of captivity in Babylon

Isaiah 46

1 Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast.

²They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.

³Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are borne by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb:

⁴And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoary hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.

⁵To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?

⁶They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god: they fall down, yea, they worship.

⁷They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him, and set him in his place, and he standeth; from his place shall he not remove: yea, one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer, nor save him out of his trouble.

⁸Remember this, and shew yourselves men: bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors.

⁹Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me,

¹⁰Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:

Or, from the Message Bible

^1-2The god Bel falls down, god Nebo slumps.
    The no-god hunks of wood are loaded on mules
And have to be hauled off,
    wearing out the poor mules—
Dead weight, burdens who can’t bear burdens,
    hauled off to captivity.

^3-4“Listen to me, family of Jacob,
    everyone that’s left of the family of Israel.
I’ve been carrying you on my back
    from the day you were born,
And I’ll keep on carrying you when you’re old.
    I’ll be there, bearing you when you’re old and gray.
I’ve done it and will keep on doing it,
    carrying you on my back, saving you.

^5-7“So to whom will you compare me, the Incomparable?
    Can you picture me without reducing me?
People with a lot of money
    hire craftsmen to make them gods.
The artisan delivers the god,
    and they kneel and worship it!
They carry it around in holy parades,
    then take it home and put it on a shelf.
And there it sits, day in and day out,
    a dependable god, always right where you put it.
Say anything you want to it, it never talks back.
    Of course, it never does anything either!

^8-10“Think about this. Wrap your minds around it.
    This is serious business, rebels. Take it to heart.
Remember your history,
    your long and rich history.
I am God, the only God you’ve had or ever will have—
    incomparable, irreplaceable—
From the very beginning
    telling you what the ending will be,
All along letting you in
    on what is going to happen,
Assuring you, ‘I’m in this for the long haul,
    I’ll do exactly what I set out to do,’ Isaiah 46:1-10 MSG

“I’ll do exactly what I set out to do.” God prophesied that the house of Judah would go into captivity and would return after “threescore and ten years;” to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth by Jeremiah (650 – 570 BC, Egypt); this is a reference to the seventy years of captivity as spelt out by God in Jeremiah 25:11 (around 600 BC).

Again, God issued a prophecy through Isaiah (earlier between 740 and 686 BC) and being able to bring that prophecy to fulfilment as proof of achieving the Credential of being God.

Isaiah 55

⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

¹⁰For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:

¹¹So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. Isaiah 55:9-11

Last verse from the Message Bible

So will the words that come out of my mouth
[will] not come back empty-handed.
They’ll do the work I sent them to do,
they’ll complete the assignment I gave them. Isaiah 55:11 MSG

Thus God prophesied through Jeremiah that the house of Judah would go into captivity about a hundred and fifty years into the future and prophesied they would return after “threescore and ten years;” that is, after 70 years.

God offers a Challenge: if His Word is void, then He had failed to establish that His thought is higher than our thoughts. He would have failed himself to be God.

Record shows that the house went into captivity from around 605 BC and they they were offered to return to Judea by the Persians from around 539 BC and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

(But this length of Judah’s captivity in Babylon would be directly related from the length of time they neglected to observe the land Sabbath according to II Chronicles 36:19-21

¹⁹ And they burned the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all the palaces thereof with fire and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof. ²⁰ And those who had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia,

²¹ to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years, II Chronicles 36:19-21).

The Books of Chronicles were written by Ezra after the Jews had returned from exile, recording what had been prophesied and how it was fulfilled. And thus the God of Israel had established himself to be God.

(B) Prophecy of an ‘anointed’ to deliver from Captivity

⁹Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is none other; I am God, and there is none like Me,

¹⁰declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’

¹¹calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth My counsel from a far country. Yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it. Isaiah 46:9-11

Or, from the Message Bible

“Think about this. Wrap your minds around it.
    This is serious business, rebels. Take it to heart.
Remember your history,
    your long and rich history.
I am God, the only God you’ve had or ever will have—
    incomparable, irreplaceable—
From the very beginning
    telling you what the ending will be,
All along letting you in
    on what is going to happen,
Assuring you, ‘I’m in this for the long haul,
    I’ll do exactly what I set out to do,’
Calling that eagle, Cyrus, out of the east,
    from a far country the man I chose to help me.
I’ve said it, and I’ll most certainly do it.
    I’ve planned it, so it’s as good as done. Isaiah 46:8-11 MSG

— Remember the former things of old; the things that were created from the beginning, or the ancient things manifested by the Lord, whether as the effects of His power, wisdom, and goodness, or in wrath, or in mercy; such as the creation of the heavens, and the earth, and all things in between;

— Declaring the end from the beginning; foretelling accurately the course of future events. This is an argument to which God offers a challenge as proof that He is God, and the only true God;

— My counsel shall stand; My purpose, my design, my will. The phrase ‘shall stand’ means that it shall be stable, settled, fixed, established; there is no Plan B; that God’s plan will not be frustrated by a “Great Satan.” No, Satan is nothing but an instrument to Him, witness the first chapter of Job:

— God has power enough to secure the execution of his designs, and He will exert that power in order that all His plans may be accomplished;

— and I will do all My pleasure; I will accomplish all My wish, or effect all My desire; it means that God would accomplish everything which was to Him an object of desire; everything which He wished, or willed; and why should He not?

— Can any of your gods do as I did, throw an event in the future and bring it to fulfilment?

Isaiah 46

¹¹Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.

¹²Hearken unto me, ye stouthearted, that are far from righteousness:

¹³I bring near my righteousness; it shall not be far off, and my salvation shall not tarry: and I will place salvation in Zion for Israel my glory.

Who can foretell a Prince Cyrus to appear and bring it to fulfilment?

— calling a ravenous bird, or eagle, from the east; that is, from Persia, as Isaiah 41:2

“Who raised up the righteous man from the east, called him to His foot, gave the nations before him, and made him rule over kings? He gave them as the dust to his sword, and as driven stubble to his bow.” Isaiah 41:2

Who brought up this eastern hero? Who called up his justice service? He lays nations at his feet and makes an end of their kings. With a thrust of his sword and the bend of his bow, this hero turns kings and their armies into dust. Isaiah 41:2 Voice (MSG: this champion)

— a prophecy issued by Isaiah about 150 years earlier. There can be no doubt that Cyrus is meant here; and from around 539 BC, Cyrus offered the Jews to return and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

And God had tested Himself and affirms that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah would be rebuilt!

Can any of your gods do as I did, throw an event in the future and bring it to fulfilment?

(C) Abraham and Exodus

During the days of Abraham there were many idol worshipers. It was thus a challenge to Abraham: could any of their gods prophesy an event or an occurrence in the future and then bring it to fulfillment?

Abraham’s father, Terah, who was an idolater; and according to Jewish tradition, Terah owned an idol shop where he sold various idols. One day while Terah was away and Abraham was in charge, he took a stick, smashed the idols and placed the stick in the hand of the largest idol.

When Terah returned, he asked Abraham what happened to all the idols. Abraham told him that a woman came in to make an offering to the idols. The idols argued about which one should eat the offering first, then the largest idol took the stick and smashed all the other idols.

Terah responded by saying that they are only statues and have no knowledge; whereupon Abraham responded by saying that you deny their knowledge, yet you worship them!

Thus the God of Abraham issues His own Proof having the Credential of God.

¹² I have declared and have saved, and I have shown, when there was no strange god among you; therefore ye are My witnesses,” saith the Lord, “that I am God.” Isaiah 43:12

— God have declared “ye are My witnesses;” He has announced or predicted future events; He has warned of danger; He has marked out the path of safety. The Targum shows one example:

“I, I have declared unto Abraham your father what would come to pass; I, I redeemed you out of Egypt, as I swore to him between the pieces; and I, I have made you to hear the doctrine of my law from Sinai, and ye are still alive, when there was no strange god among you; yea, ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God.” Isaiah 43:12 Jonathan

— God had declared to Abraham that his posterity would be in Canaan and Egypt for 430 years, Exodus 12:40-41; then “even the selfsame day it came to pass” or “to the very day,” all the Lord’s divisions left Egypt; thus with such a precised prophecy and fulfilment, they (Abraham’s posterity) should be God’s witnesses that He is God!

[note: “the phrase “I swore to him between the pieces” refers to Genesis 15:17, where God instructs Abraham to divide sacrificial animals and lay the pieces opposite each other. God then passes between them in vision, symbolizing a solemn, binding covenant]

Or, from the Message Bible

Get the blind and deaf out here and ready—
    the blind (though there’s nothing wrong with their eyes)
    and the deaf (though there’s nothing wrong with their ears).
Then get the other nations out here and ready.
    Let’s see what they have to say about this,
    how they account for what’s happened.
Let them present their expert witnesses
    and make their case;
    let them try to convince us what they say is true.
“But you are my witnesses.” God’s Decree.
    “You’re my handpicked servant
So that you’ll come to know and trust me,
    understand both what I am and who I am.
Previous to me there was no such thing as a god,
    nor will there be after me.
I, yes I, am God.
    I’m the only Savior there is.
I spoke, I saved, I told you what existed
    long before these upstart gods appeared on the scene.
And you know it, you’re my witnesses,
    you’re the evidence.” God’s Decree.
“Yes, I am God.
    I’ve always been God
    and I always will be God.
No one can take anything from me.
    I make; who can unmake it?” Isaiah 43:8-13 MSG

(D) Jerusalem to be rebuilt

Our Lord God had thus shown that he was the only true God; and He tested Himself the question whether Jerusalem and the cities of Judah would be rebuilt:

²⁶That confirmeth the word of His servant, and performeth the counsel of His messengers, that saith to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shalt be inhabited,’ and to the cities of Judah, ‘Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof’

²⁷that saith to the deep, ‘Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers’;

²⁸that saith of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd and shall perform all My pleasure,’ even saying to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shalt be built,’ and to the temple, ‘Thy foundation shall be laid.’ Isaiah 44:26-28

Or, from the Message Bible

He makes the magicians look ridiculous
    and turns fortunetellers into jokes.
He makes the experts look trivial
    and their latest knowledge look silly.
But he backs the word of his servant
    and confirms the counsel of his messengers.
He says to Jerusalem, “Be inhabited,”
    and to the cities of Judah, “Be rebuilt,”
    and to the ruins, “I raise you up.”
He says to Ocean, “Dry up.
    I’m drying up your rivers.”
He says to Cyrus, “My shepherd—
    everything I want, you’ll do it.”
He says to Jerusalem, “Be built,”
    and to the Temple, “Be established.” Isaiah 44:25-28

“At that time they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem; neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart.” Jeremiah 3:17

— the Targum says:

“At that time, they will call Jerusalem the place of the dwelling of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) of the Lord, and all nations will come to worship there in the name of the Lord in Jerusalem. They will no longer follow the evil thoughts of their hearts.” Jeremiah 3:17 Jonathan

³¹ The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and My people love to have it so. And what will ye do in the end thereof? Jeremiah 5:31

— their prophets prophesied falsely; not only proclaiming lies, but enhancing them; that the people would have peace and prosperity under the false pretence of Grace, and nothing about the truth nor God’s determination for Him to dwell among men, as Jeremiah and other prophets had prophesied.

Zechariah 14

¹ Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.

²For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

³Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

⁴And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.

⁵And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah: and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.

⁶And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear, nor dark:

⁷But it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day, nor night: but it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light.

⁸And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem; half of them toward the former sea, and half of them toward the hinder sea: in summer and in winter shall it be.

⁹And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one.

¹⁰All the land shall be turned as a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem: and it shall be lifted up, and inhabited in her place, from Benjamin’s gate unto the place of the first gate, unto the corner gate, and from the tower of Hananeel unto the king’s winepresses.

¹¹And men shall dwell in it, and there shall be no more utter destruction; but Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.

¹²And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.

¹³And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the Lord shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.

¹⁴And Judah also shall fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all the heathen round about shall be gathered together, gold, and silver, and apparel, in great abundance.

¹⁵And so shall be the plague of the horse, of the mule, of the camel, and of the ass, and of all the beasts that shall be in these tents, as this plague.

¹⁶And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles.

¹⁷And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain. — could be a severe drought; and bush fires add to unbearable summer heat.

¹⁸And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the Lord will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

¹⁹This shall be the punishment of Egypt, and the punishment of all nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

²⁰In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, Holiness Unto The Lord; and the pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar.

²¹Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.

God tested Himself and affirms that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah would be rebuilt!

Or, from the Message Bible

The Day Is Coming

^1-2Note well: God’s Judgment Day is on the way:
    “Plunder will be piled high and handed out.
I’m bringing all the godless nations
    to war against Jerusalem—
Houses plundered,
    women raped,
Half the city taken into exile,
    the other half left behind.”

^3-5But then God will march out against the godless nations and fight—a great war! That’s the Day he’ll take his stand on the Mount of Olives, facing Jerusalem from the east. The Mount of Olives will be split right down the middle, from east to west, leaving a wide valley. Half the mountain will shift north, the other half south. Then you will run for your lives down the valley, your escape route that will take you all the way to Azal. You’ll run for your lives, just as you ran on the day of the great earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah. Then my God will arrive and all the holy angels with him.

^6-7What a Day that will be! No more cold nights—in fact, no more nights! The Day is coming—the timing is God’s—when it will be continuous day. Every evening will be a fresh morning.

⁸What a Day that will be! Fresh flowing rivers out of Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea, half to the western sea, flowing year-round, summer and winter!

⁹God will be king over all the earth, one God and only one. What a Day that will be!

^10-11The land will stretch out spaciously around Jerusalem—to Geba in the north and Rimmon in the south, with Jerusalem towering at the center, and the commanding city gates—Gate of Benjamin to First Gate to Corner Gate to Hananel Tower to the Royal Winery—ringing the city full of people. Never again will Jerusalem be totally destroyed. From now on it will be a safe city.

^12-14But this is what will happen to all who fought against Jerusalem: God will visit them with a terrible plague. People’s flesh will rot off their bones while they are walking around; their eyes will rot in their sockets and their tongues in their mouths; people will be dying on their feet! Mass hysteria when that happens—total panic! Fellow soldiers fighting and killing each other—holy terror! And then Judah will jump into the fray!

^14-15Treasures from all the nations will be piled high—gold, silver, the latest fashions. The plague will also hit the animals—horses, mules, camels, donkeys. Everything alive in the military camps will be hit by the plague.

^16-19All the survivors from the godless nations that fought against Jerusalem will travel to Jerusalem every year to worship the King, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, and celebrate the Feast of Booths. If any of these survivors fail to make the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship the King, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, there will be no rain. If the Egyptians don’t make the pilgrimage and worship, there will be no rain for them. Every nation that does not go up to celebrate the Feast of Booths will be hit with the plague. Egypt and any other nation that does not make pilgrimage to celebrate the Feast of Booths gets punished.

^20-21On that Day, the Big Day, all the horses’ harness bells will be inscribed “Holy to God.” The cooking pots in the Temple of God will be as sacred as chalices and plates on the altar. In fact, all the pots and pans in all the kitchens of Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to God-of-the-Angel-Armies. People who come to worship, preparing meals and sacrifices, will use them. On that Big Day there will be no buying or selling in the Temple of God-of-the-Angel-Armies. Zechariah 14 MSG

And God had tested Himself and affirms that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah would be rebuilt!

Can any of your gods do as I did, throw an event in the future and bring it to fulfilment?

“Beware of False Prophets!”

Many false prophets have claimed that the prophecies written by the prophets are irrelevant because Israel sinned, and thus His plan was thwarted by a Great Satan.

They argue that God now has a Plan B; implying God’s original Plan couldn’t work; implying He had failed in His declaration of the end from the beginning.

Hence God issues His many rebukes:

And He said, “Hear now My words: If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will make Myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream.” Numbers 12:6

An astonishing and horrible thing is committed in the land:

The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and My people love to have it so. And what will ye do in the end thereof? Jeremiah 5:30-31

Then the Lord said unto me, “The prophets prophesy lies in My name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spoke unto them. They prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought and the deceit of their heart. Jeremiah 14:14

“For both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in My house have I found their wickedness,” saith the Lord.

“Therefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the darkness; they shall be driven on, and fall therein; for I will bring evil upon them, even the year of their visitation,” saith the Lord. Jeremiah 23:11-12

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: “Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you. They make you vain; they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. Jeremiah 23:16

O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ezekiel 13:3-4

The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly.

“I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran; I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.

But if they had stood in My counsel and had caused My people to hear My words, then they should have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their doings. Jeremiah 23:20-22

How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart. Jeremiah 23:26

Behold, I am against the prophets,” saith the Lord, “that use their tongues and say, ‘He saith.’

Behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams,” saith the Lord, “and do tell them, and cause My people to err by their lies and by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them. Therefore they shall not profit this people at all,” saith the Lord. Jeremiah 23:31-32

Thus saith the Lord God: Woe unto the foolish prophets, who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!

O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ezekiel 13:3-4

They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, “The Lord saith,” but the Lord hath not sent them; and they have made others to hope that they would confirm the word. Ezekiel 13:6

For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Let not your prophets and your diviners who are in the midst of you deceive you, neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed.

For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 29:8-9

Posted in Scriptures Studies

Isaiah (Ch 63-64)

•September 17, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Edom and Bozrah, the capital city of Idumea; these two bits of information provide further hints as to whom the characters are in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7 where the ‘Sword of the Lord’ are associated with the South.

Note: the Scriptures don’t say it is the ‘Sword of Edom or Bozrah’ but the ‘Sword of the Lord.’ Could this be a clear connection associating Edom and Idumea to the Sword of the Lord in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7?

Isaiah 63

¹ Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, this that is glorious in His apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? “I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.”

— that cometh from Edom; that is, Idumea, the country where Esau, sometimes called Edom; Edom had been guilty of ruthless atrocities (Amos 1:9-11); they had carried off Jewish prisoners as slaves (Obadiah 1:10-11); they had been allies of the Assyrian invaders (Psalm 83:6), and had smitten Judah in the days of Ahaz (II Chronicles 28:17);

— the Targum indicates using the Edom and Bozrah “to execute vengeance of judgement of His people” – his people, of course, is the house of Jacob;

— the words Edom and Bozrah may be taken in the appellative sense, to indicate in general, a field of blood, or a place of slaughter; the word Edom signifying red, and Bozrah a vintage; with dyed garments – that is, with garments dyed in blood, which in the prophetical idiom, imports God’s vengeance upon the wicked, his people;

— Bozrah, the capital city of Idumea; see further Isaiah 34:6, a parallel text where the ‘Sword of the Lord’ associated with both Edom and Bozrah are mentioned. Note: the Scriptures don’t say it is the ‘Sword of Edom or Bozrah’ but ‘Sword of the Lord.’ Could this be a clear connection to the Sword from the South in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:7?

² Why art thou red in Thine apparel, and Thy garments like him that treadeth in the wine vat?

— and thy garments like him that tread in the winefat? or winepress, into which clusters of grapes are cast, and these are trodden by men, the juice of which sparkles on their garments, and stains them, so that they become of a red colour.

³ “I have trodden the wine press alone; and of the people there was none with Me. For I will tread them in Mine anger and trample them in My fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon My garments, and I will stain all My raiment.

— God have trodden the wine-press alone; he has put on trial his people the house of Jacob; he has crushed them as grapes are crushed; Could this be a usual metaphor of Sword and Blood for both the house of Israel for 190 years and the house of Judah for 40 years in Ezekiel 4?

— perhaps the Orthodoxy (like Rashi) would have some merits if the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 relates to a suffering Jacob, incorporating wine pressing on them both; (190 years) for the house of Israel; and (40 years) for the house of Judah? (for more, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline)

⁴ For the day of vengeance is in Mine heart, and the year of My redeemed is come.

— the year of my redeemed; another rendering, is the year of my redemption:

— the red upon the clothes was the life-blood of the house of Jacob, which had spirted upon them and with which, as he, the Almighty God Yehovah, tread this wine-press, he had soiled all his garments.

⁵ And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold. Therefore Mine own arm brought salvation unto Me, and My fury, it upheld Me.

— and the Messiah looked, and there was none to help (compare Isaiah 5:2, “He looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes:” also Isaiah 41:28, “I beheld, and there was no man.”) God is represented as looking for and expecting what might reasonably have been expected, and even as surprised when he does not find it (compare Isaiah 59:16).

⁶ And I will tread down the people in Mine anger, and make them drunk in My fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.”

— make them drunk: the Hebrew often expresses calamities by a cup of wine, or strong drink, by which the distressed persons are made drunk, Psalm 75:8 Isaiah 51:21-22; they go as it were to and fro, not knowing what to do with themselves; and in special drunk with their own blood, Isaiah 49:26 Revelation 16:6.

— the Messiah will bring down their strength to the earth; whatever it is wherein their strength lies, their strong ones, or their strong places, or deep counsels; he will bring to the very dust, to nothing; like drunken men, they shall fall to the ground, not being able to stand; the most miserable condition that men can fall into, Psalm 36:12.

⁷ I will mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord, and the praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which He hath bestowed on them according to His mercies, and according to the multitude of His loving kindnesses.

— the Messiah will mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord; these are the words of the prophet Isaiah, great goodness towards the house of Israel, which he hath bestowed on them according to his mercies and kindnesses.

⁸ For He said, “Surely they are My people, children that will not lie”; so He was their Savior.

— the Messiah said, Surely they are my people. Israel was first recognized as “a people” in Egypt, when the creel Pharaoh said, “The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we“ Exodus 1:9; 3:7;

— children that will not lie; or deal falsely as the same word is translated in Psalm 44:17. The meaning is, that surely they will be faithful to God and not fall away from him into idolatry or irreligion, Isaiah 63:8.

⁹ In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity He redeemed them, and He bore them, and carried them all the days of old.

— in all their affliction he was afflicted; because of all the afflictions they endured in Egypt: this notes the sympathy that is in Christ; having the same spirit that the Father hath.

¹⁰ But they rebelled and vexed His holy Spirit; therefore He was turned to be their enemy, and He fought against them.

— but they rebelled against God; this charge is often made against the children of Israel; and indeed their history is little more than a record of a series of rebellions against God.

¹¹ Then He remembered the days of old, Moses and His people, saying, “Where is He that brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of His flock? Where is He that put His holy Spirit within him,

— the Targum paraphrases it, “he had compassion for the glory of his name, because of the remembrance of his goodness of old, the mighty works which he did by the hands of Moses for his people.”

¹² That led them by the right hand of Moses with His glorious arm, dividing the water before them to make Himself an everlasting name,

— that led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm; that is, through the Red sea: this was done by the right hand of Moses and the rod in it.

¹³ that led them through the deep, as a horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble?”

— that led them through the deep; the depths, the bottom of the sea; not through the shallow but where the waters had been deepest, the descent greatest; and at the bottom of which might have been expected much filth and dirt to hinder them in their passage, yet through this he led them.

¹⁴ As a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord caused him to rest; so didst Thou lead Thy people, to make Thyself a glorious name.

— the spirit of the Lord caused him to rest; or gently led him, that is, Israel, through the sea, with little danger as a beast walks on in a valley; this of leading Israel through the wilderness where often resting places were found for them and they were brought to the land of rest, Canaan, and settled there.

The Prayer of Isaiah

¹⁵ Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of Thy holiness and of Thy glory. Where is Thy zeal and Thy strength, the sounding of Thy heart and of Thy mercies toward me? Are they restrained?

— here begins a fervent prayer by Isaiah to God to pity Israel; look down from heaven, and behold; attributes the prevalence of evil on earth to a suspension of Yehovah’s watchfulness; hence he is said to come down from heaven to inquire (Genesis 18:21), or here, to look down.

¹⁶ Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us and Israel acknowledge us not. Thou, O Lord, art our father, our Redeemer; Thy name is from everlasting.

— doubtless thou art our Father: thus they urge God the Father, not the Son, with that relation he stands in unto them, Malachi 2:10; therefore we as thy children expect the bowels and compassions of a father.

¹⁷ O Lord, why hast Thou made us to err from Thy ways, and hardened our heart from Thy fear? Return for Thy servants’ sake, the tribes of Thine inheritance.

— O Lord, why hast thou made us with weak human nature to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? These are the words not of the wicked among the Jews but of the godly, lamenting and confessing their wandering from God’s ways, commands and ordinances, the hardness of their hearts.

¹⁸ The people of thy holiness have possessed it but a little while; our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary.

— the people of thy holiness; or thy holy people as being set apart for his servants; holiness being to be understood for a covenant separation from other people;

— have trodden down thy sanctuary; the Temple, called the sanctuary from the holiness of it; this our adversaries the Babylonians by Nebuchadnezzar, and later the Greeks by Antiochus, and the Romans by Titus have trodden down, II Chronicles 36:19.

¹⁹ We are Thine; Thou didst never bear rule over them; they were not called by Thy name.

— we are thy children, thy people, thy subject; we are in covenant which they never were; and over those whom thou hast not ruled from of old, as those upon whom thy name has not been called;

— thou never barest rule over them; not in that manner, or in that relation to them, that thou didst over us. They were not called by thy name; neither owned thee, nor owned by thee: this phrase implies a near relation in some circumstance or other as wife or servant or child.

Isaiah 64

¹ Oh, that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence

— O that thou wouldst rend the heavens, that thou wouldst come down; this is really a continuation of the prayer of Isaiah 63:15-19.

² as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil— to make Thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Thy presence!

— the Targum says, “as when thou send forth thine anger as fire in the days of Elijah, the sea was melted, the fire licked up the water to make Thy name known to the enemies of Thy people.”

³ When Thou didst fearsome things which we looked not for, Thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at Thy presence.

— when thou didst terrible things, which we don’t looked forward to, thou came down; referring to the wonderful things God did in Egypt, at the Red sea, and in the wilderness;

— and particularly at Mount Sinai, things that were unexpected, and not looked for; then the Lord came down, and made visible displays of his power and presence, especially on Mount Sinai; see Exodus 19:18.

⁴ For since the beginning of the world men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, besides thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him.

— neither hath the eye seen a God beside thee, who will work for him that waits for him; not that God alone knows what he hath prepared but that no man knows (sight and hearing being used as including all forms of spiritual apprehension) any god who does such great things as he does.

⁵ Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember Thee in Thy ways. Behold, Thou art wroth, for we have sinned; in those is continuance, and we shall be saved.

— thou meet him that rejoices and works righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou art angry; for we have sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved.

— from the Message Bible

Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at your presence— As when a forest catches fire, as when fire makes a pot to boil— To shock your enemies into facing you, make the nations shake in their boots! You did terrible things we never expected, descended and made the mountains shudder at your presence.

Since before time began no one has ever imagined, No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who happily do what is right, who keep a good memory of the way you work. But how angry you’ve been with us!

We’ve sinned and kept at it so long! Is there any hope for us? Can we be saved? We’re all sin-infected, sin-contaminated. Our best efforts are grease-stained rags. We dry up like autumn leaves— sin-dried, we’re blown off by the wind. No one prays to you or makes the effort to reach out to you Because you’ve turned away from us, left us to stew in our sins. Isaiah 64:4-6 MSG

⁶ But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

— and all our righteousness or justification are as filthy rags; as rags, they cannot cover us; as filthy rags, they would only defile us.

⁷ And there is none that calleth upon Thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of Thee; for Thou hast hid Thy face from us, and hast consumed us because of our iniquities.

— and hast consumed us because of our iniquities; by the sword, famine, pestilence and captivity.

⁸ But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our potter; and we all are the work of Thy hand.

— but now, O Lord, thou art our Father; notwithstanding all this, thou art our Father, having both created and adopted us; therefore pity us thy children; we are the clay, and thou our potter;

— we are in thy hands as clay in the hands of the potter: thou canst form us, and dispose of us as thou pleases. And we will not quarrel with thee, however thou art pleased to deal with us.

⁹ Be not sorely wroth, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for ever; behold, see, we beseech Thee, we are all Thy people.

— CEV Don’t be so furious or keep our sins in your thoughts forever! Remember that all of us are your people.

¹⁰ Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.

— thy holy cities; Zion and Jerusalem mentioned immediately after; called holy because they were built upon God’s inheritance and because his Shekinah were there.

¹¹ Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned up with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.

— is burnt up with fire; this is true, both of the first and second Temple; the first was burnt with fire by Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Jeremiah 52:13, and the second by the Romans under Titus in AD 70.

¹² Wilt Thou refrain Thyself for these things, O Lord? Wilt Thou hold Thy peace and afflict us very sore?

— wilt thou refrain thyself; wilt thou refuse to come to our aid? Wilt thou decline to visit us and save us from our calamities?

— wilt thou hold thy peace; wilt thou not speak for our rescue and command us to be delivered?

— from the Message Bible

Still, God, you are our Father. We’re the clay and you’re our potter: All of us are what you made us. Don’t be too angry with us, O God. Don’t keep a permanent account of wrongdoing. Keep in mind, please, we are your people—all of us.

Your holy cities are all ghost towns: Zion’s a ghost town, Jerusalem’s a field of weeds. Our holy and beautiful Temple, which our ancestors filled with your praises, Was burned down by fire, all our lovely parks and gardens in ruins.

In the face of all this, are you going to sit there unmoved, God? Aren’t you going to say something? Haven’t you made us miserable long enough? Isaiah 64:8-12 MSG

Posted in Isaiah

China-Russia Gas Pact Dealed?

•September 16, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China-Russia gas pact heightens Western sanctions risks

Pipeline deal reshapes Eurasian energy order as Beijing concedes on route for discounted gas, with operations expected by 2031–32

“The key reason China softened its stance this time is that Russia made an unprecedented price concession.”

AsiaTimes • September 13, 2025

The recent negotiation breakthrough for constructing the Power of Siberia 2, which will transport 50 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas to China via Mongolia annually, is expected to significantly change the geopolitical landscape and energy markets, according to Chinese and Western analysts.

On September 2, China, Russia and Mongolia signed a legally binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) to build the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline. The development signifies China’s acceptance of Russia’s proposal to route the pipeline through Mongolia, along with Russia’s agreement to offer China a discount on its natural gas.

Chinese commentators had in recent years complained that having the pipeline go through Mongolia would threaten China’s energy security as the landlocked country might lean to the West and shut down the pipeline at a critical moment. Now they praise this deal as a “win-win” for Beijing and Moscow.

“The biggest obstacles in the Power of Siberia 2 negotiations were the route selection and price agreement,” said Li Lifan, Director of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Research Centre at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “China and Russia eventually compromised, with China accepting the Mongolian route and Russia offering concessions on gas prices and transit fees.”

Li said the deal has strategic significance as it will raise total annual Russia-China gas trade to 106 billion cubic meters, about one-fifth of China’s current gas demand.

He highlighted three major benefits arising from this deal:

Broader energy cooperation: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s energy roadmap will expand beyond pipeline gas to include diversified energy sources, with future collaboration on liquefied natural gas also envisaged as a key component of China-Russia energy ties.
Economic gains for Mongolia: The pipeline will give Mongolia a vital opportunity to diversify its economy, bringing in lucrative transit fees, creating jobs, reducing air pollution and raising its geopolitical profile.
Geostrategic realignment: The pipeline is set to reshape the Eurasian energy map. Once it begins operation around 2031–2032, Russia will become China’s most crucial and reliable energy supplier.

He cautioned that the project still faces risks, citing possible Western influence and Mongolia’s “Third Neighbor” policy for building relationships with countries other than China and Russia. He added that cooperation among China, Russia and Mongolia could enhance regional stability and economic growth.

Why the deal happened

The signing of the MOU was first disclosed by Gazprom and Russian state media, which said Moscow had agreed to supply China with 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually via the new Power of Siberia 2 for 30 years. Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller told the news media that separate commercial arrangements were also reached to expand deliveries on existing routes.

Beijing has so far avoided directly commenting on the deal or releasing further details. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on September 2 that “China and Russia carry out practical cooperation in various areas, including energy, under the principles of mutual respect and mutual benefit.”

On September 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the China Victory Day parade in Beijing.

“If the gas becomes cheap enough, then using the Mongolian route makes economic sense.”

A Hebei-based energy columnist argues that China secured the upper hand in the negotiations because Russia was under mounting pressure from its faltering economy, Western sanctions and the protracted war in Ukraine.

“The key reason China softened its stance this time is that Russia made an unprecedented price concession,” the writer says. “If the gas becomes cheap enough, then using the Mongolian route makes economic sense.”

He also notes that this land route via Mongolia could lower potential geopolitical risks as it would allow China to reduce its heavy reliance on LNG shipments through the vulnerable Strait of Malacca. He says having a secure overland corridor is seen as a major strategic gain for China in today’s uncertain global environment.

“Russia guarantees that if Mongolia causes trouble, China will use an alternative route – Russia will shoulder the extra cost to redirect the gas via Kazakhstan,” a Hunan-based columnist known as “Little Jiaxin” writes. “With this fallback clause in place, China finally felt assured. Without it, the talks could never have progressed this far.”

She adds that this promise effectively removed the geopolitical risk that had haunted negotiations for over a decade.

Last year, China proposed a Kazakhstan route as an alternative, but Moscow saw it as too long and expensive compared with the shorter, cheaper Mongolian route.

Geopolitics and Western response

Some Western analysts say Beijing’s unwillingness to confirm the deal showed that the Chinese side is not in a hurry to reach a final agreement. However, some observers believe China is simply keeping a low profile to avoid Western sanctions and tariffs.

In fact, the Power of Siberia 2’s planned capacity of 50 billion cubic meters a year is similar to that of the now-defunct Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which once supplied Europe with 55 bcm annually.

Before invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia exported more than 150 bcm of gas to Europe each year through a web of major pipelines, including Nord Stream across the Baltic Sea, Yamal-Europe through Poland, TurkStream under the Black Sea and the older transit route via Ukraine.

After the invasion, Germany has halted the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have doubled direct Russian gas flows to Germany to 110 bcm per year. The EU has slashed its reliance on Russian energy. As a result, EU imports of Russian gas fell from 150 bcm in 2021 to 52 bcm last year, with the share of Russian gas in Europe’s energy mix collapsing from 45% to 19%.

The decline has prompted Moscow to pivot east, primarily toward China. Beijing welcomes cheap gas, but it does not want to upset the EU, which suffers from high energy and defense costs due to a prolonged Ukraine war.

The latest Power of Siberia 2 deal came after US President Donald Trump last month pushed for a ceasefire deal between Moscow and Kyiv. Trump also imposed a 25% tariff on India for its purchases of Russian oil. The US did not do the same to China, as both sides were negotiating chip and rare earth supply deals.

Two analysts from the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center — Joseph Webster and Landon Derentz — co-write that the Power of Siberia 2 deal could undermine Western efforts to contain Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“China is Russia’s most important trade partner and provides indispensable defense industrial base support to Moscow,” they wrote. “Any further natural gas tie-in risks prolonging the war in Ukraine by sustaining Russia’s economy and bolstering Putin politically.”

They say “the United States and its European allies should jointly consider targeted secondary sanctions against Russian energy companies, Chinese firms aiding the Russian war effort, or both.”

Meanwhile, US officials have reportedly signalled that Washington will urge G7 partners to consider imposing sweeping tariffs of 50% to 100% on both Chinese and Indian purchases of Russian oil, seeking to curtail the energy revenues sustaining Moscow’s war effort.

Posted in China, Russia

Isaiah (Ch 61-62)

•September 15, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The Scriptures are often shrouded in cryptic languages and most Jews could not see the working of God’s providence in the revelation of the Messiah in the chapters here, or in the revelation to which he came to restore all the nations back to God.

Our challenge is to de-crypt them, especially as it relates to the latter days, our days.

Typically, a prophecy begins with the house of Judah or Jerusalem, then to the house of Israel, eventually encompassing prophecies concerning the surrounding nations.

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

“In latter days you will understand it fully,” that is, this means as a whole, we wouldn’t understand these prophecies until we’re living in the latter days, soon to be our days, after God had executed his judgement in anger and performed the thoughts of his heart; only then could we understand fully!

Isaiah 61

¹ “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound,

— we ask, “Who is the speaker?” – this refers to the Messiah is abundantly proved by the fact that the Lord Yeshua expressly applied it to himself (see Luke 4:16-21, also at the end);

— if Isaiah was the speaker, he was just a forerunner because his role in proclaiming the good tidings, etc, was limited;

— he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted; whose hearts are smitten and made contrite by the Word of God, and are truly humbled under a sense of sin; who are cut to the heart, have wounded spirits; these Christ binds up, by speaking comfortably to them;

— by applying his blood; by discovering the free and full pardon of their sins; and for this, as Mediator, he had a mission and commission from his Father; he came not of himself, but he sent him:

— to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to such who were captives to sins and as it were prisoners to them, shut up by them, and in them, and held fast there;

— but Christ, the Messiah as he is the author of liberty; obtains it for his people and makes them free with it a liberty from sin, or as of prisoners from the prison house.

² To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn,

— to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord; the allusion is to the proclamation of liberty, in the year of jubilee when the trumpet was blown, and liberty was proclaimed throughout all the land (see Leviticus 25:9-10);

— Jesus or Yeshua the Messiah stopped before mentioning the days of vengeance, Luke 21:22, which calls for the destruction of Jerusalem. Perhaps there was a delay of 40 years when the Romans came and surrounded the City, then its capture and inferno in AD 70;

— but who escaped destruction and death? History recorded only two sects that escaped the inferno of AD 70:

(1) The Christians, known as Nazarenes in Acts 24:5. They escaped to a northern town called Pella, west of the Jordan River.

(2) Some Pharisees, those of the House of Hillel. They were headed by a Pharisaic rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, the head of the Sanhedrin, who was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin.

These Pharisees escaped to Yavne and established the Hillel Calendar, which was revealed by Hillel II in about AD 359 concerning the rules of the calendar. Later, they re-emerged and are now known as Rabbinic Jews.

— all other sects of the Jews faced their days of vengeance and disappeared in the AD 70 inferno: all Sadducees, Herodians, Boethusians, Essenes, together with the House of Shammai Pharisees and those of its military arm, the Zealots. They all faced their days of judgement and disappeared from history. Were they receiving a similar “fire” as those facing Sodom and Gomorrah?

³ To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.”

— to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion; or “to the mourners of Zion” those who are of Zion and mourn for the corruptions in Zion’s false doctrines, their perversion, abuse and neglect of God’s statutes and ordinances; for the disorders and divisions they cause; and the power of godliness;

— trees of righteousness; in Hebrew, ‘Oaks,’ by their being oaks of righteousness is a metaphor meant a people standing up and distinguished for righteousness or justice; instead of being subjected to money, wealth and bowing down as a reed to corruption, wickedness and sin.

⁴ And they shall build the wastes of old, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.

— during the Millennium the waste places of olden time: that is, not merely the cities that had fallen into ruins during the exile, but those that had been lying waste for lack of industrial activities; and of street violence, will be revived back into life.

⁵ And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.

— strangers will be very helpful, like servants waiting for their master’s orders; that Israel is raised to the dignity of a priestly caste, leaving the rough work of the world to be done by foreigners, who stood on a lower level, and always offering to help;

— one Report by McKinsey says of the 60 millions Latinos in the US that had migrated from the South; they often live in ‘deserts’ where adequate housing, groceries are hard to find. “Nearly 9 in 10 of the Latino residents in such communities lived in five states: California, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Texas.”

— McKinsey: Latinos are projected to make up 22.4 percent of the US labor force by 2030 and more than 30 percent by 2060 (Latinos population to 111.2 million by ’60).

⁶ But ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord; men shall call you the Ministers of our God. Ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.

— but ye, the children of Israel; as contrasted with the “strangers.” Ye shall have no need to attend to your flocks and lands: strangers will do that for you; your exclusive business will be the service of Yehovah as his “priests” – Exodus 19:6 remains yet to be realized.

⁷ For your shame ye shall have double, and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion. Therefore in their land they shall possess the double; everlasting joy shall be unto them.

— for your shame ye shall have double: because you had experienced double dose of troubles and more than your share of contempt, your inheritance in the land will be doubled and your joy go on forever.

⁸ “For I, the Lord, love judgement; I hate robbery for burnt offering; and I will direct their work in truth, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

— I hate robbery for burnt-offerings; I hate anything begotten by injustice, though they be for offering. As God will not accept of that which cost nothing, so much less of that which is the effect of rapine and oppression.

⁹ And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles and their offspring among the people; all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.”

— anyone that see the seed of Abraham shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed; that they are the spiritual seed as well as his carnal seed and are blessed with him.

¹⁰ I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall be joyful in my God. For He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation; He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.

— I will greatly rejoice; the speaker is again as in Isaiah 61:1 the ideal Servant of Yehovah, Isaiah, as well as the Messiah, who identifies himself with the people and slaves;

— the Targum, it may be noted, makes Jerusalem the speaker: “Jerusalem shall say, I will greatly rejoice in the Word of the Lord.”

¹¹ For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.

— the Targum says, “thus the Lord God shall reveal the righteousness and the praise of Jerusalem before all the nations.”

~~~

Luke 4

¹⁶ And He came to Nazareth where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read.
¹⁷ And there was delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written:
¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He hath sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
¹⁹ to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”
²⁰ And He closed the book, and He gave it again to the minister and sat down. And the eyes of all those who were in the synagogue were fastened on Him.
²¹ And He began to say unto them, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

Isaiah 62

¹ For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.

— for Zion’s sake; opinions differ as to the speaker. Is he the prophet Isaiah, or the Servant, Yeshua, or the Lord, Yehovah Himself? On the whole, the second view seems to be most in harmony with what follows:

— the true Servant, the Messiah, will carry his mediatorial intercessory work, that there may be no delay in the fulfilment of the glorious promises of redemption that have just been uttered.

² And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory; and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name.

— after being sanctified, the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and thou shall be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name thee; a renewed one, a name which shall be of significance.

³ Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God.

— and a royal diadem; in Hebrew, ‘diadem of a kingdom.’ The diadem is the wreath or chaplet, usually set with diamonds, which is “encircled” (צניף tsânı̂yph from צנף tsânaph) to roll or wind around to encircle) around the head;

— here it means such as was usually worn by monarchs; and the sense is that Jerusalem would become exceedingly beautiful in the sight of God.

⁴ Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzibah and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.

— thou, Jerusalem, shalt no more be termed Forsaken; as a woman forsaken by her husband. Neither shall thy land be termed Desolate; neither shall thy places of worship be empty, and thine ordinances of service be unfrequented. He alludes to the desolation of Jerusalem and Judah during the Babylon captivity.

⁵ For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee; and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.

— as a young man, having married a virgin, possesses and enjoys her and lives and dwells with her in great harmony and love, having a delight and complacency in her, there being a suitableness in her person and age.

⁶ “I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, who shall never hold their peace day nor night.” Ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence,

— O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen upon thy walls as the prophets of the Old Testament are called (Ezekiel 3:17; 33:2,7); pastors and ministers in the New Testament often come with misguided observations and doctrines;

— parallel Scriptures in Ezekiel 34: And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy and say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds: Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?”

⁷ and give Him no rest till He establish, and till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

— till the Messiah makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth; that it may be the subject of universal commendation and rejoicing, instead of being an object of reproach and scorn.

⁸ The Lord hath sworn by His right hand and by the arm of His strength: “Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine for which thou hast labored;

— surely I, the Lord Yehovah, will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the strangers shall not drink thy wine, for thou hast laboured: this was threatened to the people of Israel, in case of sinning against God, and revolting from him; and was accomplished in the times of their captivity in Babylon, Deuteronomy 28:33.

⁹ but they that have gathered it shall eat it and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of my holiness.”

— but they that have gathered it shall eat it; so that every man may enjoy the avails of his own labor: that every man may securely enjoy the avails of his own labor.

¹⁰ Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people. Cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people.

— go through, go through the gates; it is doubled by way of emphasis: make haste to your own land; as if Cyrus should say, Get you out of captivity as soon as you will, Isaiah 48:20.

— the Targum:

“O prophets, pass through and return through the gates; turn the heart of the people to the right way; bring good things of good things, and comforts to the righteous, who remove the thoughts of an evil imagination, which are like a stone of stumbling; lift up a sign for the people.”

¹¹ Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world: “Say ye to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his reward is with Him, and His work before Him.’”

— behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world; so it will be in the latter day when the truth shall be preached to all nations, from one end of the world to the other, Revelation 14:6;

— the word ‘behold’ is three times used in this verse, to raise attention to what is said, and as pointing out something wonderful, and to express the certainty of it.

¹² And they shall call them the Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord; and thou shalt be called Sought Out, a City Not Forsaken.

— the prophecy close by returning to a direct address to Zion-Jerusalem – “thee will men call derūshâh,” sought assiduously, that is, one whose welfare the Lord God are zealously concerned to promote (the same emphasis in Jeremiah 30:17);

— “a city that will not be forsaken,” that is, Jerusalem, a city men will gladly be resettled, and which will never be without inhabitants again.

Posted in Isaiah

Isaiah (Ch 59-60)

•September 14, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Not many people want to keep the feast of Tabernacles during this time; some seen it only as voluntary, but during the Millennium the feast of Tabernacles, together with all the other feasts, would be enforced throughout all the nations.

Zechariah 14:16 And it shall come to pass that every one who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem, shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

¹⁷ And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain. Zechariah 14:16-17

Isaiah 59

¹ Behold, the Lord’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear.

— behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened; he is not grown weaker than informer times, but is as omnipotent as ever he was; neither his ear heavy; or dull of hearing: he is not like your idol gods that have hands and cannot help, and ears and cannot hear.

² But your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.

— but your iniquities have separated; have been as a thick wall between you and your God; and have set him at a distance from you.

³ For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness.

— your hands are defiled with blood: here the prophet comes from a more general to a particular charge against them; by blood we are to understand either murders and bloodshed properly so called; or ways of injustice, extortion, oppression and cruelties, whereby men are deprived of a livelihood;

— your lips have spoken lies: or “falsehood” that is, false doctrines so called because contrary to the word of truth and which deceive men: like misplacing the Messiah in Isaiah 52:13 as Jacob in place of the Moshiach or Saviour, our Redeemer; willfully misidentifying the Suffering Servant by having their tongue muttering perverseness so as to make God’s revelation of no effect;

— that the lamb for Pascha was/is an act of defiance to the Egyptians who regarded lamb as the Egyptians’ deity, rather than a symbol of the death of the Messiah, our Moshiach or Saviour, our Redeemer;

— but the Orthodoxy still regard it only as an act of defiance to the Egyptians god, the Ram-god Khnum; the Scriptures nowhere say this, but is only a baloney figment of Jewish imagination, another muttered perverseness.

⁴ None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth; they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity.

— none calleth for justice; none seek to redress these wrongs and violences; they commit all rapines and frauds with impunity; they trust in vanity; in vain and empty words, void of all consistency; or in vain things such as their idols were often called vanity and nothing;

— and speak lies; this may refer to the judges, lawyers and false prophets, who told them they should not go into captivity; or teach false doctrines:

— the house of Israel is still indulging in lies, they conceive mischief; worshipping Easter, Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon;

— and worshipping Mithra or Mitra (the Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th but repackaged and christianised such idolatry as Christian in their mischief), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the god of heaven; and men shall worship these earthly gods, acknowledging their supremacy, everyone from his place today, Protestants or Catholics alike.

A adder snake; young are born, but here they have eggs!

⁵ They hatch adders’ eggs and weave the spider’s web; he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. — Jewish Seder always have a egg; something that could not be derived from the Scriptures!

— they hatch cockatrice’ eggs; or a poisonous serpent’s; they contrive and execute wicked purposes and practices whereby sure and sudden destruction is brought upon themselves and others. Of the cockatrice or basilisk, one kind is put for any venomous creature;

— spider’s web; this refers not to the spider’s web being made to entrap; “Come to my parlour,” the spider says from her web to the butterfly, “come”

— their wicked plans resembled the egg of the serpent: the nature of the egg cannot be easily known by an inspection. It may have a strong resemblance to those produce by some useful animals; it is only when it is hatched that its true nature is known. So it is with the plans of the wicked: when forming, their true nature and character may not be known;

— the speech is proverbial, signifying by these eggs mischievous designs; or that this figurative expression is designed to show the evil nature and tendency of their works; like Pascha for the Egyptian’s Ram-god Khnum discussed above;

— that which is crushed; the egg, when it is broken, breaketh out as a viper; their plans, however specious in their undeveloped form like the egg, its deadly nature will more clearly manifested when crushed;

Jewish Seder always have a harmless egg! But not supported by Scriptures!

— he that eateth of their eggs dieth; the serpents referred to above are among the most venomous and destructive that are known; hence those who partake in the true nature and symbol of the egg are seen as ruinous, pernicious, and evil; and thus has a death penalty (for more, see at the end).

⁶ Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works; their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands.

— their webs shall not become garments; the spider’s web is unfit for clothing, or be of any real value or utility; that their works are as unfit to secure salvation as the attenuated web of a spider is for raiment;

— their works are works of iniquity: even their best works are sinful; not only as being imperfect and having a mixture of sin in them and so filthy rags; and the act of violence is in their hands; they persecuting such that preach and profess the contrary.

⁷ Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths.

— their feet run to evil; make haste to commit all manner of evils, and with great eagerness and swiftness, taking delight and pleasure therein and continuing in it; it is their course of life;

— and they make haste to shed innocent blood: in wars abroad or at home, in quarrels and riots, or through the heat of persecution; which if it does not directly touch men’s lives,

— yet issues in the death of many that fall under the power of it; as in Iraq (under the pretext of getting rid of WMD); and Afghanistan (to bring peace and democracy there), killing millions along the way.

⁸ The way of peace they know not, and there is no judgement in their goings; they have made them crooked paths; whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.

— there is no judgement in their deeds: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace; they are of such turbulent spirits, living in such continual contentions and discords.

⁹ Therefore is judgement far from us, neither doth justice overtake us; we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness.

— therefore is judgement far from us; because we have no regard for justice or honesty, God will not plead our cause against our oppressors; neither doth justice overtake us;

— he does not defend our rights, nor avenge our wrongs; as if he had said, If we had executed justice and equity among one another, he would not have been far from us;

— we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness; or “for brightnesses” for much clear light; the Targum says, for brightness, but behold, we are walking in obscurity.

¹⁰ We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

— we grope for the wall like the blind; a blind man, not being able to see his way, feels along by a wall, a fence or any other object that will guide him. They were like the blind; they had no distinct views of truth and they were endeavoring to feel their way along as well as they could;

— probably the prophet Isaiah here alludes to the threatening made by Moses in Deuteronomy 28:28-29, ‘And the Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart; and thou shalt grope at noon-day as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways.’

— we are in desolate places as dead men; or in fat places, dead in trespasses and sin and at most have only a name to live but are dead. Some render it, “in the graves” and the Targum says

“We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes : we stumble at noonday as those that stumble in the dark; it is shut up before graves are shut up before the dead.” Isaiah 51:10 Jonathan

¹¹ We all roar like bears, and mourn sore like doves; we look for judgement, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us.

— we roar all like bears; a heavy judgements awaits which could come upon them for their sins. The word rendered here ‘roar’ – to hum, spoken of bees, is applied to any murmuring or confused noise or sound. It sometimes means to snarl as a dog;

— mourns like doves in solitude: this expresses the secret groanings under a sense of sin, and the forlorn state of religion. The Targum paraphrases it thus, “We all roar like bears by reason of our enemies, who are gathered against us, and mourn like doves.”

¹² For our transgressions are multiplied before Thee, and our sins testify against us. For our transgressions are with us, and as for our iniquities, we know them:

— for our transgressions; the word פשׁעונו here signifies sins of a high nature, namely, such as were wilfully committed against light and knowledge; rebellious sins;

— are multiplied before thee; they admit of no excuse; for they are committed before thee, and multiplied against thee, whereby thou art justly provoked to deny us all help; as for our iniquities, we know them; we are convinced of them; our guilty consciences must own and acknowledge them.

¹³ in transgressing and lying against the Lord, and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood.

— in transgressing; that is, we have been guilty of this as a continuous act; and lying against the Lord; we have proved false to God; though we have been professedly his people;

— yet we have been secretly attached to idols, and have in our hearts been devoted to the service of false gods. And departing away from our God; by the worship of idols, and by the violation of his law.

¹⁴ And judgement is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.

— and judgement is turned away backward; the word ‘judgement’ is used in the sense of justice, or lust decisions between man and man; they acknowledged that they had been influenced by partiality and by bribes; they had condemned the innocent, they had acquitted the guilty.

¹⁵ Yea, truth faileth, and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey. And the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgement.

— yea, truth fails; that is, it is not to be found, it is missing; it means that truth had no existence there; and he that departs from evil makes himself a prey; he that does not give in to the prevailing vices of the age in which he lives, now become fashionable;

— but abstains from them, and departs from doctrinal as well as practical evils; from all false doctrines, and from all superstitious modes of worship; becomes a prey to others; a reproach and a laughing stock to them; they scoff at him, and deride him for his preciseness in religion;

— and the Lord saw it and it displeased him that there was no judgement; he took notice of all this and resented it that there was no judgement; no order or discipline observed; that are simple and innocent are outwitted by the crafty and fraudulent;

— that they are not willing, or rather daring, to oppose fraud with justice and to do all things in sincerity; that no justice done to evil teachings or punishments from the civil courts.

¹⁶ And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore his arm brought salvation unto Him, and his righteousness, it sustained Him.

— and he saw that there was no man; that is, no wise and prudent man qualified to govern the affairs of the people. Or, that there was no man qualified to interpose and put an end to these evils; no one qualified to save the nation from the calamities which their sins deserved.

¹⁷ For He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon His head; and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloak.

— for he put on righteousness as a breastplate; here the Lord is represented as a warrior clothed with armour, and as he will appear in the latter day on the behalf of his people, and against their enemies, who is called faithful and true and in righteousness will make war;

— and was clad with zeal as a cloak; with zeal for his own glory, and the interest of his people and against all enemies against all pagan worship and false doctrines; and therefore his eyes are said to be as a flame of fire and vengeance against the foes of God at his second coming.

¹⁸ According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay, fury to His adversaries, recompense to His enemies; to the islands He will repay recompense.

— according to their deeds, accordingly he will repay; as the enemies of his people have treated them, so will the Lord deal with them; as they have shed their blood, he will, according to the laws of retribution and retaliation, give them blood to drink, as they deserve.

¹⁹ So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west and His glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.

— fear the name of the Lord; as hath been often showed, the fear to make his name renowned; from the west, viz. the western part of the world; His glory, or the glorious God; from the rising of the sun, viz. the eastern parts of the world;

— the whole world, the one half will be east and the other west; it shall fear and worship God, and make his name renowned, laying aside their idolatries; whether they refer it to the deliverance of his people out of Babylon, when they shall hear how God hath executed vengeance on his enemies; or to the redemption of the house of Jacob, and the calling of the Gentiles.

²⁰ “And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob,” saith the Lord.

— the Targum says, “and the Redeemer [the Messiah] shall come to Zion and to turn the transgressors of the house of Jacob to the law.”

²¹ “As for me, this is my covenant with them,” saith the Lord; “My spirit that is upon thee, and My words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed,” saith the Lord, “from henceforth and for ever.”

— the Targum interprets this of the words of prophecy; and of the law not departing from the disciples of wise men; but it is best to understand it of the truth not departing from all the elects and the seed of the elect.

~~~~

The adders’ eggs and the spider’s web!

(a) the Seder plate always has an egg!

In addition to the paschal lamb, the Seder has the matzah and maror (bitter herbs), but they also has an egg (Beitza), and as such tradition, their practice couldn’t be found or based on any of the Scriptures.

Here, Chabad offers many explanations as to why they have an egg on the Seder plate, but none sound convincing nor any come from the Scriptures; it’s more like the lying tongues of their scribes trying to justify a pagan practice adopted from neighbouring countries:

“‘You keep saying, “We have the Lord’s teachings. So we are wise!” But this is not true, because the scribes have lied with their pens” Jeremiah 8:8. — it is more lying with their tongues in this instance

(b) Easter Eggs – On the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, a celebration was made—it was Ishtar (Easter) Sunday. It was celebrated with rabbits and eggs—symbols of fertility.

From the overview of the roots of Easter, Easter eggs were dyed with the blood of infants sacrificed to gods in the temple of Ishtar by their priests. Easter eggs: the symbol of the fertility and rebirth of life; reference to woman’s reproduction and infant sacrifices to their gods. It is full of deception; nothing about Easter is harmless.

Isaiah 60

¹ Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. — whose light? without a subject “Arise, shine,” seems incomplete;

— arise, shine; the Targum and Septuagint add, “O Jerusalem” and no doubt but the kingdom of God centered in Jerusalem is addressed, composed of first the Jews (all other Israelites included) and Gentiles added later.

² For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee.

— for, behold, darkness and idolatry had covered the earth; ignorance and all kinds of errors and vices; like that of Egypt; the most palpable blindness and infatuation as to divine things.

³ And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

— and Gentiles shall come to thy light; or shall be allured by thy light to come to thee, as travellers in a dark night and out of their way when a light discovers itself make to it; and wish them much joy but shall rejoice to participate with them in their happiness.

⁴ “Lift up thine eyes round about and see; all they gather themselves together, they come to thee; thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.

— the Targum says, “lift up thine eyes O Jerusalem, round about, and see all the children of the people of thy captivity . . . thy sons shall come from far into thy midst”

— all they gather themselves and come to thee: this seems to have respect not just the Jews but all other Israelites themselves who are scattered up and down the world; and now shall gather together in a body and go up to Jerusalem, where they will go to keep the feast of tabernacles, Zechariah 14:16-21; followed by all the nations:

Zechariah 14:16 And it shall come to pass that every one who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem, shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

¹⁷ And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain.

¹⁸ And if the family of Egypt go not up and come not, upon whom there is no rain, there shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite the heathen who come not up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

¹⁹ This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all nations that come not up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

²⁰ In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses: “Holiness Unto The Lord.” And the pots in the Lord’S house shall be like the bowls before the altar;

²¹ yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts, and all those who sacrifice shall come and take of them and boil therein. And in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts. Zechariah 14:16-21

⁵ Then thou shalt see and flow together, and thine heart shall fear and be enlarged, because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the wealth of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.

— at the onset of the Millennium, the forces of the Gentiles shall pay homage unto thee with their wealth; not only kings, their generals, their armies, but common people; as well as their merchants; coming with tributes; the Targum says “the treasures of the nations shall be brought unto thee.”

⁶ The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come; they shall bring gold and incense, and they shall show forth the praises of the Lord.

— Midian was the fourth son of Abraham and Keturah Genesis 25:2, and was the father of the Midianites, riding on dromedaries (camels), paying homage with gold and incense.

⁷ All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee; they shall come up with acceptance on Mine altar, and I will glorify the house of My glory. — Kedar, in Genesis 25:13, among the descendants of Ishmael; coming with rams as tributes.

⁸ “Who are these that fly as a cloud and as the doves to their windows?

— so numerous in multitudes that they appear as flying as a dense cloud; and leading to the question, Who can they be? It is not uncommon to compare a multitude of persons to a cloud.

⁹ Surely the isles shall wait for Me—and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because He hath glorified thee.

— surely the isles shall wait for me; the Targum says, “wait for my Word,” the Messiah and his coming; the isles of Great Britain may be intended, who, as they waited for his Kingdom and readily received it as soon as it was brought to them which was very early;

— so there are many now waiting for the coming of the Messiah and his glory in the latter day and perhaps in other parts of the world.

¹⁰ “And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee; for in My wrath I smote thee, but in My favor have I had mercy on thee.

— for in my wrath I smote thee for the children of Jacob’s rejection of the prophets and the Messiah; wrath came upon them to the uttermost, upon their city, Temple, nation and to each of their destructions.

¹¹ Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night, that men may bring unto thee the wealth of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.

— thy gates shall be open continually; it implies a Millennium setting (1) a state of peace in which there would be no danger of attack; and (2) the constant stream of caravans of pilgrims, with their offerings and tributes entering by night as well as day.

¹² For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.

— the Targum says: for the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee, O Jerusalem, shall perish; yea, those nations shall utterly be destroyed;

— given that the Gentiles have their chance of repentance at the onset of the Millennium, yet repent not, they would be destined for destruction.

¹³ The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together to beautify the place of My sanctuary; and I will make the place of My feet glorious.

— Lebanon would come with their fir and pine trees as tributes; the new Jerusalem would see a revival of the glories of the days of Solomon. The cedars of Lebanon, and other trees of the forest, are to furnish timber for its buildings or even to be planted in the courts of the Temple or in its open places and streets;

— the place of my feet is clearly parallel with the “sanctuary” of the previous clause; so the word “footstool” is used of the Temple in Psalms 99:5; 132:7.

¹⁴ The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee, and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

— during the Millennium, the sons of these neighbouring countries; that is, even their descendants who had oppressed thee would become tributary to you; shall come bending unto thee; in a posture of humiliation and respect.

¹⁵ “Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.

— reflecting back that thou hast been forsaken, hated; the forsaking here refers to the various calamities, persecutions and trials, which you, the children of Jacob, had been called to endure;

— so that no man went through thee; when the country was desolate and abandoned that no travellers from one part of it to another or made it a thoroughfare in going to other lands.

¹⁶ Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings; and thou shalt know that I the Lord, am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

— or with reference of bring tributes to Jacob’s posterity; these things will certainly be accomplished; for he is the mighty God, and so able; and the God of Jacob, so obliged by covenant and relation.

— the mighty one of Jacob; styled with reference to Jacob as a person, after his posterity had been sanctified and gave God this title, Genesis 49:24.

¹⁷ “For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood, brass, and for stones, iron. I will also make thy officers peace and thine exactors righteousness.

— during the Millennium the Gentiles will bring gold instead of brass: thy poverty shall be turned to riches, all things shall be altered for the best as the days of Solomon, when gold was as brass.

¹⁸ Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation and thy gates Praise.

— violence shall no more be heard; neither the threats and triumphs of those that do violence, nor the outcries and complaints of those that suffer it, shall be heard again, but every man shall peaceably enjoy his own.

¹⁹ The sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

— the sun shall be no more thy light; the light of the sun and moon shall not be at all esteemed in comparison of the light of the Kingdom, which shall be so glorious as to eclipse all the light formerly enjoyed by her, the divine glory and majesty.

²⁰ Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

— the Targum says, “thy kingdom shall cease no more and thy glory shall not be removed.”

²¹ Thy people also shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of My planting, the work of My hands, that I may be glorified.

— that God would be glorified, and many beings made glorious by him; when people are made pure and happy as the result of his purposes and plans.

²² A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation; I, the Lord, will hasten it in his time.”

— during the Millennium a little one shall become a thousand; there shall be a great increase, as if one and that the smallest should be multiplied to a thousand;

— his time; not our time; we might wish to hasten it but it will come in due time as in the case of the Messiah’s first and second comings; so in that of the restoration of Israel and the conversion of the world in his time.

Posted in Isaiah

Our Human Potential

•September 13, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Wherefore, Paul says the trials and sufferings in this life are truly not worthy to be compared with the glorious future in God’s Kingdom and enjoying eternity with this great inheritance as His beloved children!

Paul describes it best, “But as Scripture says: ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined, the things that God has prepared for those who love him’” (1 Corinthians 2:9, God’s Word Translation).

He now goes to the outer reaches of spiritual knowledge, saying: “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing [the resurrection] of the sons of God. For the creation [or Universe] was subjected to futility [decay], not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption [or uselessness] into the glorious liberty of the children of God [who will help renew it]” (Romans 8:19-21).

As far as we know about cosmology, our solar system and the 5,830 exoplanets so far found are in need of renovation, for none is ready to be inhabited. It appears that Lucifer’s rebellion caused great havoc when he attempted to dethrone God in heaven and was cast back to the earth. As Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18, see also Isaiah 14:12-15).

This destruction will be repaired once God’s Kingdom arrives, which begins first by renewing the earth (Acts 3:21), and then the rest of the Universe. Romans 8:22-23 adds: “We know that everything in the universe is still in great pain now. Everything cries together in pain, like a woman who is ready to have a baby. It is the same for us who are believers. We have received God’s Spirit as the first of his gifts to us, but we also cry inside ourselves. We are waiting for the time when God will finish his great work. Then we will belong to Him completely as his children. Our bodies will be free from the power of sin” (EASY version).

Posted in Scriptures Studies

Forbes’ top 50 richest people in the US

•September 12, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The top 50 richest people in the US, according to Forbes

Forbes’ 2025 list of the 400 richest Americans was formed using estimates of each person’s wealth as of Sept. 1, according to the magazine.

USA Today, September 9, 2025: Here’s a look at the top 50:

Rank	Name	Net Worth	Age	Source	State
1	Elon Musk	$428 billion	54	Tesla, SpaceX	Texas
2	Larry Ellison	$276 billion	81	Oracle	California
3	Mark Zuckerberg	$253 billion	41	Facebook	California
4	Jeff Bezos	$241 billion	61	Amazon	Florida
5	Larry Page	$179 billion	52	Google	California
6	Sergey Brin	$166 billion	52	Google	California
7	Steve Ballmer	$153 billion	69	Microsoft	Washington
8	Jensen Huang	$151 billion	62	Semiconductors	California
9	Warren Buffett	$150 billion	95	Berkshire Hathaway	Nebraska
10	Michael Dell	$129 billion	60	Dell Technologies	Texas
11	Rob Walton & family	$118 billion	80	Walmart	Arkansas
12	Jim Walton & family	$115 billion	77	Walmart	Arkansas
13	Michael Bloomberg	$109 billion	83	Bloomberg LP	New York
14	Bill Gates	$107 billion	69	Microsoft	Washington
15	Alice Walton	$106 billion	75	Walmart	Texas
16	Julia Koch & family	$81.2 billion	63	Koch, Inc.	New York
17	Charles Koch & family	$73.8 billion	89	Koch, Inc.	Kansas
18	Thomas Peterffy	$73.3 billion	80	Discount brokerage	Florida
19	Jeff Yass	$65.7 billion	67	Trading, investments	Pennsylvania
20	Stephen Schwarzman	$51.9 billion	78	Investments	New York
21	Ken Griffin	$50.4 billion	56	Hedge funds	Florida
22	Jacqueline Mars	$42.2 billion	85	Candy, pet food	Virginia
22	John Mars	$42.2 billion	89	Candy, pet food	Wyoming
24	Lukas Walton	$39.8 billion	38	Walmart	Illinois
25	Miriam Adelson & family	$37.9 billion	79	Casinos	Nevada
26	Phil Knight & family	$35.7 billion	87	Nike	Oregon
27	Abigail Johnson	$35 billion	63	Fidelity	Massachusetts
28	MacKenzie Scott	$33.9 billion	55	Amazon	Washington
29	Marilyn Simons & family	$32.5 billion	74	Hedge funds	New York
30	Thomas Frist, Jr. & family	$32.4 billion	87	Hospitals	Tennessee
31	Len Blavatnik	$31 billion	68	Music, chemicals
32	Elaine Marshall & family	$30.9 billion	83	Koch Inc.	Texas
33	Melinda French Gates	$29 billion	61	Microsoft, investments	Washington
34	Henry Samueli	$27.7 billion	70	Semiconductors	California
35	Lyndal Stephens Greth & family	$27.4 billion	50	Oil & gas	Texas
36	Eric Schmidt	$26.8 billion	70	Google	California
37	Daniel Gilbert	$26.7 billion	63	Rocket Mortgage	Michigan
38	Rupert Murdoch & family	$24.1 billion	94	Newspapers, TV network	New York
39	Robert Pera	$24 billion	47	Wireless networking	California
40	Peter Thiel	$23.9 billion	57	Facebook, investments	California
41	David Tepper	$23.7 billion	67	Hedge funds	Florida
42	Ernest Garcia, II.	$23.1 billion	68	Used cars	Arizona
43	Steve Cohen	$23 billion	69	Hedge funds	Connecticut
44	Diane Hendricks	$22.3 billion	78	Building supplies	Wisconsin
45	Rick Cohen & family	$22.1 billion	73	Warehouse automation	New Hampshire
46	Todd Graves	$22 billion	53	Fast food	Louisiana
47	Stanley Kroenke	$21.3 billion	78	Sports, real estate	Texas
48	John Menard, Jr.	$20 billion	85	Home improvement stores	Wisconsin
49	Christy Walton	$19.7 billion	76	Walmart	Wyoming
50	Jerry Jones & family	$19.6 billion	82	Dallas Cowboys	Texas

But according to Bloomberg

Posted in US

Isaiah (Ch 57-58)

•September 11, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Blessed to those who know and keep the weekly and annual Sabbaths perpetually:

“If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable, and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words,

“then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it,” Isaiah 58:13-14

Isaiah 57

¹ The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come.

— the righteous are delivered from the sting of death; the pains of sufferings; the careless world disregards this, and very few notice it as a public warning;

— they are taken away in compassion and that they may not see the evil, nor share in it, nor be tempted by it; the righteous man, when he dies, enters into peace and rest.

² He shall enter into peace; they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness.

— he shall enter into peace, or ‘he shall go in peace.’ So the Septuagint, ‘his burial shall be in peace;’ that is, that by his death the righteous man shall enter into rest; he shall get away from conflict, strife, agitation and distress.

³ “But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore.

— draw near to face God’s tribunal, to receive their sentence; though Hezekiah and Josiah had made great changes when each ascended the throne and had done their best to put down idolatry,

— yet idolatry was still dear among the people, and was easily revived by each of their sons; thus the Jews were guilty of idolatry before the captivity.

⁴ Against whom do ye sport yourselves? Against whom make ye a wide mouth and draw out the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood,

— CSB Who are you mocking? Who are you opening your mouth and sticking out your tongue at? Isn’t it you, you rebellious children, you offspring of liars,

⁵ inflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks?

— inflaming in lust with these idols; being inflamed or growing hot after idols; that is, lusting after them and mad upon them;

— under the clefts of the rocks; dark and shady groves; deep and sombre caverns were the places where the abominable rites of the pagan superstitions were practiced.

⁶ Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion; they, they are thy lot. Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering, thou hast offered a meat offering. Should I receive comfort in these?

— among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion; or thy god; but the portion of Jacob is not like them, stocks and stones, Jeremiah 10:16;

— whenever they could pick up smooth stones, whether in the stream of a brook or in a valley, they polished and formed them into an image and made gods of them; and these were their portion and inheritance and which they left to their children.

⁷ Upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed; even thither wentest thou up to offer sacrifice.

— upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed; temples and altars which are usually built on high places where they commit spiritual adultery; that is, idolatry in imitation of the heathens who had their temples and altars on high places;

— the Targum says, “Upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set the place of thy house of thy dwelling” which agrees very well with the great city the seat of the beast; like the temple at Mount Gerizim and later the cathedral of Rome.

⁸ Behind the doors also and the posts hast thou set up thy remembrance; for thou hast uncovered thyself to another than Me, and art gone up; thou hast enlarged thy bed and made thee a covenant with them; thou lovedst their bed where thou sawest it.

— as the Targum says:

“Behind the doors and the posts hast thou set up thy remembrance of thy idols; thou hast been like a woman who is beloved by her husband, but goeth astray after strangers; thou hast enlarged thy bed.”

⁹ And thou wentest to the king with ointment, and didst increase thy perfumes, and didst send thy messengers far off, and didst debase thyself even unto hell.

— but when thou went to the king, that is, the king of Assyria or Egypt to whom the Israelites were very prone to seek, and trust and send presents; thou disgraced yourselves;

— this verse has a preamble in the Targum but not in the Masoretic Text:

“When thou didst keep the law, thou didst prosper in the kingdom; and when thou didst multiply for thyself good works, thy camp was enlarged,” — sounds authentic but why not in the Masoretic Text?

¹⁰ Thou art wearied in the greatness of thy way; yet saidst thou not, ‘There is no hope.’ Thou hast found the life of thine hand; therefore thou wast not grieved.

— thou art wearied in the greatness of thy way; thou hast not eased or relieved but only tired thyself with all thy tedious journeys and laborious endeavours.

¹¹ “And of whom hast thou been afraid or feared, that thou hast lied, and hast not remembered Me, nor laid it to thy heart? Have not I held My peace even of old, and thou fearest Me not?

— and of whom hast thou been afraid or feared? and what or who are they the fear of whom drives thee to these wicked and desperate courses? Are they not men, weak and mortal creatures such as wholly depend upon me and can do nothing to thee either against me or without me?

— and hast not remembered me; or “for thou hast not remembered me nor laid it to thy heart?” or “put me upon thy heart”

— the Targum has a more comprehensive perspective:

“And of whom hast thou been afraid? and on account of whom hast thou feared? Thou hast surely multiplied speaking lies, and thou hast not remembered my service, and hast not had my fear in thine heart: I would have given you the ends of the world, if you had returned to my law; but thou hast not returned to me.”

¹² I will declare thy righteousness and thy works, for they shall not profit thee. — the Targum says, “I have shewn thee those good works, which would have been thy righteousness; but thou hast multiplied evil works which did not profit thee.”

¹³ When thou criest, let thy companies deliver thee; but the wind shall carry them all away, vanity shall take them. But he that putteth his trust in Me shall possess the land, and shall inherit My holy mountain,

— when thou criest; in the time of thy trouble; let thy companies deliver thee; properly, “a gathering; a throng; a collection,”

— here it refers either to the throngs of the idols which they had collected, and on which they relied; or to the collection of foreigners which they had summoned to their assistance; if people trust to other objects for aid than the arm of God, they will be left in the day of trial to such assistance as they can render them;

— the Targum ends with “but he that putteth his trust in my Word shall possess the earth, and shall inherit my holy mountain.”

¹⁴ And shall say, ‘Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way; take up the stumbling block out of the way of My people.’”

— the Targum says, “and he shall say, teach and admonish, turn the heart of this people to the right way; remove the stumbling-block of the wicked out of the way of the congregation of my people.”

¹⁵ For thus saith the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

— for thus saith the high and lofty; the central truth for the comfort of God’s people is that the infinitely Great One cares even for the infinitely little;

— whose name is Holy; who is omnipotent, everlasting, and unchangeable, holy in all his words and ways, and therefore both can and will deliver his people, as he hath promised to do.

¹⁶ For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth; for the spirit should fail before Me, and the souls which I have made.

— for I will not contend with thee forever; I will not be angry with my people forever, nor always refuse to pardon and comfort them;

— the Targum says, “for I will not take vengeance of judgement forever, neither shall my wrath be eternal.”

¹⁷ For the iniquity of his covetousness was I wroth and smote him; I hid Me and was wroth, and he went on waywardly in the way of his heart.

— the Targum says,

“My wrath is upon them on account of their robbed riches, and I smote them; I removed my Shekinah from them, and cast them out. I scattered their captives, because they went astray after the imagination of their hearts.”

¹⁸ I have seen his ways and will heal him; I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners.

— I have seen his ways, and will heal him, the ways of such who trust in the Lord, the ways of the humble and contrite;

¹⁹ I create the fruit of the lips; peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near,” saith the Lord; “and I will heal him. — the fruit of the lips; which is praise and thanksgiving,

²⁰ “But the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

— but the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest; disturbed by winds, storms and hurricanes, when its waves rise, rage and tumble about, and beat against the shore and sand, threatening to pass the bounds fixed for it;

— the wicked persist in the alienation from God; are incapable of the peace which God brings to his people: they are like the sea in its tossed and stormy state; as this cannot rest and as its waters cast out slime and mud;

— so has their natural state become one of perpetual disturbance, leading to the uninterrupted production of unclean and ungodly thoughts, words and works.

— the Septuagint renders it, ‘But the wicked are tossed like waves and are not able to be at rest.’

²¹ There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.”

— but the wicked are storm-battered seas that can’t quiet down. The waves stir up garbage and mud. There’s no peace,” God says, “for the wicked.”

— and from the Message Bible

A Message from the high and towering God, who lives in Eternity, whose name is Holy: “I live in the high and holy places, but also with the low-spirited, the spirit-crushed, And what I do is put new spirit in them, get them up and on their feet again.

For I’m not going to haul people into court endlessly, I’m not going to be angry forever. Otherwise, people would lose heart. These souls I created would tire out and give up. I was angry, good and angry, because of Israel’s sins. I struck him hard and turned away in anger, while he kept at his stubborn, willful ways.

When I looked again and saw what he was doing, I decided to heal him, lead him, and comfort him, creating a new language of praise for the mourners. Peace to the far-off, peace to the near-at-hand,” says God— “and yes, I will heal them.

But the wicked are storm-battered seas that can’t quiet down. The waves stir up garbage and mud. There’s no peace,” God says, “for the wicked.” Isaiah 57:17-21 MSG

Isaiah 58

~~~

¹ “Cry aloud, spare not; lift up thy voice like a trumpet! And show My people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins.

— cry aloud; literally, with the throat, i.e., with no faint whisper as from stammering lips, but with full strength of voice; and so the Targum expresses it, “O prophet, cry with thy throat;”

— lift up thy voice like a trumpet; Speak loud and distinct, so that the language of reproof may be heard; and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins:

“I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts” Hosea 2:11

Mithra, Sun Goddess of the Persians, being worshipped every Christmas

— her feast days; which “Christians” understand and practice are:

(a) Christmas, which honor the Mithraism – a form of nature worship based on the Sun-Goddess Mithra who on the darkest night of the year (December 20/21), gives birth to “Light” causing each day thereafter to grow longer until the Summer solstice; and

(b) Easters, a celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols; and to those who actually think eggs and bunnies have something to do with the resurrection; and

(c) her sabbaths which is Sundays, where the original keepers were the Samaritans, brought from Assyria: “And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof” II Kings 17:24.

Easter or Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex

² Yet they seek Me daily and delight to know My ways, as a nation that did righteousness and forsook not the ordinance of their God. They ask of Me the ordinances of justice; they take delight in approaching to God.

— yet they seek me daily; they cover all their wickedness with a profession of religion, from time to time resorting to my house, pretending to ask counsel of me and to desire and seek my favour and blessing. And delight to know my ways;

— that is, either, (a) they seem to delight to know them, men being often said in Scripture to be or do that which they seem or profess to be or do: or (b) they really delight; for there are many men who take some pleasure in knowing God’s will and word, and yet do not conform their lives to them.

³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ say they, ‘and Thou seest not? Why have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no note?’ Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labors.

— in those solemn days of fasting which I have appointed; or in those times when I have called you by the course of my providence and counsels of my prophets, unto fasting, weeping and mourning, yet ye find pleasure, indulging in pride, covetousness and malignant passions.

— in the day of your fast ye find pleasure; better, ye carry on your business. Fasts were not governed like the Sabbath by a fixed law and the people consequently lost sight of the true end of fasting—prayer, meditation, penitence.

⁴ Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness; ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high.

— ye fast for strife and contention; it produced a quarrelsome temper which even led to open violence, “smiting with godless fist;”

— to make your voice to be heard on high; that is in strife and contention that your voice can be heard on the mountain top that their prayers would ascend to heaven and be heard by God.

⁵ Is it such a fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord?

— a fast is a day to afflict the soul; if it does not express true sorrow for sin it is not a fast. These pretenders had shown sorrow on stated or occasioned fasts, but they indulged in pride, covetousness and malignant passions.

⁶ “Is not this the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

— is not this the fast that I have chosen? – or approve, fasting is right and proper; but that which God approves and follows by deeds of humility, kindness and reflection.

⁷ Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?—when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

— to share your bread with the hungry and to offer shelter to the homeless poor, to clothe the naked when you behold them and not turn your back on your own kin;

— and from the Message Bible

“This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families.

Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ “If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people’s sins, If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.

I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places— firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again. Isaiah 58:6-9 MSG

⁸Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward.

— then shall thy light; cause of rejoicing, break forth as the morning; arise as certainly and speedily as in the morning the light arises out of darkness.

⁹ Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say, ‘Here I am.’ If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger and speaking vanity,

— “the putting forth of the finger” – pointing at those that could not comply with them, by way of scorn and derision and persecuting them for it; and so is the same with smiting with the fist of wickedness.

¹⁰ and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity and thy darkness be as the noonday.

— then shall thy light rise in obscurity; that is, it will be as if the cheerful light of the sun should rise amidst the shades of midnight; their calamities and trials would be suddenly succeeded by the bright and cheerful light of prosperity.

¹¹ And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones; and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters fail not.

— like a watered garden; like a garden for the pleasure and beauty of it, a paradise; like a garden watered for the continual flourishing of thy estate; there shall be no withering or decay upon thy prosperous condition.

¹² And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Paths to dwell in.

— thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; either such foundations as have been razed up and lay so for ages past; or raise up such as shall continue for generations to come;

— and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach and the restorer of paths to dwell in; the Targum says, “they shall call thee, the restorer of the right way, and converters of the wicked to the law.”

¹³ “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable, and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words,

— the Sabbath is a sign between God and his people; his appointing it is a sign of his favour to them; and their observing it is a sign of their obedience to him;

“Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘Verily My Sabbaths ye shall keep; for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that ye may know that I am the Lord who doth sanctify you. Exodus 31:13 — Sabbaths, plural, both weekly and yearly

Moreover, I gave them my Sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them. Ezekiel 20:12 — Sabbaths, plural, both weekly and yearly

— and call the Sabbath a delight; this expresses the positive feelings of keeping the Sabbath. To these it is not wearisome, nor are its hours heavy, they love the day of sweet and holy rest; they esteem it a privilege, not a burden nor a task;

¹⁴ then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

— then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord: that is, if thou wilt delight thyself in the Sabbath, then thou shalt delight in the God of the Sabbath; or thou shalt have cause to delight in the Lord, in his goodness and faithfulness to thee and so shalt live by faith in him as the Fountain of all good.

Posted in Isaiah

Is there a Binding Power Of Siberia 2 Pipeline Deal?

•September 11, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China has agreed in principle to the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, having signed “a legally binding memorandum of understanding” (MoU) with Russia. But what does this mean?

Below are several key points from a chat with ChatGPT

Key Points:

A lexically binding MoU was signed on 2 September 2025 between Russian energy giant Gazprom and China’s CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) to construct the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which will deliver up to 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas annually via Mongolia over the next 30 years Financial Times Reuters+2 Reuters+2 The Moscow Times
This agreement signals a major strategic shift in energy cooperation between the two nations, especially as Russia pivots away from European markets amid sanctions Financial Times Reuters+1 The Times of India Pipeline Technology Journal The Diplomat
However, key commercial components such as final pricing, financing, and a definitive construction timeline remain unresolved and are still under negotiation Financial Times Reuters

In short, while China has committed to the Power of Siberia 2 project through the signed agreement, the detailed groundwork — such as pricing agreements, financing, and construction plans — is yet to be finalized.

Q. Gazprom says, Putin says, Russia says, but what did China says?

But surprisingly, China itself has offered very few public statements on the project:

What China’s Reports Show

1. Statements from Russian Media and Officials

Reuters and other outlets highlight that China and Russia “gave their blessing” to the pipeline, based on comments from Gazprom—not direct quotes from Chinese officials. Yahoo Finance UK Reuters.
News agencies cite Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller confirming a binding memorandum with China’s CNPC, but again, no Chinese spokesperson is quoted. Reuters The Moscow Times.

2. Chinese State Media Notes Confirmations, Not Commentary

The Global Times reports on the memorandum signing and growing energy cooperation, without elaborating on China’s rationale or emphatic statements. Global Times.

Why So Little from China?

China tends to minimize direct commentary in sensitive geopolitical agreements. This approach helps:

Control messaging.
Maintain negotiation flexibility.
Avoid escalating public or international scrutiny.
Allow focus on domestic policy rather than foreign optics.

Final Takeaway

So far, all we know is that China has quietly endorsed the project, allowing a binding agreement to be signed. But it has not publicly elaborated on costs, construction specifics, or broader strategic implications.

**Q. Gazprom says, Putin says, Russia says, but what did China says?**

Q. There couldn’t be an agreement when the price, which is the most important thing, isn’t agreed on, isn’t it?

Exactly — you’ve spotted the heart of the issue.

For huge projects like Power of Siberia 2, the gas price formula (how much China pays Russia per cubic meter/MMBtu, often linked to oil or LNG benchmarks) is the single most important term.
Without an agreed price (or at least a formula), a full commercial supply contract can’t really exist.

That’s why:

What Gazprom and CNPC signed on Sept 2, 2025 is described as a “binding memorandum” (obligation to keep working together), not a final sales contract.
Russia emphasizes the deal politically, but China stays quiet, likely because price negotiations are still unresolved.
Until the price and delivery schedule are fixed, the pipeline may have a framework deal, but not a full-fledged gas supply agreement.

So you’re right: an agreement in principle can exist (route, volumes, cooperation), but a true supply contract only exists once the price mechanism is agreed.

Q. For power of Siberia 2, China wants the price to be very low, like Russian domestic price, but Putin wants it to be market price, how much is the gap?

You’re absolutely right — the pricing gap is the central sticking point in the Power of Siberia 2 negotiations. Here’s a clearer breakdown of what we know:

Price Discrepancy Between Russia’s Domestic and Export Gas Rates

Russian domestic gas price: approximately $60 per 1,000 cubic meters
Power of Siberia 1 export gas (China): about $257 per 1,000 m³

So there’s already a fourfold difference between domestic and export prices.

China (CNPC) Prefers gas priced close to Russian domestic rates (~$60), arguing for fairness and affordability.
Russia (Gazprom / Putin) Insists on a market-based formula, similar to European export pricing (~$257), though slightly discounted. Putin claims it offers China a competitive advantage compared to European prices.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Mongolian President Ukhnagiin Khurelsukh get together for a trilateral meeting in Beijing

What This Means

The divide — ranging from $60 to $257 per 1,000 m³ — reflects tactical negotiation: China pushes for affordability, Russia seeks value and energy substitution for lost European markets.
Negotiations remain highly conflicted, since a durable gas deal can’t be finalized without settling price terms.
If Russia holds close to $257, China may balk entirely. If China secures domestic-level pricing, Russia’s export profits collapse.

So, to conclude, there is still no binding agreement for the Power Of Siberia 2 Pipeline to go ahead; only a legally binding agreement to keep on talking.

Posted in China, Russia

China’s new heights with C929 and C939

•September 10, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China seeks new heights with C929 and C939 jumbo jets, but can it build them without the West?

CNA News • September 4, 2025

China has long held ambitions of turning global aviation into an “ABC” market: breaking the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing with the entry of world-class Chinese jets.

That strategy is already well underway, with the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) having already received orders for hundreds of its regional and narrowbody planes, the C909 and C919.

Now, the Chinese aircraft manufacturer is doubling down on plans to expand its fleet to include widebody models – including a self-developed answer to Boeing’s iconic 747 jumbo jet.

Enter the C929 and C939

COMAC appears laser-focused on producing its own liners capable of undertaking long-haul flights, an endeavour that is not only being driven by market demand but also political and strategic factors.

“There are not too many other engineering products other than big planes that are so visible, so recognisable,” said David Yu, a professor at New York University Shanghai specialising in aviation financing.

“Just like America and Europe, China has many reasons to develop and fly home-grown widebodies that reflect its status and ambitions.”

COMAC was incorporated in 2008 with the mission of realising Beijing’s long-term aviation strategy, with the Chinese leadership convinced that the country needed a complete suite of aircraft to showcase its prowess in advanced manufacturing.

And COMAC executives have stressed that the rapid rollout of the C919 over the past few years only marked the initial steps of a much larger project, as the firm graduates from making single-aisle jets to larger, more sophisticated models.

Wei Yingbiao, the company’s then-deputy general manager, who is now an executive at another state-owned enterprise, reiterated this point once again at a forum in Harbin this past December.

“We are eyeing C929 and C939 widebodies, doing designs,” said Wei. “In addition, we are also envisioning new generations down the road, including electric, hydrogen and hybrid types.”

The C929 will carry up to 440 people and have a range of 12,000 kilometres – about the distance from Shanghai to New York. It will reportedly match the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350 in some performance metrics.

Prototypes for the new jet are currently under development. Domestic suppliers are reportedly due to start shipping some large components, including the first fuselage middle section, for the project in 2027.

The bigger C939, whose specs are still being sketched out, is predicted to be close in size to the Boeing 777 and 747.

Though COMAC has yet to commit to a delivery date, there are hopes that the C929 and C939 can be developed in a shorter time frame than Boeing and Airbus’ first widebodies.

Boeing began work on its first large jet, the iconic 747 series, in the 1960s, as air travel in the US was entering a golden age. The plane was inducted into service in 1970, 13 years after Boeing’s first narrowbody, the 707, was launched.

But Airbus needed less than 10 years – from conception to trial production – to create its first widebody model, the A300, with the plane entering into service in 1974.

The C929 was first conceived in 2016 as a Sino-Russian joint venture project, then known as the CR929. Though Russia later pulled out, some groundwork had already been laid for the project.

“Certainly you don’t have to start all over again, as the CR929 has already provided a foundation,” said a source with COMAC subsidiary Shanghai Aircraft Manufacturing, who declined to be named.

“Designing a widebody today is easier than when Boeing first started out in the 1960s. There are mature designs, components and partners that COMAC can look at.”

But analysts warn that COMAC may have to navigate some tough geopolitical headwinds to get its widebodies off the ground. While external tensions are unlikely to deter the company from pursuing its ambitions, they could complicate them.

In particular, the commercial viability of COMAC’s new widebodies may hang on the attitudes of foreign watchdogs, with the company unable to rely solely on domestic long-haul travel.

Eric Lin, head of greater China research at UBS in Hong Kong, said there would need to be strong demand for long-haul travel within China and a robust outbound travel market for the C929 and C939 to succeed.

“You need to have a pickup in Chinese outbound travel to amplify that demand,” Lin said. “And that means foreign regulators would need to approve them for international flights.”

China has some purely domestic demand for widebodies, with Chinese carriers deploying them on busy routes such as Beijing-Guangzhou and Beijing-Shanghai.

Though the global aviation market has increasingly skewed toward smaller planes in recent years, which has led Western planemakers to cut back on production of jumbo jets, “demand for widebodies will sustain, with long-haul routes unsuitable for small units”, said John Grant, an analyst with British aviation consultancy OAG.

In an August report, Boeing predicted that China’s commercial fleet would double by 2043, meaning it would need to acquire another 1,575 new widebody planes.

COMAC can also depend on support from China’s state-owned airlines, which have placed huge orders for the C919 and will be expected to do so again for future domestic airliners. In November, Air China was confirmed as the launch customer for the C929.

But the international market will still be vital. COMAC could possibly mitigate any delay in certification from Western regulators by first deploying its widebodies domestically and then “start selling overseas to developing countries that are China’s allies and do not require Western endorsement,” Grant said.

He added, though, that this approach would not allow COMAC to make a dent in Airbus and Boeing’s dominant market shares anytime soon.

And the Chinese firm will continue to be beholden to the West in other ways, too.

The C929 and C939 will almost certainly use engines made by Western suppliers, as home-grown alternatives are still not up to standard. This could make them vulnerable to political risks.

The C919’s engine import agreement with Western suppliers including CFM International, a Franco-American joint venture, was signed in 2011. But the global political situation has changed since then, and “the C929 and C939 may face further uncertainties,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the US-based Aerodynamic Advisory.

“China’s aircraft sector may be seen as dual military-civilian by the West going forward – good luck getting approval for using Western engines [for new models] should political and trade environment changes deepen,” Aboulafia said.

NYU Shanghai’s Yu predicted that, even though there are existing design parameters for COMAC to follow as it develops its widebodies, China’s political tensions with the West could set back the company’s production and delivery schedule for the C929, with the C939 further behind.

The best way for Beijing to shield COMAC from potential geopolitical headwinds, Yu suggested, might be to promote the company’s international cooperation.

The two widebody models will be even more reliant on Western tech than the C919, given the complexity of developing such a large model from scratch. But Yu said that dependence could also prove useful in some ways.

“The more Western firms get involved, the more transparent China’s civil aviation programmes will become and the less political blowback from the West there will be,” said Yu, who is also chairman of the China Aviation Valuation Advisors consultancy.

The source with Shanghai Aircraft Manufacturing insisted the planemaker could replicate the C919’s domestic-foreign partnerships.

“A majority of the C919’s Western suppliers … can smoothly transition to the C929 and future programmes,” said the source, adding that many of the companies have been working with COMAC for over a decade.

Representatives from American and European partners including GE Aerospace and Liebherr told the Post at the Zhuhai Airshow in November that the companies would back COMAC’s ambitions to make widebody aircraft.

Posted in China, Comac, Tech Race '25-26

Isaiah (Ch 55-56)

•September 9, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The Scriptures are often shrouded in cryptic languages; as usual a prophecy of Isaiah will start with the house of Judah and Jerusalem then spread to the house of Israel and soon it includes many prophecies concerning other nations surrounding the region.

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

“God’s favor rests on those who attend to justice, who devote themselves to doing what is right, Who keep the Sabbath and don’t disregard or belittle it, who keep from doing what is wrong: destructive, deceitful, or violent” Isaiah 56:2 VOICE

Isaiah 55

¹ “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

— Ho – (הוי hôy); this word is calling attention to an issue one of importance;

— everyone that thirsts; the word ‘thirst’ indicates intense desire and is thus applied to the sense of want which sinners often have and to their anxious wishes for salvation.

² Why do ye spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken diligently unto Me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.

— why do ye spend money for that which is useless? Lavish away time, opportunities, and strength, in reading and hearing false doctrine, which is not food, but chaff; and the errors and heresies of false teachers:

— and let your soul delight itself in falsehood; in the goodness and fatness of the Lord’s house, attending on the word and ordinances with spiritual pleasure and delight; and which is the way to become fat and flourishing in spiritual things.

³ Incline your ear, and come unto Me; hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.

— hear; hearken attentively and obediently to my counsel; hearing being oft put for obeying, as Isaiah 42:18 “Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see;” or as the Targum says, “Incline your ear and receive instruction of my law, obey my Word and your soul shall be quickened.”

⁴ Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people.

— behold, I have given him; this is evidently the language of God respecting the Messiah, or of David as representing the Messiah;

— a leader and commander to the people; he is a “leader” as David a type did; as a general leads out and on his armies to battle; as a shepherd leads his flock to good pastures; he is a commander in a military way, a wise, powerful and courageous, and always victorious as a King commands his subjects;

— the Targum says, “behold, I have appointed him a Prince to the people, a King, and a ruler over all kingdoms.”

⁵ Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for He hath glorified thee.”

— and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee; knew not even God himself as the Gentiles did not, much less the Messiah;

— they knew neither his person nor his offices, nor the way of peace, and were in a state of gross darkness; and to whom the Gospel was not known, which is a revelation of Christ, and of good things by him. The Targum adds, “to offer tribute unto thee.”

⁶ Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near.

— seek ye the Lord; the commencement of religion in the heart is often represented as a desire to seek God; and inquiring for his ways Deuteronomy 4:29;

— so the Targum (Jonathan) says, “seek the fear of the Lord, while ye are alive.” Or as one in the Jerusalem Talmud interprets these words, “whilst the Shechinah is found in the sanctuary; before he hides his face, and causes his Shechinah to remove from you.”

⁷ Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.

— let the wicked forsake his way; his evil way, as the Targum paraphrases it, his wicked course of life; and which is his own way, of his own choosing, and in which he delights;

— and let him return unto the Lord; from whom he has departed, against whom he has sinned; and acknowledges his sin before the Lord, attends his word and worship; the Targum says, “and let him turn to the worship of the Lord.”

⁸ “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” saith the Lord.

— the things that God thinks and purposes are not the things that man thinks and purposes and therefore because the thoughts are different the outcomes of them in deeds are divergent.

⁹ “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

— by way of comparison, the relation in which the ways and thoughts of God stand to those of man; the Almighty God’s thoughts transcend those of man as much as the heaven is higher than the earth.

¹⁰ For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

— for as the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return again until they have done what they are sent to do, or have produced the following effects; otherwise they may be exhaled into vapours as they often are and drawn up again by the sun.

¹¹ so shall My word be that goeth forth out of My mouth: It shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

— this is set forth under a figure drawn from the rain and the snow and return not till it has moistened the earth and fertilized it and made it green and offered seed to the sower and bread to the eater;

— so my word be which go forth out of my mouth: it will not return to me fruitless, till it has accomplished that which I willed, and prosperously carried out that for which I sent it.

¹² “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

— for ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; though these words may literally respect the Israelites’ return from captivity to their own land, attended with joy and peace; as the preceding verse may respect the word of promise concerning it;

— as it is interpreted by the Targum, “for ye shall go out with joy from among the nations, and with peace shall ye be carried to your own land: the mountains and the hills shall rejoice before you with praise, and all the trees of the field shall clap with their branches.”

¹³ Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree; and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

— the Targum says “Instead of the wicked the righteous shall rise up, and instead of sinners shall rise up those that fear sin: and it shall be before the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign, that shall not cease.”

Isaiah 56

¹ Thus saith the Lord, “Keep ye judgement, and do justice; for My salvation is near to come, and My righteousness to be revealed.

— keep ye judgement and do justice: this phrase signifies the duties which one man owe to another but here to signify the duties which men owe to God,

— to hold fast and do justice; which are his statutes and judgements; and so likewise all the ordinances of the Lord, all those should be kept.

² Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it; who keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil.”

— that keep the Sabbath from polluting it; here lies in the nature of the case that a devout king like David, Hezekiah and Josiah would be observers of the Sabbath;

— instead of observing the Sabbath, today, more than 98.5 percent of Christians are keeping Sunday, in fact they’re honouring the Sun by observing Sunday worship. They have “their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the SUN toward the east; whose Godly judgement is to be stoned to death – ’till they die.

— also, following the SUN-worshipping Samaritans, most Church of God Communities are showing their contempt for God by having their “wavesheaf offering” and Pentecost on a Sunday; always on a Sunday. And these are supposedly in God’s Sanctuary, but God says He is a jealous God, so these pretenters could be spewed out of His mouth! A death penalty Deuteronomy 17:3-5 – ’till they die!

³ Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, “The Lord hath utterly separated me from His people;” neither let the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.”

— the son of the stranger; the stranger who keep the Sabbath is as the blessed son of Israel, the same with the blessed man in Isaiah 56:2; the Gentile, who by birth is a stranger to God, will also be of the house of Israel;

— neither would such a stranger who keeps the Sabbath says, Behold, I am a dry tree – A dry tree is an emblem of that which is barren, useless, unfruitful.

⁴ For thus saith the Lord: “Unto the eunuchs that keep My Sabbaths, and choose the things that please Me, and take hold of My covenant,

— for thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs; even the eunuchs, who have hitherto been excluded from the privileges of the people of God and who have been regarded as a separated and degraded people shall be admitted to the same privileges as others;

— that keep my sabbaths; the word is used here in the plural, both the weekly and the annual Sabbath (at the feasts of Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, day of Atonement and Tabernacles; and even the land Sabbath); the term could be used to represent other observances as well (more at the end).

⁵ even unto them will I give in Mine house and within My walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

— even to them will I give in mine house and within my walls; the Targum says, “in the house of my sanctuary, and in the land of the house of my Shekinah” meaning the Temple at Jerusalem;

— a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters; a far greater blessing and honour than that of having posterity which is but only temporal and so as to have a good name; and it is he that gives them “an everlasting name that shall not be cut off,” as the Targum says.

⁶ Also the sons of the stranger that join themselves to the Lord to serve Him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be His servants, every one that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of My covenant,

— also the sons of the stranger; to be his servants, whoever keep the Sabbaths from desecrating it and those who hold fast to my covenant, the conditions on which they should be admitted to the same privileges and of course the same reward.

⁷ even them will I bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon Mine altar, for Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.”

— mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people; Jews and Gentiles shall have equal access to my house, and shall there call upon my name, Yehovah;

— a house of prayer for all people; Gentiles, the proselytes, the sons of the strangers as others, are all welcome to the church of God to worship and pray to the Lord there.

⁸ The Lord God which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, “Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him.”

— Yehovah the Almighty God will not only restore the scattered outcasts of Israel (Isaiah 11:12; Psalm 147:2) to their own land, but “will gather others (‘strangers’) to him (Israel), besides those gathered” to his gathered from other folds; that is, in addition to the outcast Israelites collected from other nations, John 10:16.

⁹ All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, yea, all ye beasts in the forest.

— all ye beasts of the field; this refers to some invasion of the land of Judea; signifying a great slaughter that should be made, like that in Revelation 19:17 to which the fowls of the heaven are invited, as to a supper;

— the Targum says “all the kings of the people that shall be gathered to oppress thee, O Jerusalem, shall be cast in the midst of thee; they shall be for food to the beast of the field, the beast of the forest shall be satisfied with them.”

¹⁰ His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark, sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.

— the Targum indicates plural ‘their’ for ‘his,’ their watchmen are blind: they know nothing, all of them are dumb dogs, they are not able to bark, they are slumbering, they lie down, they love to sleep;” their false prophets and teachers; they would be most shameful of them, because they are supposed to be knowledgeable and teaching others; but they are all ignorant;

— some may design such who call themselves pastors or evangelists of the Word, and yet neither have knowledge nor how to preach, all are like dumb dogs; couldn’t reprove the errors and vices of men, nor warn them of their danger.

¹¹ Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand; they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter.

— yea, they are greedy dogs; insatiably covetous shepherds that have no truths nor understanding; They live off the fleece of their sheep; they have no understanding; do not care, or love or desire either to understand the word of God themselves or to make the people understand it;

— they all look to their own way; that is, they are all selfish; they regard neither God’s glory nor the people’s good, but only the satisfaction of their own base desires; everyone for his gain from his quarter, in their places and stations.

¹² “Come ye,” say they, “I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.”

— these false shepherd will fetch wine out of their cellar, having good store of it, and that of the best and will fill themselves with strong drink; fill their bellies and skins full of it till drunken with it;

— the Targum confirms in this way, saying, “Come ye, say they, We will fetch wine, and we will be intoxicated with old wine, and tomorrow our banquet shall be better than today, great, very great..”

~~~

Both the Weekly and Annual Sabbaths; blessed are those who keep them!

Leviticus 23

¹ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

² “Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: ‘Concerning the feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are My feasts.

³ “‘Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of rest, a holy convocation. Ye shall do no work therein; it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings.

⁴ “‘These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons.

⁵ On the fourteenth day of the first month at evening is the Lord’S Passover.

⁶ And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread unto the Lord; seven days ye must eat unleavened bread.

⁷ On the first day ye shall have a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work therein.

⁸ But ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord seven days. On the seventh day is a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work therein.’”

⁹ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

¹⁰ “Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: ‘When ye come into the land which I give unto you and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.

¹¹ And he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted for you; on the morrow after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it.

¹² And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf a helamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering unto the Lord.

¹³ And the meat offering thereof shall be two-tenths part of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savor; and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, a fourth part of a hin.

¹⁴ And ye shall eat neither bread nor parched corn nor green ears, until the selfsame day that ye have brought an offering unto your God; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

¹⁵ “‘And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete.

¹⁶ Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days, and ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.

¹⁷ Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two-tenths part. They shall be of fine flour; they shall be baked with leaven; they are the firstfruits unto the Lord.

¹⁸ And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish of the first year, and one young bullock and two rams; they shall be for a burnt offering unto the Lord, with their meat offering and their drink offerings, even an offering made by fire, of sweet savor unto the Lord.

¹⁹ Then ye shall sacrifice one kid of the goats for a sin offering, and two lambs of the first year for a sacrifice of peace offerings.

²⁰ And the priest shall wave them with the bread of the firstfruits for a wave offering before the Lord with the two lambs; they shall be holy to the Lord for the priest.

²¹ And ye shall proclaim on the selfsame day that it may be a holy convocation unto you. Ye shall do no servile work therein; it shall be a statute for ever in all your dwellings throughout your generations.

²² “‘And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not rid cleanly the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleanings of thy harvest. Thou shalt leave them unto the poor and to the stranger: I am the Lord your God.’”

²³ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

²⁴ “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.

²⁵ Ye shall do no servile work therein, but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.’”

²⁶ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

²⁷ “Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a Day of Atonement. It shall be a holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.

²⁸ And ye shall do no work in that same day, for it is a Day of Atonement to make an atonement for you before the Lord your God.

²⁹ For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people.

³⁰ And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people.

³¹ Ye shall do no manner of work; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

³² It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls. On the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening unto evening, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.”

³³ And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,

³⁴ “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, ‘The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days unto the Lord.

³⁵ On the first day shall be a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work therein.

³⁶ Seven days ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. On the eighth day shall be a holy convocation unto you, and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. It is a solemn assembly, and ye shall do no servile work therein.

³⁷ “‘These are the feasts of the Lord which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, to offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord, a burnt offering and a meat offering, a sacrifice and drink offerings, every thing upon his day”

³⁸ besides the Sabbaths of the Lord, and besides your gifts, and besides all your vows, and besides all your freewill offerings which ye give unto the Lord.

³⁹ “‘Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the Lord seven days; on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath.

⁴⁰ And ye shall take for yourselves on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.

⁴¹ And ye shall keep it a feast unto the Lord seven days in the year. It shall be a statute for ever in your generations; ye shall celebrate it in the seventh month.

⁴² Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths,

⁴³ that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.’”

⁴⁴ And Moses declared unto the children of Israel the feasts of the Lord.

Posted in Isaiah

China displays new weapons in military parade

•September 8, 2025 • Leave a Comment

What new weapons did China has on display during its massive military parade?

CBS News • September 3, 2025 ~ ABC News Independent Diplomat IrishTimes

China showed off a range of weapons and military hardware with a massive parade on Wednesday, staged in front of President Xi Jinping and 20 other heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Here’s a look at some of the weapons that were on display, including some the world had not seen previously:

Drones, AI and lasers

China’s LY-1 laser weapon was displayed during the parade for the first time, mounted on top of armored trucks. Defense analyst Alexander Neill told the BBC that the powerful device is believed to have the ability to disable electronics or blind pilots.

The LY-1 laser weapon, a ship-based air defense weapon, is seen displayed on top of trucks as part of a military parade in Beijing, China, Sept 3, 2025, in Beijing, China.

There were a number of conventional drones on display, as well as some AI-powered ones.

One that drew particular attention was the AJX002 giant submarine drone, which measures approximately 65 feet long, or 20 meters.

Also known as an extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicle, it could carry out reconnaissance or surveillance missions.

A 20 meters long AJX002 unmanned underwater military vehicle during the military parade. Lying in wait deep in the seas or even in the oceans, one could pierce and sink an aircraft carrier without it knowing who or what hits them.

China also showed off stealth attack drones in the parade, including the GJ-11, which is capable of flying alongside manned fighter jets and aiding them in their missions.

“Robotic wolves” were also on display. Experts say the four-legged, walking robots could be used for numerous operations, such as sweeping for mines, reconnaissance missions or hunting down enemy troops.

A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) GJ-11 unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) is driven on a truck down Chang’an Avenue at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

New nuclear-capable, long-range missiles

A new version of China’s Dongfeng-5 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile, the DF-5C, was unveiled for the parade. It is said to have a longer range than previous variants, Neill told the BBC. He said the missile can also carry up to 12 warheads on a single mission.

The new missile is silo-based, launched from underground facilities, and is meant to be a strategic deterrent, Neill said.

China’s new DF-5C strategic nuclear missiles has an estimated range of more than 20,000km; that is, it has the entire globe under its strike range.

According to The Associated Press, the DF-5C has an estimated range of about 12,400 miles, which makes it easily capable of reaching any part of the United States from mainland China.

A number of other nuclear-capable missiles were rolled down central Beijing’s Chang-an (“Eternal Peace”) Avenue, including the DF-61. Like the DF-5C, it is an intercontinental ballistic missile, but the DF-61 can be fired from a mobile launcher. Little is known about the new weapon, but the previous model has a range of more than 7,500 miles, and it can also carry multiple warheads.

A Chinese JL-3 submarine-launched intercontinental missile is seen during the V-Day military parade over the defeat of Japan, on Sept 3, 2025, in Beijing, China.

The AP said China’s parade also featured the JL-1 and JL-3 nuclear-capable long-range missiles, the first of which is launched from aircraft and the second from vessels at sea.

China wants to “replace traditional structures”

“China not only wants to augment, but replace traditional structures,” defense analyst Michael Raska told CBS News partner network BBC News, adding that it seems to have taken lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine, where a strategy has been to “throw drones at the enemy” to wear down their defenses.

Unmanned Chinese military ground vehicles, on the back of a truck.

While some countries are concerned about incorporating artificial intelligence into their military systems, China appears to be plowing ahead and “believe they can control AI,” Raska told the BBC. “They are going all the way to integrate it into their systems.”

The parade showed that China has the resources to build up a significant arsenal, but Raska said the US still maintains the edge operationally.

The US is more agile in battle because it has a “bottom-up” culture, where decisions can be made and adapted on the ground in response to evolving situations, Raska said. China, on the other hand, “can have flashy platforms and systems but they will not move a finger until they receive an order from the top,” Raska told the BBC.

A Chinese military drone **Assault Boat: Type-928D** is seen during a parade marking the end of World War II, on Sept 3, 2025, in Beijing’s Tiananmen.

“The Chinese think it’s technology that creates deterrence. They believe that will deter the US…. but at the operational level, there have been instances which show they may not be as good as they say they are,” Raska said.

The 30 meters long AJX002 presents a long, slender profile — a stretched torpedo — with public estimates of roughly 18–20 meters in length and about 1–1.5 meters in diameter.

ABC News

China has unveiled a new “triad” of nuclear missiles, drones and lasers at the country’s largest ever military parade.

Nukes that can be launched from anywhere

China for the first time showed off its triad of nuclear-capable missiles that can be launched from sea, land and air.

State news outlet Xinhua said the missiles were China’s strategic “ace” power to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and dignity.

Among the new missiles revealed at the parade was the Dongfeng-5C, or DF-5C, an intercontinental strategic nuclear missile with a “global reach,” according to Xinhua.

The YJ-15 missile along with its pre-existing YJ-17, YJ-19 and YJ-20 hypersonic missiles as one of several anti-ship missiles at a military parade in Beijing.

Drones underwater and in the sky

China has advanced underwater drones and Ms Parker said it appeared there were two new types on display in the parade.

One was an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance model and the other would be used for offensive purposes.

“It’s probably got explosives in the front of it, or the ability to deploy explosives,” Ms Parker told the ABC.

She said they could be a concern, particularly to Western forces in the Pacific.

“[China] seems to be ahead of other countries,” Ms Parker said.

“They seem to be accelerating the ability to integrate offensive capabilities — mines, torpedoes, explosives — into them.”

However, she stressed that just because they had been seen on the back of a truck at a parade, it didn’t mean the underwater drones’ capabilities had been proven.

China’s uncrewed underwater 20m AJX002 vehicles for both intelligence and offensive purposes. Hidden deep in the seas or even in the oceans, one could pierce and sink an aircraft carrier without it knowing who or what hits them.

A HSU100 underwater drone passes in the military parade in front of Tiananmen

Ms Parker said it was clear from what was seen at the parade that China had been focusing on uncrewed aerial, underwater and ground vehicles.

China has been talking up AI integration, and its aerial drones’ ability to operate with fighter aircraft piloted by humans.

“We don’t know if that’s true, you can’t tell that from the back of a truck, but clearly they are investing in uncrewed capabilities,” she said.

The parade also featured unmanned helicopters designed to be launched from ships.

Why is China showing these weapons?

The key themes Ms Parker noticed from the weapons displayed was the focus on uncrewed drones and the ranges and variety of missiles.

“It demonstrates an advanced capability,” she said.

“[It’s about] showing a technologically advanced military and this second message of ‘by the way, you don’t necessarily know what we have.'”

Lasers seen as a cheaper and effective way to counter drones and missiles.

UNSW China expert Guangyi Pan told the ABC the new weapons demonstrated the PLA’s vision for future warfare.

“Undoubtedly, the greatest enhancement is in information warfare and electronic warfare, where the PLA will gain significant advantages,” he told the ABC.

He said the speed at which the new weapons had been developed showed “China’s leading position in both technological advancement (quality) and industrial manufacturing scale (quantity).”

Edward Chan, from the ANU’s College of Asia & the Pacific, told the ABC the parade signaled a significant leap in China’s military capability.

He said the broad spectrum of new military assets on display, including satellites, missile systems and drones, have been central to China’s military modernisation over the past decade.

“[They] reflect greater preparedness for potential conflicts in the Western Pacific,” Dr Chan said.

Space defence system

The HQ-29 space defence system, capable of taking down foreign satellites, was displayed for the first time at the parade in a prominent display of aerial power.

While not much is known about its exact capabilities, the large size implies an extreme range similar to the US Navy’s SM-3 Block IIA, which can be launched from land or ship.

Robot Dogs / Wolves

China displayed a legion of robot dogs or wolves, highlighting Beijing’s growing emphasis on what it describes as “intelligentised warfare.” The robots, paraded on top of armoured vehicles, could be utilised in the battlefield or weaponised and used in direct combat.

AsiaTimes

Since at least 2020, US intelligence assessments and Chinese sources have pointed to new ICBMs under designations such as DF-45 or DF-51, with speculative claims of ranges beyond 15,000 kilometers and payloads of up to 14 warheads. However, none of these figures has been confirmed.

The DF-61 is widely seen as part of China’s ongoing nuclear buildup, which the US Department of Defense (DoD) estimates surpassed 600 operational warheads in mid-2024 and could exceed 1,000 by 2030.

As the nuclear standoff intensifies, China’s mobile DF-61 and the US’s silo-based arsenal raise a crucial question: in the next great deterrent contest, will survival depend on mass or mobility?

“The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle” Psalm 78:9

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26

Isaiah (Ch 53-54)

•September 7, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Inspired by the Lord, Isaiah prophesied that both houses of Israel were blind and deaf:

“Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see” Isaiah 42:18

“His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark, sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber” Isaiah 56:10

Their wolfy shepherd and watchmen are just the same—dumb, deaf and blind!

Isaiah 53

Many theologians noted that the subject of the Suffering Servant, which the Targum (Isaiah 52:13) identifies as the Messiah, should start from Chapter 52:13 and onto the end of Chapter 53. More commentaries of this Suffering Servant and its prophecy are at the end.

¹ Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

— our report; literally, that which has been heard by us, or reported to us. But the word is used technically for a prophetic revelation (see Isaiah 28:9,19; Jeremiah 49:14);

— here the word would seem to refer especially to the Messianic prophecies delivered by Isaiah. To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? The “arm of the Lord,” which has been “made bare in the eyes of all the nations” (Isaiah 52:10); the word of God is expressly called the power of God, 1 Corinthians 1:18.

² For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. — Rashi justifies erroneously that “all Israel as one man;”

— for his Suffering Servant shall grow up as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground; and the reason or occasion why the Jews generally rejected their Messiah is because he didn’t come into the world with pomp and power, like an earthly monarch, as they would imagine; but

— he shall grow up, brought forth, and brought up; before him (before the unbelieving Jews, of whom “my servant the Messiah” spoken of in Isaiah 52:13 (Targum) and which the Jews are blinded to, as springing up of a low and insignificant plant or shrub out of the earth; has no strength nor straightness, of body; without verdure, leaves, blossom, and therefore despised;

— the Suffering Servant hath no form nor comeliness; when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him; when we shall look upon him, expecting to find incomparable beauty and majesty in his countenance, and carriage and condition, we shall be altogether disappointed and shall meet with nothing amiable or desirable in him.

³ He is despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. And we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

— nowhere in all the Old Testament is it so plainly and fully prophesied that the Messiah ought to suffer and the Jews esteemed him not; which is repeated to show the great contempt cast upon him, to be despised and rejected of men before he is to enter into his glory.

⁴ Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

— the Septuagint renders the words, “he bears our sins” and the Targum, where the ancient Jews understood this prophecy of the Messiah, is, “he shall pray for our sins, and our iniquities for his sake shall be forgiven us.”

— Rashi erroneously says “he [that is, Israel] was chastised with pains so that all the nations be atoned for with Israel’s suffering.” No human, from Abraham to Jacob, nor from King David to Zerubbabel could have such intrinsic qualities; and of course, Israel or Jacob (whom the Jews thought was the suffering servant) doesn’t suffer for the sins of the nations; they suffer because of their own sins;

In Daniel 9:5, Daniel prayed, “We have sinned, we have done wickedly.” Daniel nowhere says that Judah’s captivity and suffering were to bear the griefs or sorrows for other nations!

— for more, see Daniel’s Prayer, a Critique

⁵ But He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed.

— but he, the Suffering Servant, was wounded for our transgressions; not for any sins of his own, but for ours, for our transgressions of his law, in order to make atonement and satisfaction for them;

— he was bruised for our iniquities; as bread corn is bruised by threshing it; he being broken and crushed to pieces under the weight of sin, and its punishment; the ancient Jews understood this of the Messiah; for in one place they say of King Messiah, “he was wounded for our transgressions; and bruised for our iniquities;”

— and with his stripes we are healed; or “by his stripe” so called from the gathering and settling of the blood where the blow is given. As a physician, the wonderful Messiah heals by taking the sicknesses of his people upon himself, by bearing their sins, and being wounded and bruised for them and by his enduring blows and suffering death itself for them;

— nar! the phase “with His stripes we are healed” is Isaiah speaking on behalf of “we” that is, Israel of both houses; how then could Israel suffers for the sins of Israel?

— the Targum says, therefore, He shall pray for our sins, and our iniquities for His sake shall be forgiven us.

⁶ All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

— all we like sheep have gone astray; all the children of God, whether Jews or Gentiles; whom he compares to “sheep” not for any good qualities, but for our foolishness and stupidity;

— and particularly for their being subject to go astray from the shepherd and from their good pastures, and who never return of themselves until they are brought back by the shepherd; so the people of God, in a state of nature are like the silly sheep who go astray from God;

— and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all; that is, God the Father against whom we have sinned, from whom we have turned and whose justice must be satisfied; he has laid on his own Son, the sins of all his elect.

⁷ He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not his mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter; and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.

— he, the Suffering Servant, was oppressed and was afflicted; he was injuriously treated by both the Jews and Romans; they handled him roughly; he was oppressed and afflicted, both in body and mind, with their blows and with their reproaches;

— and he being the surety of his people, was responsible for them and did answer, the debt they owed was required, the payment of it was called for and he accordingly answered; the punishment of the sins of his people was exacted of him and did bear it in his own body on the tree;

— so the Suffering Servant opened not his mouth: not against his enemies, by way of threats or complaint; nor even in his own defence; nor against the justice of God as bearing hard upon him, not sparing him but demanding and having full satisfaction; nor against his people and their sins.

⁸ He was taken from prison and from judgement; and who shall declare His generation? For He was cut off out of the land of the living; for the transgression of My people was He stricken.

— the Suffering Servant was taken away from due justice and judgement; that is, his life was taken away in a violent manner, under a pretence of justice; whereas the utmost injustice was done him; a wrong charge was brought against him, false witnesses were suborned, and his life was taken away with wicked hands.

⁹ And He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in His death, because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth.

— and he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death; these words are generally supposed to refer to a fact that Christ who died with two wicked men besides him as if he himself had been one, was buried in a rich man’s grave;

— neither was any deceit in his mouth: no false accusation was delivered by him; he was no deceiver of the people as he was charged; he did not attempt to seduce them from the true worship of God or persuade them to believe anything contrary to the law of Moses and the prophets;

— he, the Suffering Servant, was no enemy to the state, nor indeed guilty of any manner of sin, nor given to any arts of trick and dissimulation.

¹⁰ Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief. When thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.

— yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; the sufferings of Christ are signified by his being “bruised” as it was foretold he should have his heel bruised by the serpent, Genesis 3:15;

— but here it is ascribed to Yeshua or Jesus as the Suffering Servant: he was bruised in body when scourged and nailed to the cross; and was bruised and broken in spirit when the sins of his people were laid on him;

— “He shall see His seed.” Opponents of Jesus being the description here point to this Being has seed, whereas Jesus hadn’t; first, it makes no sense that whether Jesus has seed is being dependent on us (or ‘thou’ as the verse says) making an offering for sin; second, this phase “for sin” imputes that Christ would sin, for we know that he didn’t sin, else he cannot save humanity with his own sacrifice;

— and third; following the evidence presented above, this verse could be another example of the lying pen of the scribes, Isaiah 8:8; that is, some scribes could most probably had altered it;

— the Targum has it this way:

“And it was the pleasure of the Lord to refine and to purify the remnant of His people, in order to cleanse their souls from sin, that they might see the kingdom of their messiah, that their sons and daughters might multiply, and prolong their days, and those that keep the law of the Lord shall prosper through His pleasure” Isaiah 8:8 Jonathan

¹¹ He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. By His knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.

— the travail of his soul is the toil and labour which the Suffering Servant had endured in working out the salvation of his people; his obedience and death, his sorrows and sufferings;

— particularly those birth throes of his soul under a sense of divine wrath for the allusion is to women in travail; and all the agonies and pains of death which he went through;

— now the fruit of all this he sees with inexpressible pleasure and which gives him an infinite satisfaction; namely, the complete redemption of all the chosen ones and the glory of the divine perfections as well as his own glory which follows.

¹² Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong, because He hath poured out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors; and He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

— therefore will God divide him a portion with the great; the great ones of the earth: these are the words of God the Father, promising his Son that he shall have as great a part or portion assigned him as any of the mighty monarchs of the world;

— nay; he would be made much higher than the kings of the earth, and his name above every name in this world; and all this in consequence of his sufferings and as a reward of all the sacrifice he made.

~~~

More on the Suffering Servant and its Fulfilment

He will be exalted (52:13) Philippians 2:9
He will be disfigured (52:14; 53:2) Mark 15:17,19
He will make a blood atonement (52:15) 1 Peter 1:2
He will be widely rejected (53:1,3) John 12:37,38
He will bear our sins and sorrows (53:4,5) Romans 4:25; 1 Peter 2:24,25
He will be our substitute (53:6,8) II Corinthians 5:21
He will voluntarily accept our guilt and punishment (53:7-8) John 10:11; 19:30
He will be buried in a rich man’s tomb (53:9) John 19:38-42
He will save those who believe in Him (53:10-11) John 3:16; Acts 16:31
He will die on behalf of transgressors (53:12) Mark 15:27,28; Luke 22:37

Isaiah 54

¹ “Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear! Break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child! For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife,” saith the Lord.

— Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; the Targum refers this to Jerusalem, paraphrasing the words thus,

“Sing, O Jerusalem, which was like a barren woman that bears not; rejoice with praise and be glad, who was like a woman that conceives not: for more shall be the children of Jerusalem that was laid desolate, than of the inhabited city, saith the Lord.”

² Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations; spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.

— enlarge the place of Jerusalem; to which the church is compared because of its uncertain and movable condition, being sometimes in one place and sometimes in another;

— and before the day of Pentecost, Jerusalem was like a barren woman; the number of converts were very small; few believed in the Messiah; the names of the disciples were but a hundred and twenty;

— but after Pentecost great multitudes were converted to the living God; which is a great rejoicing to the church; the bounds of the church were extended to other parts of Judea, Galilee, Samaria and beyond.

³ For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left, and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited.

— for thou shall break forth on the right hand and on the left; to the south and to the north as the Targum says, like an inundation of water that breaks through and overflows the banks of the river and spreads itself into adjacent countries.

⁴ “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed; neither be thou confounded, for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more.

— fear not; the fulfilment of these things, however unlikely they might seem yet God is able to perform them; and therefore thou should not be given to a fearful, distrustful, and unbelieving heart:

— for thou shall not be ashamed; but should not be ashamed of her hope, faith and confidence; nor should she be ashamed of her barrenness which should cease; and of the fewness of her children or converts which would be many; and would now be enlarged.

⁵ For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is His name and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; the God of the whole earth shall He be called.

— for thy Maker is thine Husband, that is the Husband of the church, and of every true believer; who secretly betrothed them to himself in eternity;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; (more on this at the end)

⁶ For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused,” saith thy God.

⁷ “For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. — for a short moment have I forsaken thee.

⁸ In a little wrath I hid My face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.

— in a little wrath; or in a short moment of indignation, as the Targum says; the Septuagint, ‘In a little wrath I turned away my face from thee.’

In a little wrath might be 40 years for Judah and 190 years for Israel; for an indepth study, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

— I hid my face from thee; the Targum says, “I removed the presence of my Shekinah, yea, for a short time from thee,” indicating here that the husband is the Father rather than the Son (as the Shekinah is associated only with the Father, who sits between the Cherubim on the mercy seat).

⁹ “For this is as the waters of Noah unto Me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee.

— for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; and confirmed it by a rainbow; for as the Targum says, this is as the waters in the days of Noah;

— so have I sworn that I would not in wrath with thee, but in love; and of this he has given the strongest assurances; he has not only said it, but swore to it like unto Noah and the rainbow.

¹⁰ For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed,” saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.

— though the mountains should remove and the hills be shaken yet my loving-kindness shall not depart, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed.

¹¹ “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors and lay thy foundations with sapphires.

— O thou afflicted, tossed with tempests, and not comforted; Or “O thou poor” – for the first Christian churches chiefly consisted of poor people not the mighty and noble being called;

— and which were greatly “afflicted” with false teachers who broached errors and heresies and made schisms among them; and “tossed with tempests” like a ship at sea;

— behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours; or “with paint” such as women used to paint their faces or eyes with; the Targum is, “behold, I lay the stones of thy pavement with mosaic, and thy foundations with costly stones.”

¹² And I will make thy windows of agates and thy gates of rubies, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.

— the Septuagint renders it, “of jasper” a stone more fit for that purpose; and it is interpreted of the jasper in the New Jerusalem is said to be like unto the “jasper stone” Revelation 21:11.

¹³ And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.

— the Targum says, “all thy children shall know the law of the Lord.” Of course, the law is the statutes and all the ordinances as in the Old Testament, except with some modifications, but the trunk is from there.

¹⁴ In righteousness shalt thou be established; thou shalt be far from oppression, for thou shalt not fear; and from terror, for it shall not come near thee.

— thou shalt be far from oppression, for thou shall not fear; neither from within nor from outside your borders; not from any false teachers; nor from persecutors that oppress the people.

¹⁵ Behold, they shall surely gather together, but not by Me; whosoever shall gather together against thee shall fall for thy sake.

— or as the Targum says, “in the end, the kings of the nations, who are gathered together to oppress thee, O Jerusalem, shall be cast down in the midst of thee.”

¹⁶ Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy.

— both the smith that makes all warlike instruments and the soldier that uses them are my creations; and totally at my command and therefore they cannot hurt you without my leave. To destroy; to destroy only whom and when I please.

¹⁷ No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgement thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of Me,” saith the Lord.

— no weapon that is formed; no instrument of war, no sword, or spear; no instrument of persecution or torture that is made by the smith, Isaiah 54:16; shall prosper, that it shall not have the ultimate prosperity. It might be permitted for a time to appear to prosper – as persecutors and oppressors have done; but there would not be final and complete success.

~~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

PREPARE for ‘WW3’

•September 7, 2025 • Leave a Comment

PREPARE FOR WAR France orders hospitals to ready for ‘WW3’ & treat hundreds of wounded soldiers per day in less than a year.

FRANCE has put its hospitals on a war footing – PREPARE for ‘WW3’

The Sun • September 1, 2025 ~ Daily Express

FRANCE has put its hospitals on a war footing – ordering them to prepare for the day Europe is plunged into all-out conflict with Russia.

Health bosses have been told to brace for a “major engagement” by March 2026, with chilling instructions to be ready to treat a flood of wounded troops from across the continent.

According to documents obtained by Le Canard Enchaîné, the plan assumes France will become a hub for battlefield casualties.

It would need to absorb hundreds of injured soldiers from both its own forces and those of its NATO allies.

The French ministry of health said the order was designed to “anticipate, prepare and respond to the health needs of the population while integrating the specific needs of defense in the health field.”

President Putin, Prime Minister Modi, and President Xi at the SCO meeting in Tianjin

Among the risks identified, officials warned, was the prospect of a huge influx of foreign victims.

The ministry bluntly admitted: “It is therefore a question for our health system of anticipating the care of military patients in the civilian health system.”

And while Paris frames it as a “major engagement,” the reality is far starker.

Under NATO’s Article 5, if France were attacked – or if Russian troops stormed into any allied nation – the whole alliance would be pulled in.

That chain reaction would almost certainly drag in Britain, the US and much of Europe, transforming a regional clash into the nightmare of World War Three.

“But we will be on our guard, not just the German forces, but NATO.”

The stakes could not be higher. NATO chief Mark Rutte has already sounded the alarm that Russia and China together could light the fuse on World War Three.

He laid out a nightmare scenario in July: Beijing seizes Taiwan while Putin strikes NATO territory, possibly the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

“That is most likely the way this will progress,” he warned.

“But we will be on our guard, not just the German forces, but NATO.”

The Tianjin Troika – as India, China, and Russia – represents the other force

In a chilling interview, he added: “They are now producing three times as much ammunition in three months as the whole of NATO is doing in a year. This is unsustainable.”

Russia mocked Rutte, sneering he had “gorged on too many of the magic mushrooms beloved by the Dutch” and should prepare for “a future in a hellish Siberian labour camp”.

Across the continent, the preparations for WW3 are no longer hypothetical – they are visible on streets, in schools, in bunkers, and now, hospitals.

Posted in BRICS, Europe, France

Europe could ‘die out’ – Musk

•September 6, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department; and the Washington Post to the CIA” Pepe Escobar

The tech billionaire was responding to data showing Scotland’s deaths outpaced births by 34% in the first half of 2025, following the trend of South Africa, where Musk came from; and where the blacks have taken over.

~ RT “If people wearing headscarves bother you so much, if you don’t want to see us anymore, move… Go somewhere else, get out!” Raiss (a headscarved Belgian official) is heard saying in the clip.

RT World News • August 31, 2025

Europe could “die out” unless it fixes its demographic problems by boosting birth rates, tech billionaire Elon Musk has warned.

In a post on X on Saturday, Musk was responding to statistics from Scotland showing 34% more deaths than births in the first half of 2025.

“Unless the birth rate at least gets back to replacement rate, Europe will die out,” he wrote, referring to the average number of children needed per couple for a population to replace itself.

The replacement fertility rate is generally set at 2.1 children per woman, accounting for child mortality and near-equal gender ratios at birth. Recent studies, however, suggest that this level may be insufficient, pointing to a long-term survival threshold closer to 2.7 children per woman.

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.4 in 2024, while Scotland’s stood at 1.3 – both far below replacement levels. In the EU, fertility has been declining for years, reaching a record low of 1.4 live births per woman in 2023.

Musk, a vocal advocate for higher birth rates who has fathered at least 14 children and donated millions to fertility research, has often raised the alarm over the demographic decline in Europe. His warnings, however, extend beyond Europe. Musk has cited global demographic data, claiming that civilization “is going to crumble” unless birth rates rise. He previously argued that population collapse due to low fertility “is a much bigger risk to civilization” than climate change.

Worldwide, fertility has been falling for over 50 years. UN data shows it stood at around 2.2 births per woman in 2024, down from 5 in the 1970s and 3.3 in the 1990s. Only 45% of countries and areas – home to roughly a third of the global population – reported fertility levels at or above 2.1 last year. Just 13% had fertility rates of 4.0 or higher, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yemen.

Falling birth rates and population decline have also become a pressing issue for Russia, with Rosstat recording just 1.2 million births in 2024 – the lowest since 1999 – reflecting a fertility rate of 1.4.

Posted in Europe, Islamic

Isaiah (Ch 51-52)

•September 5, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20;

God says in Isaiah 46:9 “Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is none other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’” Isaiah 46:9-10.

Isaiah 51

¹ “Hearken to Me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: Look unto the rock from whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit from whence ye are dug.

— hearken unto me; to the God of their fathers, who now addresses them; regarded as in exile and bondage and as desponding in regard to their prospects. In this situation, God, or perhaps more properly the Messiah is introduced as addressing them with the assurances of deliverance.

² Look unto Abraham your father and unto Sarah that bore you; for I called him alone, and blessed him and increased him.

— for I called him alone and blessed him and increased him; he was without issue when he was “called” out of Chaldea into another country and also the only one of the family;

— and the Lord “blessed” him not only with flocks and herds, and gold and silver, but with a son in his old age; and so “increased” him that there sprung from him as many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand by the sea shore innumerable, Hebrews 11:12;

— the Septuagint version, between “blessed” and “increased” insert these words, “and I loved him” which are not in the Hebrew text. The Targum says, “for Abraham was one alone in the world, and I brought him to my service, and I blessed him and multiplied him.”

³ For the Lord shall comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places, and He will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.

— if God had raised up so great a nation from so humble in origin, he had power to restore the waste places of Judea to more than their former beauty and prosperity.

⁴ “Hearken unto Me, My people, and give ear unto Me, O My nation; for a law shall proceed from Me, and I will make My judgement to rest as a light of the people.

— and give ear unto me, O my nation; not only of the Jews but also the Gentiles; a nation taken out of all nations; a chosen and a holy nation. The Septuagint version renders it “kings” such are made and “my judgment shall be for a light of †the nations;”

— whereas the Targum: “for the law shall go forth from me, and my judgment like a light; the nations which I led into captivity shall praise it.”

⁵ My righteousness is near; My salvation is gone forth, and Mine arms shall judge the people. The isles shall wait upon Me, and on Mine arm shall they trust.

— my righteousness is near; these righteousness are either the words of God the Father, or his Son, which he calls his own because he approves and accepts words which may be rendered, “my righteous One,”

— Or these are the words of Christ, speaking of his own righteousness which was near being spoken by him as it was when he became the Chief Justice of the law by setting an example as revealed in his commandment in the Kingdom;

— many pretenders err in understanding here; if there are no law and statute how could anyone judge? His arms shall judge the people; both the arms of Christ are ready to execute the laws and statutes and to protect and defend them.

⁶ Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath; for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner. But My salvation shall be for ever, and My righteousness shall not be abolished.

— for the heavens shall vanish away; the heavens shall glide away to disappear as smoke is dissipated and disappears in the air;

— the earth shall wax old; shall wax old like a garment; and be folded up and laid aside and shall decay and be destroyed.

⁷ “Hearken unto Me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is My law; fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings [verbal abuse, mockery, or scorn].

— hearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law; that is, the law to keep his Sabbath, weekly and annual, not idolatry like worshipping heavenly bodies;

— today, more than 98.5 percent of Christians are honouring the Sun by observing Sunday worship. They have “their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the SUN toward the east; whose Godly judgement is to be stoned to death – ’till they die.

— also, following the SUN-worshipping Samaritans, most Church of God Communities are showing their contempt for God by having their “wavesheaf offering” and Pentecost on a Sunday; always on a Sunday. And these are supposedly in God’s Sanctuary, but God says he is a jealous God, so these pretenders could be spewed out of his mouth! A death penalty in Deuteronomy 17:3-5 says ’till they die!

Mithra killed the Bull (Rome conquered the Persians?)

Mithra (the Sun-God whose birthday they celebrated on December 25th as Christmas), and Protestants or Catholics alike worship this sun-god

⁸ For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool; but My righteousness shall be for ever, and My salvation from generation to generation.”

— moth shall eat them up; your reproachers shall be easily destroyed; but my salvation will abide through eternity.

⁹ Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art Thou not It that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?

— the Targum interprets the dragon as Pharaoh and his army who were strong as a dragon; and that same mighty arm that destroyed Egypt and its tyrannical king can and will destroy that great city, spiritually called Sodom and Egypt;

— and the beast that has two horns like a lamb, but speaks like a dragon and to whom the dragon has given his seat, power and authority; or rather this may be believed, the great red dragon has been cast out, or Rome Pagan has been destroyed by him.

¹⁰ Art Thou not that hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep, that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?

— art thou not which hath dried the sea; that is the Red sea and the deep waters of it; by causing a strong east wind to blow which drove the sea back and made it a dry land and the same arm and mighty power can and will dry up the waters of the river Euphrates to prepare the way of the kings of the east, Revelation 6:12.

¹¹ Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come with singing unto Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their head. They shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and mourning shall flee away.

¹² “I, even I, am He that comforteth you. Who art thou that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man who shall be made as grass,

— I even I am he that comfort you; the word ‘I’ is repeated here to give emphasis to the Being and to impress deeply upon them the fact that their consolation came alone from God and God alone; and that since God was their protector and friend they had no occasion to fear anything that man could do.

¹³ and forgettest the Lord thy Maker, who hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth, and hast feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor, as if he were ready to destroy? And where is the fury of the oppressor?

— and where or “but where” is the fury of the oppressor? where’s the fury of Pharaoh, that great oppressor of God’s Israel formerly?

— it is gone and vanished like smoke: where’s the fury of Sennacherib king of Assyria and his army that threatened Jerusalem with ruin? and where is, or will be, the fury of the king of Babylon? it will not last always; nor the fury of the an oppressor at endtime.

¹⁴The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, that he should not die in the pit, nor that his bread should fail.

— speedily shall the crouching captives be set free that he shall not die (and go down) to the pit nor shall his bread fail.

¹⁵ But I am the Lord thy God, who divided the sea whose waves roared; The Lord of hosts is His name.

¹⁶ And I have put My words in thy mouth and I have covered thee in the shadow of Mine hand, that I may plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, ‘Thou art My people.’”

¹⁷ Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem, who hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury; thou hast drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out.

— which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury; the effect of divine wrath and this signifies that judgement would begin at the house of God.

¹⁸ There is none to guide her among all the sons whom she hath brought forth; neither is there any that taketh her by the hand of all the sons that she hath brought up.

— following up the image in Isaiah 51:17, intoxicated and confused by the cup of God’s anger, she has none to guide her in her helpless state; she has not yet awakened out of the sleep caused by that draught;

— this applies to the house of Jacob then and now, as all his posterity are misguided by false shepherds everywhere; for examples:

— 1a) the house of Judah hasn’t come to term with what the Godhead is; it is composed of God the Father and God the Son, hence in Genesis, Elohim (God in the plural) created the heavens and the earth; but the Orthodox Jews couldn’t identify the Son which is all over in the Scriptures, especially the Torah and the Prophets; the Targum;

— 1b) the lamb for Pascha was/is symbol of the sacrifice of the Messiah, our Moshiach or Saviour, our Redeemer, but the Orthodox still regard it only as an act of defiance to the Egyptians who regarded lamb as the Egyptians’ deity. The Scriptures nowhere say this, but is only a figment of Jewish imagination;

— 2a) the house of Israel is indulging in idolatry; worshipping Easter, which is another form of worshipping Astarte, a title of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon;

— 2b) and Mithra or Mitra (the Sun-God whose birthday many honor and celebrate on December 25th which they christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the god of heaven; and they worship these earthly gods, everyone from his place today, Protestants or Catholics alike;

— and those who persist in their blindness will be horsewhipped! Nar, those who resist would suffer Judgement by drinking at “the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury” Isaiah 51:17 – by the sword, by famine, by pestilence and spending years in captivity to reflect and repent there (for more see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline and The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!)

¹⁹ These two things are come unto thee—who shall be sorry for thee?” desolation and destruction, and the famine and the sword” by whom shall I comfort thee?

— see, those facing judgement by drinking at “the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury” shall suffer (1) “desolation and destruction,” (2) “the famine and the sword.”

— “A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee; and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.” Ezekiel 5:11-12

²⁰ Thy sons have fainted; they lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net; they are full of the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of thy God.

— the head or top of the streets indicates the beginning and most important part of a street; the nation’s leaders, elders and princes, those who are in control or have influence where the nation is heading; Ephraim for both houses of Jacob;

— “And I will cast you [Judah] out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim” Jeremiah 7:15; examples of “they lie at the head of all the streets”

— and this “full of the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of thy God” is reaffirmed in Hosea 11:12 Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit. “I have seen a horrible thing in the house of Israel,” Hosea 6:10;

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²¹ Therefore hear now this, thou afflicted, and drunken, but not with wine.

— but not with wine; with the cup of God’s fury; the Targum expresses it, drunk with tribulation; with afflictions at the hand of God and persecutions from fellow men.

²² Thus saith thy Lord the Lord, and thy God that pleadeth the cause of His people: “Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of My fury; thou shalt no more drink it again.

— on the onset of the Millennium, at the mercy of the Messiah, thou shalt no more drink it again; or “any longer” – thou shalt no more be subject to similar trials and calamities.

²³ But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee, who have said to thy soul, ‘Bow down, that we may go over.’ And thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the street to them that went over.”

— but God will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; the nations that have made war upon thee and that have reduced thee to bondage; the calamities which the elect had suffered, God would transfer to their foes, from the nations; thus the times and callings of the Gentiles.

Isaiah 52

¹ Awake, awake! Put on thy strength, O Zion! Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city! For henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.

— awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; this prophecy is sure to be fulfilled: by Zion is meant the elect before the Millennium in the latter days, the days which is described as “wretched and miserable, and poor and blind and naked,” Revelation 3:17;

— which is called upon to wake out of sleep; and this is repeated to show what a deep sleep had fallen on Jerusalem, the danger she was in through it, and the forcefulness of the speaker, “Awake, awake!” or the great concern the Lord had for her; and this is the very state of the church now.

² Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem. Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.

— shake thyself from the dust; or “the dust from thee” in which she had sat, or rolled herself as a mourner; or where she had been trampled upon; but now being delivered from them as well as from all false shepherds and teachers of false doctrine;

— loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion; or loose thou “the bands off thy neck from thee” which seems to indicate the people of God in mystical Babylon, a little before its destruction who will be called out of it; and to throw off the Romanish yoke, or her daughter’s protesting yoke and release themselves from that captivity and bondage who should free themselves.

³ For thus saith the Lord: “Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money.”

— ‘Ye have sold yourselves,’ and become authors of their own bondage; as they who had made themselves prisoners had done so without paying any price for them.

⁴ For thus saith the Lord God: “My people went down aforetime into Egypt to sojourn there, and the Assyrian oppressed them without cause.

— the Septuagint renders it, ‘and were carried away forcibly to the Assyrians.’ Some have supposed that this refers to the oppressions that they experienced in Egypt, and that the name ‘Assyrian’ – so called because of his power and cruelty – is refer here to the Pharaoh.

⁵ Now therefore, what have I here,” saith the Lord, “that My people are taken away for nought? They that rule over them make them to howl,” saith the Lord, “and My name continually every day is blasphemed.

— and everyday my name is blasphemed continually; by ascribing their extent of power and authority, their dominions and conquests, not to the Lord but to their idols; opening their mouths in blasphemy against God, his name and tabernacle and his people, Revelation 13:5.

— the Targum says, “and they continually, all the day, provoke them to anger, because of the worship of my name.” The Septuagint is, “On account of you my name is continually blasphemed among the Gentiles.”

⁶ Therefore My people shall know My name; therefore they shall know in that day that I am He that doth speak. Behold, it is I.”

— my people shall know my name; God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end)

⁷ How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, “Thy God reigneth!”

— “Thy God reigneth! – the Targum is, “the kingdom of thy God is revealed.”

⁸ Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice; with the voice together shall they sing: for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion.

— for they shall see eye to eye; that is, distinctly, clearly as when one is near another; or it may mean that they shall be united – they shall contemplate the same object, or look steadily at the same thing.

⁹ Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem: for the Lord hath comforted His people, He hath redeemed Jerusalem.

— the Lord shall return with his Shekinah and redeem Jerusalem, a city reclaimed, rebuilt and inhabited.

¹⁰ The Lord hath made bare His holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

— all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God; all nations of the world shall with astonishment behold the wonderful work of God, first in bringing his people into captivity, then out of it in their redemption by the Messiah.

¹¹ Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord.

— the sacrificial offerings with return in Jerusalem as prophesied in Ezekiel 40-48; and “those that carry the vessels of the house of the sanctuary of the Lord have been chosen;” as the Targum says of the Levites and the priests would. And for the populace, presenting themselves three times a year before the holy city are essential; else there wouldn’t be any rain.

¹² For ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the Lord will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rearward.

— for ye shall not go out with haste; as if driven out or compelled to flee. You shall not go from captivity as your fathers went from Egypt in a rapid flight and in a confused and tumultuous manner.

Many theologians noted that the subject of the Suffering Servant starts here and onto the end of Chapter 53

¹³ “Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently, He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. (הָא יַצְלַח עַבְדִי מְשִׁיחָא יְרוּם וְיִסְגֵי וְיִתְקוֹף לַחֲדָא:) — from Sefaria, the Targum interprets מְשִׁיחָא as the Messiah; He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high;

— “Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper, He shall be exalted and extolled, and He shall be very strong,” Isaiah 52:13 Targum;

The Targum is an indispensable source of understanding the Bible. Started by Ezra for those returning Jews from Babylon and for these returnees they could only understand the Sacred Text in Aramaic; hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the verses quoted.

“Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see” Isaiah 42:18. But the Orthodoxy today choose to be blind!

¹⁴ As many as were astonished at thee—His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men”

— when the Messiah was revealed, as at the end of His First Coming, He was so marred – (משׁחת mishechath); so defaced, destroyed, disfigured; this was a disfiguration or defacement of his aspect, more than that of any man;

The Targum verse in full: “As the house of Israel anxiously hoped for Him many days, (which was poor among the nations; their appearance and their brightness being worse than that of the sons of men.)” Isaiah 52:14 Jonathan

— this phrase “the house of Israel anxiously hoped for him” shows that the house of Israel and the Suffering Servant are two separate entities, hence the Suffering Servant could not be the house of Israel!

Verse 15, which contains Messianic significance, is not in KJ21, but appear in others and the followings:

The Targum translated by Etheridge; or from Sefaria

¹⁵ Thus shall He scatter many nations; before Him kings shall keep silence: they shall put their hands upon their mouths, for that which had not been told them shall they see: and that which they had not heard shall they consider.

— since King David, Israel (nor any ordinary man) had ever “scatter many nations.”

— Or as in Chabad Bible: So shall he cast down many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for, what had not been told them they saw, and [at] what they had not heard they gazed;

— the Septuagint: Thus shall many nations wonder at him; and kings shall keep their mouths shut: for they to whom no report was brought concerning him, shall see; and they who have not heard, shall consider.

— Young: So doth he sprinkle many nations. Concerning him kings shut their mouth, For that which was not recounted to them they have seen, And that which they had not heard they have understood!

— the sprinkling of the blood of a sacrifice, which could mean the shedding of blood for our (Jews and Gentiles) sins; (He will cleanse many nations with his blood, GW).

— The JPS 1917:

So shall he startle many nations,
Kings shall shut their mouths because of him;
For that which had not been told them shall they see,
And that which they had not heard shall they perceive.

~~ 12,24,26,42,52,54 ~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

His name Yehovah, is specifically stated, and should be used. The following verses translated as the LORD erred in translation. Titles are okay, but sometimes He asked us pointedly to call on His name:

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

Why China can build so quickly and America can’t

•September 4, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Why China can build so quickly and America can’t

Yahoo News • August 30, 2025

America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.

Meanwhile, there’s China. A country that builds much faster — high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones — all churned out at breakneck speed.

Why can China do this, and why does it seem like America can’t?

Dan Wang is the author of a new book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s a deeply reported, deeply personal book about the country he grew up in, returned to, and then left again. And it’s filled with surprising insights into China’s evolution as a country.

There isn’t a single answer to the question about why China can move fast and why we can’t, but Wang offers one I haven’t heard before. He says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers — and that many of our differences flow from this divide.

I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about how that engineering mindset has shaped China, and what these two societies can learn from each other. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

“The US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the first things you say in the book is that China and America are constantly locking horns. And you find that both tragic and comical because, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.” Why do you see it that way?

The first thing is that both countries are, in many ways, unintelligible to themselves. How many Americans truly understand America? You’re sitting in the Gulf Coast, Sean, and I wonder how many Americans have a deep sense of what’s going on there.

I think Americans and Chinese are alike because both embrace dynamism and shortcuts. There’s a kind of hucksterism in the US — a willingness to cut corners, to improvise — and that exists in China, too. Both societies carry the pride of a great civilization, but also a restless embrace of change. In contrast, places like Europe or Japan tend to be far more suspicious of change, more comfortable with stasis.

Let’s get into the central idea of your book: China as an “engineering state” and America as a “lawyerly society.” It’s a striking frame. How did you come up with it, and why is it useful?

I wanted a fresh framework to understand these two countries beyond the stale 20th-century categories of capitalist, neoliberal, authoritarian, or democratic.

China, I argue, is an engineering state. At times, the entire Standing Committee of the Politburo, the country’s top leadership, was filled with trained engineers. Hu Jintao, for example, was a hydraulic engineer who supervised the building of a dam. His premier, Wen Jiabao, was a geologist. They approached society as if it were a giant technical problem, something to be solved like a hydraulic system or a math equation.

America, by contrast, began as a lawyerly society. The Declaration of Independence reads like a legal case. Many of the Founding Fathers were lawyers, and so were the vast majority of presidents up through Lincoln. Even today, lawyers are dramatically overrepresented in politics and business. The Biden White House was famous for its Yale Law grads.

How exceptional is that?

The US isn’t unique, but the Anglosphere in general has this tradition: skilled debaters rising into political power. Lawyers dominate not just politics but corporate leadership, too. Even President Donald Trump, though not a lawyer, governed in a lawyerly way — suing people constantly, using accusations in the court of public opinion. His vice president, JD Vance, is also a Yale Law product.

You tell a story in the book about a five-day bike ride you took through Guizhou Province in 2021. Why was that trip so pivotal for you?

This was the summer of 2021, when China was at the height of its zero-Covid success. The country was sealed off, even from many of its own citizens abroad, so I decided to travel internally.

Guizhou is in the far southwest: green mountains, jagged karst rocks, breathtaking beauty. It’s also China’s fourth-poorest province, very remote, not part of the booming export economy. Yet what I saw there stunned me: far better infrastructure than in California, where I work, or New York, where I went to school.

This poor province had half a dozen high-speed rail links, brand-new highways, and multiple airports. Meanwhile, America’s richest states struggle to maintain basic infrastructure.

Apparently 45 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges are in that one province, which is…wild.

Exactly. That’s what the engineering state does. Instead of redistributing wealth, Beijing pours resources into colossal projects. Guizhou alone has 11 airports, some with barely a dozen flights a week. Monumentalism is part of the culture: What’s more thrilling for an engineer than a record-breaking bridge or the world’s biggest dam?

Local leaders are also incentivized. If you’re a provincial official who builds a gigantic bridge, GDP ticks up for a while and you can point to your “big-ass bridge” when asking Beijing for a promotion. There’s a construction lobby, too — state-owned enterprises always whispering, “Isn’t it time for another mega-project?”

China builds fast, but you write that it also “breaks people.” What do you mean by that?

If the engineering state only stopped at physical infrastructure, the ledger might be mostly positive. China now has excellent logistics, well-functioning cities, and a carbon-efficient national high-speed rail system.

“I don’t believe repression is necessary, but it certainly played a role in the trajectory we see today.”

But Beijing also insists on social engineering. It treats populations as if they can be managed like valves in a hydraulic system. Ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang face detention camps and forced assimilation. For the majority population, the hukou system has long restricted movement.

And then there’s the one-child policy. This was my favorite chapter to write, though also the most horrifying. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping empowered engineers to shape policy, and one brilliant mathematician from the missile industry convinced him that population trajectories could be managed like missile trajectories. The result was decades of forced sterilizations and abortions.

The official number is over 300 million abortions during the one-child era, the equivalent of the entire US population. Rural women were terrorized. Children were taken from mothers or beaten out of them. It was an idiotic policy pursued with staggering brutality.

Do you think China’s growth actually depended on this kind of repressiveness?

I’d like to say no, because I don’t want to believe repression is essential to flourishing. But it’s hard to deny that it was part of China’s growth formula. Compared with India, which is far more democratic and pluralistic, China has outperformed on many development indicators. India still has high illiteracy rates and malnutrition. China is considerably richer.

I don’t believe repression is necessary, but it certainly played a role in the trajectory we see today.

How do ordinary Chinese people feel about their own system?

It’s difficult to know, but many of my parents’ generation — born in the early 1960s — saw steady improvement. Their cities now have subways. They can ride high-speed rail. Some classmates became wealthy. The general sense has been: Life keeps getting better, decade by decade.

That said, under Xi Jinping, there are more headwinds: slowing growth, youth unemployment, government crackdowns on tech and property sectors. But the tangible improvements still matter. China opened its first expressway only in 1988. By the time that generation turned 18, the country had built a highway system larger than America’s. Nine years later, it had built another. That scale of visible change fuels optimism.

Let’s pivot back to America. What has China’s rise helped you see more clearly about the US?

In the US we debate living standards, housing shortages, decarbonization, and the hollowed-out manufacturing sector. On all of those, China offers lessons.

China’s “housing crisis” is oversupply — prices collapsing because they built too much. In the US, prices are skyrocketing because we build too little. China manufactured masks, swabs, and PPE during the pandemic at a scale US factories couldn’t match. It has built vast mass transit systems.

I don’t think we need to copy China. If America could just spend as much on building transit as Japan, Spain, or France, that would be enough. But China reminds us what abundance looks like.

Is the friction we’re talking about here — the endless procedures, lawsuits, rules — the price of pluralism?

That’s hard to accept. Walk around New York or the Midwest and it feels like the ruins of a once-great industrial civilization. Infrastructure is just barely maintained. Housing is unaffordable where the jobs are. Decarbonization requires transmission lines and wind and solar projects, but we can’t build at scale.

Some degree of litigiousness protects pluralism, yes. But right now America mostly works for the wealthy. If you’re rich in New York, you can live above the housing crisis in a skinny high-rise, travel by car or helicopter, even hire private firefighters. But a society that only works for the wealthy is not sustainable.

Why does this procedure fetish seem worse now than it used to be? We had lawyers when we built the Hoover Dam and sent people to the moon.

The lawyers changed. For much of American history, lawyers were deal-makers, often working alongside generals and builders. Eisenhower, for example, had personally experienced the misery of driving cross-country on unpaved roads, which helped inspire the interstate highway system.

But in the 1960s, public trust in the technocratic establishment collapsed. People reacted against environmental destruction, against Robert Moses ramming highways through cities, against Vietnam. Law students at places like Harvard and Yale embraced a new slogan: “Sue the bastards.” Lawyers became regulators and litigators, not builders. They solved the problems of the previous generation, but in doing so created new ones: paralysis, gridlock, endless procedure.

Let’s talk briefly about Trump. How does Beijing see him?

As a familiar type. Trump is like a coal-mine boss who stumbled into wealth: uncouth, transactional, driven by animal instinct. The Communist Party knows how to handle people like that.

Beijing rolled out the red carpet for him, literally letting him handle ancient golden artifacts. Trump clearly loved the glamour. He’s never had a bad word for Xi Jinping, except during the pandemic. In some ways, he’s been friendlier to China than to Germany or Japan.

But he’s mercurial. Sometimes he waves a big stick, sometimes he cuts a deal. That instability makes him both a threat and, oddly, a comfort. They know how to manage a figure like him.

Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, Beipanjiangzhen, Zhenfeng, Guizhou, China

I think Americans understand that China is this formidable political object, but is it more than just a great power looking to pursue and defend its own interest? Is it also an ideological project? Does Beijing want to remake the world in its image, or does it just want to dominate its sphere?

Scholars debate this. Some argue that if you give China an inch — say, Taiwan — it will take more. Others think China mostly wants to dominate its own sphere, East and Southeast Asia, and muzzle critics abroad.

China doesn’t necessarily want to turn America into socialism. But it does want to suppress dissent about the Communist Party, even overseas. The question is: Do we tolerate that as mere influence, or do we see it as intolerable interference?

What would it look like to combine the best of the American and Chinese systems?

Honestly, there’s no utopia. Every country is a tangle of imperfections. Europe provides mass transit and middle-class goods, but housing is often less affordable than in the US. Japan has demographic stagnation. Canada has soaring home prices.

The lesson isn’t that anyone has it figured out, it’s that we can all learn from each other. The US remains uniquely dynamic, always debating, always questioning. That constant self-criticism gives it a better shot at fixing itself than most places.

You end the book on a surprisingly optimistic note about both countries. Why?

Because neither China nor America is condemned to stasis. Europe and Japan often are. Both the US and China still embrace dynamism and change, even if imperfectly.

In the US, I admire the relentlessness of debate. We’re always asking how we screwed up, and how we might do better. In China, the system is rigid, but it sometimes produces shockingly fast fixes to deep problems. That capacity for reform, even if inconsistent, is real.

I still think pluralism is the safer long-term bet than top-down control and the sort of whipsaw changes you get in an engineering state.

I agree. Pluralism is the right virtue. But the US also has to govern effectively. If it can’t provide housing, infrastructure, safety, or opportunity for ordinary citizens, pluralism won’t save it.

Meanwhile, if China continues to build and deliver visible improvements, it could weaken America by further hollowing out our industries and inspiring pride at home. The real contest is simply this: Which country works best for the people living in it?

And right now, America’s biggest task is to actually do better for the broad majority. That’s the challenge we all have to meet.

Posted in China, US

Isaiah (Ch 49-50)

•September 3, 2025 • Leave a Comment

This chapter deals with the second Being in the Godhead, which the house of Judah hasn’t come to term with; it is composed of God the Father and God the Son, but the Orthodox Jews couldn’t see this, nor could identify the Son which is all over in the Scriptures, especially in the Torah and the Prophets; and here in Isaiah 49 and 50.

Isaiah 49

¹ “Listen, O isles, unto Me, and hearken, ye people from afar! The Lord hath called Me from the womb; from the bowels of My mother hath He made mention of My name.

— Listen unto me, O isles; these are not the words of Cyrus, nor the Prophet Isaiah, but of the Son, the Messiah or Christ, calling upon the inhabitants of the isles to hearken to him; by whom are meant the inhabitants of islands being called, probably of the house of Israel;

— “Isles from afar!” as before stand vaguely for far off isles, coastlines or countries; the invitation is addressed to the nations far and wide.

² And He hath made My mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath He hid Me, and made Me a polished shaft. In His quiver hath He hid Me,

— and he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; or “he hath put his words in my mouth as a sharp sword,” as the Targum says; namely, the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, the Logos, and is sharper than a two-edged Sword.

³ and said unto Me, ‘Thou art My servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’

⁴ Then I said, ‘I have labored in vain; I have spent My strength for nought and in vain; yet surely My judgement is with the Lord, and My work with My God.’”

— yet surely my judgement is with the Lord; this indicates that below the Lord, the Highest, which could only be the Father, someone else is making judgement and who else except the Son?

— or the reward of my work is before my God, as the Targum says; the Lord knew that he had called him to his office; how prudently, diligently and faithfully he had executed it; and what was his right and due and which would be given him.

⁵ “And now saith the Lord that formed Me from the womb to be His servant, to bring Jacob again to Him, though Israel be not gathered—yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and My God shall be My strength”

— who could “bring Jacob again to Him” that is, to confirm in the worship of the true God; except someone of a high level in rank; not Cyrus, not prophet Isaiah, not any human; it’s an enormous task pointing that this Being is no none else except the Son.

⁶ and He said: ‘It is a light thing that Thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel. I will also give Thee for a light to the Gentiles, that Thou mayest be My salvation unto the end of the earth.’”

— “a light to the Gentiles” and not a colonizer, an enforcer of Israel’s systems and values upon the Gentiles however how good they think they are, such as democracy, human rights and others but only as a light to the Gentiles.

⁷ Thus saith the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel, and His Holy One, to Him whom man despiseth, to Him whom the nation abhorreth, to a Servant of rulers: “Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the Lord who is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel; and He shall choose Thee.”

— to him whom man despises; to Yeshua, the Son of God, to whom in the days of his flesh; this description most truly and fully agreed with that Isaiah 53:3, for men, both Jews and Gentiles, among whom he lived, have despise him from their hearts.

⁸ Thus saith the Lord: “In an acceptable time have I heard Thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped Thee; and I will preserve Thee and give Thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages,

— thus saith the Lord; these are the words of God the Father said to his Son and these words continued;

⁹ that Thou mayest say to the prisoners, ‘Go forth,’ to them that are in darkness, ‘Show yourselves.’ “They shall feed on the paths, and their pastures shall be in all high places.

— show yourselves; among the people of God in his house of his laws, statutes and ordinances when called, converted and enlightened by his spirits;

— or “be revealed” or manifested when they are known to be, what they have not known before the people and children of God. The Targum says, “shew yourselves to the light.”

¹⁰ They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the heat nor sun smite them; for He that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall He guide them.

— during the Millennium, they shall not hunger nor thirst; all their needs shall be abundantly provided for as a Shepherd will provide for his flock.

¹¹ And I will make all My mountains a way, and My highways shall be exalted.

— mountains a way; during the Millennium, God will remove all obstructions out of the way.

¹² Behold, these shall come from far—and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Sinim.” — Sinim סִינִֽים sî·nîm;

— the western countries known to the Hebrews were some of the islands of that sea and a few of the maritime regions; probably referring to where the house of Israel had been taken to; they shall return;

— from the land of Sinim; there have been many different opinions in regard to the ‘land of Sinim’ – the Targum version renders it as land of the South; Isti de terra Australi; others, like Ptolemy and Gesenius say the country here referred to is Sina or China; both qualify as “these shall come from far.”

— Sinim; the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary says “the Arabians and other Asians called China Sin, or Tchin; the Chinese had no special name for themselves, but either adopted that of the reigning dynasty or some high-sounding titles. This view of “Sinim” suits the context which requires a people to be meant “from far,” and distinct from those “from the north and from the west” [Gesenius].

— in the Book of Mormon reads Sinim: “And then, O house of Israel, behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.” The index of this scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defines Sinim as “possibly [the] land of China.”

— Could Sinim gives rise to the prefix Sino- ; like Sino-American, Sino-Anglo, Sino-Russian, Sino-Tibetan?

¹³ Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth! And break forth into singing, O mountains! For the Lord hath comforted His people, and will have mercy upon His afflicted.

— the expression, “O earth” is expressed seven times throughout the OT, here by Isaiah, elsewhere by Moses, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Micah, empahsizing that God, too, has a message for the whole of humanity;

— Sing, O heavens; as in Isaiah 44:23, all nature is invited to join in the chorus of praise for the (1) deliverance of Israel; and (2) of all the nations.

¹⁴ But Zion said, “The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.”

¹⁵ “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

— “Does a woman forget her sucking child, so as not to have compassion upon the child of her womb?

¹⁶ Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are continually before Me.

— even though mothers should forget, I will not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls stand continually before me.”

¹⁷ Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee.

— from the Message Bible

“Can a mother forget the infant at her breast, walk away from the baby she bore? But even if mothers forget, I’d never forget you—never. Look, I’ve written your names on the backs of my hands. The walls you’re rebuilding are never out of my sight. Your builders are faster than your wreckers. The demolition crews are gone for good.

Look up, look around, look well! See them all gathering, coming to you? As sure as I am the living God”—God’s Decree— “you’re going to put them on like so much jewellery, you’re going to use them to dress up like a bride. Isaiah 49:17 MSG

¹⁸ Lift up thine eyes round about and behold; all these gather themselves together and come to thee. As I live,” saith the Lord, “thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all as with an ornament, and bind them on thee as a bride doeth.

— all these, the Gentiles as sufficiently appear from what hath been already said and from that which follow. Thy kingdom shall not only be restored and established in Jerusalem but it shall be vastly enlarged and adorned by the accession of the Gentiles to it.

¹⁹ For thy waste and thy desolate places and the land of thy destruction shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.

— and they that swallowed thee up; the enemies that laid waste thy land and that “absorbed,” as it were thy inhabitants and removed them to a distant land;

— and those who would destroy you shall be [from] far away? Russia and China?

(a) after being kicked out of the SWIFT payment system, Russia destroyed Ephraim by leading BRICS++ countries (mainly from the Global South) in de-dollarization of the dollar as a reserve currency;

(b) enticed by high corporate profits from cheap labor, American industrialists had moved into China, destroying themselves in the process by hollowing out themselves through de-industrialization!

²⁰The children whom thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, ‘The place is too narrow for me; give place to me that I may dwell.’

— the place is too strait for me; there is no room for us all; this is indicative of such an increase as took place when the return of the exiles to the Promised Land and shall yet more abundantly than any time before that they will call for more land to dwell in.

²¹Then shalt thou say in thine heart, ‘Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children and am desolate, a captive and removing to and fro? And who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?’”

— NOG

Then you will ask yourself, “Who has fathered these children for me? I was childless and unable to have children. I was exiled and rejected. Who raised these children for me? I was left alone. Where have they come from?”

— MSG

“And your ruined land? Your devastated, decimated land? Filled with more people than you know what to do with! And your barbarian enemies, a fading memory. The children born in your exile will be saying, ‘It’s getting too crowded here. I need more room.’

And you’ll say to yourself, ‘Where on earth did these children come from? I lost everything, had nothing, was exiled and penniless. So who reared these children? How did these children get here?’”

²² Thus saith the Lord God: “Behold, I will lift up Mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up My standard to the people; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.

— bring … sons in … arms; the Gentiles shall aid in restoring Israel to its own land (Isaiah 60:4; 66:20); children able to support themselves are carried on the shoulders from the East; but infants in the arms or astride on one haunch (Isaiah 60:12). “Thy sons” must be distinct from “the Gentiles,” who carry them; and therefore cannot primarily refer to converts among the Gentiles;

— another interpretation: behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles; to lift up the hand is a sign of beckoning to, or inviting; and that God would call the Gentiles to partake of the blessings of the true religion and to embrace the God of Israel (see also Isaiah 11:11; could this time period coincide with Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline?)

²³ And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: They shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet. And thou shalt know that I am the Lord, for they shall not be ashamed that wait for Me.”

— and kings shall be thy nursing fathers and queens thy nursing mothers; who shall show favour and respect to the elect of God, grant them liberty, protect and defend them in their religious privileges:

— and since the Messiah is the King of kings, and Lord of lords; so this is to be understood not figuratively of apostles and other shepherds who are kings and priests unto God and who feed the church with the milk of the Word and the breasts of ordinances; but literally also as kings and queens of the earth;

— and is thought to have had its fulfilment, at least in part in Cyrus, Ahasuerus, Esther and others; but more so as priestly kings and queens as Ezra and Nehemiah, Zerubbabel and others; and will have a far greater accomplishment in the latter day glory.

²⁴ Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered?

²⁵ But thus saith the Lord: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered; for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.

— being lawful captives to the service of God, yet delivered by a price of unspeakable value. Here is an express promise: Even the prey of the terrible shall be delivered;

— they being viewed as God’s enemies deprived of his prey, bound and cast into the pit; and all the powers that have combined to enslave, persecute or corrupt the elects are destroyed; that all the earth may know that our Saviour and Redeemer is Yehovah, the Mighty One of Jacob.

²⁶ And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh, and they shall be drunken with their own blood as with sweet wine. And all flesh shall know that I, the Lord, am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.”

— MSG

Can plunder be retrieved from a giant, prisoners of war gotten back from a tyrant? But God says, “Even if a giant grips the plunder and a tyrant holds my people prisoner, I’m the one who’s on your side, defending your cause, rescuing your children.

And your enemies, crazed and desperate, will turn on themselves, killing each other in a frenzy of self-destruction. Then everyone will know that I, God, have saved you—I, the Mighty One of Jacob.”

Isaiah 50

¹ Thus saith the Lord: “Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? Or which of My creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.

— your mother’s divorcement? – God speaks of himself as the husband of his people, as having married his chosen to himself, indicating the tender affection which he had for his people;

— ye have sold yourselves; that is, you have gone into captivity on account of your sins. It has been your own act and you have thus become bondmen to a foreign power only by your own choice; the nation has been rejected and suffered to go into exile on account of its transgressions.

² Why, when I came, was there no man? When I called, was there none to answer? Is My hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver? Behold, at My rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness; their fish stink because there is no water, and dieth for thirst.

— was there no man? – that is, when I came to call you to repentance, why was there no man of the nation to yield obedience? the Targum says, “wherefore have I sent my prophets, and they are not repented? They prophesied, but they obeyed not.”

— when I called, was there none to answer? – none obeyed or regarded my voice. It was not, therefore, by his fault that they had been punished but it was because they did not listen to the messengers which God had sent unto them;

— is my hand shortened at all? – it was not because God was unable to save that they had been thus punished. To shorten the hand, that is, to cut it off, is an emblem of diminishing or destroying our ability to execute any purpose (see Isaiah 59:1). So in Numbers 11:23 : ‘Is the Lord’s hand waxed short?’

— behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea; he was able to do it and did so for the children of Israel and made a passage through the Red Sea for them as on dry land; which was done by a strong east wind he caused to blow, here called his “rebuke” Exodus 14:20.

³ I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.

— God clothe the heavens with gross and thick darkness; perhaps reminding us of the three days’ darkness the Egyptians were in, Exodus 10:12, or with thick and black clouds, as in tempestuous weather frequently; or by eclipses of the sun; there was an extraordinary instance of great darkness at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, Matthew 27:45.

⁴ “The Lord God hath given Me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. He wakeneth morning by morning; He wakeneth Mine ear to hear as the learned.

— the tongue of the learned; the tongue of those who are instructed;’ that is of the eloquent; or the tongue of instruction; that is, one that is qualified to me or others; it means that on the subject of religion he was eminently endowed with intelligence and with knowledge;

— he waken me morning by morning; that is, he wakens me every morning; from an instructor who awakens his pupils early in order that they may receive instruction;

— the Redeemer would be eminently endowed under the divine instruction and guidance for his work; he would be one who was, so to speak, in the school of knowledge and who would be qualified to impart instruction to others.

⁵ The Lord God hath opened Mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back.

— hath opened mine ear; hath revealed unto me; or rather, hath given me power and a willingness to hear and receive his commands as this phrase is used, Psalm 40:6; Isaiah 35:5.

⁶ I gave My back to the smiters and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; I hid not My face from shame and spitting.

— I, the Messiah, gave my back to the smiters; I submitted willingly to be scourged or whipped; this is one prophecy which can be applied to no other one but the Messiah; it was literally fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 27:26; compare Luke 18:33).

⁷ For the Lord God will help Me, therefore shall I not be confounded; therefore have I set My face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.

— for, the Lord God will help me, the Messiah; though as a man I am weak and inconsiderable yet God will strengthen me to go through my great and hard suffering.

⁸ He is near that justifieth Me. Who will contend with Me? Let us stand together. Who is Mine adversary? Let him come near to Me.

— he is near that justifies the Messiah; his Father was “near” him in his whole state of humiliation; he left him not alone; he was at his right hand and therefore he was not moved;

— and “justified” him from all the false charges they brought against the Messiah and from all the sins of his people that were upon him; these he took upon him and bore them, upon which he was acquitted; and which is evident by his resurrection from the dead, by his ascension to heaven and session at the right hand of God.

⁹ Behold, the Lord God will help Me. Who is he that shall condemn Me? Lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up.

— they all shall wax old; all my enemies shall pass away as a garment is worn out and cast aside; the Messiah would survive all their attacks; his cause, his truth and his reputation would live while all the power, the influence, the reputation of his adversaries, would vanish as a garment that is worn out and then thrown away.

¹⁰ “Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of His Servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.

— the persons addressed in this call to faith are ‘those who fear the Lord,’ and ‘obey the voice of his Servant.’ It is implied that these two things are necessarily connected so that obedience to Son;

— the Messiah is the test of true religion for the fear of the Lord does not exist where the Word of the Son is neglected or rejected; but those that truly fear God, obey the voice of his Son.

¹¹ Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks! Walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have from Mine hand: ye shall lie down in sorrow.

— behold, all ye that kindle a fire; this refers to the wicked; in times of darkness and calamity, instead of trusting in God they would confide in their own resources and endeavor to kindle a light for themselves in which they might walk; but the result would be that they would find no comfort and would ultimately under his hand lie down in sorrow;

— the phrase, ‘that kindle a fire,’ refers to all the plans which people form with reference to their own salvation; all which they rely upon to guide them through the darkness of this world; it may include all the schemes of human philosophy, of false religion, of paganism;

— of infidelity, deism and self-righteousness; all dependence on their own good works or charities ties. All these are false lights which people rekindle, in order to guide themselves when they resolve to cast off God and to resist his spirit.

Posted in Isaiah

Venezuela deploys warships

•September 2, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department; and the Washington Post to the CIA” Pepe Escobar

Trump has only two cards left: (1) Trump said Monday that he could charge 200% tariffs on Chinese goods if Beijing does not export magnets to the US; and (2) he said he could withhold airplane parts to ground China’s American-made Boeing jets. That is, he has no more cards on chips, TSMC or Nvidia’s.

Venezuela deploys warships, drones to coast as US naval squadron nears

Venezuelan Defence Ministry orders naval patrols as US warships sent to waters off country’s coast to tackle Latin American drug cartels.

People sign up to join the civil militias, called by the government of President Nicolas Maduro, at a square in Caracas, Venezuela.

Aljazeera • August 27, 2025

Venezuela’s defence minister says military vessels and drones will be sent to patrol the country’s coastline amid simmering tension with the United States after Washington deployed warships to waters off Venezuela to fight drug trafficking.

In a video on social media on Tuesday, Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino announced a “significant” drone deployment as well as naval patrols along the country’s Caribbean coast, including “larger vessels further north in our territorial waters.”

The move comes after Washington last week deployed an amphibious squadron of three warships towards Venezuela’s coast in what it said was an operation against Latin American drug cartels.

News agencies reported on Monday that two more US ships – a guided missile cruiser and a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine – had also been dispatched to the Caribbean, and that some 4,500 US service members, including 2,200 Marines, were part of the deployment.

The US naval build-up comes after the administration of US President Donald Trump last week accused Venezuela’s left-wing president, Nicolas Maduro, of being involved in cocaine trafficking and working with drug cartels.

Washington also announced that it had doubled a reward for the capture or prosecution of Maduro on drug charges from $25m to $50m. The US is also offering a reward of $25m for the arrest or prosecution of Venezuelan Minister of the Popular Power for Interior Diosdado Cabello.

US officials have accused Maduro and members of his government of heading the Venezuelan cocaine trafficking cartel Cartel de los Soles, which Washington has designated a terrorist organisation.

Maduro has dismissed the accusations and accused the US of attempting to instigate regime change in his country.

Military build-up

On Monday, Maduro insisted during a weekly television show that his country, unlike neighbouring Colombia, is “free of coca leaf crops and free of cocaine production.”

Maduro, who has also criticised the US government for not addressing the drug consumption within its borders, has mobilised hundreds of thousands of local militia members to strengthen national security amid the threats from Washington.

Some 15,000 Venezuelan troops have also been dispatched to the country’s border with Colombia to crack down on criminal groups, including those involved in drug trafficking.

In a separate announcement on Tuesday, Defence Minister Padrino said an ongoing operation in Venezuela’s northeastern corner had resulted in the dismantling of shipyards where criminals intended “to manufacture semisubmersibles and boats to transport drugs by sea” to markets in Europe and North America.

The move to deploy US warships and personnel off Venezuela comes as Trump pushes for using the military to thwart cartels he blames for the flow of fentanyl and other illicit drugs into US communities, and for perpetuating violence in some US cities.

Venezuela’s mission to the United Nations denounced the US’s “escalation of hostile actions and threats” in a letter, local media outlet Noticias Venevision reported on Tuesday.

A banner offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello

Referring to the imminent arrival of US ships off the coast, Venezuela told the UN that Washington’s actions were “a serious threat to regional peace and security”, while the presence of a nuclear-powered attack submarine was “a clear act of intimidation.”

The letter also demanded “guarantees” that the US would “not deploy or threaten to use nuclear weapons in the region”, Noticias Venevision reported.

Despite the military build-up, analysts have downplayed the possibility of a US invasion or US strikes on Venezuela, while many Venezuelan people have shrugged off the US threat as posturing, the AFP news agency reported.

Maduro, who claimed a third term in office following an election in July 2024, which was described as deeply flawed, has been in Trump’s sights ever since the US president’s first term, from 2017 to 2021.

But the US policy of maximum pressure on Venezuela, including an ongoing oil embargo, failed to dislodge Maduro from power.

“I think what we’re seeing represents an attempt to create anxiety in government circles and force Maduro to negotiate something,” International Crisis Group analyst Phil Gunson told the AFP regarding the building tension.

For understanding this deep-rooted conflict, consider this:

“And Esau harbored hatred in his heart against Jacob, his brother, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.

“And Esau said in his heart, ‘I will not do as Cain did, who killed Abel during their father’s lifetime and then their father had another son, Seth.

“Rather, I will wait until the days of mourning for my father have passed, and then I will kill Jacob my brother, and I will be the sole heir.’” Genesis 27:42 Jonathan

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Posted in Latin Americas, Monroe Doctrine, US, Venezuela

Isaiah (Ch 47-48)

•September 1, 2025 • Leave a Comment

God claims that the house of Jacob, or rather, its shepherd, doesn’t know Him:

“For Jacob My servant’s sake, and Israel Mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.

“I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God besides Me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me,” Isaiah 45:4-5

Contrast those who don’t know to ones who know:

“And I will give thee the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, who call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel” Isaiah 45:3

Isaiah 47

¹ “Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground. There is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans! For thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate.

— Babylon is represented under the emblem of a woman deeply in distress. She was to be degraded and endure sufferings; and is represented sitting on the ground, grinding at the handmill, the lowest and most laborious service.

² Take the millstones and grind meal; uncover thy locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers.

— uncover thy locks; the picture of suffering is heightened by the fact that the female slave has to wade unveiled, and bare-legged, all sense of shame outraged;

— the Targum says,

“Receive this calamity and go into servitude; put away the glory of thy kingdom, thy princes are overthrown, the people of thy armies are scattered, they have vanished away like waters of the river.”

³ Thy nakedness shall be uncovered; yea, thy shame shall be seen; I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man.”

— thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen; not only stripped of your garments and have nothing to cover your naked bodies, being spoiled of all by your enemy soldiers; but should have nothing to cover those parts which women are most ashamed to view.

⁴ As for our Redeemer, the Lord of hosts is His name, the Holy One of Israel.

— the prophet exults in the Lord of hosts, YEHOVAH, as the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel. God often permits wicked men to prevail against his people; but those who cruelly oppress them will be punished.

⁵ “Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more be called the Lady of Kingdoms.

— for thou shalt no more be magnificence, splendor, beauty and power, called the lady of kingdoms; which have given occasion to this appellation and which have led the nations by common consent to give it to thee shall be entirely and forever removed.

⁶ I was wroth with My people, I have polluted Mine inheritance and given them into thine hand. Thou didst show them no mercy; upon the ancient hast thou very heavily laid thy yoke.

— the sin of Babylon was that she had gone beyond her commission as the chastiser of Israel, casting off all reverence for age and making even the old men do the hard tasks of bond-slaves (Lamentations 4:16, 5:12; Zechariah 1:15).

⁷ And thou saidst, ‘I shall be a lady for ever,’ so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart, neither didst remember the latter end of it.

— and thou said, I shall be a lady forever; this describes the pride and over-confidence of Babylon; she was false confident in her wealth and splendour, the faked strength of her gates and walls; and in her misguided faith of abundant resources to resist an enemy or sustain a siege.

⁸ “Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, who dwellest carelessly, who sayest in thine heart, ‘I am, and none else besides me; I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children.’

— that dwell carelessly in misguided security, without any consciousness of external danger.

⁹ But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day: the loss of children, and widowhood. They shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments.

— but the loss of children and widowhood shall come to thee suddenly, at once, at one and the same time;

— the destruction of Babylon was swift, catching the city off guard before its inhabitants even realized it, as the king and his nobles indulged in a feast. that very night Belshazzar was slain and Darius the Mede took the kingdom.

¹⁰ For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness; thou hast said, ‘None seeth me.’ Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I am, and none else besides me.’

— for thou has trusted in thy wickedness; ‘wickedness’ here refers doubtless to the pride, arrogance, ambition and oppressions of Babylon.

¹¹ Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth. And mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off. And desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know.

— and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know; that is, before hand, neither the persons nor the time when it shall come;

— notwithstanding their astrologers and soothsayer, pretending to tell what would come to pass; but not being able by their craftsmanship to give the least hint of Babylon’s destruction as to either time or means, the Chaldeans were in great security, ignorant of their ruin at hand as will the destruction of a modern mystical Babylon.

¹² “Stand now with thine enchantments and with the multitude of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast labored from thy youth; if so be thou shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail.

— stand now with thine enchantments; a scornful challenge to Babylon’s magicians to show whether they can defend their city.

¹³ Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators stand up and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee.

— thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels; speaking of astrologers, magicians and soothsayers; who were never able to give any satisfactory answers to questions put to them, as appears from Nebuchadnezzar’s consultation with them about his dream; and Belshazzar’s about the handwriting upon the wall.

¹⁴ Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame; there shall not be a coal to warm at, nor fire to sit before it.

— they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame; from those dreadful calamities that shall come upon them like flames of fire; and if they cannot deliver themselves by their art and skill, how should they deliver others?

¹⁵ Thus shall they be unto thee with whom thou hast labored, even thy merchants, from thy youth; they shall wander every one to his quarter. None shall save thee.

— thy merchants or they with whom thou has traded from thy youth shall wander everyone to his own quarter. None shall save thee; they shall all leave thee and flee speedily to their countries and habitations.

Isaiah 48

¹ “Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel and have come forth out of the waters of Judah, who swear by the name of the Lord and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth nor in righteousness;

— hear this, O house of Jacob; his descendants and posterity; come forth out of the waters of Judah; that is, those of the seed of Judah;

— but not in truth, nor in righteousness; not according to the complete will and truth of God; so what are their problems?

— 1a) the house of Judah hasn’t come to term with what the Godhead is; it is composed of God the Father and God the Son, hence in Genesis, Elohim (God in the plural) created the heavens and the earth; but the Jews couldn’t identify the Son which is all over in the Scriptures, especially the Torah and later, the Prophets;

God the Father has shared His name יהוה with His Son Exodus 23:21

— 1b) the lamb for Pascha is a symbol of the death of the Messiah, our Moshiach, Savior, and Redeemer; however, the Orthodox view it solely as an act of defiance against the Egyptians, who considered the lamb a minor deity. The Scriptures do not mention this, as it is merely a figment of Jewish imagination;

Why Orthodox are so fascinated with a pagan god is a deep Mystery!

— 2a) and the house of Israel is still indulging in idolatry; worshipping Easter, which is another form of worshipping Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon;

Astarte, the queen of heaven, one of the Chaldean goddess

— 2b) and Mithra or Mitra (the Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th which they christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the god of heaven; and men shall worship these earthly gods, acknowledging their supremacy, everyone from his place today, Protestants or Catholics alike;

Mithra, birthday on December 25th, christianised today as Christmas

— and those who persist in their blindness will be horsewhipped! Nar, those who resist would suffer Judgement by the sword, by famine, by pestilence and spending years in captivity to reflect and repent there (for more see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline and The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!)

² for they call themselves of the holy city and stand themselves upon the God of Israel—the Lord of Hosts is His name: — although they call themselves of the holy city, they do not worship God in sincerity and truth;

— Jerusalem was called ‘the holy city,’ because the temple, the ark and the divine presence were there, and it was the place where God was worshipped.

³ I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they went forth out of My mouth, and I showed them; I did them suddenly, and they came to pass.

— God have declared the former things; that is, in former times he had predicted future events by the prophets which have come to pass as they were foretold. Though the fulfillment might have appeared to be long delayed, yet it came to pass at the very time.

⁴ Because I knew that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron sinew and thy brow brass,

— thou art obstinate; they were obstinate and intractable, an expression probably taken from a bullock which refuses to bow down to receive the yoke; or move left or right.

⁵ I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; before it came to pass I showed it thee, lest thou shouldest say, ‘Mine idol hath done them, and my graven image, and my molten image hath commanded them.’

— my idols and molten images had not foretold these events and when they came to pass, it could not, therefore, be pretended that they had been produced by idols;

— by predicting them, Yehovah kept up the proof that he was the true God and demonstrated that he alone was worthy of their worship.

⁶ Thou hast heard; see all this, and will not ye declare it? I have shown thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them.

— even hidden things; events which are so concealed that they could not be conjectured by any human understanding or by any contemplation of natural causes. They are, as it were, laid up in dark treasure houses and they can be known only by him to whom ‘the darkness shineth as the day;

— compare to Isaiah 45:3; the “treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places” – for two examples of hidden secrets, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline and The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!)

⁷ They are created now and not from the beginning, even before the day when thou heardest them not, lest thou shouldest say, ‘Behold, I knew them.’

— even before the day when thou heard them they were in the heart of God, kept and reserved in his mind and therefore they are God’s hidden things before the Israelites heard anything of them.

⁸ Yea, thou heardest not; yea, thou knewest not, yea, from that time that thine ear was not opened; for I knew that thou wouldest deal very treacherously and wast called a transgressor from the womb.

— yea, thou hear not; not only that these events could not have been foreseen by them but that when they were actually made known to them they were still ignorant, dull and sceptical.

⁹ “For My name’s sake will I defer Mine anger, and for My praise will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off.

— for my own name’s sake I will defer mine anger; and although thou dost justly deserve my hottest anger and most dreadful judgements, which if thou repent not, I will in time inflict thee into captivity; yet at present I will spare thee, not for thy sake, but for the vindication of my own name and glory.

¹⁰ Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.

— in the furnace of affliction; referring particularly to their trials in Babylon and perhaps another one in the future. Afflictions are often likened to fire; from the fact that fire is used to purify metals and afflictions have the same object in reference to the people of God.

¹¹ For Mine own sake, even for Mine own sake, will I do it; for how should My name be polluted? And I will not give My glory unto another.

— for how should my name be polluted? blasphemed and evil spoken of among the house of Jacob; who would be ready to say that either the Lord did not love his people and was not mercifully disposed towards them; or that he could not save them and that their hands or their gods were mightier than he.

¹² “Hearken unto Me, O Jacob and Israel, My called: I am He; I am the First, I also am the Last.

— hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel; called out of Egypt, out of Babylon, and out of the world who had the name of God called upon them; so such who are called with a holy calling according to the purpose of God.

¹³ Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand hath spanned the heavens; when I call unto them, they stand up together.

— mine hand also hath laid; I am the Creator of all things, and I have all power and am abundantly able to deliver you from all your foes.

¹⁴ “All ye, assemble yourselves and hear. Who among them hath declared these things? The Lord hath loved him; He will do His pleasure on Babylon, and His arm shall be on the Chaldeans.

— who among them hath declared these things? that are future, that concern the redemption and salvation of Israel? which of all the idols among the nations whom the children of Israel were prone to listen to that could foretell things to come?

— the Lord hath loved him; that is, Israel, as the Targum says, whom the Lord loved but would raise Cyrus to do his pleasure in Babylon as he does; and whom he distinguished from others by bestowing excellent qualifications on him;

— he will do his pleasure on Babylon through Cyrus, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans; he shall do as he pleases with Babylon and with his army destroy the Chaldeans.

¹⁵ I, even I, have spoken; yea, I have called him; I have brought him, and he shall make his way prosperous.

— I, even I, have spoken; the word ‘I’ is repeated to give emphasis; to furnish the utmost security that it should be certainly accomplished. It means, that Yehovah and he alone had declared this and that it was entirely by his power that Cyrus had been raised up and had been made prosperous.

¹⁶ “Come ye near unto Me; hear ye this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I; and now the Lord God and His Spirit hath sent Me.”

— God have not spoken in secret; he had foretold the raising up of both Cyrus and later, the Messiah, in delivering his people in terms so plain that it could not be pretended that it was conjectured, and so clear that there was no ambiguity.

¹⁷ Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the Lord thy God who teacheth thee to profit, who leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go.

¹⁸ O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea.

— as a river; ‘that is, in abundance like a full flowing river that fills the banks and that conveys fertility and blessedness through a land; as the waves of the sea; large, abundant, infinite, persistent and continual.

¹⁹ Thy seed also had been as the sand, and the offspring of thy loins like the gravel thereof; his name should not have been cut off nor destroyed from before Me.”

— as the sand; this is often used to indicate a great and indefinite number, for multitude according to his promise made to Abraham.

²⁰ Go ye forth from Babylon! Flee ye from the Chaldeans! With a voice of singing declare ye; tell this, utter it even to the end of the earth; say ye, “The Lord hath redeemed His servant Jacob.”

— say ye, the Lord hath deemed his servant Jacob; referring both the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

²¹ And they thirsted not when He led them through the deserts; He caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them; He cleaved the rock also, and the waters gushed out.

— he caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them; the allusions are that before this happen, they;

— (1) let them hear and say, “It is truth” (Isaiah 43:9) indicating there is no truth before that; and (2) “thou hast not known Me” (Isaiah 45:4-5) indicating that both houses of Israel and Judah today have not known God;

— second, this also promised that much more truth would be revealed.

²² “There is no peace,” saith the Lord, “unto the wicked.”

— there is no peace to the wicked beyond the grave. “A sinner can have no peace at the judgement bar of God; he can have no peace in hell.”

— In the entire future world, there is nowhere he can find peace or rest, and whatever this life may be, even if it be a life of prosperity and external comfort, yet to him there will be no prosperity in the future world and no external or internal peace there.

Posted in Isaiah

F/A-18 Crisis: String Of Crashes

•August 31, 2025 • Leave a Comment

F/A-18 Crisis: String Of Crashes Rocks US Navy & Allies; What’s Going Wrong With Hornet Fighter Family?

Latest: a Malaysian F/A-18 Hornet crashed, reported DNYUZ

EurAsianTimes August 22. 2025 ~ Fox News

Tragedy seems to have struck the F-18 Hornet family, with an unprecedented string of crashes involving legacy Hornets, Super Hornets, and Growler variants reported in less than a year.

In an unfortunate coincidence this week, a Malaysian F/A-18 Hornet crashed just a day after a US Navy Super Hornet met a similar fate.

The Malaysian F/A-18 Hornet fighter reportedly crashed on the runway of Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Airport in Kuantan during takeoff on the night of August 21. The Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) later confirmed the incident, saying that one of its F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets was involved in an accident.

“We would like to inform you of an accident involving an F/A-18D Hornet at 9.05 pm on Aug 21 at the Sultan Ahmad Shah Airport in Kuantan. We are taking immediate action and will update on the latest development,” the service said in a statement. Both pilots ejected themselves from the cockpit before the crash and are now undergoing treatment.

Shortly after the incident, videos of the incident started surfacing on social media, showing the aircraft’s engine bursting into flames during takeoff. The RMAF has since issued an advisory to the citizens, urging them not to post unverified reports and footage.

While the cause of the crash was not immediately known, the Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim called for a “thorough probe” into the crash.

This is reportedly the first crash involving the two-seat F/A-18D Hornet fighter jet since it went into service in 1997. Before this, one of these fighter jets reported a failure after takeoff at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace show in 2019. However, the aircraft was able to land safely using just one engine.

Earlier, a Finnish Force F/A-18C Hornet fighter jet had crashed near Rovaniemi Airport (RVN) in northern Finland on May 7 while it was on a demonstration flight focused on aerobatic maneuvers. The aircraft crashed just five minutes after takeoff. The pilot successfully ejected from the aircraft.

Earlier, the US Navy had lost an F/A-18D Hornet in a crash in August 2023. The two-seater aircraft, operated by Marine All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron, crashed shortly after takeoff during a training flight as part of Service Level Training Exercise 5-23. The pilot was unfortunately killed in the accident.

It is pertinent to note that, unlike Finland and the US, Malaysia currently operates a fleet of just eight F/A-18D (now seven) jets that are operated by the 18th Squadron at Butterworth Air Base.

The aging aircraft are fast approaching the end of their life, which is why Malaysia is in the process of acquiring up to 30–33 second-hand but upgraded F/A-18C/D Hornets from the Kuwait Air Force, as previously reported by the EurAsian Times. The finalisation of the deal is expected sometime this year.

In recent years, Malaysia’s current fighter fleet has seen attrition. The recent phase-out of the BAE Hawk light attack fleet and the 2017 retirement of 16 MiG-29Ns have resulted in gaps in capabilities.

Even though there are still 18 Su-30MKM aircraft of Russian origin in service, the Air Force has had trouble simultaneously defending Peninsular and East Malaysia. With the Kuwaiti Hornets still away, the latest crash spells bad news for RMAF.

That said, the Malaysian crash came just one day after the US Navy lost an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet off the coast of Virginia on the morning of August 20.

The aircraft assigned to the Strike Fighter Squadron 83 crashed during a routine training flight, the US Navy said. The pilot had ejected and was rescued by the search team. The cause of the crash is not known, and the incident is now under investigation.

While the Hornet is now supposedly a legacy aircraft, it is the crash of its upgraded variant—the F/A-18E/F—that has sent alarm bells ringing across the United States military.

The Super Hornet variant is only operated by the United States and Australia. While the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) has reported no crashes, the US has lost about six of these aircraft, priced at about $60 million, in just over ten months.

Super Hornets Are Crashing

The string of accidents involving the Super Hornet began in October 2024 when an EA-18G Growler, which is the electronic warfare (EW) equivalent of the F/A-18E Super Hornet, crashed Near Mount Rainier, Washington State, USA. The aircraft reportedly crashed during a routine training flight and turned out to be very fatal, as both pilots were killed.

Following this, the Super Hornets were deployed aboard aircraft carriers dispatched to the West Asian region to battle the Yemen-based Houthis. The US lost three Super Hornets in the Red Sea alone.

In December 2024, a Super Hornet was lost in the case of friendly fire, when it was shot down by the US missile cruiser USS Gettysburg. The incident happened over the Red Sea after the Super Hornet, assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, was on a mission to protect merchant vessels from Houthi rebels.

At the time, the absence of positive target identification and lack of human situational awareness were believed to be potential causes of the incident, as reported by the EurAsian Times.

While the reason behind the friendly fire is still being investigated, the incident highlighted that the primary causes of fratricide have remained constant despite rapid changes in technology and the increasing complexity of US air-land operations.

On April 28, 2025, another aircraft was lost when the USS Harry S. Truman did an evasive maneuver in the face of fire from Yemen-based Houthi rebels.

This sharp turn resulted in the aircraft going overboard. “The F/A-18E was actively under tow in the hangar bay when the move crew lost control of the aircraft. The aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the US Navy said in a statement at the time.

While the Navy was still coping with this preventable loss, another such incident occurred in May 2025. A two-seater F/A-18F Super Hornet belonging to the Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11, also known as the Red Rippers, plunged into the sea.

At the time, preliminary reports suggested that the aircraft had crashed during an attempted nighttime landing on the aircraft carrier, as the aircraft’s hook could not catch the carrier’s arresting wire.

“The arrestment failed, causing the aircraft to go overboard. Both aviators safely ejected and were rescued by a helicopter assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 11,” an unidentified defense official told USNI News. “The aviators were evaluated by medical personnel and assessed to have minor injuries. No flight deck personnel were injured.”

No pilots died during the three crashes. However, the fact that the US Navy lost about $180 million worth of fixed-wing aircraft in less than six months raised eyebrows, especially because all three losses reported were directly or indirectly linked to the US military campaign against the Yemen-based Houthis. The campaign failed to achieve its desired goals and was eventually called off.

In addition to these, an EA-18G Growler also crashed in February 2025 in San Diego Bay, near Naval Base Coronado, California, USA. The crash occurred during a routine training flight. Both pilots ejected and were rescued, with no serious injuries reported.

Operating aboard aircraft carriers like Truman, the Super Hornet is a multi-role fighter utilized for close air support, strike missions, and air superiority. Popularly remembered as the Top Gun aircraft, the Super Hornets are vital to the US Navy’s global operations, as demonstrated by the effort to increase their firepower.

Although the US Navy also uses the F-35C Lightning II, which has stealth and sophisticated sensors, the Super Hornet is still the mainstay of the force because of its adaptability, larger fleet, and operational reliability. Perhaps, this is why it signed a contract for 17 additional Block III Super Hornets for $1.3 billion in March 2024, with deliveries expected only by spring 2027.

The frequent losses of Super Hornets don’t augur well for the US Navy, as it is its primary carrier-based fighter jet. As of early 2024, the US Navy had approximately 420 active Super Hornets in service, four of which have now been lost.

Moreover, there is no direct, dedicated alternative to the EA-18G Growler in the US military’s inventory that matches its specific combination of carrier-based operations, advanced jamming capabilities, and SEAD/EA mission profile.

The US Navy’s F/A-XX, a sixth-generation carrier-based stealth jet, is expected to replace the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet in the US Navy in the mid-2030s.

However, with the program now off the priority list, it could be a while before the service finds a Super Hornet replacement.

“And they shall come against thee with chariots, wagons, and wheels, and with an assembly of people, who shall set against thee buckler and shield and helmet roundabout; and I will set judgement before them, and they shall judge thee according to their judgements.

“And I will set My jealousy against thee, and they shall deal furiously with thee. They shall take away thy nose and thine ears, and thy remnant shall fall by the sword. They shall take thy sons and thy daughters, and thy residue shall be devoured by the fire” Ezekiel 23:24-25

Posted in US, US Navy

Isaiah (Ch 45-46)

•August 30, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Something to think about the length of Jacob’s forthcoming Captivity! It’s subjective but a historical precedent from the house of Judah could give us a clue regarding its timeline:

“And I will scatter you among the nations, and will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.

‘Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate and ye are in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest and enjoy her sabbaths” Leviticus 26:33-34

According to God’s judgement its length in Captivity is tied to their years of neglect; and drawing from Judah’s experience, it was seventy years, “to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept her Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years, II Chronicles 36:19-21.

For a more indepth study on this subject, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

Isaiah 45

¹ “Thus saith the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut:

— thus saith the Lord to his anointed; that is, Cyrus, who is called the Lord’s anointed because he was raised up and ordained by divine counsel to perform God’s good pleasure.

The Lord’s anointed, Cyrus the Great (Reign 559–530 BC)

² I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight; I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron.

— I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight; or “level the hilly places” as pioneers do; he would remove all impediments and obstructions out of his way and cause him to surmount all difficulties.

³ And I will give thee the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, who call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

— and I will give thee the treasures of darkness; the treasures which kings have amassed and which they have laid up in dark and secure places. The word ‘darkness,’ here, means that which was hidden, unknown, secret.

⁴ For Jacob My servant’s sake, and Israel Mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.

— UNBELIEVABLE! Even God says both “Jacob My servant’s sake, and Israel Mine elect” have not known him! This is a serious charge coming from God Almighty himself, so how?

— the house of Judah hasn’t come to term with what the Godhead is; it is composed of God the Father and God the Son, hence in Genesis, Elohim (God in the plural) created the heavens and the earth; but the Jews couldn’t identify the Son which is all over in the Scriptures, especially the Torah and later, the Prophets;

— and the lamb for Pascha was/is symbol of the death of the Messiah, our Moshiach or Saviour, our Redeemer, but the Orthodox still regard it only as an act of defiance to the Egyptians who regarded lamb as the Egyptians’ deity. The Scriptures nowhere say this, but is only a baloney figment of Jewish imagination;

— and the house of Israel is still indulging in idolatry; worshipping Easter, which is another form of worshipping Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon;

— and Mithra or Mitra (the Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th which they christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the god of heaven; and men shall worship these earthly gods, acknowledging their supremacy, Protestants or Catholics alike, everyone from his place today;

— and those who persist in their blindness will be horsewhipped! Nar, those who resist would suffer judgement by the sword, by famine, by pestilence and spending years in captivity to reflect and repent there (for more see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline and The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!)

⁵ I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God besides Me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me,

— “though thou hast not known Me” is repeated to give double assurance, or the sake of emphasis or strong confirmation;

— they have not known nor understood God, even known as the God of Abraham, their father; reaffirming emphatically that they, even the Elect, are stupid, ignorant and blind.

⁶ that they may know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is none else.

— I, Yehovah, that’s my name, beside me there’s no God: I equipped thee when you don’t know me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and its going down, that there is none without me.

⁷ I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things. — I, Yehovah, and there is none else, creator of light and creator of the darkness; founder of peace, and creator of evil.

⁸ “Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness; let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it.

— the Targum interprets this of the resurrection of the dead, paraphrasing as, “Let the heavens drop down from above, and the clouds flow with good, let the earth open itself, and the dead live, and let righteousness be revealed together; I the Lord have created them.”

⁹ “Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, ‘What makest thou?’ or thy work, ‘He hath no hands’?

— woe unto him that strives with his Maker; that contends with him, enters into a controversy and disputes with him;

— or litigates or quarrels with his purposes and decrees; murmurs and repines at his providences and finds fault with his judgements: this seems to have respect to the murmurs, and quarrels.

¹⁰ Woe unto him that saith unto his father, ‘What begettest thou?’ or to the woman, ‘What hast thou brought forth?’

— woe unto him; this implied wickedness and foolishness for a son to complain of his father or mother in regard to his birth or of his rank and condition of life.

¹¹ “Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker: Ask Me of things to come concerning My sons, and concerning the work of My hands command ye Me.

— instead of striving with God in regard to his purposes, their wisdom is in prayer to ask and even command God, in so far as it is for God’s glory and for their real good; ask Him of things to come; that is, God alone can direct and order future events; and it is their privilege to make inquiry respecting those events.

¹² I have made the earth and created man upon it; I, even My hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.

— God have made the earth and created man upon it: I, even My hands have stretched out the heavens and all their host, that is, the stars, have I commanded.

¹³ I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways; he shall build My city, and he shall let go My captives, not for price nor reward, saith the Lord of hosts.”

— I have raised him up in righteousness; though this may be said with some respect to Cyrus, yet chiefly to the Messiah of whom Cyrus was a type; him the Lord appointed and determined to be the Saviour and Redeemer of his people; him he sent forth in time for that purpose.

¹⁴ Thus saith the Lord: “The labor of Egypt and merchandise of Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine. They shall come after thee; in chains they shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee; they shall make supplication unto thee, saying, ‘Surely God is in thee, and there is none else; there is no god.’”

— surely God is in thee; in thee only is God. These of course are words of all the Gentiles to Israel, expressing their acceptance of the true religion. Israel’s God has proved himself to be the God of history, the only true God.

¹⁵ Verily Thou art a God who hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

— the Septuagint renders this, ‘For thou art God, though we did not know it, O God of Israel the Saviour.’ We may be in the dark now, but in due time we shall be permitted to see his design and to witness results so glorious as shall satisfy us that his ways are all just and his dealings right.

¹⁶ They shall be ashamed and also confounded, all of them; they shall go to confusion together that are makers of idols.

— they shall be ashamed and be confounded; that is, they shall find all their hopes fail and be suffused with shame that they were ever so senseless as to trust in blocks of wood and stone.

¹⁷ But Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation; ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.

— or as the Targum says, “They are saved by the Word of the Lord.”

¹⁸ For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God Himself that formed the earth and made it—He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited: “I am the Lord, and there is none else.

— the Lord that created the heavens, not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited; Judea and Jerusalem, lying waste during the Babylon captivity, shall be peopled again by the exiles.

¹⁹ I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I said not unto the seed of Jacob, ‘Seek ye Me in vain.’ I, the Lord, speak righteousness; I declare things that are right.

— God have not spoken in secret; the word rendered ‘secret’ (סתר sı̂ther) indicates a hiding or covering; and the phrase means secretly, privately. He did not imitate the pagan oracles by uttering his predictions from dark and deep caverns, and encompassed with the circumstances of awful mystery and with designed obscurity.

²⁰ “Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, ye that are escaped of the nations. They have no knowledge, who set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save.

— and pray to a god that cannot save; itself, nor them; cannot hear their prayers, nor return an answer; cannot help and assist them in distress, nor deliver them out of their troubles; and therefore it must be the height of madness and folly to pray unto it.

²¹ Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together. Who hath declared this from ancient time? Who hath told it from that time? Have not I, the Lord? And there is no God else besides Me, a just God and a Savior. There is none besides Me.

— tell ye, and bring them near and let them take counsel together; and gather their gods, their makers and their worshippers and let them lay their heads together and consult what proof they are able to give of their divinities, particularly by foretelling things to come.

²² “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.

— that God is willing to save all; since he would not give an invitation at all unless he was willing to save them; and capable of doing so.

²³ I have sworn by Myself; the word is gone out of My mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, that unto Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

— that unto me every knee shall bow; not only the Jews, but all nations shall worship him and submit to his laws, statutes and ordinances: which is signified by the bowing of the knee, a posture of reverence and subjection, and by one eminent part of God’s worship, swearing by his name.

²⁴ Surely, shall one say, ‘In the Lord have I righteousness and strength. Even to Him shall men come, and all that are incensed against Him shall be ashamed.

— shall be ashamed; the enemies of God shall see their own feebleness and folly; and they shall be ashamed that they have endeavored to oppose one so mighty and glorious as the Almighty God.

²⁵ In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory.’”

— all the seed of Israel; all the physical seed or descendants of Jacob; all who have a character resembling that of Israel or Jacob; all who are the true children and friends of God.

Isaiah 46

¹ Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth; their idols were upon the beasts and upon the cattle. Your carriages were heavy laden; they are a burden to the weary beast.

— Bel boweth down; Bel or Belus (בל bēl, from בעל be‛ēl, the same as בעל ba‛al was the chief god of the Babylonians and was worshipped in the celebrated tower of Babylon.

² They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.

— the Targum understands this and the preceding verse; “they are cut off, yea, they are altogether cut to pieces, and they were not able to deliver them; and their worshippers are gone into captivity.”

³ “Hearken unto Me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, who are borne by Me from the belly, who are carried from the womb:

— hearken unto me; the false gods are borne away as a burden; the true God bears them, that is, supports his people; he is able to bear their burden.

⁴ And even to your old age I am He, and even to hoary hairs will I carry you. I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.

— even to your old age; the care of a mother ceases in the natural course of things before a man grows old but the fatherly, we might almost say the mother-like, maternal care of God for his chosen ones endures even to the end of life.

⁵ “To whom will ye liken Me and make Me equal, and compare Me, that we may be like?

— the design of these verses is to show the folly of idolatry, and the vanity of trusting in idols, since all are but worms, dust and ashes.

⁶They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith, and he maketh it a god: they fall down, yea, they worship.

— they who pour gold out of the bag and weigh silver with the balance, hire a goldsmith to make it into a god that they may fall down, yea, throw themselves down to worship them;

⁷ They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him and set him in his place, and he standeth. From his place shall he not remove; yea, one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer nor save him out of his trouble.

— they lift it up, carry it away upon their shoulder and set it down in its place: there it stands; from its place it does not move: men also cry to it, but it does not answer; it saves no one out of distress.

⁸ “Remember this, and show yourselves men; bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors.

— O transgressors; ye who have violated the laws of God by the worship of idols. Many prophecies, delivered long ago, are not yet fulfilled; but the fulfilling of some is along the way and the rest will soon come to pass.

⁹ Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is none other; I am God, and there is none like Me,

— I am God, and there is none like me; for greatness or goodness, or that has done the like things; not one of the gods of the nations.

¹⁰ declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’

— declaring the end from the beginning; foretelling accurately the course of future events; this is an argument to which God often appeals in proof that he is the only true God;

— a Proof of God Credential:

It was a challenge, and still is: could any of your gods prophesy an event or an occurrence in the future and then bring it to fulfillment?

¹¹ calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth My counsel from a far country. Yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.

— calling a ravenous bird; Cyrus is thus described as ravenous as Nebuchadnezzar is in Jeremiah 49:22, Ezekiel 17:3.

¹² “Hearken unto Me, ye stouthearted, that are far from righteousness:

— ye stouthearted; the word like analogous terms in Ezekiel 2:4; Ezekiel 3:7, implies at once obduracy and ignorance.

¹³ I bring near My righteousness; it shall not be far off, and My salvation shall not tarry; and I will place salvation in Zion for Israel My glory.

— or Israel may be called his glory because he gives glory to them; not only grace here but glory hereafter when their salvation wilt be complete, that is, completely enjoyed.

Posted in Isaiah

China’s chokehold sparks Quad action

•August 29, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China’s critical minerals chokehold sparks Quad action

The global production of advanced technologies — from smartphones and electric vehicles to renewable energy and military systems — relies on rare earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium, essential for permanent magnets.

Pearls and Irritations • August 25, 2025 ~ East Asia Forum

As of early 2025, more than 90% of the world’s processing capacity for rare earth magnets remains concentrated in China, creating a pressing vulnerability in global supply chains.

China’s rare earths chokehold has triggered not just a supply crisis, but a strategic awakening, forcing democracies like those in the Quad — Australia, India, Japan and the US — to rewire their mineral dependencies, industrial strategies and geopolitical alignments.

The issue escalated significantly in early 2025, following the re-election of US President Donald Trump and the subsequent imposition of sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports. In response, Beijing announced curbs on the export of rare earths and related magnet components.

Immediately, global shipments of rare earth magnets fell to multi-year lows and production lines across the automotive, aerospace and electronics sectors experienced severe disruptions. From windshield wiper motors to electric vehicle powertrains, critical components were suddenly at risk.

In response to growing industrial strain, Washington and Beijing initiated talks aimed at stabilising trade flows. By late June 2025, both sides unveiled a limited framework designed to alleviate immediate pressures. But any semblance of stability proved short-lived.

Chinese officials disclosed that export licences had been issued only on a limited basis, with each permit valid for just six months. Concurrently, reports emerged of magnet stockpiling within China’s Baotou rare earth hub, raising concerns about future availability and signalling Beijing’s continued leverage over global supply chains, even under conditions of diplomatic detente.

These restrictions have pushed India’s IREL to pursue rare earth magnet partnerships with Japan and South Korea as of August 2025.

While these developments received limited media attention, their implications are far-reaching. Temporary curbs on exports led to production halts at multiple European automotive plants, exposing the fragility of high-tech manufacturing ecosystems.

Crucially, this is not solely a commercial issue – it represents a latent threat to national security. Without secure access to critical minerals, Western defence industries risk cost escalations, procurement delays and degradation of core capabilities.

The EU Depends On China & Russia For Rare Earths

Amid these disruptions, the Quad adopted a more co-ordinated stance. In July 2025, foreign ministers met in Washington and launched the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, a collective effort aimed at reducing strategic vulnerabilities in mineral supply chains.

Their joint statement acknowledged that over-dependence on any single country posed risks of coercion, price manipulation and supply insecurity. The initiative seeks to fund joint investments in mining, processing and stockpiling, with a focus on politically stable and partner-aligned jurisdictions.

Initial indications suggest the initiative is gaining traction. Japan has expanded its lithium co-operation with Australia, and India has expedited its domestic mineral approval processes and signed new bilateral supply agreements with partners in Africa and Central Asia. In Brussels, the European Parliament has increasingly echoed Quad concerns, calling for greater alignment in mineral policy.

Industry actors are also adapting. Japanese automakers are exploring cobalt reserves in Queensland, US and Australian firms are initiating rare earth projects in Africa, and Indian companies are enhancing both overseas partnerships and domestic refining capacity. These developments point to an incipient restructuring of global industrial logic away from single-node dependence and towards diversified, resilient supply ecosystems.

Still, the path to fully realising the Quad’s ambitions is likely to encounter structural and political obstacles. Divergent regulatory standards, environmental compliance timelines and capacity gaps among member states may slow progress. Each Quad member brings distinct geopolitical considerations. India, for instance, continues to balance diversification imperatives with its longstanding commitment to strategic autonomy.

The capital-intensive nature of mining and refining projects, particularly in frontier markets, also poses financing challenges. Addressing these hurdles will require sustained public-private co-ordination, trust-building mechanisms and frameworks that ensure policy continuity across political cycles. Success will depend on whether the Quad can translate shared intent into coherent and enduring institutional architecture.

What was previously viewed as an inconvenient dependence on China is now recognised as a strategic liability. The focus has shifted from reactive supply protection to proactive industrial sovereignty and geopolitical flexibility. This transformation underscores a deeper structural lesson: that technological capacity is inseparable from material security.

The sudden scarcity of rare earths has revealed the extent to which global innovation is contingent on unbalanced access to critical inputs. The Quad’s mineral initiative, though not widely publicised, marks a significant step towards structural co-operation among democratic states. If effectively implemented, it could underpin long-term economic stability and technological leadership across the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

Securing the supply chains of critical technologies requires more than just market mechanisms. It demands co-ordinated policy, cross-border investment and institutional trust. The coming decade will test whether democratic coalitions can extend their co-operation beyond shared values to the material foundations of power. Rare earths may prove not only to be vital commodities but defining instruments of strategic resilience.

The EU Depends On China & Russia For Rare Earths

China’s Upper Hand: Rare Earth Metals

Former Deputy PM of Australia and Governor of Western Australia, Kim Beazley, says:

Just a note on processing rare earths from the monazite piles at Eneabba with Iluka and the product from Browns Range: Australia can supply at least half the western world’s needs before the end of this decade for permanent magnets. Add in Lynas in Malaysia and we could probably supply the world. There is one monazite pile in Victoria as well which could be processed at Eneabba.

There is excitement around the globe every time a new source is discovered, but getting the mines up takes years. Australia is only 20% explored, but that doesn’t matter – what matters is processing. What we have already discovered does the job. The federal government is helping, but we need to treat this as strategic like the Chinese do. To get it up and running would cost slightly less than a US aircraft carrier.

China’s response on trade with the US through this ban is undermining Trump’s attack. He is having considerable difficulty in the negotiations. We in WA have five of the best six mining engineering schools globally. Virtually all rare earth mining sites contain all of them, but in very different amounts. Iluka has an offtake agreement with Browns Range, which has massive amounts of the heavy rare earths critical for permanent magnets. China fears this, which is why Treasury has had great difficulty forcing Chinese companies to sell down their stakes

Posted in Rare Earth & Critical Materials, Tech Race '25-26

Isaiah (Ch 43-44)

•August 28, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

Isaiah 43

¹ But now thus saith the Lord who created thee, O Jacob, and He that formed thee, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine.

— the Lord that created thee; the Almighty God, Yehovah, has created Israel as specially answering for his own purpose. To “call by thy name” is a mark of individualizing tenderness.

² When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.

— through troubles of any kind, that tenderness continues.

³ For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior; I gave Egypt for thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee.

— God gave Egypt for its ransom: this was fulfilled when he smote the Egyptians, both first-born and others and drowned Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, for the safety and benefit of his people. But why Ethiopia and Seba?

⁴ Since thou wast precious in My sight, thou hast been honorable, and I have loved thee; therefore will I give men for thee and people for thy life.

— the sense is, from that time that God had chosen them for his precious and peculiar treasure and people, he has had a great esteem and affection for them.

⁵ Fear not, for I am with thee; I will bring thy seed from the east and gather thee from the west;

— fear not; I will bring thy seed, thy descendants; the sense is God will re-collect his scattered people from all the EAST and WEST; a fulfilment of Deuteronomy 30:3, where God promises to gather his people scattered from among ALL the nations, if they should repent.

⁶ I will say to the north,‘ Give up,’ and to the south, ‘Keep not back.’ Bring My sons from far and My daughters from the ends of the earth,

— coming back from Babylon didn’t fulfil this, for God will say to the NORTH and to the SOUTH, and from the ENDS of the earth: Give up; Give up my people, or restore them to their own land;

— bring my sons; bring all my people from the distant lands where they have been driven in their dispersion. This is a commanding passage because all lands are under the control of God and he could at once command and they would obey;

— this is definitely prophetic, since he issues a command which is heard in all quarters of the globe and the scattered people of God come flocking again to their own land;

— further, it is a Proof of God Credential:

It was a challenge, and still is: could any of your gods prophesy an event or an occurrence in the future and then bring it to fulfillment?

⁷ even every one that is called by My name: For I have created him for My glory; I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”

— everyone that is called by my name; to be called by the name of anyone is being regarded as his son since a son bears the name of his father (see Isaiah 44:5; Isaiah 48:1); the expression, therefore means all are to be regarded as the children of God.

⁸ Bring forth the blind people that have eyes and the deaf that have ears.

— to bring out a blind people: Heb. הוֹצִיא, like לְהוֹצִיא to bring out those currently in exile (verses 5-6 above), those minds are exiled because they became like blind; although they had eyes they could not see.

⁹ Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the people be assembled. Who among them can declare this and show us former things? Let them bring forth their witnesses, that they may be justified; or let them hear and say, “It is truth.”

— all the nations; rather all ye nations; Israel is a witness on the one hand a multitude of nations to assemble before him in Jerusalem, Zechariah 14:17. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, they will have no rain; they are expected to be there to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles;

— and not Easter, which is another form of worshipping Astarte, one of the titles of, first, as Phoenician Goddess, then the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, fertility and sex. She is featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the “Ishtar Gate” was part of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon;

The Mysteries of Astarte: the Ancient Phoenician Goddess

— nor Mithra or Mitra (the Sun-God whose birthday many drunks honor and celebrate on December 25th which they christianised as Christmas), Zeus and others; called “gods of the earth” in distinction from the God of heaven; and men shall worship these earthly gods, acknowledging their supremacy, everyone from his place today, Protestants or Catholics alike;

— those who rebel and continue to resist will be horsewhipped! Nar, those who resist would suffer judgement by the sword, by famine, by pestilence and spending years in captivity to repent there (for more see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline and The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!).

¹⁰ “Ye are My witnesses,” saith the Lord, “and My servant whom I have chosen, that ye may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after Me.

— you, the people of Israel, are my witnesses, saith the Lord; they could testify that the Lord had foretold their affliction in Egypt, their coming from thence and settling in the land of Canaan, many hundreds of years before they came to pass and which were exactly fulfilled.

¹¹ I, even I, am the Lord, and besides Me there is no savior.

— I, even I, am the Lord; the repetition of the pronoun ‘I’ makes it emphatic. The design is to affirm that there was no other being to whom the name ‘Yehovah’ pertained.

¹² I have declared and have saved, and I have shown, when there was no strange god among you; therefore ye are My witnesses,” saith the Lord, “that I am God.

— God have declared; I have announced or predicted future events; I have warned of danger; I have marked out the path of safety. He had thus shown that he was the true God.

¹³ Yea, before the day was, I am He, and there is none that can deliver out of My hand; I will work, and who shall turn it back?”

— yea, before the day was I am he; before there was a day, before the first day of the creation; that is before time was or from all eternity, I am he that have spoken of it by all the prophets from the beginning of the world and now it is accomplished.

¹⁴ Thus saith the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “For your sake I have sent to Babylon and have brought down all their nobles, and the Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships.

— the Targum paraphrases it to make the sense clearer, “because of your sins have I carried you captive unto Babylon”

— as Daniel confirmed it by acknowledging their sins and prayed for his people:

And I prayed unto the Lord my God, and made my confession and said, “O Lord, the great and fearsome God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love Him and to them that keep His commandments,

we have sinned and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly and have rebelled, even by departing from Thy precepts and from Thy judgements, Daniel 9:4-5.

¹⁵ I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King.”

— I am the Lord, your Holy One; and therefore need not doubt of the performance of those promises: the Creator of Israel, your King; and therefore both able and willing to protect you.

¹⁶ Thus saith the Lord, who maketh a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters,

¹⁷ Who bringeth forth the chariot and horse, the army and the power (they shall lie down together, they shall not rise; they are extinct, they are quenched as tow):

— they shall lie down together, they shall not rise; they lay down in the Red Sea where they sunk to the bottom and perished and never rose more at least to life, nor never will till the general resurrection:

— they are extinct, they are quenched as tow; or flax as the wick of a candle when put into water is quenched at once; so the Egyptian became extinct in the Red Sea.

¹⁸ “Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.

— so great and wonderful shall be God’s future interpositions in your behalf that what he has done great as that was shall be comparatively forgotten.

¹⁹ Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

— God will do a new thing; something that has not hitherto occurred, some unheard of and wonderful event that shall far surpass all that he had formerly done.

²⁰ The beast of the field shall honor Me, the dragons and the owls, because I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to My people, My chosen.

— even the beast of the field shall honor me, the dragons and the owls, for I give waters and rivers in the wilderness and the desert, how much more would give drink to my people, my chosen.

²¹ This people have I formed for Myself; they shall show forth My praise.

— this people have I formed for myself, that is, the elect who may include the Gentiles, compared to a desert and wilderness, distinguished from Jacob and Israel in the next verse, and the same with the chosen people before mentioned; who being chosen of God.

²² “But thou hast not called upon Me, O Jacob; but thou hast been weary of Me, O Israel.

— thou hast been weary, as a people, you have been weary of me; they had accounted his laws grievous and oppressive; and they had groaned under what they regarded as burdensome rites and ceremonies;

— and so the Targum says, “ye of the house of Jacob have not met together for my worship; but that ye were weary of the doctrine of my law, O Israel.”

²³ Thou hast not brought Me the lambs or kids of thy burnt offerings, neither hast thou honored Me with thy sacrifices. I have not caused thee to serve with an offering, nor wearied thee with incense.

— thou hast not brought me the small cattle of thy burnt offerings; the kids and the lambs which according to the law should have been brought for burnt offerings daily, morning and evening;

— and much less did they bring the larger cattle of burnt offerings as oxen and bullocks;

— the Targum renders it “the rams of thy burnt offerings”- the Septuagint version, “the sheep” – and these were not brought to him but to their idols; or however were not brought in a right way and manner or having the right principles or with the right attitudes.

²⁴ Thou hast bought Me no sweet cane with money, neither hast thou filled Me with the fat of thy sacrifices. But thou hast made Me to serve with thy sins; thou hast wearied Me with thine iniquities.

— thou hast made me to serve with thy sins; thou hast made me to bear the load and burden of thy sins, which are very grievous and oppressive to me, Amos 2:13.

²⁵ “I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

— and I will not remember thy sins; God forgives and forgets.

²⁶ Put Me in remembrance; let us plead together; declare thou, that thou mayest be justified.

— put me in remembrance, that is, remind me of every plea which thou hast to urge before me in thy plea.

²⁷ Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed against Me.

— thy first father hath sinned, these words have been interpreted: (1) of Adam; (2) of Abraham; (3) of Jacob; (4) of the ancestors of Israel collectively; (5) of this or that high priest individually.

²⁸ Therefore I have profaned the princes of the sanctuary, and have given Jacob to the curse and Israel to reproaches.

— and have given Jacob to the curse; to utter destruction, to which persons or things accursed were devoted; to be the objects of their enemies’ scorn and reproaches; the Septuagint renders it, ‘I have given Jacob to be destroyed;’ or the Targum “and I have delivered Jacob to the slaughter.”

Isaiah 44

¹ “Yet now hear, O Jacob My servant, and Israel, whom I have chosen.

— O Jacob, hear ye now; although I have chastised thee for thy sins and had just cause utterly to destroy thee, yet in judgement I will remember mercy and will still own thee as my chosen servant.

² Thus saith the Lord that made thee and formed thee from the womb, who will help thee: Fear not, O Jacob, My servant, and thou, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.

— thou, Jesurun; the ideal name of Israel as the Targum says, which means the upright one as a poetical name; so the Book of Jasher is the book of the “upright” of the heroes of Israel; the Septuagint as “beloved Israel.”

³ For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit upon thy seed, and My blessing upon thine offspring.

— for God will pour water upon anyone thirsty; including upon the land, as the Targum says, “in a thirsty place” as a dry land is a thirsty land; it thirsts for water, large quantities of rain to moisten it, and make it fruitful.

⁴ And they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the watercourses.

— they shall spring up as among the grass; they shall increase and flourish like grass and those herbs and plants which grow up in the midst of it.

⁵ One shall say, ‘I am the Lord’s’; and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob; and another shall subscribe with his hand, ‘Unto the Lord,’ and surname himself by the name of Israel.

— one shall say, I am the Lord’s, etc; there shall be an influx of proselytes; who were not called by the name of Jacob and Israel; but now:

— instead of the nations looking scornfully on and uttering gibes and jeers at Israel’s fall, on seeing Israel’s rise they shall be anxious to have a part in it and shall hasten to enrol themselves among the worshippers of Yehovah;

— “One shall say, I am Yehovah’s” – while “another shall proclaim the name of Jacob,” as that in which he glories; and a third shall write on his hand, “I am Yehovah’s” and take as a surname the name of Israel.

⁶ “Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the First, and I am the Last, and besides Me there is no God.

— here God renews his contest with idols which he insists upon so oft and so much because his own people were exceeding prone to idolatry.

⁷ And who, as I, shall call and shall declare it, and set it in order for Me, since I appointed the ancient people? And the things that are coming and shall come, let them show unto them.

— since … ancient people; have given the house of Jacob prophecy of the future ever since I appointed them as My people in ancient times; therefore they were qualified to be His witnesses.

⁸ Fear ye not, neither be afraid. Have not I told thee from that time and have declared it? Ye are even My witnesses. Is there a God besides Me? Yea, there is no God. I know not any.”

— is there a God besides me? for there were many fictitious and false deities but none omniscient and omnipotent that could foretell future events and accomplish them as he did; there is no god but the one God: the Father and Son.

⁹ They that make a graven image are all of them vanity, and their delectable things shall not profit. And they are their own witnesses; they see not nor know, that they may be ashamed.

— a graven image is one that is cut, or sculptured out of wood or stone, in contrast from one that is molten, which is made by being cast; to show, at length, the vanity of idols and of idol-worship.

¹⁰ Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing?

— “Who hath molten” means “who has been so foolish as to do so; to take so much trouble about a thing which cannot possibly profit any one?”

¹¹ Behold, all his fellows shall be ashamed; and the workmen, they are of men. Let them all be gathered together; let them stand up; yet they shall fear, and they shall be ashamed together.

— the uniqueness of God having been set forth, the prophet now turns to the images and the image-makers, overwhelming them with his scorn and ridicule.

¹² The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his arms. Yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth; he drinketh no water and is faint.

— God proceeds here to show the folly and absurdity of idolatry; and in order to this he goes into an extended details of the manner in which idols were usually made.

¹³ The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line. He fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man, that it may remain in the house.

— having cut down a tree, he stretches out his rule or line upon it, the carpenter now proceeds to the construction of his god.

¹⁴ He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest. He planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.

— to make gods, he hews down cedars and taketh the cypress and the oak; of trees both pleasant and durable, but are all useless.

¹⁵ Then shall it be for a man to burn, for he will take thereof and warm himself. Yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread; yea, he maketh a god, and worshipeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.

— when shall it be for a man to burn, which there cannot be a greater instance of stupidity and folly, but it will afford materials for a nice fire.

¹⁶ He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast and is satisfied. Yea, he warmeth himself and saith, “Aha, I am warm; I have seen the fire.”

— image-making is described, to expose more folly of idolaters; Aha; an expression of joy and delight, being before a good fire in winter.

¹⁷ And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image. He falleth down unto it and worshipeth it, and prayeth unto it and saith, “Deliver me, for thou art my god.”

— being graved and carved, such an idol was his god, in whom he trusted, and from whom he expected relief and help. Monstrous stupidity!

¹⁸ They have not known nor understood; for He hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see, and their hearts, that they cannot understand.

— they have not known nor understood; they are blind, ignorant and stupid. Nothing could more strikingly show their ignorance and stupidity than this idol worship.

¹⁹ And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, “I have burned part of it in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it. And shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? Shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?”

— shall I fall down to the stock of a tree? or “the bud of a tree?” or that which is made out of a tree of their own planting, cutting down and hewing, part of which has been used to the above purposes; and the remaining lifeless log shall they worship it as a god?

²⁰ He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul nor say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

— more pouring of scorn on idolaters; they make the gods they worship; they take a tree and saw it up:

— one log serves for a fire to cook their food, and with compass and pencil and plane they carve the figure of a man and then they bow down to it and say, ‘Deliver me, for thou art my god!’

²¹ “Remember these, O Jacob and Israel, for thou art My servant. I have formed thee; thou art My servant. O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten by Me.

— remember these things which are now said about the folly of idolatry and the vanity of worshipping idols; the argument is to turn their attention to God and to lead them to put their trust in him.

²² I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and as a cloud, thy sins; return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee.”

— God have blotted out as a thick cloud; as the sun commonly dissolves or the wind scatters the thickest and blackest cloud so as there is no remnant nor appearance of it left. Return from thine idolatry and other wicked practices.

²³ Sing, O ye heavens, for the Lord hath done it! Shout, ye lower parts of the earth! Break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest and every tree therein; for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified Himself in Israel.

— Sing, O ye heavens, for the Lord hath done it; done what he promised, the forgiveness of the sins of his people and their redemption. So the Targum says, “for the Lord hath wrought redemption for his people.”

— because the heavens are called upon to sing on this occasion as the angels of heaven did when the Redeemer was born, and who rejoice at the salvation of God’s elect, Luke 2:13, shout, ye lower parts of the earth; the earth, which is low in comparison of the heavens.

²⁴ “Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, and He that formed thee from the womb: I am the Lord that maketh all things, that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth by Myself;

— that stretches forth the heavens alone, that spreads abroad the earth by myself; of himself and by his own strength and power;

— and he stretched out the vast space of the heavens as a curtain and spread out the earth in its length and breadth and the large surface of it to that great circumference which it has; a full proof of his proper deity!

²⁵ that frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad, that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish;

— and makes their knowledge foolish; he makes them appear to be fools.

²⁶ that confirmeth the word of His servant, and performeth the counsel of His messengers, that saith to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shalt be inhabited,’ and to the cities of Judah, ‘Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof’;

— all suppose that Jerusalem which in the prophet’s time was full of inhabitants, should be emptied of people: by the sword, famine, pestilence and captivity; yet nevertheless, there should be a return of the the house of Jacob from captivity;

— and this city Jerusalem should be peopled and inhabited again; and also that the other cities of Judea and Samaria shouldn’t be laid waste, but all should be rebuilt and restored to a flourishing state again. The Lord had said it and it should be done.

²⁷ that saith to the deep, ‘Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers’;

— that saith to the deep, be dry; the Targum says, “that saith to Babylon, be desolate.”

²⁸ that saith of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd and shall perform all My pleasure,’ even saying to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shalt be built,’ and to the temple, ‘Thy foundation shall be laid.’

— that saith of Cyrus; this is the first time in which Cyrus is expressly named by Isaiah, though he is often referred to. Here is mentioned expressly by name and it was fulfilled about two hundred years later.

The Lord God says to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shalt be rebuilt and be inhabited.’

Posted in Isaiah

The US Navy is struggling to build a drone fleet

•August 27, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The US Navy is building a drone fleet to take on China — it’s not going well

Malay Mail August 21, 2025 ~DeccanHerald

NEW YORK, Aug 21 — During a US naval test off the California coast last month, which was designed to showcase the Pentagon’s top autonomous drone boats, one vessel stalled unexpectedly.

As officials scrambled to fix a software glitch, another drone vessel smashed into the idling boat’s starboard side, vaulted over the deck, and crashed back into the water — an incident captured in videos obtained by Reuters.

The previously unreported episode, which involved two vessels built by US defence tech rivals Saronic and BlackSea Technologies, is one of a series of recent setbacks in the Pentagon’s push to build a fleet of autonomous vessels, according to a dozen people familiar with the programme.

Weeks earlier, during a separate Navy test, the captain of a support boat was thrown into the water after another autonomous BlackSea vessel it was towing suddenly accelerated, capsizing the support boat, according to four people familiar with the matter. The captain was rescued and declined medical attention. The incident was first reported by Defence Scoop.

Both incidents stemmed from a combination of software failures and human error, including breakdowns in communication between onboard systems and external autonomous software, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity to share sensitive information.

The Navy, Saronic and BlackSea declined to comment on the incidents.

The videos showing the drone crash were verified by two Reuters sources, the landscape matching terrain imagery, the GARC-096 name ID and structure of the boat matching file imagery of Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft (GARC).

US military leaders, seeing the outsized impact of maritime drones in the Ukraine war, have repeatedly said they need autonomous swarms of aerial and maritime drones to hinder a potential advance by China across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan itself has begun acquiring its own maritime drones.

The drones being developed in Ukraine, which often look like speedboats without seats, and are capable of carrying weapons, explosives and surveillance equipment, are primarily remote-controlled and cost close to US$250,000 (RM1 million) — making them optimal for kamikaze missions that have effectively neutralized Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The US, meanwhile, is aiming to build an autonomous naval fleet that can move in swarms and without human command — a more ambitious task at a higher price point; as much as a few million dollars per speedboat.

The recent test failures highlight the challenges facing the Navy’s effort to deploy the nascent technologies, said Bryan Clark, an autonomous warfare expert at the Hudson Institute. It will need to adapt its “tactics as it better understands what the systems can do and what they can’t do.”

But the Navy’s problems go beyond getting the boats to work: its autonomous maritime drone acquisition unit has also been rocked by the firing of its top admiral, and a top Pentagon official voiced concerns about the programme in a candid meeting with Navy brass last month, Reuters found.

Since the most recent incident, the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Unit (DIU), which had acquired technology for the tests, has indefinitely paused a contract — valued close to US$20 million — with L3Harris, one of the companies providing autonomous software used to control some of the vessels, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the cause of the accidents or the L3Harris contract being paused, which has not been previously reported.

A Pentagon spokesman said it conducted drone tests as part of a “competitive and iterative approach, between operators and industry.”

L3Harris declined to comment on the contract and directed questions to the DIU. The DIU declined to comment.

“L3Harris stands behind the safety, integrity and capability of our autonomy command-and-control product,” said Toby Magsig, who oversees L3Harris’ autonomous software products.

Rise of sea drones

To accelerate its drone effort, the Pentagon in 2023 launched the US$1 billion Replicator programme, through which branches like the US Navy and the DIU planned to acquire thousands of aerial and maritime drones, along with the software to control them. The first systems from this programme are due to be announced this month.

The Navy has committed at least US$160 million to BlackSea, which is producing dozens of its Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft boats a month, according to procurement records.

Saronic, which was recently valued at US$4 billion in a funding round backed by Andreessen Horowitz and 8VC, makes the competitive sea drone Corsair, but is yet to announce a major contract. Federal procurement records show the company has generated at least US$20 million from prototype agreements.

“These systems will play a critical role in the future of naval warfare by extending fleet reach, improving situational awareness, and increasing combat effectiveness,” acting chief of naval operations Jim Kilby said during a visit to BlackSea’s facility in June.

Navy turmoil

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has made fielding swarms of drones a top military priority. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed last month included almost US$5 billion for maritime autonomous systems.

But, so far, the Navy’s approach has faced scepticism under the new administration.

In April, the Navy’s key drone boat procurement unit — known as Programme Executive Office Unmanned and Small Combatants (PEO USC) — touted a successful demonstration of the software used to control BlackSea’s vessels in a post on LinkedIn, hailing it as “a major step forward in advancing #maritime autonomy.”

In response, Colin Carroll, then-chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of Defence Steven Feinberg, suggested the programme was duplicating other efforts within the Pentagon. “I have a feeling that there are changes in this programme’s future,” he replied to the LinkedIn post. Carroll, who is no longer with the Pentagon, declined to comment further.

The PEO USC was recently placed under review, according to four people familiar with the matter, due to a series of setbacks, and could be restructured or shut down.

This comes two months after the Navy said it had sacked the unit’s leader, Rear Admiral Kevin Smith, due to a loss of confidence in his leadership after the Naval Inspector General substantiated a complaint against him. Reuters was unable to contact Smith.

During a meeting last month, Feinberg grilled Navy officials about their autonomous vessel capabilities, including those being fielded by the PEO USC, according to three people briefed on the meeting. Feinberg was unimpressed by some of the capabilities being acquired by the Navy and questioned whether they were cost-effective, the people said.

A Pentagon spokesman said, “we’re not going to comment on private internal meetings” and directed questions about PEO USC to the Navy.

The Navy declined to comment on the meeting or the acquisition unit being put under review. Spokesman Timothy Hawkins said the PEO USC stands by its mission, including its role as acquisition authority for the maintenance and modernization of unmanned maritime systems.

The turmoil comes as shipbuilders and software providers are angling to secure even larger autonomous maritime projects, such as unmanned submarines and cargo-carrying ships.

Last week, the PEO USC started accepting proposals for the Modular Attack Surface Craft, to acquire medium and large vessels capable of carrying containers, surveillance equipment, and conducting strikes.

T.X. Hammes, an autonomous weapons expert and Atlantic Council fellow, said the Navy is in uncharted waters, trying to overhaul decades of tradition at high speed.

“You’ve got a system that’s used to building big things, taking years to make a decision, and now suddenly you’re asking them to move fast,” he said. — Reuters

“The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle” Psalm 78:9

Posted in US

Isaiah (Ch 41-42)

•August 26, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The Targum is an indispensable source of understanding the Bible. Started by Ezra for those returning Jews from Babylon and for these returnees they could only understand the Sacred Text in Aramaic; hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the verses quoted.

The subject of God’s servant changes back and forth between Jacob and the Messiah; and here in Isaiah 42:1 and Isaiah 52:13, the Targum specifically identifies “my servant” as “the Messiah” while in the Masoretic text both are uncertain and debateable.

Isaiah 41

¹ “Keep silence before Me, O islands, and let the people renew their strength; let them come near, then let them speak; let us come near together to judgement.

— O islands; this word properly means islands and is so translated here by the Septuagint and the Targum. But the word also is used to denote maritime countries; countries that were situated on seacoasts or the regions beyond sea.

² “Who raised up the righteous man from the east, called him to His foot, gave the nations before him, and made him rule over kings? He gave them as the dust to his sword, and as driven stubble to his bow.

— who raised up the righteous man from the east; the Targum interprets this of Abraham, and so the Talmud; he was a righteous man, was raised up out of an idolatrous family from Ur of the Chaldees, on the other side the river Euphrates, which lay east of Judea.

³ He pursued them, and passed safely, even by the way that he had not gone with his feet.

⁴ Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am He.”

— Can any heathen god raise up one in righteousness, make what use of him he pleases and make him victorious over the nations? The Lord did so with Abraham; and more so he would do so with Cyrus, anointing him as king even before he was born.

⁵ The isles saw it, and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid, drew near, and came.

— the isles saw it; the distant nations saw what was done in the conquests of the rapid conquests of Cyrus whom God in this remarkable manner had raised up; and they had known of the mighty power of God above the fakeness of idols;

— and feared; were alarmed, and trembled; all were apprehensive that they would be subdued, and driven away as with the tempest.

The Lord anointed Cyrus as king even before he was born

⁶ They helped every one his neighbor, and every one said to his brother, “Be of good courage.”

— the idolatrous nations helped everyone his neighbor; the idea is that these idolatrous nations formed confederations to strengthen each other, and to oppose him whom God had raised up to subdue them;

— the prophet Isaiah describes a state of general consternation existing among them when they supposed that all was in danger and that their security consisted only in confederation.

⁷ So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer, him that smote the anvil, saying, “It is ready for the soldering”; and he fastened it with nails, that it should not be moved.

— the carpenter, who brought wood to compose the body of the idol; the goldsmith who was to prepare golden plates for covering and adorning of the image which some of them beat out upon the anvil;

— and others smoothed or polished as it is ready for the soldering; that we may put the several parts together and set it up to be worshipped. He fastened it to the wall or pillar, lest it should fall down, or be carried away from them.

⁸ “But thou, Israel, art My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham My friend.

— but thou Israel art my servant; thus the Gentiles show themselves to be the servants of their idols and own them for their gods: but Jacob art my people and I am and will be thy God.

⁹ Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, ‘Thou art My servant; I have chosen thee and not cast thee away’

— Abraham, the father of the Jews, taken from the remote Ur of the Chaldees. Others take it of Jacob or Israel, called out of Egypt.

¹⁰ fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness.

— fear thou not; this promise is plain in its meaning and is full of consolation; it is to be regarded as addressed primarily to the exiled Jews during their long and painful captivity in Babylon; and the idea is that they who had been selected by God to be his special people had nothing to fear.

¹¹ Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded; they shall be as nothing, and they that strive with thee shall perish.

— all they that were incensed against thee; they who were enraged against thee, that is, the Chaldeans or other enemies who made war upon you and reduced you to bondage, shall be ashamed and confounded.

¹² Thou shalt seek them and shalt not find them, even them that contended with thee. They that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of nought.

— thou shalt seek them; this denotes that it would be impossible to find them for they should cease to exist. The whole verse is emphatic, repeating in varied terms what was said before and meaning that their foes should be entirely destroyed.

¹³ For I, the Lord thy God, will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, ‘Fear not; I will help thee.’

¹⁴ “Fear not, thou worm Jacob and ye men of Israel; I will help thee,” saith the Lord and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

— fear not, thou all the tribes of Jacob; the servant of the Almighty is reminded that he has no strength of his own but is “as a worm, and no man” (Psalm 22:6);

— Jacob had not been chosen because he was to be a great and mighty nation; for Israel then was “the fewest of all people” (Deuteronomy 7:7); to emphasize this the prophet speaks of God-given strength.

¹⁵ “Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff.

— behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth; as the new threshing wheels of a cart, in the manner of saws; for corn with the Jews was threshed out by drawing a cart with wheels over it, which wheels were stuck with teeth or spikes of iron;

— or by a cart or sledge filled with stones to press it down, and at the bottom with iron teeth, which being drawn to and fro by oxen over the sheaves, separated the grain from the husk.

¹⁶ Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them; and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel.

— to fan or to winnow, an operation which was performed by throwing the threshed grain up with a shovel into the air so that the wind drove the chaff away. So all their enemies, and all the obstacles which were in their way should be scattered.

¹⁷ “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none and their tongue faileth for thirst, I, the Lord, will hear them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.

— the poor and needy; the promise may perhaps take as its starting-point given to the return of the exiles, in which earthly things are the parables of the heavenly.

¹⁸ I will open rivers in high places and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land springs of water.

— I will open rivers; every shape of the physical contour of the country, bare hills, arid steppes and the like, is to be transformed into a new beauty by water in the form adapted to each: streamlets, rivers, lakes and springs.

¹⁹ I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia tree, and the myrtle and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine and the box tree together,

— I will plant in the wilderness; a picture as of the Paradise of God (Isaiah 51:3), with its groves of stately trees, completes the vision of the future.

²⁰ that they may see and know, and consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.

— for the things before said are plain marks of the hand of the Lord, and are as clear proofs of his almighty power, as what was done in the creation of all things.

²¹ “Produce your cause,” saith the Lord; “bring forth your strong reasons,” saith the King of Jacob.

— bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob; who acknowledge the Lord as their King and their God and whom he rules over, protects and defends;

²² “Let them bring them forth and show us what shall happen; let them show the former things, what they be, that we may consider them and know the latter end of them; or declare us things to come.

— the God of Jacob claims that the power of predicting the future is his own inalienable prerogative; let them, that is, their idols, or the worshippers of idols, the heathens, their gods,

— thus God is offering a challenge of whoever that claim to be God, if he could bring an event to fulfilment; that would bring forth the evidences of their divine nature and power, let them show us what they could predict and bring them into fulfilment;

— further, it is a Proof of God Credential:

It was a challenge, and still is: could any of your gods prophesy an event or an occurrence in the future and then bring it to fulfillment?

See more from other texts of Isaiah 44:7-8; Isaiah 45:3-7; Isaiah 46:9-10

⁷ And who, as I, shall call and shall declare it, and set it in order for Me, since I appointed the ancient people? And the things that are coming and shall come, let them show unto them.

⁸ Fear ye not, neither be afraid. Have not I told thee from that time and have declared it? Ye are even My witnesses. Is there a God besides Me? Yea, there is no God. I know not any.” Isaiah 44:7-8

³And I will give thee the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, who call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

⁴For Jacob My servant’s sake, and Israel Mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.

⁵I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God besides Me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me,

⁶that they may know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is none else.

⁷I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things. Isaiah 45:3-7

⁹Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is none other; I am God, and there is none like Me,

¹⁰declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’ Isaiah 46:9-10

²³ Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good or do evil, that we may be dismayed and behold it together.

— that we may know that ye are gods; the prediction of future events is the highest evidence of omniscience and divinity; and it is demanded, that if they were gods they should be able to make such a prediction as would demonstrate that they are of divine nature.

²⁴ Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought; an abomination is he that chooseth you.

— behold, ye are of nothing, or ‘worse than nothing.’ Your idols are useless; and they were powerless, unable to render aid to their worshippers as absolute nothingness would be and all their confidence in them was vain and foolish.

²⁵ “I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come; from the rising of the sun shall he call upon My name. And he shall come upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay.

— I have raised up one, that is, Cyrus; in the previous verses God had shown that the idols had no power of predicting future events;

— he stakes, so to speak, the question of his divinity on that point and the whole controversy between him and them is to be decided by the inquiry whether they had the power of foretelling what would come to pass, power to foretell future events;

— in this he appeals to the fact that he had raised up Cyrus in accordance with his predictions and in such a way that it would be distinctly seen that he had this power of foretelling future events.

²⁶ Who hath declared from the beginning, that we may know? And beforetime, that we may say, ‘He is righteous’? Yea, there is none that showeth, yea, there is none that declareth, yea, there is none that heareth your words.

— who hath declared from the beginning; the meaning of this passage is ‘there is no one among the soothsayers and the worshippers of idols who has predicted the birth, the character and the conquests of Cyrus.

²⁷ The first shall say to Zion, ‘Behold, behold them!’ And I will give to Jerusalem one that bringeth good tidings.

— the first; I who am the first as I said before, Isaiah 41:4, and therefore capable of declaring or foretelling things to come from the beginning which their idols cannot do, Isaiah 41:26.

²⁸ For I beheld, and there was no man, even among them; and there was no counselor that, when I asked of them, could answer a word.

— for I beheld and there was no man; that is, no one who had foretold the future. Yehovah, speaking through the prophet, looks round in vain for that.

²⁹ Behold, they are all vanity! Their works are nothing; their molten images are wind and confusion.

— for I beheld and they are vain things, and are falsely called gods; they are of no more solidity, efficacy, and use, than confusion and hot air.

Isaiah 42

¹ “Behold My Servant, whom I uphold, Mine Elect, in whom My soul delighteth: I have put My Spirit upon Him; He shall bring forth judgement to the Gentiles.

— behold my servant; the word ‘servant’ may be applied either to Isaiah, Jacob, Cyrus, or the Messiah; and the question to whom it refers here is to be decided in the Targum, which says, “behold, my servant, the Messiah;”

— this is the King Messiah; nor of Cyrus, nor of the people of Israel but of Christ as it is applied, Matthew 12:17 who is spoken of under the character of a “servant” as he is; not as a divine Being for as such he is the Son of God;

— but as man and in his office as Mediator; a servant of the Lord but of his divine Father; who chose him, called and sent him and assigned him his work;

— he shall bring forth judgement to the Gentiles; whose judgement is according to truth; the rule of human judgement in things spiritual and saving and by which the Son of God judges and rules in the hearts of both the Israelites and Gentiles;

Behold, my servant, the Messiah, whom I bring, my chosen in whom one delights: as for my Word, I will put my Holy Spirit upon him; he shall reveal my judgment unto the nations. Isaiah 42:1 Jonathan

— the Targum, which identifies “my servant” specifically as “the Messiah” is an indispensable source of understanding the Bible. Started by Ezra for those returning Jews from Babylon and for these returnees they could only understand the Hebrew Text in Aramaic; hence the Targum is as if Ezra is speaking to us from the verses quoted.

² He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. — the Messiah shall not cry; either in a way of contention as anger is oft accompanied with clamour or in a way of ostentation;

— the Messiah shall neither erect nor manage his kingdom with violence and outward pomp and state as worldly princes do, but with meekness and humility; nor lift up his voice;

— nor cause his voice to be heard in the street; as contentious or in a menacing manner or like vain-glorious preachers frequently do.

³ A bruised reed shall He not break, and the smoking flax shall He not quench; He shall bring forth judgement unto truth.

— bruised: “It pleased the Lord to bruise Him” (Isaiah 53:5,10); so the Messiah can feel for the bruised; reed—fragile: easily “shaken with the wind”

— and although the Messiah favours the weak yet will he not spare the wicked but will judge them according to truth and equity.

⁴ He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till He hath set judgement in the earth; and the isles shall wait for His law.”

— fail; faint; man in religion may become as the almost expiring flax-wick but not so he in his purposes of justice; discouraged; literally, “broken,” that is, checked in zeal by discouragements;

— isles … wait; the distant lands beyond sea shall put their trust in his Kingdom; may refer to the fact that the populations of these countries bordering on the Mediterranean; now even the distant nations shall wait for the Messiah and his law.

⁵ Thus saith God the Lord—He that created the heavens and stretched them out, He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it, He that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein:

— this, with what follows is a preface to the call of the Messiah to the great work of redemption; setting forth the greatness of God as a Creator, that calls upon him and thereby encouraging him as man and Mediator in it as well as their Saviour and Redeemer.

⁶ “I, the Lord, have called Thee in righteousness, and will hold Thine hand, and will keep Thee, and give Thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles;

— for a light of the Gentiles; ‘light’ is the emblem of knowledge, law and instruction of the true religion; the Messiah is often called ‘light,’ and the ‘light of the world.’

⁷ to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

— to open the eyes of the blind; this is equivalent to saying that the Messiah would impart instruction to those who were ignorant; it relates to the Jews as well as to the Gentiles; of the world which is often represented as one of darkness and blindness; he would acquaint them with God and with the way of salvation.

⁸ I am the Lord; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images.

— I am Yehovah, the Lord; that is My name; who have all being in and of myself and give being to all my creations. The everlasting, unchangeable and omnipotent God, who therefore both can and will fulfil all his promises;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; (more on this at the end)

⁹ “Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.”

— behold, the former things which he had foretold, are come to pass; He had by his prophets foretold events which had now been fulfilled and this should lead them to confide in him alone as a test of the true God;

— and new things do I declare; things pertaining to future events relating to the stewardship of the Messiah and to the universal prevalence of his religious truth in the world.

¹⁰ Sing unto the Lord a new song and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea and all that is therein, the isles and the inhabitants thereof.

— new song; such as has never before been sung, to express which no hymn for former mercies would be appropriate. The new song shall be sung when the Lord shall reign in Jerusalem and all “nations shall flow unto it” (Isaiah 2:2; 26:1; Revelation 5:9; 14:3).

¹¹ Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar doth inhabit. Let the inhabitants of the rock sing; let them shout from the top of the mountains.

— let the inhabitants of the rock sing; it is uncertain whether the word ‘rock’ here (Hebrew, סלע sela‛, Greek Πέτραν Petran, ‘Petra’ or ‘rock’) is to be regarded as a proper name or to denote in a general sense those who dwell in the rocky part of Arabia;

— Kedar was a son of Ishmael, the father of the Kedarenians or Cedrei; they often changed their place in the neighborhood of Petra, or Sela, as they were the names of the celebrated city that was the capital of Idumea; also the capital of the Nabatheans.

¹² Let them give glory unto the Lord, and declare His praise in the islands.

— and declare his praise in the islands; as on the western continent and their isles close by; so on the eastern continent and near by islands , the islands of Greece, and all the islands in the Aegean sea.

¹³ The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man; He shall stir up jealousy like a man of war. He shall cry, yea, roar; He shall prevail against His enemies.

— our Lord the Almighty, Yehovah will no longer restrain his wrath: he will go forth as a mighty warrior (Exodus 15:3) to destroy his people’s and his enemies and to deliver Israel and his elects.

¹⁴ “I have long time held My peace; I have been still and refrained Myself. Now will I cry like a travailing woman; I will destroy and devour at once.

— cry like a travailing woman who after having restrained her breathing for a time at last overcome with labor pain lets out her voice with a panting sigh; so Yehovah will give full vent to his long pent-up wrath; I will at once breathe hard and pant, namely, giving loose to my wrath.

¹⁵ I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their herbs; and I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the pools.

— I will make waste mountains and hills; not dry and barren ones for these were waste already but such as are clothed with grass and herbs as the following words imply; which is to be understood metaphorically of God’s destroying his most lofty and flourishing enemies who are oft compared to mountains and hills.

¹⁶ And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.

— and I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; the Targum interprets this of the people of Israel, thus “I will lead the house of Israel which are like to the blind in a way which they knew not, in paths they have not learned I will lead them.”

¹⁷ They shall be turned back, they shall be greatly ashamed, that trust in graven images, that say to the molten images, ‘Ye are our gods.’

— they shall turned back from their former course, from their idolatry and their idols and be converted to the living God;

— and should fly to the rocks and mountains to hide and cover them from the wrath of God; for this phrase is used of the overthrow of enemies of their being obliged to turn their backs and flee.

¹⁸ “Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see.

— as in verse 16, the Targum interprets this of the people of Israel, who are blind; and deaf here.

¹⁹ Who is blind, but My servant? Or deaf, as My messenger that I sent? Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant?”

— who is blind, but my servant? – these words continue to be spoken referring to either the house of Israel or the house of Judah, or both; and it wouldn’t make sense to refer to the Messiah; who are so blind and deaf as Israel or Jacob is.

²⁰seeing many things, but thou observest not, opening the ears, but he heareth not.”

²¹ The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake; He will magnify the law and make it honorable.

— he will magnify and elaborate what the law means; how to keep them: the law, the statutes and all the ordinances, including all his promises and pledges, in spirit and in truth.

²² But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses. They are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, “Restore.”

— a people, Israel, being robbed and for a spoil, and none saith, restore; there is none to be an advocate for them; no one that asks for their restoration;

— for almost almost two thousand years the house of Judah have been in this condition and yet none of the kings and princes of the earth have issued a proclamation for their return to their own land as Cyrus did; and no one moves for it, either from among themselves or others.

²³ Who among you will give ear to this? Who will hearken and hear for the time to come?

— who among you will give ear to this? – who is there in the nation that will be so warned by the judgements of God, that he will attend to the lessons which he designs to teach, and repents his life and return to him?

²⁴ Who gave Jacob for a spoil and Israel to the robbers? Did not the Lord, He against whom we have sinned? For they would not walk in His ways, neither were they obedient unto His law.

— it was Yehovah, the God of their fathers and of their nation who had brought this calamity upon them. It was not the work of chance but it was the immediate and direct act of God on account of their sins.

²⁵ Therefore He hath poured upon him the fury of His anger and the strength of battle; and it hath set him on fire round about, yet he knew not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart.

— yet he knew not; they refused to attend to it nor lay it to heart; they pursued their ways of wickedness, regardless of the threatening judgements and the impending wrath of God given by his prophets;

— they did not consider that these evils were inflicted for their crimes nor did they turn from their wicked ways when they were thus threatened with the wrath of God.

— and from another translation from the Message Bible

Pay attention! Are you deaf?
    Open your eyes! Are you blind?
You’re my servant, and you’re not looking!
    You’re my messenger, and you’re not listening!
The very people I depended upon, servants of God,
    blind as a bat—willfully blind!
You’ve seen a lot, but looked at nothing.
    You’ve heard everything, but listened to nothing.
God intended, out of the goodness of his heart,
    to be lavish in his revelation.
But this is a people battered and cowed,
    shut up in attics and closets,
Victims licking their wounds,
    feeling ignored, abandoned.
But is anyone out there listening?
    Is anyone paying attention to what’s coming?
Who do you think turned Jacob over to the thugs,
    let loose the robbers on Israel?
Wasn’t it God himself, this God against whom we’ve sinned—
    not doing what he commanded,
    not listening to what he said?
Isn’t it God’s anger that’s behind all this,
    God’s punishing power?
Their whole world collapsed but they still didn’t get it;
    their life is in ruins but they don’t take it to heart.

~~~ Isaiah 42:18-25 MSG ~~~

~~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

But the Orthodox Jews have gone overboard, so holy is his name, they believe, thus they refrain from even calling his name, referring to him as Hashem, that is, “The Name,” which isn’t his name; just pointing, saying somewhat ‘you know what name I mean.’ His name is Yehovah, and is also not Yahweh, which is the Samaritan counterfeit version.

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

Venezuela’s Maduro Calls On Countries To ‘Unite’

•August 25, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Venezuela’s Maduro Calls On Other Countries To ‘Unite’ To Defend Its ‘Right To Sovereignty, Peace’

“Our union is what has made us strong,” Maduro claimed

The Trump administration has reiterated its claim that Maduro is the leader of the criminal group of the Cartel of the Suns and doubled the reward to $50 million for information leading to the arrest of the Venezuelan president. In addition, the US designated the Cartel of the Suns as an international terrorist organization. CNN

LatinTimes • August 21, 2025

Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro called on friendly countries to “unite” to defend its “right to sovereignty, peace and self-determination” as US warships move off its coast.

Speaking at an extraordinary ALBA-TCP summit, Maduro began with a call to “the national unity of all Venezuelans to guarantee peace with sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination of the peoples.”

He then addressed the group’s countries, saying “I dare, brothers of Latin America and the Caribbean, to call for the union of all rebel people, social movements, to defend Venezuela’s right to sovereignty, peace, self-determination and its own development.”

“Our union is what has made us strong,” Maduro told representatives of Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada and St Lucia.

The group then published a press release condemning the US’s “imperialistic and destabilizing policy, which, through unilateral coercive measures, diplomatic blackmailing and media campaigns, seeks to undermine the region’s peace and sovereignty.”

The deployment of U.S. forces near the Venezuelan coast is completely dominating the conversation in the South American country. On Wednesday, Jorge Rodriguez, president of Venezuela’s regime-friendly Legislative Assembly, said all people who enter the country unlawfully will be arrested.

“Whoever it may be. Foreigners who enter the country unlawfully can come in, but won’t come out. They’ll stay here. In prison,” Rodriguez said during an Assembly session, a statement greeted by applause from those present.

Also on Wednesday, Attorney General Tarek William Saab said that the Trump administration’s deployment is a “farse” to target Maduro.

“The US empire has tried, and failed due to global rejection, using the farce of fighting drug-trafficking to place an unprecedented reward” on Maduro, the official said.

Maduro, on his end, said earlier this week that “the empire has gone mad,” adding that the Trump administration is “fabricating extravagant lies” and “has regurgitated its threats to Venezuela’s peace and stability.”

Reuters reported on Wednesday that the US has ordered an amphibious squadron to the region as part of the deployment. Concretely, the USS San Antonio, USS Iowa Jima and USS Fort Lauderdale will carry 4,500 service members, including 2,200 marines. They could arrive as early as Sunday.

For understanding this deep-rooted conflict, consider this:

“And Esau harbored hatred in his heart against Jacob, his brother, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.

“And Esau said in his heart, ‘I will not do as Cain did, who killed Abel during their father’s lifetime and then their father had another son, Seth.

“Rather, I will wait until the days of mourning for my father have passed, and then I will kill Jacob my brother, and I will be the sole heir.’” Genesis 27:42 Jonathan

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Posted in Latin Americas, US Navy, Venezuela

Military Preparing Attacks on Mexican Cartels

•August 24, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department; and the Washington Post to the CIA” Pepe Escobar

Ken Klippenstein • August 21, 2025

The Trump administration has directed the military to prepare for lethal strikes against cartel targets inside Mexico, three military sources tell us. The Top Secret planning order, issued in late Spring, directs Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to manage the attack plans, which are to be ready by mid-September.

Though US-Mexico military relations are broad and cooperative, any military action south of the border is considered extremely sensitive for both Washington and the Mexican federal government and is rarely discussed in public.

“Not only is Donald Trump uniquely focused on TCOs [transnational criminal organizations, the official name for cartels], having designated them terrorists in one of his first Executive Orders, but he has shown himself to be willing to take unilateral action despite potentially negative political ramifications,” says one senior intelligence official. He and the other sources say that military action could be unilateral — that is, without the involvement or approval of the Mexican government.

The unprecedented order was discussed at a July meeting at NORTHCOM headquarters in Colorado Springs that was led by Colby Jenkins, the unconfirmed Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. Within days, Gen Gregory M Guillot, commander of NORTHCOM, hosted the two highest ranking Mexican military officials: Gen Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, Secretary of National Defense, and Adm Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles, Secretary of the Navy.

“Today, more than ever, the challenges we face demand a joint, coordinated, and adapted response,” Morales said after the Colorado visit, trying to impress upon Pentagon and military leaders that any potential operation be conducted by the two nations together.

To address the extreme political sensitivities and to honor Mexico’s sovereignty, operations inside Mexico have previously been conducted by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the clandestine arm of the US military that has been involved in targeted killings in the Middle East. The New York Times has reported that the CIA has increased reconnaissance operations over Mexico with its own drones, another indicator of increased preparations for operations.

“NORTHCOM was previously sidelined in any Mexico planning, the conventional special operations components mostly involved in joint training with their Mexican counterparts and non-lethal missions such as at-sea interdictions of shipments, but now it is being tasked to be the hemispheric synchronizer, of a far larger magnitude” says the senior intelligence official. One reason is that prospective attacks also have to coordinate with the intelligence community at large, the FBI, and various homeland security agencies (such as Border Patrol and ICE) who all now are focused on Mexico (and are conducting their own operations inside Mexico).

NORTHCOM is already involved in Mexico in a host of ways, including in combating the cartels. Gen Guillot alluded to this in recent testimony to Congress, where he said that his cooperation with Mexico is already closer than at any point in history.

“It is already apparent the military-to-military relationship between the United States and Mexico is robust and expanding as both nations address the challenges posed by common threats to our citizens and shared interests. The bonds between USNORTHCOM and our Mexican military partners are broad, resilient, and focused on expanding our combined capability to defend and secure North America from myriad state and non-state threats. Countering competitor influence in the region remains a key priority for USNORTHCOM and our Mexican military partners, and as a direct result, the US and Mexican militaries are more operationally compatible than at any point in our shared history.”

That’s the overt side: countering Chinese influence and investments in Mexico, thwarting Russian influence (and operations); and stemming the flow of drugs, precursor chemicals and even weapons of mass destruction components through Mexico.

Now, NORTHCOM has tasked its subordinate Special Operations Command (called SOCNORTH) to undertake “operational preparation of the battlespace” inside Mexico to set the stage for future military operations, and to prepare cartel-related “target packages” for potential strikes and “direct action” attacks on the ground against high-value individuals, compounds, and supply chain targets associated in particular with the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Direct attacks could also involve air and drone strikes.

“Direct action” is a term special operations forces use to describe small-scale offensive operations carried out by Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, or Marine Corps raiders. Think of the airstrikes on Iran this summer as a kind of direct action, against a discrete target with a “strategic” or national purpose.

There is one major difference when it comes to Mexico: the political sensitivities involved. Unlike Iran, Mexico is a rich country which, of course, borders the US and cooperates with it in countless ways. Independence from America is a major issue domestically, not to mention the large Mexican-American population.

In congressional testimony by Gen Guillot, he has also addressed increased NORTHCOM intelligence collection.

GUILLOT: Recently we’ve been permitted to increase our ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance], our intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance to —

SEN ROGER WICKER: Permitted by Mexico?

GUILLOT: No, by the department, sir. But we do have intelligence sharing with Mexico to show them what we see. And we have increased cooperation with Mexico to go address the cartel violence in terms of sending more troops.

It is by no means clear that Mexico City would ever approve any type of US military action inside the country. In 2023, former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took the controversial step to ask the Mexican legislature to approve increased operations (which was described as “training”) by the Army 7th Special Forces Group. Those operations commenced in February, when a small group arrived in Mexico to train their counterparts.

Jenkins, the Acting Assistant Secretary told Congress after the brief deployment that “SOCNORTH’s training of our capable Mexican SOF [Special Operations Forces] partners are critical to … denying cartels or other criminal organizations their desired end states.”

When Trump declared the cartels’ trafficking of drugs and people into America an “invasion,” he wasn’t joking. Far from a rhetorical flourish, it’s by now clear that the language he’s using has created the basis for the military to prepare to respond to cartels in a similar way that it did with terrorists after 9/11.

“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of the cartels in a recent interview.

Trump, military sources also tell me, is focused on results, willing to ignore law, rules, and even policy recommendations in his zeal to have “progress” towards his goals with regard to national security. For the White House, the fentanyl crisis in America is one of the key measures of the success of the new war on the cartels.

Fentanyl’s death toll represents a crisis, having claimed the lives of over 225,000 Americans.

In a tense exchange, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee Sen. Roger Wicker pressed Gen Guillot on what progress his command was making on fentanyl, stressing its death toll. Guillot replies, “I wouldn’t say it’s better.”

WICKER: So, because time is limited, we had 225,000 in a three year space. Are we making any progress? Now it’s 2025. Has it gotten better?

GUILLOT: No, I, I wouldn’t say it’s better, but I do think, Chairman, that we have a better foundation now that we’ve increased the intelligence to, to make a rapid progress against this threat.

WICKER: It definitely needs to get better. And so tell us what you need and, uh, thank you for your efforts. You got eight seconds.

GUILLOT: More, uh, more ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] is the first. And then, uh, expanded authorities would be required to, uh, um, more advise and assist types of operations between our forces and the tier one Mexican forces.

(“Tier one” being another term for the clandestine special operations forces, Guillot is here referring to Mexico’s equivalent to Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 under the JSOC, called Fuerza Especial de Reacción.)

The intelligence community’s annual threat assessment released in March put an unprecedented emphasis on cartels, casting them as “the most immediate and direct threat to America’s security.”

“Western Hemisphere-based TCOs [transnational criminal organizations] and terrorists involved in illicit drug production and trafficking bound for the United States endanger the health and safety of millions of Americans and contribute to regional instability,” the assessment reads. The document specifically mentions several cartels based in Mexico, including Sinaloa and New Generation Jalisco.

Gen Guillot is even more explicit, saying in February that Mexican cartels “threaten US sovereignty.”

“Transnational criminal organizations based in Mexico continue to threaten US sovereignty and territorial integrity through the production and trafficking of fentanyl and other illicit drugs, and the facilitation of unlawful mass migration towards the US southern border.”

Asked in January if he would deploy special forces into Mexico to take out cartels, President Trump replied, “Could happen.” Now, with the order to prepare target packages inside Mexico, a far more likely and ominous possibility looms. Not an invasion, not the “deployment” of U.S. special operators, not boots on the ground, but the kinds of strikes that the U.S. military has become expert at in the Middle East and South Asia.

Trump labels 8 Latin Cartels as ‘terrorists’

Trump now considers these cartels as terrorists

Posted in Cartels, Mexico, US

Isaiah (Ch 39-40)

•August 24, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Who are the enemies that will desolate the house of Israel, identified here as the United States? Many believe Russia was one and some still believe it is the main threat of the United States. Others, like warmonger John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, give incredible speeches around the world saying China is the main threat.

And Mearsheimer brilliantly emphasizes the United States are protected by fish to the left and fish to the right, but foolishly negates to address America’s broken border in the South; and that the Scriptures say that America’s main “enemy” comes from the unprotected and porous South. At least Colonel Douglas Macgregor got his foresight on target! For more on the enemy from the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! or Obadiah.

The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Isaiah 39

¹ At that time Merodachbaladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters and a present to Hezekiah; for he had heard that he had been sick and had recovered.

— he sent letters and presents to Hezekiah; by his ambassadors, the purpose of which as spies and secret agents were to congratulate him upon his recovery, and to inquire concerning the miracle that was wrought in his land; either the destruction of the Assyrian army in one night by just an angel;

— or rather the sun’s going back ten degrees; to enter into an alliance with him; and this seems to be the true reason of sending these ambassadors; desirous of entering into a league with Hezekiah.

² And Hezekiah was glad with them, and showed them the house of his precious things — the silver and the gold, and the spices and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armor, and all that was found in his treasures. There was nothing in his house nor in all his dominion that Hezekiah showed them not.

— shewed them the Temple and palaces of precious things; this fixes the date of the embassy at a time prior to the payment to Sennacherib (II Kings 18:15-16), unless we were to assume that the treasury had been replenished by the gifts that followed on the destruction of Sennacherib’s army;

— the silver and the gold; large quantities of not only which he and his predecessors had laid up, which had been very lately greatly exhausted by the demand of three hundred talents of silver, and thirty talents of gold by the king of Assyria; to answer which Hezekiah had given all the silver in the Temple and in the treasures of the king’s house, and was so drove by necessity, that he cut off the gold from the doors and pillars of the Temple, II Kings 18:14.

³ Then came Isaiah the prophet unto King Hezekiah and said unto him, “What said these men? And from whence came they unto thee?” And Hezekiah said, “They have come from a far country unto me, even from Babylon.”

— Isaiah did not come by himself, but was sent by the Lord; in the time of his distress and illness he could send for him but now being well and in prosperity he forgot the prophet to send for him for his advice, how he should behave towards these men as not to offend the Lord:

— what said these men? – What proposition have they made? What is the design of their coming? It is implied in the question that there had been some improper communication from them. To this question Hezekiah makes no answer to this first question;

— but he replies at once to the second and said they are come from Babylon; as being what his heart was lifted up with, that ambassadors should come to him from a very distant country and from so famous a place as Babylon; which showed that his name was great in foreign regions and was in high esteem in distant countries and even so great a prince as the king of Babylon courted his friendship.

⁴ Then said he, “What have they seen in thine house?” And Hezekiah answered, “All that is in mine house have they seen. There is nothing among my treasures that I have not shown them.”

— coming nearer to the point he had in view, then said he, what have they seen in thine house? that he had shown them what he ought not to have done, and especially from such a principle of pride and vanity as he did;

— there is nothing among my treasures that I have not showed them: which were more secret, laid up in cabinets, under lock and key; his gold, silver, jewels and precious stones, spices and ointments. Most probably the furniture and vessels of the Temple, though he does not mention them;

— here, Hezekiah proved to be doing something very foolish, not qualify to be considered a wise Counselor, as Rabbinic Judaism foolishly taught; for more, see A Study of Isaiah 9. Why Rabbinic Judaism believe in such foolishness, have you ever wonder?

⁵ Then said Isaiah to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord of hosts:

— hear the word of the Lord of hosts; hear what the mighty God that rules in heaven says of this. This is an instance of great fidelity on the part of the prophet; who felt himself sent from God in a solemn manner to rebuke sin in a monarch, and a pious monarch. It is an instance that resembles the boldness and faithfulness of Nathan when he went to David, and said, ‘Thou art the man.’

⁶ ‘Behold, the days come that all that is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in store until this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left,’ saith the Lord.

— behold, the days come; the captivity of the Jews in Babylon commenced about one hundred and twenty years after this prediction;

— nothing shall be left, saith the Lord; this was measure for measure as there was nothing that was not shown to the ambassadors, spies and secret agents, so nothing should be left untaken away by the Babylonians;

— Moses had declared repeatedly, that, if they were a rebellious people, they should be removed from their own to a foreign land; but he had not designated the country Leviticus 26:33-34; Deuteronomy 28:64-67; Deuteronomy 30:3.

⁷ ‘And of thy sons who shall issue from thee, whom thou shalt beget, they shall be taken away; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’”

— and of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, they shall be taken away; Manasseh his immediate son was taken and carried to Babylon, though afterwards released; nor does it appear that he was made a eunuch or an officer there;

— this had its fulfilment in Jeconiah and his children and in others that were of the seed royal, as Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; this is expressed in different words, signifying much the same, to affect the mind of Hezekiah the more:

— and they shall be eunuchs, or “chamberlains” but were “eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon;” thus Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah were “eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

⁸ Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, “Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken.” He said moreover, “For there shall be peace and truth in my days.”

— then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken; Hezekiah was at once convinced of his sin, acknowledged it and owned that the sentence pronounced was just and right; and that there was a mixture of mercy and goodness in it;

— he said moreover, for there shall be peace and truth in his days; or a confirmed peace, lasting prosperity in the state of temporal mercies, for which he was thankful; “O that there were peace” in his days.

Isaiah 40

¹ “Comfort ye, comfort ye My people,” saith your God.

— Comfort ye, comfort ye; twice repeated to give double assurance. Having announced the coming captivity of the Jews in Babylon, God now desires His servants, the prophets (Isaiah 52:7), to comfort them;

— the scene is laid in Babylon; the time near the close of the captivity; the ground of comfort is the speedy ending of the captivity, the Lord himself being their leader.

² “Speak ye comfortingly to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received from the Lord’S hand double for all her sins.”

— speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her; or “speak to or according to the heart of Jerusalem” to her very heart, what will be a cordial to her, very acceptable, grateful and comfortable;

— and let it be proclaimed aloud, that she may hear and understand it. By “Jerusalem” is meant the inhabitants of Zion and the true elects living there.

³ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

— the voice of him that cries in the wilderness; that is, the voice of one called John the Baptist, who fulfilled this prophecy; prepare ye the way of the Lord,

— make straight in the desert a highway for our God: by whom is meant the Messiah to whom a deity a noble testimony is bore here, being called “the Word” and “our God” whose way John prepared himself, by preaching the doctrine of repentance, administering the ordinance of baptism, pointing at the Messiah.

A voice of him that crieth in the wilderness:

⁴ Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

— every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low; as a consequence of John’s ministry and our Lord’s coming, such who were depressed and were low and humble in their own eyes, would be raised up and comforted;

— and that such who were elated with themselves and their own righteousness should be humbled; their pride and haughtiness should be brought down.

— and the crooked shall be straight and the rough places plain; what before was dark and intricate in prophecy should now become clear; and such doctrines as were not so well understood should now become plain and easy.

⁵ And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

— and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed; the Son himself who is also the Messiah reflects the brightness of his Father’s glory and his own glory.

⁶ The voice said, “Cry!” And he said, “What shall I cry?” “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

— the voice said, cry; a voice from the Lord; it is the Lord’s voice to the prophet, giving them an order to prophesy;

— all flesh is grass; declare the frailty and mortality of men; all princes, nobles and monarchs; all armies and magistrates are like grass and will soon fade away.

⁷ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it; surely the people is grass.

— the grass withers, the flower fades; and so does man and all his glory and goodliness: because the spirit of the Lord blows upon it: alluding to some impetuous and blasting wind blowing upon herbs and flowers to their withering and fading.

⁸ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

— the grass withers; this is repeated from the former verse for the sake of emphasis or for strong confirmation.

⁹ O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength. Lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”

— O Zion, that brings good tidings; or rather “Oh, thou that brings good things to Zion; thou that brings good tidings to Jerusalem;”

— behold your God! that divine Being is here that was promised, prophesied of and expected; even Immanuel, God with us, God in our nature, God manifest in the flesh, God our Saviour;

— your Lord and your God; the Targum says, “the kingdom of your God is revealed.”

¹⁰ Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and His arm shall rule for Him; behold, His reward is with Him, and His work before Him.

— behold, the Lord God will come with a strong hand; this is of the second coming of the Son of God; such assurances being given by promise and prophecy; and will summon all nations before him;

— and pass and execute the proper sentence on them; when his arm shall openly bear rule, he will take to himself his great power and reign.

¹¹ He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He shall gather the lambs with His arm and carry them in His bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

— he shall gather the lambs with his arm; and for the young and feeble in years and piety; the tender lamb, unable to keep up with the flock, becomes weary and exhausted; and the shepherd naturally takes it in his arms and carries it.

¹² Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?

— and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance; as easily as a man can throw in his goods into a pair of scales and take the true weight of them with equal ease did the Lord raise the mountains and the hills in a proper proportion;

— the answer to the above question is that it was the same divine Being of whom it is said, “behold your God, and who should come with a strong hand, and feed his flock.”

¹³ Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being His counselor hath taught Him?

— who did God either need or take to advise him in any of his works, either of creation or the government of the world? were they not all the effects of his own sole wisdom?

— therefore though all the nations of the world contrive and conspire against him and against this work of his as indeed they will do, yet his own counsel shall confound all their devices and carry on his work in spite of them.

¹⁴ With whom took He counsel, and who instructed Him, and taught Him in the path of judgment, and taught Him knowledge, and showed to Him the way of understanding?

— with whom he took counsel and who instructed him; this is the same as before only repeated in other words, the more strongly to deny that any mere creature counselled, taught and instructing and managing the works of creation.

¹⁵ Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.

— behold, the nations, all the nations of the earth. This is designed to show the greatness of God, in comparison with that which strikes man as great – a mighty nation;

— and the main object is to show that God could accomplish his purposes without their aid and that they could not resist him in the execution of his plans; if they were as nothing, how little could they resist the execution of his plans!

¹⁶ And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering.

— and Lebanon is not sufficient to burn the trees of it, as the Targum says; these are not sufficient for fire to burn a sacrifice with for the majesty of God.

¹⁷ All nations before Him are as nothing, and they are counted to Him less than nothing, and vanity.

— all nations before him are as nothing as if they were non-entities and were not real beings in comparison of him, who is the Being of beings, the author of all beings which exist in all nations; who are all in his sight and are not only as grasshoppers as is after mentioned but even as nothing.

¹⁸ To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto Him?

— to whom then will ye liken God? there is nothing in the whole creation that can bear any resemblance to him or he to them; since all nations are as a drop of the bucket as the small dust of the balance as nothing, yea, less than nothing and is only vanity: “or what likeness will ye compare unto him” ordain and appoint for him?

¹⁹ The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold and casteth silver chains.

— the workman melts a graven image; or “the founder” melts some sort of metal as iron, brass, copper or lead, which he casts into a mould for an image and afterwards graves or gets it graved.

— and the goldsmith spreads it over with gold; or “the finer” he stretches out plates of gold and covers it with them so that it looks as if it was made of solid gold and deceives the eyes of men; such stupidity and vanity are there in mortals to believe that there can be deity in such a piece of workmanship!

²⁰ He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a skillful workman to prepare a graven image that shall not be moved.

— he that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation; who is so poor that he cannot bring an offering to his God, yet he will have one; and though he cannot purchase a golden or silver one, or one that is gilt and adorned with either; yet he will have a wooden one.

²¹ Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?

— have ye not known, God to be the only true God, the Maker and Governor of the world and all its inhabitants? how can you be ignorant of so evident a truth? He addresses his speech to the idolatrous Jews themselves in the times of Manasseh, when idolatry abounded or to all idolaters.

²² It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers, who stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in,

— that sits as a judge or governor upon his throne; upon the circle of the earth; or above the circle; far above this round earth, even in the highest heavens; from whence he looks down upon the earth, where men appear to him like grasshoppers.

²³ who bringeth the princes to nothing; He maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.

— that brings the princes to nothing; that is, all princes and kings, no matter how great their power, their wealth and their dignity, they are by his hand reduced to nothing before him.

²⁴ Yea, they shall not be planted, yea, they shall not be sown; yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth. And He shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble.

— yea, they shall not be planted; the kings and rulers, especially they who oppose God in the execution of his purposes. The idea in this verse is that their name and family should become extinct in the same way as a tree does from which no shoot starts up.

²⁵ “To whom then will ye liken Me, or shall I be equal?” saith the Holy One.

— to whom then will ye liken me? – the prophet Isaiah having thus set forth the majesty and glory of God, asks now with great emphasis what could be an adequate and proper representation of such a God;

— and if God was such a Being, how great was the folly of idolatry and how vain all their confidence in the gods which their own hands had made.

²⁶ Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, who bringeth out their host by number. He calleth them all by names by the greatness of His might, for He is strong in power; not one faileth.

— lift up your eyes on high; direct your eyes toward heaven and in the contemplation of the wonders of the starry world, and of God’s power there, learn the evidence of his ability to destroy his foes and to save his friends.

²⁷ Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel: “My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God”?

— my way is hidden from the Lord; meaning not their course of life or their religious actions, their attendance on public worship, their prayers and other duties of religion; but their sufferings for his name’s sake, the tribulations they endured which they imagined God took no notice of;

— and my judgement is passed over from my God; my cause and case are neglected by him; he does not undertake my cause or right my wrongs, and avenge the injuries done me, or deliver me out of the hands of those that contend with me.

²⁸ Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding.

— there is no searching of his understanding; it is infinite, it reaches to all persons and things and therefore he cannot be at a loss to provide for his people or plead their cause; nor can their case be unknown to him or he want either power or skill to help them.

²⁹ He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increaseth strength.

— he gives power to the faint; who are ready to faint under afflictions because they have not immediate deliverance, or their prayers are not answered at once, or promises not fulfilled as they expected;

— to such he gives fresh supplies of spiritual strength; he strengthens their faith and enlarges their views, to behold the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living and confirms his blessings and promises of grace unto them.

³⁰ Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall;

— even the youths shall faint; the most vigorous young men, those in whom we expect manly strength and who are best suited to endure hardy toil. They become weary by labor; their powers are soon exhausted;

— the design here is to contrast the most vigorous of the human race with God and to show that while all their powers fail, the power of God is unexhausted and inexhaustible.

³¹ but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.

— they shall mount up with wings as eagles; which fly most strongly and swiftly, and high out of the reach of all danger; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint; they shall be enabled to run or walk in their way as they please without any weariness.

Posted in Isaiah

SS #04 The Word from the Ancients

•August 23, 2025 • Leave a Comment

This Study is a Continuation from SS #01 The Written Word from Moses to King James

Some say “the Bible doesn’t require extra-biblical interpretation nor do we need any from the Oral Law,” which is proven false in the above Study.

Others claim we need “the Scriptures only!” Here we need to use our wisdom, and be cautious, because it might be true, because outside materials could be false, especially if they contradict the Scriptures. But sometimes outside materials could be true and add to our reservoir of knowledge to understand the Scriptures. We need to use our wisdom.

So we will start with one example:

(1) In Genesis 15:18On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the River Euphrates:

— from the river of Egypt; the river of Egypt is the Nile, which overflowed annually and made the basin fruitful; so the Targum of Jonathan calls it the Nile of Egypt; it was rendered, “from the Nile of Mizraim” or Egypt to the great river, Euphrates.

After the Flood and the Confusion at Babel, the Land (of this earth) was divided:

But an earlier part of this same story was found in the Book of Jubilees. There the sons of Noah made an oath, a commitment by an oath; a version could be found in this noncanonical book what that mean:

And thus the sons of Noah divided unto their sons in the presence of Noah their father, and he bound them all by an oath, imprecating a curse on every one that sought to seize the portion which had not fallen (to him) by his lot.

And they all said, “So be it; so be it,” for themselves and their sons for ever throughout their generations Book of Jubilees Chapter 9:18-19

And here onto the next chapter, the reason is being given in the Chapter 10:

³⁹ In the fourth week in the first year in the beginning thereof in the four and thirtieth jubilee, were they dispersed from the land of Shinar.

⁴⁰ And Ham and his sons went into the land which he was to occupy, which he acquired as his portion in the land of the south.

⁴¹ But Canaan saw the land of Lebanon to the river of Egypt that it was very good, and he went not into the land of his inheritance to the west (that is to) the sea,

⁴² and he dwelt in the land of Lebanon, eastward and westward from the border of Jordan and from the border of the sea.

⁴³ And Ham, his father, and Cush and Mizraim, his brothers, said unto him: “Thou hast settled in a land which is not thine, and which did not fall to us by lot:

⁴⁴ do not do so; for if thou dost do so, thou and thy sons will fall in the land and (be) accursed through sedition;

⁴⁵ for by sedition ye have settled, and by sedition will thy children fall, and thou shalt be rooted out for ever.

⁴⁶ Dwell not in the dwelling of Shem; for to Shem and to his sons did it come by their lot.

⁴⁷ Cursed art thou, and cursed shalt thou be beyond all the sons of Noah, by the curse by which we bound ourselves by an oath in the presence of the holy judge, and in the presence of Noah our father.”

⁴⁸ But he (Canaan) did not hearken unto them, and dwelt in the land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and his sons until this day. And for this reason that land is named Canaan. Book of Jubilees Chapter 10:39-48

— and that Land was allocated to Shem; then later to Abraham and onto the children of Jacob, or specifically the Israelites. The Hezbollah or Hamas today or any other Lebanese or Palestinians wouldn’t have a chance.

So, each one of us need to use our wisdom and caution to determine whether the above material adds to our reservoir of knowledge.

Posted in Scriptures Studies, Zionism

Isaiah (Ch 37-38)

•August 22, 2025 • Leave a Comment

The following verses give a clue what’s in store for us in the near future!

“And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth—blood and fire and columns (pillars) of smoke” Joel 2:30

“The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again” Isaiah 24:20

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

The king of Assyria, Sennacherib set to conquer Judah

Isaiah 37

This chapter has the same subjects and themes as II King 19; of King Hezekiah beseeching the Lord with sackcloth.

¹ And it came to pass, when King Hezekiah heard it, that he rent his clothes and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord.

— and Hezekiah went into the house of the Lord; to the Temple to pray: he could have prayed in his own house (as Daniel did), but he chose rather to go to the house of God, beseeching the Lord with sackcloth.

² And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and the elders of the priests, covered with sackcloth, unto Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz.

— unto Isaiah the prophet; at last the people did consult and see their counsellor; in that supreme hour of calamity the prophet who had been despised and derided was their only resource. What could he do to extricate them from the evil net which was closing round them?

³ And they said unto him, “Thus saith Hezekiah: ‘This day is a day of trouble and of rebuke and of blasphemy; for the children have come to birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.

— for the children are come; the meaning of this figure is plain: there was the highest danger. It was as in childbirth in which the pains had been protracted, the strength exhausted and where there was most imminent danger in regard to the mother and the child;

— so Hezekiah said there was the most imminent danger in the city of Jerusalem; they had made all possible preparations for defense; and now in the most critical time they felt their energies exhausted, their strength insufficient for their defense and they needed the intervention of God.

⁴ It may be the Lord thy God will hear the words of Rabshakeh, whom the king of Assyria his master hath sent to reproach the living God, and will reprove the words which the Lord thy God hath heard. Therefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left.’”

— Rabshakeh; a name or a title serving the king of Assyria, probably the chief officer or cup-bearer;

— wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left; lift up thy voice, thy hands and thine heart in prayer to God in heaven; for those that are left; the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the other ten having been carried captive some time ago; the few that remained seems to be made use of as an argument for prayer in their favour.

⁵ Thus the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah. — so the servants of King Hezekiah came to delivered the message to Isaiah.

⁶ And Isaiah said unto them, “Thus shall ye say unto your master, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard, wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me.

— wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed God by representing God as no better than the gods of the Gentiles, but unable to deliver out of the hands of the king of Assyria the city of Jerusalem, when he had said he would.

⁷ Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’”

— God will put a spirit into him; a spirit of fear and dread, which will oblige him to desist from his purposes, and flee; as he did which cut off his army in one night.

⁸ So Rabshakeh returned and found the king of Assyria warring against Libnah, for he had heard that he had departed from Lachish.

— and found the king of Assyria warring against Libnah; a city in the tribe of Judah and lay nearer to Jerusalem than Lachish where Rabshakeh left him; so that he seemed to be drawing his army towards that city on which his heart was set.

⁹ And he heard say concerning Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, “He has come forth to make war with thee.” And when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying,

— the Ethiopians in those days retained Upper Egypt under Tirhakah, with Thebes as the capital. Tirhakah’s fame as a conqueror rivalled that of Sesostris; he and one at least of the Pharaohs of Lower Egypt were Hezekiah’s allies against Assyria. The tidings of his approach made Sennacherib the more anxious to get possession of Jerusalem before his arrival.

¹⁰ “Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah king of Judah, saying: Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying, ‘Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’

— thus shall Rabshakeh speak to Hezekiah king of Judah, let not thy God, in whom thou trustest, deceive thee; nothing could be more devilish and satanical, to represent the God of truth.

¹¹ Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by destroying them utterly. And shalt thou be delivered?

— behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, by destroying them utterly; Rabshakeh boasts of the achievements of himself and his ancestors; to gratify their lusts; but though many had been destroyed by them yet not all;

— not Ethiopia whose king was come out to make war with him; nor Egypt which was in confederacy with Ethiopia; nor Judea, he was now invading; but this he said in a taunting way to terrify Hezekiah:

— and shalt thou be delivered? canst thou expect it? surely thou cannot. Is it probable? yea, is it possible thou shouldest be delivered? it is not; as sure as other lands have been destroyed so sure shall thine.

¹² Have the gods of the nations delivered those whom my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan and Haran and Rezeph and the children of Eden who were in Telassar?

— have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed? asked Sennacherib; they have not. But what then? is the God of Israel to be put upon a level with such dunghill gods? so Sennacherib reckoned him as Rabshakeh before, in his name.

¹³ Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arphad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah?”

¹⁴ And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it; and Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.

— and Hezekiah went up unto the house of God; the Temple, the outward court of it, further than that he could not go:

— and spread it before the Lord; not to read it as he had done or to acquaint him with the contents of it; he brought it as a proof of what he had to say to him in prayer and to support him in his allegations, and as a means to quicken himself in the discharge of that duty.

¹⁵ And Hezekiah prayed unto the Lord, saying,

¹⁶ “O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, who dwellest between the cherubims, Thou art the God, even Thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; Thou hast made heaven and earth.

— the prayer opens with a solemn invocation of Yehovah, first his name as the God of Israel and second as the only true God and Creator of all things.

¹⁷ Incline Thine ear, O Lord, and hear; open Thine eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, who hath sent to reproach the living God.

— and hear all the words of Sennacherib which he hath sent to reproach the living God; the Septuagint understands it of the words which Sennacherib sent in the letter to reproach the Lord; but in II Kings 19:16, it is, “which hath sent him” the messenger, Rabshakeh,

— or whoever was the person that brought the letter to Hezekiah. The Targum paraphrases the latter part thus, “to reproach the people of the living God.”

¹⁸ In truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their countries,

— the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations and their countries: or “all the lands and their land” the Targum says, “all provinces and their lands” the countries and town and villages in them.

¹⁹ and have cast their gods into the fire; for they were no gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they have destroyed them.

— for they were no gods, but the works of hands, wood and stone; they were made of wood or of stone, and therefore could not be called gods; nor could they save the nations that worshipped them, nor themselves from the fire:

— therefore they have destroyed them; the Assyrian kings were able to do it and did do it because they were idols of wood or stone; but it did not therefore follow that they were a match for the God of Israel, the true and living God.

²⁰ Now therefore, O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that Thou art the Lord, even Thou only.”

²¹ Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent unto Hezekiah, saying, “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Whereas thou hast prayed to Me against Sennacherib king of Assyria,

²² this is the word which the Lord hath spoken concerning him: ‘The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.

— the virgin, the daughter of Zion; hath despised thee; that is the inhabitants of Zion, called a “virgin” because it had never been forced or taken and to show that it was a vain thing in Sennacherib to attempt it as well as it would have been an injurious one;

— since God, the Father of this virgin, would carefully keep her from any sexual contamination; and he who was her husband to whom she was espoused as a chaste virgin, would defend and protect her.

²³ “‘Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice and lifted up thine eyes on high? Even against the Holy One of Israel.

— whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? A creature like thyself? no, but a God, and not one like the gods of the nations, the idols of wood and stone, but the living God, the Holy One of Israel.

²⁴ By thy servants hast thou reproached the Lord, and hast said, “By the multitude of my chariots have I come up to the height of the mountains, to the sides of Lebanon; and I will cut down the tall cedars thereof, and the choice fir trees thereof; and I will enter into the height of his border and the forest of his Carmel.

— Isaiah continued his reply: the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser, are full of like boasts, the multitude of his chariots; and hast said, by the multitude of my chariots am I come up to the height of the mountains; not only with his foot soldiers, but with his chariots, and a great number of them, he had travelled over hills and mountains,

— as Hannibal over the Alps, and was now upon the high mountains which were round about Jerusalem, and very near the mountain of the Lord’s house;

²⁵ I have dug and drunk water; and with the sole of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of the besieged places.”

— his boast continued; this again was one of the boasts of the Assyrian conqueror, Sennacherib I have dug and drunk water; that their armies were so numerous that they drank up all the waters in their march he would not rest till Jerusalem, the most renowned height of the land of Lebanon, was lying at his feet.

²⁶ “‘Hast thou not heard long ago how I have made it, and of ancient times, that I have formed it? Now have I brought it to pass that thou shouldest be to lay waste fortified cities into ruinous heaps.

— the speech of Sennacherib ends, and that of the Holy One of Israel begins: hast thou not heard, that the events of history had all been foreseen and ordered, as in the remote past, by the counsels of Yehovah. Now I have brought it to pass, that you as my servant should devastate fortified cities into ruinous heaps.

²⁷ Therefore their inhabitants were of small power; they were dismayed and confounded; they were as the grass of the field and as the green herb, as the grass on the housetops and as corn blighted before it be grown up.

— they were dismayed and confounded; not so much at the sight of Sennacherib’s army but because the Lord had dispirited them and took away their natural courage from them so that they became an easy prey to him:

— they were as the grass of the field: which has no strength to stand before the mower; as the grass on the housetops: which has no matter of root and is dried up with the heat of the sun.

²⁸ “‘But I know thy sitting down, and thy going out and thy coming in, and thy rage against Me.

— but I know thy abode and thy going out and thy coming in; wherever you dwelt, what you did at home, your secret councils, cabals, contrivances, schemes and plans of subduing of kingdoms and your scheme into the land of Judea;

— so the Targum says, “thy sitting down in counsel, and thy going forth to make war, and thy coming into the land of Israel is known to me.”

²⁹ Because thy rage against Me and thy tumult have come up into Mine ears, therefore will I put My hook in thy nose and My bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest.’

— because thy rage against me and thy tumult is come up into mine ears; the rage which Sennacherib expressed both by Rabshakeh, and in his letter against Hezekiah and his people is taken by the Lord as against himself;

— therefore will I put my hook in thy nose and my bridle in thy lips; comparing Sennacherib to leviathan, or to some unruly fish, not easily caught and managed;

— or to a bear or buffalo in whose noses men put iron rings and lead them about at pleasure; signifying hereby the strength, fierceness and fury of the Assyrian monarch and the power of God to restrain him.

³⁰ “And this shall be a sign unto thee: Ye shall eat this year such as groweth of itself, and the second year that which springeth of the same; and in the third year sow ye and reap, and plant vineyards, and eat the fruit thereof.

— and this shall be a sign unto thee; not to Sennacherib but to Hezekiah; for here the Lord directs his speech to the latter in order to comfort him under the dreadful apprehensions he had of the Assyrian monarch; assuring him of deliverance; giving him a sign or token of it:

— ye shall eat this year such as groweth of itself: and the second year that which springeth of the same: and in the third year sow ye and reap and plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof: all which was wonderful;

— whereas either through the invasion of the land or the siege of the city they could not till their land as they had used to do, or was destroyed or eaten up by the Assyrian army.

³¹ And the remnant who have escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward.

— and the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah; the few that escaped out of the cities of Judah upon Sennacherib’s invasion of the land and besieging and taking the fenced cities thereof, who fled to Jerusalem for safety;

— shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward: this is a prophecy, which occurred numerous time in the past; perhaps another one in the future. The Targum says, “as a tree which sends forth its roots below, and lifts up its branches above.”

³² For out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and they that escape out of Mount Zion. The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this.

— shall go forth a remnant; the word ‘remnant’ means that which is left; usually implying a small portion. No doubt a part of the Jews were destroyed in the invasion of Sennacherib, later by the Babylonians, then the Romans,

— but the assurance is here given that a portion of them would remain in safety and that they would constitute that from which the future prosperity of the state would arise.

³³ “Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: ‘He shall not come into this city nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields, nor cast a bank against it.

— Sennacherib shall not come into this city; he encamped probably on the northeast side of the city and his army would be destroyed there;

— nor shoot an arrow there; that is, no shoot an arrow within the walls of the city; nor come before it with shields; the army should not be permitted to come before the city defended with shields and prepared with the means of attack and defense.

³⁴ By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city,’ saith the Lord.

³⁵ ‘For I will defend this city to save it for Mine own sake and for My servant David’s sake.’”

— and for the sake of his servant David in whose seed he had promised the kingdom should be established; not for the merits of the inhabitants of it but for the sake of his own name and glory who had been blasphemed by the Assyrian monarch and his general.

³⁶ Then the angel of the Lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

— a prodigious slaughter (185,000) indeed! which shows the power and strength of an angel of the Lord; behold, they were all corpses; the whole dead army, excepting a few; this may well be expressed with a note of admiration, “behold!” for a very wonderful thing it was.

³⁷ So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went, and returned and dwelt at Nineveh.

— dwelt at Nineveh; for some eighteen or twenty years after his disaster, according to the Assyrian inscriptions. The word, “dwelt” is consistent with any indefinite length of time;

³⁸ And it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword, and they escaped into the land of Ararat; and Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead. — thus a prophecy was fulfilled.

King Sennacherib of Assyria (Reign 705–681BC)

Isaiah 38

¹ In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, came unto him and said unto him, “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’”

— in those days Hezekiah was sick unto death; this was about the time that Sennacherib invaded Judea, threatened Jerusalem with a siege and his army was destroyed by an angel from heaven; but whether it was before or after the destruction of his army, no one is sure.

² Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed unto the Lord

— then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall; either to the wall of his bedchamber where he lay sick that his tears might not be seen, and his prayers interrupted; or else to the wall of the Temple, as the Targum says, towards which good men used to look when they prayed.

³ and said, “Remember now, O Lord, I beseech Thee, how I have walked before Thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in Thy sight.” And Hezekiah wept sorely.

— wept sore; Josephus (quoted by Commentary Critical and Explanatory) says the reason why he wept so sorely was that being childless; he was leaving the kingdom without a successor; but his wishes, when gratified, prove a curse!; for he lived to have a son; that son was the idolater Manasseh, the chief cause of God’s wrath against Judah and of the overthrow of the kingdom.

⁴ Then came the word of the Lord to Isaiah, saying,

⁵ “Go, and say to Hezekiah, ‘Thus saith the Lord, the God of David thy father: I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears. Behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years.

— God of David thy father; God remembers the covenant with the father to the children (Psalm 89:28, 29); so, perhaps, that fifteen years allowed him to have a son, Manasseh.

⁶ And I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and I will defend this city.

— and I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; so that it seems that Hezekiah’s sickness was while the king of Assyria was near Jerusalem and about to besiege it and before the destruction of the Assyrian army.

⁷ And this shall be a sign unto thee from the Lord that the Lord will do this thing that He hath spoken:

— and this shall be a sign unto thee from the Lord; which it seems Hezekiah asked and it was put for him to choose, whether the shadow on the sundial should go forward or backward ten degrees and he chose the latter, II Kings 20:8, which was a token confirming and assuring.

⁸ Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the degrees, which has gone down in the sundial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward.’” So the sun returned ten degrees by which degrees it had gone down.

— so the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down; and so this day was longer by these degrees than a common day, and accordingly, we suppose the sun went back, suddenly or as it usually moved, though in a retrograde way and made the same progress again through these degrees.

⁹ The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah when he had been sick and had recovered from his sickness:

— the writing of Hezekiah king of Judah; the Septuagint calls it a “prayer” but the Targum is much better, “a writing of Thanksgiving for the Miracle.”

¹⁰ I said, “In the cutting off of my days I shall go to the gates of the grave; I am deprived of the residue of my years.”

— Hezekiah shall go to the graveyard; he perceives that he must die without any hopes of prevention; the grave is called a man’s long home.

¹¹ I said, “I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord, in the land of the living; I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world.

— I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world; or “time” of this fading transitory world, which will quickly cease.

¹² Mine age is departed and is removed from me as a shepherd’s tent; I have cut off like a weaver my life. He will cut me off with pining sickness; from day even to night wilt Thou make an end of me.

— mine age is departed; the time of my life is expired; as a shepherd’s tent, which is easily and speedily removed; I have cut off, by my sins, provoking God to do it. Or I do declare and have concluded that my life is or will be suddenly cut off;

— for men are oft said in Scripture to do those things which they only declare and pronounce to be done; as men are said to pollute and to remit and retain sins and the like, when they only declare men and things to be polluted and sins to be remitted or retained by God.

¹³ I reckoned till morning that, as a lion, so will He break all my bones; from day even to night wilt Thou make an end of me.”

— I reckoned till morning; or “I set my time till the morning” – Hezekiah thought he should have died before the night came on and now it was come; the Targum says, “I roared until the morning, as a lion roars.”

¹⁴ Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter; I did mourn as a dove; mine eyes fail with looking upward. O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me! — rather “like a crane and a swallow” – both are sometimes loud and clamorous;

— like a crane when the pain was very acute and grievous; and sometimes very low, through weakness of body like the twittering of a swallow; or the moan he made under his affliction was like the mournful voices of these birds at certain times;

— I did mourn as a dove; silently and patiently within himself for his sins and transgressions; and because of his afflictions, the fruit of them.

¹⁵ What shall I say? He hath both spoken unto me, and Himself hath done it. I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.

— what shall I say? in a way of praise and thankfulness, for the mercies promised and received; I know not what to say; I want words to express the gratitude of my heart for the kindness bestowed. What shall I render to God for all his benefits? So the Targum says, “what praise shall I utter and speak unto him?”

— I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul; before he did not reckon of a day to live, now he speaks of his years, having fifteen added to his days, during which time he should “go softly” in a thoughtful meditating frame of mind;

— frequently calling his bitter affliction, acknowledging the goodness and kindness of God unto him; cheerfully, after the bitterness of my soul as it may be rendered; that is, after it is over, or because of deliverance from it.

— so the Targum says, “with what shall I serve him, and render to him for all the years he hath added to my life, and hath delivered me from the bitterness of my soul?”

¹⁶ O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit; so wilt Thou recover me and make me to live.

— O Lord, by these things men live; not by bread only but by the word of God: by the promise of God and by his power performing it; and by his favour and goodness continually bestowed.

¹⁷ Behold, for peace I had great bitterness; but Thou hast in love for my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption, for Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back.

— behold for peace I had great bitterness; meaning not that instead of peace and prosperity which he expected would ensue upon the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, came a bitter affliction upon him;

— for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back; as loathsome and abominable; for though God sees all the sins of his people with his eye of omniscience and in his providence takes notice of them and chastises for them, yet not with his eye of avenging justice.

¹⁸ For the grave cannot praise Thee, death can not celebrate Thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth.

— for the grave cannot praise thee, death can not celebrate thee; that is they that are in the grave, they cannot celebrate the praises of God; their souls may praise him but they in their bodies cannot till the resurrection morn, or as long as they are under the dominion of the grave;

— so the Targum says, “they that are in the grave cannot confess before thee, and the dead cannot praise thee.”

¹⁹ The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day; the father to the children shall make known Thy truth.

— the living; only the living; emphatic repetition; his heart is so full of the main object of his prayer that for want of adequate words he repeats the same word;

— father to the children; one generation of the living to another. Hezekiah probably also hints at his own desire to live until he should have a child, the successor to his throne to whom he might make known and so perpetuate the memory of God’s promise.

²⁰ The Lord was ready to save me; therefore we will sing my songs with the stringed instruments all the days of our life in the house of the Lord.

— the Lord was at hand to save him; he arose for his help; he who one day expected death every moment was the next day in the temple praising God.

²¹ For Isaiah had said, “Let them take a lump of figs and lay it for a plaster upon the boil, and he shall recover.”

— for Isaiah had said; before the above writing was made; for this and the following are probably added by Isaiah or some other person. The Septuagint version adds, “to Hezekiah” but the speech seems rather directed to some of his servants, or those that were about him;

— let them take a lump of figs, and lay it for a plaster upon the boil, and he shall recover; which was done and he did accordingly recover; this was a miracle within a miracle since figs are hurtful to ulcers; it was not from the natural force of these figs but by the power of God that this cure was effected.

²² Hezekiah also had said, “What is the sign that I shall go up to the house of the Lord?”

— Hezekiah also had said; what evidence or proof have I that I shall be restored and permitted to go to the Temple? The miracle on the sun-dial was performed in answer to this request and as a demonstration that he should yet be permitted to visit the Temple of God.

Posted in Isaiah

Trump launches Chip’ Manhattan Project’

•August 21, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Trump launches ‘Manhattan Project’ as one of America’s largest companies set to be nationalized

Daily Mail • August 18, 2025 ~ MSN

The Trump administration has launched their own ‘Manhattan Project,’ as reports have suggested one of America’s largest chipmakers could be partly nationalized.

Intel, the largest chip fabricator in the US, has been in talks with Donald Trump over a potential government stake in the company.

It comes amid concerns that America relies too heavily on manufacturers in Taiwan – an island nation that China has repeatedly threatened to invade.

If China were to invade Taiwan, it would throttle America’s ability to compete in the booming chipmaking that is being driven by artificial intelligence.

‘This feels like the Manhattan Project – or the run-up to World War II,’ MIT AI computer scientist Dave Blundin said on a podcast with MIT engineer Peter Diamandis.

‘It’s every bit as important as the space race was, as the nuclear arms race was. Actually, it’s more important.’

The consideration to nationalize the company, a move typically done in times of national urgency, comes as the US is looking to get ahead of China in the AI and tech arms race.

American companies like Nvidia and AMD design AI chips but they are fabricated in Taiwan. Intel is unique as the only major US company that both designs and fabricates its own chips.

Intel’s advanced abilities to manufacture semiconductors would allow the US to give up its reliance on foreign fabrication plants (fabs), especially in Taiwan which controls more than 60 percent of the market, in order to power artificial intelligence, defense and the economy.

The talks remain ongoing and finer details continue to be made clear, but the idea would be that the US government would pay for the stake in the company, one person close to the matter told Bloomberg.

Another stressed that the talks do not ensure that the deal is definitive, and the discussion could end without a deal being made.

The move, according to AI and tech experts on Diamandis’ podcast Moonshots, echoes the ‘Manhattan Project’ as a sort of a ‘national survival strategy.’

‘The reason the US needs to protect Taiwan fundamentally… is because the fabs are there. If the fabs all move to the US, then why would the US defend Taiwan?’ Blundin said.

Concerns have been raised about the decision to nationalize the company, as he added: ‘They’re putting the whole industry on a kind of war footing, like mobilization for conflict, except the battleground is supply chains and chip fabs.’

Intel told Bloomberg, while declining to comment on the discussion with the Trump administration, that the company is ‘deeply committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts to strengthen US technology and manufacturing leadership.’

‘We look forward to continuing our work with the Trump administration to advance these shared priorities, but we are not going to comment on rumors or speculation,’ the company added.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told the outlet: ‘Discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration.’

The move comes after two AI companies agreed last week to hand over 15 percent of their chip sales revenue in China to the US government in exchange for export licenses.

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) entered an unprecedented arrangement with the White House to promote and sell their semiconductors in China last week, three people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.

‘In the short term, this is fantastic. In the long term, wow, could this turn bad in a hurry,’ Blundin said. ‘It’s good for the US economy, but we’re going to use that to fund [the] US catching up in the chip wars.’

‘Very, very good business deal and incredibly slippery slope precedent.’

The deal could pour more than $2 billion into the US government, the New York Times reported, although Trump did not reveal what the money may be used for.

Just as sources say Trump and the AI companies entered the agreement, the president declared he would impose a 100 percent tariff on the imports of semiconductors and chips unless the company is ‘building in the United States.’

News of Trump’s discreetly entered agreement with Nvidia and AMD has been slammed by experts who say the move could have detrimental repercussions when it comes to US-China relations.

‘This is an own goal and will incentivize the Chinese to up their game and pressure the administration for more concessions,’ Liza Tobin, who previously served as China director at the National Security Council, told The New York Times.

The move to sell microchips to China has been heavily criticized, as many see it as a threat to national security and a move against America’s best interests.

Posted in US

Isaiah (Ch 35-36)

•August 20, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Something to think about the length of Jacob’s forthcoming Captivity! It’s subjective but a historical precedent from the house of Judah could give us a clue regarding its timeline:

“And I will scatter you among the nations, and will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.

‘Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate and ye are in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest and enjoy her sabbaths” Leviticus 26:33-34

According to God’s judgement, Israel’s length in Captivity is tied to their years of neglect; and drawing from Judah’s experience, it was seventy years, “to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for as long as she lay desolate she kept her Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years, II Chronicles 36:19-21.

For a more indepth study on this subject, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

Isaiah 35

¹ The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

— this is a continuation of Isaiah the 34th chapter; that is, during the Millennium the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, either for the wild beasts, satyrs, owls and vultures, that shall inhabit Edom or Petra and because it shall be an habitation for them;

— or they shall be glad for them, the Edomites and for the destruction of them; that is, as the Targum paraphrases it, “they that dwell in the wilderness, in the dry land, shall rejoice.”

² It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God.

— the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; the wilderness shall be as pleasant and fruitful as Lebanon, Carmel and Sharon; which were eminent parts of the land of Canaan as hath been oft noted;

— they, who are understood by the wilderness shall see the glory of the Lord; the glorious discoveries and effects of God’s power and goodness to his people.

³ Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.

— strengthen ye the weak hands; ye prophets and shepherds of God, comfort and encourage his people who are now ready to faint with hopes of that salvation which in due time he will work for them.

⁴ Say to them that are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense; He will come and save you.”

— say to them that are of a fearful heart; who because of their own weakness and the strength of their enemies are discouraged and cast down;

— be strong, fear not, resist your fears, confide in the power, love and faithfulness of God who has promised to deliver those that trust in him and has engaged that as your day is your strength shall be, and you shall become strong.

— Behold, your God will come though he seem to be absent and to have departed from you, he will come and abide with you.

⁵ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.

— during the Millennium, the eyes of the blind shall be opened; the images are of joy and exultation, the times of happiness when God would come to save them from their foes;

— this passage is a description of what the Messiah, the Lord Jesus, did that it doubtless refers to the miracles which he would perform; in numerous instances did he in fact restore the blind to sight, giving thus the most unequivocal proof that he was the Messiah sent from God;

— and for the house of Israel, their blind would see their idolatry worship; such as (1) Astarte, the queen of heaven; from whom Easter is derived; and (2) Mithra, worshipping the sun-god, when a mystical white Christmas of Babylon have been worshipped without their knowing.

⁶ Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.

— an hart demoting the stag, or male deer; sometimes refers to any species of deer or antelope and this is referred here as its quick and sprightly nature;

— and the tongue of the dumb shall be able to sing and to praise God. On the restoration of the dumb to the benefits of language.

⁷ And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water; in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

— and the parched ground shall supernaturally become a pool and the thirsty land springs of water; such persons who have been like the parched earth, barren and unfruitful or like the earth scorched with the sun shall be comforted and refreshed; shall now enjoy peace and prosperity.

⁸ And a highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, but it shall be for those; the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

— God shall be with them walking in the way; that is, he shall be their companion and guide in the way. Hence though fools they shall not err therein; the way shall be so plain and straight that even the most foolish travelers cannot easily mistake it.

⁹ No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon; it shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there.

— no lion shall be there; lions abounded in all the countries adjacent to Palestine; they are objects of dread and alarm. The prophet Isaiah therefore suggests that there should be no cause for such dread and alarm as they walk there.

¹⁰ And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

— and during the Millennium the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away;

— sorrow and sighing shall flee away; which expressions are too magnificent and emphatical to be satisfied by the return of the Jews from Babylon to their own land; and from another captivity of 190/40 years just before the Millennium;

For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

Isaiah 36

¹ Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them.

— the fourteenth year of Hezekiah was BC 714 or 713. Sargon was then King of Assyria and continued king till BC 705. Sennacherib did not ascend the throne till that year and he did not lead an expedition into the land of Judea till BC 701.

² And the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem unto King Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the Fuller’s Field.

— Rabshakeh; a name or a title, probably the chief officer or cup-bearer;

— a penalty of three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold was imposed and paid, Hezekiah being reduced to empty his own treasury and that of the Temple and even stripping the Temple doors and pillars of the plates of gold with which they were overlaid.

³ Then came forth unto him Eliakim, Hilkiah’s son, who was over the house, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah, Asaph’s son, the recorder.

— Eliakim; it is significant that Eliakim now fills the office which, a short time before had been filled by Shebna while the latter is reduced to the inferior position of a scribe (Isaiah 22:15-25). The change is clearly traceable to Isaiah’s influence. The “scribe” was the secretary who formulated despatches and degrees; the “recorder” probably the registrar of the official annals.

⁴ And Rabshakeh said unto them, “Say ye now to Hezekiah, ‘Thus saith the great king, the king of Assyria: What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?

— say ye now to Hezekiah; tell him what follows; thus saith the great king, the king of Assyria; this he said boastingly of his master and in order to terrify Hezekiah and his subjects; whom he would represent as little in comparison of him who had subdued many kingdoms and aimed at universal monarchy.

⁵ I say, thou sayest (but they are but vain words), “I have counsel and strength for war.” Now on whom dost thou trust, that thou rebellest against me?

— the first part of the words are Hezekiah’s, “I say (sayest thou)”; and the latter, Rabshakeh’s note upon them; though they may be understood as Hezekiah’s or what he is made to speak by Rabshakeh.

⁶ Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, in Egypt, whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him.

— Lo, thou trust in the staff of this broken reed on Egypt his ally and auxiliary; and which is rightly called “the staff of a broken reed” if trusted to and leaned upon the banks of the river Nile in Egypt.

⁷ But if thou say to me, “We trust in the Lord our God,” is it not He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and said to Judah and to Jerusalem, “Ye shall worship before this altar”?

— Rashi: Whose high places… has removed: he [Hezekiah] abolished all the pagan temples and the altars and the high places and has coerced all Judah to prostrate themselves before one altar.

⁸ Now therefore give pledges, I pray thee, to my master the king of Assyria, and I will give thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them.

— there was something absurd in the idea of Judah coming out as strong in its cavalry. You could have the two thousand horses if your riders could manage these horses?

⁹ How then wilt thou turn away the face of one captain of the least of my master’s servants and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen?

— how then wilt thou turn away the face of one captain of the least of my master’s servants and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen? that is, he reproaches Hezekiah’s small power which is not able to resist one of Sennacherib’s least captains.

¹⁰ And have I now come up without the Lord against this land to destroy it? The Lord said unto me: “Go up against this land, and destroy it.”’”

— Rabshakeh would insinuate that he had a commission from the Lord God, a boastful inference from the past successes of Assyria, designed to influence the Jews to surrender.

¹¹ Then said Eliakim and Shebna and Joah unto Rabshakeh, “Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in the Aramaic language, for we understand it; and speak not to us in the Jews’ language in the ears of the people who are on the wall.”

¹² But Rabshakeh said, “Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men who sit upon the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?”

— Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants; the king’s officers, knowing the little faith of their people, perhaps without misgivings of their own and listening eagerly on the wall, recognise in Rabshakeh’s words an echo of Isaiah’s and lose courage as feeling that they were fighting against the God who was chastising them?

— the Syrian or Aramaic was a common ground for the ambassadors on both sides as being the language of commerce and diplomacy. “Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the men who are sitting on the wall, who are destined with you to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”

¹³ Then Rabshakeh stood and cried with a loud voice in the Jews’ language, and said, “Hear ye the words of the great king, the king of Assyria!

— then Rabshakeh stood, indicating the posture of a man who intends to speak to them at a distance. And cried with a loud voice so that those on the wall could hear.

¹⁴ Thus saith the king: ‘Let not Hezekiah deceive you, for he shall not be able to deliver you.

— thus saith the king, the king of Assyria, whom he personated, whose general and ambassador he was; so he spoke to command the greater awe of the people and the more to terrify them:

— let not Hezekiah deceive you; with fair words, promising protection and safety, making preparations for the defence of the city and to oblige the besiegers to break up the siege of it: for he shall not be able to deliver you.

¹⁵ Neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, “The Lord will surely deliver us; this city shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.”

— neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord; both by his own example and by arguments to persuade his people to do so likewise; of this Rabshakeh was sensible and was more afraid of this than of any thing else and therefore laboured this point more than any other;

— saying, the Lord will surely deliver us, this city shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria: since the Lord had promised to defend it, Isaiah 31:5 since it is expressly promised by the Lord that he would deliver him and the city out of the hand of the king of Assyria.

¹⁶ Hearken not to Hezekiah, for thus saith the king of Assyria: Make an agreement with me by a present, and come out to me; and eat ye every one of his vine and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern,

— hearken not to Hezekiah; nor would he have them obey him in things civil any more than hearken to him in things sacred, and so the Targum says, “Hearken not to Hezekiah” nor receive any orders from him, nor pay any regard to them:

— make an agreement with me, that is, “make peace with me” and the Septuagint version is, “if ye wish to be blessed, come out to me;” forsake your king, throw off your allegiance to him, surrender yourselves and city to me.

¹⁷ until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

— until I come; these are the words of the king of Assyria delivered by Rabshakeh. It was proposed that they should remain safely in Jerusalem until Sennacherib should himself come and remove them to his own land.

¹⁸ Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, “The Lord will deliver us.” Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?

— beware lest Hezekiah persuade you; to trust in the Lord, stand up in your own defence and not listen to these proposals; or lest he “deceive you” with vain words;

— hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land; over whom he presided and to whom the people were devotees: out of the hand of the king of Assyria? this reasoning would have had some weight in it had the Lord God of Israel been like the gods of the nations but he is not.

¹⁹ Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And have they delivered Samaria out of my hand?

— where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? What become of them? where are they to be found? where’s their power to protect and defend the people they presided over?

— and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? the gods of the above places which were worshipped in Samaria or the gods peculiar to that place; though Samaria was not taken by the present king of Assyria, Sennacherib but by a predecessor of his, Shalmaneser.

²⁰ Who are they among all the gods of these lands that have delivered their land out of my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?’”

— who are they amongst all the gods of these lands, that have delivered their land out of my hand? Not one of them, it is suggested; wherefore then should it be thought practicable;

— that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand? thus blasphemously setting the Lord God of Israel upon a level with the fictitious gods of the Gentiles. If Rabshakeh was an apostate Jew he must have known better but the malice of such is usually the greatest.

²¹ But they held their peace and answered him not a word; for the king’s commandment was, saying, “Answer him not.”

— but they held their peace; Hezekiah seems to have commanded silence as if distrustful either of the wisdom of the ambassadors or of the effect which any chance words might have upon the garrison and people of Jerusalem.

²² Then came Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, to Hezekiah with their clothes rent, and told him the words of Rabshakeh.

— with their clothes rent the act was the customarily expression of their horror at the blasphemy of Rabshakeh’s words; they would not reply to that blasphemy and trusted to the effect of this silent protest on the minds of the people who had heard it.

Posted in Isaiah

China reveals its DF-100 missile

•August 19, 2025 • Leave a Comment

China reveals DF-100 missile in response to US encirclement

AsiaTimes • August 15, 2025

This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China released rare new DF-100 footage as part of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) documentary marking the force’s 98th anniversary, offering fresh visual cues on the supersonic cruise missile’s specifications and strategic reach.

The two-minute video shows the DF-100 operating during a cable communications exercise simulating full-spectrum jamming, reinforcing the archetype: a fast, long-range strike platform meant to arrive in waves and overwhelm layered defenses across the First and Second Island chains before they can react.

Technically, the system slots into China’s strike portfolio as a high-speed standoff weapon. The DF-100, first unveiled in 2019, is credited with a 3,000–4,000-kilometer range, a Mach 4 cruising speed and high strike accuracy, enabling time-on-target hits within 40 minutes.

Those capabilities, if accurate and realized, bring US bases in Okinawa and Guam and key logistics hubs in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea into the weapon’s target range.

The DF-100 can launch from road-mobile vehicles or the H-6N bomber, with air launch extending reach to roughly 6,000 kilometers. Footage highlighting a sharp conical warhead and oversized tail fins suggests maneuver authority and penetration potential, while the urban launch scene telegraphs mobility and survivability in cluttered terrain.

As a class, supersonic standoff munitions occupy a purposeful middle ground. In a November 2020 War on the Rocks article, David Zikusoka notes that weapons flying between Mach 1 and Mach 5 balance speed, cost and survivability, arriving faster than subsonic cruise missiles and striking time-sensitive targets in minutes without the nuclear ambiguity of ballistic or hypersonic trajectories.

Zikusoka adds that, while not invulnerable, this speed envelope complicates interception timelines and compresses decision cycles, particularly when used in coordinated salvos that strain radar tracking and fire-control loops.

The DF-100’s value also lies in how it can be teamed with ballistic missile fires. The China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) mentions in a November 2020 report that the DF-100 does not extend China’s geographic reach beyond existing ballistic systems, but it enables simultaneous time-on-target salvos alongside DF-21 or DF-26 missiles, forcing defenders to counter different flight profiles at once.

That complexity amplifies a preexisting problem. Asia Times has previously noted that Guam’s disjointed air and missile defense architecture may be insufficient against saturation attacks mixing drones, ballistic missiles and supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles with hypersonic gliders—an attack geometry designed to exhaust interceptors and create exploitable gaps.

US magazine depth and reload constraints magnify that risk. Greg Hayden mentions in an April 2025 CIRIS article that even sophisticated US missile defenses can be emptied quickly by China’s expanding arsenal because interceptor stockpiles are limited.

Hayden points out that at-sea reloading delays for Aegis-equipped warships can sideline launchers for hours or days, while production bottlenecks and single-source dependencies hinder rapid replenishment.

He also adds that without at-sea reloading and genuine surge manufacturing, US missile defenses could collapse in a high-intensity fight as shot doctrine collides with inventory reality. Yet China’s precision fire is only as deadly as its ability to find, fix and finish targets at scale, and that is where its system-level vulnerability sits.

General Chance Saltzman highlighted in an April 2025 hearing before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission that the PLA’s precision strike enterprise leans heavily on more than 500 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites—optical, radar and radiofrequency (RF)—to build a space-enabled targeting network capable of holding US and allied forces at risk.

Saltzman mentioned that these assets are inherently vulnerable due to predictable orbits and limited defensive measures, stressing that degrading China’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) backbone could blunt its long-range strike capability by breaking the cueing chain that missiles like the DF-100 require.

The timing and tone of the DF-100’s showcase also fit a signaling pattern tied to US missile placements along China’s periphery.

In September 2024, China conducted its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch in 44 years, a move that coincided with the announcement that month of the indefinite US Typhon missile deployment in the Philippines. The Typhon launcher can fire SM-6 and Tomahawk cruise missiles, the latter capable of striking mainland targets.

Following the Typhon deployment, the US indefinitely stationed the shorter-ranged Navy/Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) in the Philippines, with plans unveiled this month to deploy NMESIS in Japan as well.

The DF-100’s supersonic speed maps neatly to time-sensitive, high-value mobile targets such as Typhon and NMESIS, threatening to kill them before they can fire or relocate—an effect that increases confidence in preemption while inviting counter-preemption.

This US deployment pattern is read in Beijing as part of a broader containment scheme. In a January 2024 report for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Veerle Nouwens and other writers mention that Chinese analysts perceive US plans to field land-based missiles across the First and Second Island Chains as a direct challenge to China’s strategic mobility and posture.

According to Nouwens and others, these forward deployments are seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine China’s anti-access/area-denial systems and threaten inland facilities. They note that, in response, Chinese strategists anticipate China will substantially increase its land-based missile deployments—conventional and nuclear—to counter the perceived encirclement.

Capacity-wise, the PLA Rocket Force remains the backbone of that response. In a June 2025 US Senate Committee on Appropriations statement, ranking US officials mentioned that the PLARF is pressing ahead with modernization to deepen strategic deterrence.

According to the statement, the PLARF possesses over 900 short-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching Taiwan; 400 ground-launched cruise missiles able to hit targets across the entire First Island Chain; 1,300 medium-range ballistic missiles that cover the Second Island Chain; 500 intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can strike parts of Alaska and Australia; and more than 400 nuclear-capable ICBMs with global reach.

Those numbers, combined with road mobility and decoys, illustrate how volume and variety can saturate defenses and create dilemmas at sea and ashore. But order-of-battle size is not the same as combat credibility.

While acknowledging rapid modernization, Eamon Passey points out in a December 2024 article for the American Foreign Policy Council that the PLARF still suffers persistent capability gaps that undercut deterrence.

Passey mentions that China has added dual-capable platforms and expanded joint training, but systemic weaknesses endure: a shortage of battle-tested personnel, unrealistic training scenarios, and poor-quality conscripts that limit operational credibility.

In addition, Passey notes that corruption concerns further erode institutional integrity, complicating reform and readiness at precisely the moment China is attempting to knit sensors, shooters and command networks into a high-velocity kill web.

Whether meant as a warning or a performance, the DF-100’s reemergence signals that the next Pacific missile duel may hinge less on who fires first than on who can keep finding, hitting and sustaining the missile fight.

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” Isaiah 28:1

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26

Israeli Smotrich vows to occupied West Bank

•August 18, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich vows to resume E1 development in occupied West Bank

ABC News • August 15, 2025 ~ CNN

In short:

Bezalel Smotrich, who is sanctioned by Australia and the UK, says a controversial new development “definitively buries the idea of a Palestinian state.”
The E1 development has been paused amid international pressure for more than a decade, but now the Israeli government appears ready to construct it.
The plans would expand one of Israel’s largest settlements in the occupied West Bank and sever the territory into southern and northern portions.

On a hilltop overlooking the West Bank, controversial far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made a stunning declaration to raucous applause.

“We will continue to build a fulfilling Jewish reality,” he said.

“This reality definitively buries the idea of a Palestinian state, simply because there is nothing to recognise, and no-one to recognise.”

In the hills behind him to the east of Jerusalem, was Ma’ale Adumim, one of Israel’s largest settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Mr Smotrich had just revived, and approved, a highly controversial plan to extend the settlement through to East Jerusalem, which many Palestinians and their allies fear would rip the West Bank into two.

Known as the E1 plan, many consider it a death knell for the two-state solution.

Development blocks creation of ‘viable Palestinian state’

The E1 plan has been met with fierce opposition for many years, by Palestinians and much of the globe.

The latest iteration of the plan would see 3,400 houses for Israeli settlers built in an area extending from East Jerusalem to Ma’ale Adumim, which stretches east toward the Dead Sea.

“It’s smack in the centre of the West Bank, and it breaks it up into a northern part and a southern part,” said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim.

“It’s not possible to undo 100,000 Israeli settlers in that area. It would mean there’s no Palestinian contiguity and there’s no way to create a viable Palestinian state.”

Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, but the Israeli government considers many of the established towns and villages to now be part of the state of Israel.

About 700,000 Israeli settlers live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with settlement building sharply intensifying.

Israel froze construction plans to build E1 in 2012, and again after a renewed push for the plan in 2020.

It did so because of objections from the US and European allies, who considered it a significant threat to any future peace deal and two-state solution.

But the international landscape has changed.

Mr Smotrich, who has been sanctioned by Australia and the UK over accusations of inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, said the US was in his corner.

“Everything I do in the Judea and Samaria [the biblical names for the area] is being done in full coordination with Netanyahu and with his blessing.

“It’s done in full coordination with our friends in the White House, with President Trump, with his team, with Ambassador Huckabee.”

Mr Tatarsky said that for more than 20 years Israel held back from these plans in part because of pressure by the international community.

“The fact that now the Israeli government is going through with this plan just shows in what situation we are in, both in the goals of the current Israeli government and the lack of a serious, international intervention.”

The Palestinian Authority’s presidential spokesperson, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the PA condemned the plan.

“These are illegal decisions and proposals and we hope that the world community will never allow Israel to force its laws on the Palestinian land,” he said.

An Israeli group that tracks settlement activity in the West Bank, Peace Now, said while steps were still required before construction, if cleared, infrastructure work could begin within a few months.

“The E1 plan is deadly for the future of Israel and for any chance of achieving a peaceful two-state solution. We are standing at the edge of an abyss, and the government is driving us forward at full speed,” the group said.

Posted in Israel, Zionism

Isaiah (Ch 33-34)

•August 17, 2025 • Leave a Comment

“The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again” Isaiah 24:20

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

Isaiah 33

¹ Woe to thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled; and dealest treacherously, and they dealt not treacherously with thee! when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and when thou shalt make an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee.

— thou shalt be spoiled; this was literally fulfilled when the Assyrian monarchy lost its splendor and power and was finally taken over by the more mighty Babylon empire.

— they shall deal treacherously with thee; that is, ‘thou shalt be dealt with in a treacherous manner.’ The result was that Sennacherib was treacherously slain by his own sons as he was ‘worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god’ Isaiah 37:38, and thus the prophecy was literally fulfilled.

² O Lord, be gracious unto us; we have waited for Thee; be Thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.

— we, the house of Israel, have waited for thee; time after time, year after year, in the use of means; hoping for his kind appearance; expecting help and salvation.

— be thou their arm every morning; when they pray unto thee, the morning being the time of prayer; and also be their arm all the day long, to lean and depend upon, to support, protect and defend them; and the Targum, “our strength every day, our salvation also in the time of distress.”

³ At the noise of the tumult the people fled; at the lifting up of Thyself the nations were scattered.

— at the noise of the tumult; which shall be made upon the angel’s destroying the army; the people fled; those of the army who escaped that stroke. At the lifting up of thyself to execute judgement, the people of many nations which made up Sennacherib’s army, and the nations were scattered.

⁴ And your spoil shall be gathered like the gathering of the caterpillar; as the running to and fro of locusts shall he run upon them.

— and your spoil; the treasure which you have raked by spoiling diverse people; shall be gathered; but you shall be forced to flee with all possible speed, leaving your spoils behind like the gathering of the caterpillar; as caterpillars gather and devour all the fruits of the earth;

— or as the running to and fro of locusts; as locusts, especially when they are armed by a commission from God, come with great force, devouring every thing before them;

— or like the Russian oligarchs, who are charged complicit in crimes, that sail their superyachts (private jets, posh homes, football clubs and other trophies) scurrying away like rats to places of refuge like Dubai, Bahrain, Doha or other safe havens before being seized by Western officials after their wealth are deemed stolen from the Russian people!

⁵ The Lord is exalted, for He dwelleth on high; He hath filled Zion with judgement and righteousness.

— the Lord is exalted; by the destruction of so potent an army and by the defence of his people. For he dwelleth on high; he is, and will appear to be, superior to his; he dwelleth in heaven, whence he can easily and irresistibly pour down judgements upon his enemies.

⁶ And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times and strength of salvation; the fear of the Lord is his treasure.

— and wisdom and knowledge; to govern thyself and the people well; the fear of the Lord is his treasure; thy chief treasure and delight shall be in promoting the fear and worship of God.

⁷ Behold, their valiant ones shall cry without; the ambassadors of peace shall weep bitterly.

— behold, their valiant ones shall cry outside: the ambassadors of peace to beg peace for the Assyrian shall weep bitterly.

⁸ The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth; he hath broken the covenant, he hath despised the cities, he regardeth no man.

— the highways lie waste; in the consternation and alarm that was produced by his approach, the roads that had been usually thronged were now solitary and still. A mournful desolation already prevailed and they apprehended still greater calamities and hence they wept;

— he hath broken the covenant; Sennacherib broke his oath given to Hezekiah of departing for a sum of money, II Kings 18:14,17; he hath despised the cities; the defenced cities of Judah which he despised and easily took; he regarded no man; either to spare them or to fear them.

⁹ The earth mourneth and languisheth; Lebanon is ashamed and hewn down. Sharon is like a wilderness, and Bashan and Carmel shake off their fruits.

¹⁰ “Now will I rise,” saith the Lord; “now will I be exalted; now will I lift up Myself.

— now will God be exalted; that is, in his power by the destruction of the enemies of the elect; and in the hearts and mouths of his people, on account of their deliverance and salvation;

— now will God lift himself up, higher than they, and reduce them to a low estate and condition. The repetition of the word “now” has its emphasis and is designed to observe the time of God’s appearing in the cause of his people and the firmness of his resolution to do it without delay.

¹¹ Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble; your breath, as fire, shall devour you.

— ye, O ye Assyrians! shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble, instead of solid corn. Your great hopes and designs, O ye Assyrians! shall be utterly disappointed;

— your breath, as fire, shall devour you; your rage against my people shall bring ruin upon yourselves.

¹² And the people shall be as the burnings of lime; as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire.

— and the people shall be as the burnings of lime; like chalk stones that are burnt to make lime of; which may denote not only their hardness and impenitency which brought upon them and issued in the wrath of God;

— as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire; thorns are a fit simile to express the unfruitfulness, uselessness and harmfulness of wicked men and these “cut up” and so not green and moist, but dry and fit fuel for the fire, which burn the more easily and quickly.

¹³ Hear, ye that are far off, what I have done, and ye that are near, acknowledge My might.”

— hear, ye that are far off, all ye nations that are afar off, indicating that the destruction of the Assyrian army would be to signal that it would be known to distant nations and would constitute a similar warning to them.

¹⁴ The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites: “Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?”

— sinners in Zion; who had the guise and form of religion but not the power of it and were for fleeing to Egypt and trusting in Pharaoh but not in the Lord; these are pretenders with a false religion disguised as the elect.

¹⁵ He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly, he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil;

— he that walks righteously; this describes the characteristics of the righteous who put their confidence in God; and speaks uprightly; his words are well-ordered, words which are not false, perfidious, slanderous or obscene; for an individual his words are simple, honest and true; for a magistrate his decisions are according to justice;

— he that despise the gain of oppressions; by ‘Deceits’ – he abhors the gain that is the result of imposition, false dealing and false weights.

— or if it means oppressions as the word usually does, he does not oppress the poor or take advantage of their needy condition or affix exorbitant prices or extort payment in a manner that is harsh and cruel.

¹⁶ he shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the fortifications of rocks; bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure.

— he, those with wealth, shall dwell on high; or high places were usually places of safety, being inaccessible to an enemy; he should be safe from the anger, wrath and consuming fire.

¹⁷ Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold the land that is very far off.

— thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty in his royal robes and with a cheerful countenance, as a King reigning gloriously before his elects in Jerusalem;

— the Targum says, “thine eyes shall see the Shekinah of the King of worlds in his praise;” that is, the glory of the Majesty of God.

¹⁸ Thine heart shall meditate terror: “Where is the scribe? Where is the receiver? Where is he that counted the towers?”

— thine heart shall meditate terror: this is either premonition concerning a future judgement as if he said, Before these glorious promises, thou shalt be brought into great straits and troubles.

— or rather, a thankful acknowledgment of deliverance from a former danger; as if he had said, When thou art delivered, thou shalt with pleasure and thankfulness recall to mind thy former terrors and miseries;

— the world of the Jews in their distress, they ask where is the scribe? who enrolled and pay the army; or who prescribed the tribute to be paid; or who kept an account of the spoil; perhaps being given the charge of reviewing an army and who made an estimate of the strength of Jerusalem.

¹⁹ Thou shalt not see a fierce people, a people of a deeper speech than thou canst perceive, of a stammering tongue that thou canst not understand.

— fierce people; the Assyrians shall not be allowed to enter Jerusalem. Or, thou shalt no longer see fierce enemies threatening thee as previously; such as the Babylonians, Romans or any endtime enemies that is yet to assail Jerusalem;

— a people of a deeper speech; a people whose language is so deep, that is, so dark or obscure that it cannot be understood by you. This refers to the army of the Assyrians, who spoke the Syrian language, which was understood by some of the Jews, but which was unintelligible to the masses.

²⁰ Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities; thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.

— look upon Zion; contemplate Zion’s beauty and safety, and her glorious and peculiar privileges; it is an object worthy of thy deepest meditation;

— the city of our solemnities: the chief part of Zion’s glory and happiness that God was solemnly ordained and the solemn assemblies and feasts kept in Zion. A quiet habitation which was but very obscurely and imperfectly fulfilled in an earlier Zion;

— but it would clearly and fully be accomplished in a latter Zion, the kingdom of God in the times of the Millennium against which we are assured that the gates of hell shall not prevail.

²¹ But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.

— during the Millennium, there in and around Zion the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams: as if we were surrounded with such great rivers as the Nile or Euphrates, which were a great security to Egypt and Babylon;

— wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby; but they shall have from God the security of a great river yet they shall be freed from the disadvantage of it.

²² For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us. — that is, “The Lord, our judge, the Lord, our lawgiver . . . He will save us.”

²³ Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail; then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.

— thy tacklings are loosed; God directs his speech to the Assyrians; and having tacitly designed their army under the notion of a gallant ship;

— he represents their broken and undone condition by the metaphor of a ship tossed in a tempestuous sea, having her cables broken and all her tacklings loose, and out of order so as she could have no benefit of her masts and sails; and therefore is quickly broken or swallowed up by the sea;

— they, the Assyrians, then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey; they who came to spoil and prey upon my people shall become a prey to them and shall be forced to flee away so suddenly;

— the general sense of the place is, that God’s people shall be victorious over all their enemies.

²⁴ And the inhabitant shall not say, “I am sick”; the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity.

— the inhabitant of Jerusalem, God’s people shall not say, I am sick; shall have no cause to complain of any sickness or calamity; shall be fully delivered from all their enemies and evil occurrences; shall enjoy perfect tranquility and prosperity.

Isaiah 34

¹ Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people! let the earth hear, and all that is therein, the world, and all things that come forth from it.

— the Judgement on all nations are concerned, but particularly nearby nations such as of Edom or Idumea; Moab and Ammon; Lebanon and Syria; but countries afar are not excluded;

— let the earth hear and all that is therein: not just the land of Judea but all the earth and the inhabitants of it: the world and all things that come forth of it; which may either be understood of those that dwell in it, as the Targum interprets it;

² For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and His fury upon all their armies; He hath utterly destroyed them; He hath delivered them to the slaughter.

— for the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations; all the nations of the earth which have committed fornication with either the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Greeks or the whore of Rome, or have given in to her false worship, superstition and idolatry; which is the reason of God’s wrath.

³ Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stench shall come up out of their carcasses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood.

— their slain shall be cast out into the fields where they shall lie unburied and be left for a prey to all ravenous birds and beasts; whereby he implies, either the vast numbers which shall be slain so as they could not have time or place to bury them; or the curse of God upon them;

— shall be melted with their blood; shall be filled with their blood which shall run down abundantly from the mountains with great force and dissolve and carry down part of the earth of the mountains with it as great showers of rain frequently do.

⁴ And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll; and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.

— and all the host of heaven: the sun, moon and stars; shall be dissolved; also in the prophetic language the heavenly luminaries represent kings, empires and states:

— shall be dissolved; so great shall be the confusion and consternation of mankind as if all the frame of the creation were broken into pieces as of the general judgement;

— the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, Heb. as a book; for books were then written in scrolls, which they usually rolled up together; and when they were so no man could read any word in it; and no more shall any man be able to see those truths and lights of heaven for they shall all be obscured and confounded.

⁵ “For My sword shall be bathed in heaven; behold, it shall come down upon Edom and upon the people of My curse in judgement.”

— for my Sword shall be bathed in heaven; that is, the Sword of the Lord, as it is called in the next verse Isaiah 34:6, and it is he that is speaking; it designs the vengeance of the Lord, the punishment he will inflict on the wicked,

— said to be “bathed in heaven” because it was determined and prepared there; the allusion may be to the bathing of Swords in some sort of liquor to harden or brighten them, and so fit them for use;

— it shall come down upon Idumea; upon the Edomites, who, though they were nearly related to the Israelites yet were their implacable enemies. But these are named for all the enemies of God’s elects, of whom they were an eminent type;

— Chabad Bible: “upon the nation with whom I contend [with], for judgment” – in great probability this would refer to the house of Jacob and not so much to Edom; if so this few verses would be tied to Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:5 where the Sword of the Lord or My Sword is similarly mentioned.

⁶ The sword of the Lord is filled with blood; it is made fat with fatness and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams; for the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

— is filled with blood; shall drink its fill of blood. The metaphor is here taken from a great glutton or drunkard, who is almost insatiable with meat and drink;

— with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams: by lambs and goats and rams, he means people of all ranks and conditions, high and low, rich and poor. A sacrifice; so he calleth this bloody work because it was done by God’s command, and for his honour; and therefore was a service acceptable to him.

— Bozrah, the capital city of Idumea; see further Isaiah 63:1, a parallel text; where Edom and Bozrah are mentioned. Could this be connected to The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! in Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:5?

⁷ And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.

— and the unicorns shall come down with them; together with the bullocks and bulls, which are also mentioned in Deuteronomy 33:17

“His (singular; that is, only one unit as Joseph) glory is like the firstling of his bullock and his horns are like the horns of unicorns. With them (with his brothers) he (singular: Joseph) shall push the people together to the ends of the earth; and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim and they are the thousands of Manasseh.”

For a detailed study, see (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

⁸ For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance, and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion.

— the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion; the long-delayed day of retribution should come at last; this would be the outcome from the hand of the Almighty God for the persistent hostility of the Edomites to the city which he had chosen.

⁹ And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.

— the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch; the imagery of the punishment which is to fall on Edom is suggested partly by the scenery of the Dead Sea, partly by the volcanic character of Edom itself with its extinct craters and streams of lava.

¹⁰ It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.

— and Petra, first inhabited by the Edomites, then the Ishmaelites, shall be a desolation as in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbouring cities thereof.

¹¹ But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it; and He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.

— but the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the word for “cormorant” is rendered a “pelican” in Psalm 102:6 they were both unclean fowls; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it; which were likewise unclean creatures.

¹² They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing.

— the idea is that the kingdom would be desolate; there would be no people to rule. Or, there will be no nobles there who shall survive the destruction to undertake the government of the state.

¹³ And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof; and it shall be a habitation of dragons and a court for owls.

— an habitation of dragons and a court for owls; the wild creatures named are identified, as elsewhere, with “jackals” (“wild dogs”) and “ostriches” like the ruins of Petra.

¹⁴ The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there and find for herself a place of rest.

— and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; or the “hairy” one; from which word the goat has its name; and these creatures are described by the ancients as half goats and half men;

— the Targum renders it demons (Rashi: the name of a female demon); and with this well agrees the account of Babylon or Rome as fallen, that it shall be the habitation of devils and the hold of every foul spirit.

¹⁵ There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay and hatch and gather under her shadow; there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.

— there shall the great owl make her nest: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate; signifying that Idumea (like the wilderness of Petra) would be a horrible desolation and barren wilderness.

¹⁶ Seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read: No one of these shall fail, none shall lack her mate; for My mouth, it hath commanded, and His Spirit, it hath gathered them.

— seek ye out of the book of the Lord; of the law of Moses and of the prophets; which being consulted, it will appear that punishment was threatened to be inflicted on the enemies of God’s people; of all enemies, but particularly the Edomites.

¹⁷ And He hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by line; they shall possess it for ever; from generation to generation shall they dwell therein.

— God hath divided the land to them, as it were by lot and line as Canaan was divided among the Israelites. The Targum says, “by His Word hath cast the lot for them” and his hand hath divided it unto them by line; the same adds, “He hath divided it unto them by line; they shall possess it for ever; from generation to generation they shall dwell therein.”

After the Flood and the Confusion at Babel, the Land was divided:

This is a commitment by an oath; an expanded version could be found in the Book of Jubilees:

And thus the sons of Noah divided unto their sons in the presence of Noah their father, and he bound them all by an oath, imprecating a curse on every one that sought to seize the portion which had not fallen (to him) by his lot.

And they all said, “So be it; so be it,” for themselves and their sons for ever throughout their generations Book of Jubilees Chapter 9:18-19

And here onto the next chapter, the reason is being given in the Chapter 10:

³⁹ In the fourth week in the first year in the beginning thereof in the four and thirtieth jubilee, were they dispersed from the land of Shinar.

⁴⁰ And Ham and his sons went into the land which he was to occupy, which he acquired as his portion in the land of the south.

⁴¹ But Canaan saw the land of Lebanon to the river of Egypt that it was very good, and he went not into the land of his inheritance to the west (that is to) the sea,

⁴² and he dwelt in the land of Lebanon, eastward and westward from the border of Jordan and from the border of the sea.

⁴³ And Ham, his father, and Cush and Mizraim, his brothers, said unto him: “Thou hast settled in a land which is not thine, and which did not fall to us by lot:

⁴⁴ do not do so; for if thou dost do so, thou and thy sons will fall in the land and (be) accursed through sedition;

⁴⁵ for by sedition ye have settled, and by sedition will thy children fall, and thou shalt be rooted out for ever.

⁴⁶ Dwell not in the dwelling of Shem; for to Shem and to his sons did it come by their lot.

⁴⁷ Cursed art thou, and cursed shalt thou be beyond all the sons of Noah, by the curse by which we bound ourselves by an oath in the presence of the holy judge, and in the presence of Noah our father.”

⁴⁸ But he (Canaan) did not hearken unto them, and dwelt in the land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and his sons until this day. And for this reason that land is named Canaan. Book of Jubilees Chapter 10:39-48

— and that Land was allocated to Shem; then later to Abraham and onto the children of Jacob, or specifically the Israelites. The Hezbollah or Hamas today or any other Lebanese or Palestinians wouldn’t have a chance.

Posted in Isaiah

OpenAI’s CEO says Graduates will soon be working in space

•August 16, 2025 • Leave a Comment

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman says in 10 years’ time college graduates will be working ‘some completely new, exciting, super well-paid’ job in space

Fortune • August 11, 2025

With Gen Z facing existential career crises, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that in just 10 years, college grads will be exploring the solar system—jobs that will reel in sky-high salaries. The tech leader even says he’s envious of young people because our early-career jobs will look “boring” by comparison.

As AI reshapes the workforce, many Gen Z college graduates are finding out the hard way that their degrees don’t guarantee a smooth career launch.

Now, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—one of Silicon Valley’s biggest leaders driving the AI revolution—is admitting the elephant in the room is true: AI will wipe out some jobs entirely. However, the tech billionaire insists the coming decade could be the most exciting time in history to start a career, especially for anyone who’s ever dreamed of working in space.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Psalm 19:1

For all of creation is waiting, yearning for the time when the sons of God will be revealed. Romans 8:19; to assist in the perfecting of his creation.

The Lord sees everything in the whole earth; the seven lights are the seven eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth, to see if anyone would put up their hands. Zechariah 4:10

Isaiah did, and he put up his hand, and replied, “Here I am; send me,” Isaiah 6:8. You only need to be “faithful over a few things” Matthew 25:23 emphasizes the importance of some critical matters, one being the Sabbath, which leads to be made ruler over many things.

If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? John 3:12

Posted in Tech Race '25-26

Isaiah (Ch 31-32)

•August 15, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Many believe Russia was and still is the main threat to the United States. Others, like John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, give incredible speeches around the world saying China is the main enemy.

And Mearsheimer brilliantly emphasizes the United States are protected by fish to the left and fish to the right, but foolishly negates to address America’s broken border in the South.

And that the Scriptures say that America’s main “enemy” comes from the porous South! At least Colonel Douglas Macgregor got his foresight on target! For more on the enemy from the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

Isaiah 31

¹ Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help, and depend upon horses and trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong, but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the Lord!

— woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; or “O ye that go down.” Such were their desperation for help for their people, or ambassadors sent to the king of Egypt, asking to supply them with men and horses against the king of Assyria, contrary to the express command of God;

— and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; having their dependence upon, and placing their confidence in, the strength and numbers of the cavalry of the Egyptians.

² Yet He also is wise, and will bring evil, and will not call back His words, but will arise against the house of the evildoers and against the help of them that work iniquity.

— yet he also is wise; that is, God, the Holy One of Israel, whom they disregard; and wiser too than the Egyptians; so wise as to know all their schemes, and able to confound them, as well as most certainly and fully to complete his own; and it would have been therefore the highest wisdom to have attributable to him and not to men;

— but will bring evil; the punishment or affliction on wicked men which he has warned and which they could in no way escape; and will not call back his words; his warnings delivered by the prophets: these, as he does not repent of, he will not revoke or make void, but fulfil and accomplish.

³ Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh, and not spirit. When the Lord shall stretch out His hand, both he that helpeth shall fall and he that is helped shall fall down, and they all shall fail together.

— now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and indeed they are but frail, feeble, mortal, and mutable men, and therefore not to be trusted in, and depended on; or to be put upon an equality with God;

— and the Israelites that are helped shall fall down; helped by the Egyptians, who should also fall and be destroyed, though not now; yet hereafter by the Chaldeans as they were: and they all shall fail together; both the Egyptians and the Jews.

⁴ For thus hath the Lord spoken unto me: As the lion and the young lion roaring on his prey, when a multitude of shepherds is called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor abase himself for the noise of them; so shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion and for the hill thereof.

— like the lion and the young lion roaring on his prey; or “growling over his prey” for the lion roars when he is hungry and wants a prey and not when he has got one; but when he has one and feeding upon it, he makes a lower noise, a growling one;

— so shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion; that is, he shall come down from heaven with his angel and fight against the “Assyrian” army, in favour of the inhabitants of Zion or Jerusalem and deliver them; and there will be no more withstanding him or putting him off from his purpose, or preventing his good designs and resolutions than the shepherds are able to divert a lion from his prey.

⁵ As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending, also He will deliver it; and passing over, He will preserve it.

— as birds in the air at a distance, especially the eagle, have their eye upon their nests and their young ones in them and when in danger fly to their assistance and hover over them to keep off those that would hurt them, so the Lord, on high sees his people when in distress and hastens to surround, protect and defend them.

⁶ Turn ye unto Him from whom the children of Israel have deeply revolted.

— turn ye unto him from the Egyptians to whom they sought for help unto the Lord, whom they had neglected; from evil ways and practices, idolatry and impiety to the true worship of God, to his word and ordinances, statutes and commands;

— the Targum says, “return to the law; for you have multiplied sin,” which they had rejected and broken.

⁷ For in that day every man shall cast away his idols of silver and his idols of gold, which your own hands have made unto you for a sin.

— with contempt and abhorrence, everyman shall cast away his idols of silver and his idols of gold; everyman “his” own idol and even those that were of the greatest value, which were made of gold and silver;

— which their own hands have made; their idols were the work of their own hands and were made by them in order to commit sin with, the sin of idolatry; for the punishment which your hands have made; it was a sin to make such idols especially with a view to worship them.

⁸ “Then shall the Assyrian fall by the sword, but not of a mighty man; and the sword, not of a lowly man, shall devour him; but he shall flee from the sword, and his young men shall be discomfited.

— then shall the Assyrian fall with the sword, not of the Assyrian army under Sennacherib, which besieged Jerusalem in Hezekiah’s time; which as soon as the people were brought to a sense of their sin and cast away their idols as a proof of it, were utterly destroyed;

— not by the sword of Hezekiah, nor any of his valiant generals; and the sword, not of a mean man shall devour him; neither the sword of a general, nor of a private soldier, nor indeed of any man but of an angel; see II Kings 19:35;

— but he shall flee from the sword; from the drawn sword of the angel, who very probably appeared in such a form as in 1 Chronicles 21:16 which Sennacherib king of Assyria seeing, as well as the slaughter made in his army by him, fled from it; in the Hebrew text it is added, “for himself” he fled for his life, for his own personal security; see II Kings 19:36;

— and his young men shall be discomfited; his choice ones, the flower of his army, they “melt away” through fear; or die by the stroke of the angel upon them.

⁹ And he shall pass over to his stronghold for fear, and his princes shall be afraid of the ensign,” saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion and His furnace in Jerusalem.

— and the king of Assyria shall pass over to his stronghold in fear; this is of departing in haste from the siege of Jerusalem to some stronghold in his own country, particularly his strong city Nineveh, for fear of the angel and destruction following him; nor could he think himself safe until he had got there;

— others render it (and the original will bear it), “and his rock shall pass over for fear” his mighty men, his men of valour, in whom he trusted who were his strength upon which he depended; these as many as were left of them, fled away. So the Targum says, “his princes shall flee for fear.”

Isaiah 32

¹ Behold, a King shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgement.

— behold, a King shall reign in righteousness; not Hezekiah as modern Judaism thought; but rather the Son of God, the Messiah who is also “King” not only of Judah, but the whole world, and who “reigns” in and over his Kingdom and people, being set as King by his Father over his holy hill of Zion;

— and princes, the elects of God, shall rule in judgement: who are set over the Kingdom and who rule with righteous judgement when they rule according to the word of God; they who shall teach the truth and administer ordinances, statues and the law.

² And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

— and a man; evidently, the princes referred to in the previous verse; shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, a place where one may take refuge from a violent wind and tempest;

— a covert, a place of shelter and security; wind and tempest are emblematic of calamity and oppression; and the sense is that the princes would be the protector of other people and would save them from the calamities.

³And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.

— and the eyes of them that see; that there shall be, under the reign of this wise and pious prince, on the part of the prophets and teachers, a clear view of divine truth and on the part of the people who hear, a disposition to hearken and to attend to it.

⁴ The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.

— the heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge; who have been hasty and who have not given themselves time to consider what they have read or heard, and have hastily received every thing that has been suggested to them,

— especially by carnal sense and reason, shall now sit down, and coolly consider issues, and so gain an understanding of divine and deeper spiritual knowledge, of the knowledge of God, his Son, the Messiah, the Christ, of his person, offices, his righteousness and redemption;

— and the tongue of the stammerer shall be ready to speak plainly; or “shall make haste to speak neatly” elegantly and politely; such who hesitated in speech, and spoke in a blundering manner, or scarcely intelligibly, especially when they spoke of divine and spiritual things,

— yet now, without the least hesitation, in the freest and most ready manner, with all plainness and propriety shall talk of these things, to the great delight, satisfaction and use of those that hear them.

⁵ The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.

— the vile person; the base and worthless shall be no more called liberal; they shall no longer be reputed honourable, because of their high and honourable places, but wickedness shall be discovered wherever it is, and virtue manifested and rewarded;

— nor the churl said to be bountiful, the sordid and covetous man; but under this one vice all vices are understood, as under the opposite virtue of bountifulness all virtues are comprehended.

⁶ For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practice hypocrisy and to utter error against the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry; and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.

— for the vile person will speak villainy; men shall no longer be miscalled; for every one will discover what he is by his words and actions. And will work iniquity; he will, from time to time, be devising wickedness, that he may execute it when he hath opportunity;

— to practice hypocrisy; to do bad things, though with a pretence of religion and justice; to utter error; to pass unjust sentences, directly contrary to the command of God; to cause the drink, whereby they take away the bread and drink of the poor.

⁷ The instruments also of the churl are evil; he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.

— the instruments also of the churl are evil; the sense is that such covetous or wicked princes most willingly choose and employ wicked men in their affairs, because such men will, without any regard to conscience or justice: serve all their exorbitant desires;

— he devises wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaks right; he consults, contrives and forms schemes with all craft and cunning, on purpose, to corrupt the poor and meek, humble and afflicted souls, with false doctrines;

— even when these poor and needy ones, who want to have sound and comfortable doctrine delivered to them, speak and ask for that which is right and just, agreeably to the oracles of God; therefore such a man is unfit to be a ruler in the house of God.

Man’s wickedness is devising lies, see Who is this lying Ephraim?

⁸ But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.

— liberal, or rather “noble-minded” – he who is truly liberal and virtuous will show it by designing and practicing liberal or virtuous actions;

— liberal, who devises liberal things, and persists or continues in liberal things. But the liberal; the word ‘liberal’ means generous, noble, benevolent; a man of large views and of public spirit; a man above covetousness, and self-seeking.

⁹ Rise up, ye women that are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless daughters; give ear unto my speech.

— ye women that are at ease; they who are surrounded by the comforts which affluence gives, and that have no fear of being reduced to other than a princess.

— ye careless daughters – Hebrew, ‘Daughters confiding;’ that is, those who felt no alarm, and who did not regard God and his warnings and threats.

¹⁰ Many days and years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women; for the vintage shall fail, the gathering shall not come.

— for the vintage shall fail – a large part of the wealth and the luxury of the nation consisted in the vintage. When the vine failed, there would be, of course, great distress;

— the sense is that in consequence of the invasion of Israel’s enemies, this might occur either from the dread of the invasion or because Israel’s enemies would destroy everything in their march;

— many days and years shall ye be troubled; a year and somewhat more, or days upon a year, year upon year; and so indicates a long duration of their troubles; and so the troubles of the wicked, before their utter destruction that could last a great while; it might be 190 years for Israel and 40 years for Judah?

For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

¹¹ Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones. Strip you and make you bare, and gird sackcloth upon your loins;

— tremble, ye women that are at ease; the G7 that are rich and living in comfort; the call to repentance includes their stripping themselves of their costly finery, and putting on the “sackcloth” and put on the habiliments of mourning, indicative of a great calamity.

¹² they shall lament for the teats, for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine.

— they shall lament for the teats; either of the beasts of the field, that should be dried up; or else of the women, their breasts and teats, which should afford no milk for their infants, through the famine that should press them sore, which would occasion great lamentation, both in mothers and children.

¹³ Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers, yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city.

— upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; the curse of the earth, being uncultivated, and this through want of men, they being destroyed or carried captive by the enemy;

— this is to be understood of the land of Judea and of Samaria; which is mentioned to show the apostasy of both houses, for which ruin came upon their land; upon all the houses of joy; that is, Jerusalem, the joy of the whole earth; and the “houses of joy.”

¹⁴ Because the palaces shall be forsaken, the multitude of the city shall be left; the forts and towers shall be for dens for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks,

— the palaces of the princes and nobles shall be forsaken; they being obliged to flee from the enemy or being taken and either slain or carried captive; “the palaces” meaning the royal palaces; and so of the king’s palace;

— a pasture of flocks; where flocks of sheep feed, instead of being inhabited by men; for the desire or at the will of the Ishmaelites and their army and certain it is that Jerusalem now is in the hands of the Ishmaelites, Turks or Muslims; or by the modern Edomites in the land of Ephraim.

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

— the Targum says, “the place which was a house of joy and gladness for kings is now become a spoil for armies.”

¹⁵ until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest.

— until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high; that is, Jerusalem shall lie in ruins until the effusion of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, which, as it was before the destruction of the city by the Romans, so the desolation it was brought on until the fullness of the Gentiles are fulfilled;

— and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest; this will be the consequence, fruit and effect of the effusion of the Spirit in the latter day of even at the beginning of the Millennium.

¹⁶ Then judgement shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field.

— then judgement shall dwell in the wilderness; in the desert part of the world, inhabited by Gentiles where the Scriptures, the rule of judgement and where the judgement of the Lord had no place, now they shall have one and such as do justice and judgement shall dwell there.

¹⁷ And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever.

— and the work of righteousness; that which righteousness produces at the beginning of the Millennium; or the effect of the prevalence of righteousness on the nation; shall be peace; there shall be no internal agitation and no conflicts with foreign nations.

¹⁸ And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings and in quiet resting places

— and in quiet resting places where they may sleep and rest quietly and none to disturb them and make them afraid; and where they shall enjoy much spiritual prosperity and safety, great peace and quietness, comfort and rest;

¹⁹ when it shall hail, coming down on the forest; and the city shall be low in a low place.

— when, or rather, and it shall hail; as my blessings shall be poured down upon my people, who, from a wilderness, are turned into a fruitful field so my judgements shall fall upon them who were a fruitful field but are turned into a forest;

— and the city, Jerusalem, which, though now it was the seat of God’s worship and people, yet he foresaw would be the great enemy of the Messiah; shall be low in a low place; that is, shall be greatly humbled or brought very low.

²⁰ Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass.

— at the onset of the Millennium, a golden age of agriculture receives its final touch of waters: the whole land should be irrigated by calmly flowing streams and men should cast their seed broadcast and the oxen and the asses should draw the plough over a rich and fertile land. Amen.

Posted in Isaiah

Tan, CEO of INTEL, a Victim of Trump’s Racism

•August 14, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Donald Trump has publicly criticized Intel’s CEO following a report in which it was claimed that Lip-Bu Tan had invested at least $200 million in hundreds of Chinese advanced manufacturing and chip firms. Some of these companies were reportedly linked to the Chinese military.

“The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Tan was born in 1959 in Muar, Johor, in Malaysia to an ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia. His father was the chief editor of Malaysian Chinese-language daily newspaper Nanyang Siang Pau and his mother was a teacher. Tan was educated in neighbouring Singapore; he graduated from Nanyang University with a bachelor’s degree with a major in physics.

Tan then moved to the United States and completed a master’s degree in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tan began his doctoral studies in nuclear engineering at MIT.

However, after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and the subsequent sharp reduction in opportunities in the nuclear industry, Tan left MIT and moved to the University of San Francisco in California, where he graduated with a Master of Business Administration.

He is recognized as a visionary leader who has played a crucial role in shaping the modern tech landscape. Tan’s goal was to be like Thoreau: a “contrarian, rather than just following the trend.”

In February 2004, the Cadence Design Systems board of directors elected Tan to the board. Tan became interim co-CEO of Cadence in October 2008, following the resignation of Michael Fister in October 2008. The Cadence board formally named Tan president and CEO effective January 2009. From 2009 to 2021, he served as the CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a company he is credited with reinventing and leading to significant growth.

During his tenure, Cadence’s stock surged by 3,200%, and it became a key player in the chip design software industry, securing Apple as a major client. His leadership at Cadence earned him the 2022 Robert N Noyce Award, the semiconductor industry’s highest honour. Under Tan’s leadership, Cadence grew its net worth to $1.3 billion by 2012, including $440 million in that year alone (51%).

Cadence also expanded its Shanghai office in 2012. In 2013, Cadence purchased private chip design company Tensilica for $380 million. In November 2017, Tan dropped the title of president while remaining CEO of Cadence. He stepped down as CEO and became executive chairman in 2021. He stepped down from the office of chairman of Cadence in 2023.

In 2017, the analytics firm Relationship Science named him most connected executives in the technology industry garnering a perfect “power score” of 100.

“The CEO of Intel is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately”

On March 12, 2025, Tan was named CEO of Intel, effective March 18.

Most Chinese media and pundits have praised Tan for his new position. They said Chinese people feel proud that “Chinese faces” (Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Hock Tan, and Lip-Bu Tan) are now controlling four US chip giants (Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and Intel, respectively).

Huang (of Nvidia, first to cross the $4trillion mark; now largest in capitalization) and Su (Chair and CEO of AMD) were born in Taiwan, while Hock Tan (CEO of Broadcom, born in Penang) also hails from Malaysia.

Wikipedia, JagranJosh, Techbest, Biography, AsiaTimes

In August 2025 President Trump posted on Truth Social that Tan should resign immediately. “The CEO of Intel is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!”

~~~~~

US President Donald Trump has now made a U-turn on his opinion over Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, days after publicly demanding his resignation. Trump said he met Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He praised Tan’s achievements and said his cabinet members would work with him and bring him suggestions for the coming week.

Trump praises Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan days after demanding his resignation, calls his success ‘an amazing story’

The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high, and thou shalt come down very low.
He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him. He shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee and overtake thee till thou be destroyed, because thou hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded thee. Deuteronomy 28:43-45

Posted in Tech Race '25-26, US

Isaiah (Ch 29-30)

•August 13, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20;

“In latter days you will understand it fully,” that is, it means as a whole, we wouldn’t fully understand these prophecies until we’re living in the latter days; after God had executed his judgement in anger and performed the thoughts of his heart!

Our challenge is to de-encrypt them, especially as it relates to the latter days, our days.

Isaiah 29

¹ “Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! Add ye year to year; let them kill sacrifices.

— Woe to Ariel; the name Ariel interpreted as “the lion of God” or “the hearth of God,” and belongs to the same poetic synonym the Valley of Vision (Psalm 22:1);

— so called because Jerusalem was the place in the observance of the feasts: the Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles; burnt-offering, or of the public worship of God; the place where the Sanctuary is, the Shekinah and fire is, as on a hearth, continually burned on the altar.

² Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and sorrow; and it shall be unto Me as Ariel.

— yet God will distress Ariel; or “straiten” it by causing it to be besieged; and this he would do, notwithstanding their yearly sacrifices and their observance of their solemn feasts;

— and there shall be heaviness and sorrow; on account of the siege; by reason of the devastations of enemies from every side, invading all the cities and towns in Judea round about; and because of the famine and bloodshed in the city;

— and it shall be unto me as Ariel; the whole city shall be as the altar, a sacrifice; as that was covered with the blood and carcasses of slain beasts, so this with the blood and carcasses of men;

— and so the Targum says, “and I will distress the city where the altar is, and it shall be desolate and empty; and it shall be surrounded before me with the blood of the slain, as the altar is surrounded with the blood of the holy sacrifices on a solemn feast day;”

— this maybe where Judah shall bear his iniquity for forty days: I have appointed thee a day for a year. Ezekiel 4:4-6; Septuagint; after the start of the 10 tribes house of Israel and last for 150 years, the house of Judah shall join in for 40 years.

For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

³ And I will camp against thee round about, and will lay siege against thee with a mound, and I will raise forts against thee.

— and God will camp against thee, that is, by those enemies whom God will assist and enable to take and destroy thee; this may refer to different sieges of Jerusalem, that of Sennacherib, that of the Chaldeans to that of the Romans, or perhaps even another at the endtime?

⁴ And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust; and thy voice shall be as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.”

— thou shalt be brought down; thy speech shall be low; thou, who now speaks loftily, shalt be humbled, and in a submissive manner, and with a low voice, shalt beg the favour of thine enemies as one that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground.

⁵ Moreover the multitude of thy strangers shall be like small dust, and the multitude of the terrible ones shall be as chaff that passeth away; yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly.

— moreover the multitude of thy enemies shall be like small dust, or fine dust that is easily dissipated by the wind; and the multitude of an invading, besieging army, the terrible ones shall be as chaff that are blown away:

— yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly; like the angel of the Lord slew 185,000 of Sennacherib’s forces in a single night.

And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. II Kings 19:35

⁶ Thou shalt be visited by the Lord of hosts with thunder and with earthquake and great noise, with storm and tempest and the flame of devouring fire.

— but thou, that is, Ariel, or Jerusalem, shalt be visited by the Lord of hosts with thunder and with earthquake and great noise, with storm and tempest and the flame of devouring fire; revisiting of the days as was before Mount Sinai;

⁷ And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel, even all that fight against her and her fortifications, and that distress her, shall be as a dream of a night vision.

— and the multitude of all the nations that fight against Jerusalem, perhaps a new revived “Roman army” which consisted of men of all nations, that fought against Jerusalem; the city in which was the altar;

— as the Targum paraphrases it:

“And the multitude of all the nations, that are gathered together against the city, and the altar which is in her, and all their camps and their armies, that are oppressing her, shall be like a phantom of the night.”

⁸ It shall even be as when a hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty. Or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and behold, he is faint and his soul hath appetite. So shall the multitude of all the nations be that fight against Mount Zion.

— his soul of Israel’s enemy is empty; his appetite or desire is unsatisfied. Or his stomach or body is empty; so shall all the multitude from all nations that fight against Mount Zion; either shall quickly perish;

— or having raised their expectations and pleased themselves with the booty they should obtain, of which they thought themselves sure, shall find themselves mistaken and all like an illusive dream.

⁹ Stay yourselves, and wonder! Cry ye out, and cry! They are drunken, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink.

— true shepherd of Israel should cry ye out and cry: his people are drunk but not with wine; they stagger but not with strong drink; consider yourselves the case and circumstances of these people and wonder at their stupidity.

¹⁰ For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes; the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath He covered.

— the Lord hath poured out upon the people of Israel the spirit of deep sleep; of spiritual blindness, a reprobate mind, a mind void of sound judgement and sense by their shepherds and the seers;

— a hardness of heart and insensibility to dangers, by their rulers, magistrates and ministers and other chief of the people what we call a judicial blindness that they which might be made blind against the light.

¹¹ And the vision of all has become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, “Read this, I pray thee”; and he saith, “I cannot, for it is sealed.”

— and the vision of all, even the learned, the scholarly; all the prophetic books, plus the book of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah; and Revelations, every vision by these writers; is unto them as the words of a book that is sealed;

— which no man can read while it is sealed up, being in the form of rolls, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, read this, but he replied, I cannot; for it is sealed. Ordinary learning, without supernatural light, will not be to understand the word of God and things divine;

— for example, without knowing who modern Ephraim is, most of the prophecies in the OT remains sealed! But you can have a more indepth studies here:

(1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

¹² And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, “Read this, I pray thee”; and he saith, “I am not learned.”

— the Scriptures is a sealed book to every man, learned or unlearned; it is encrypted with signs and symbols; unless he begins to study it with a simple heart and a teachable spirit, and only upon God’s spirits, that he may thence learn the truth and the will of God; otherwise he would be blinded.

¹³ Therefore the Lord said: “Inasmuch as this people draw near Me with their mouth and with their lips do honor Me, but have removed their heart far from Me, and their fear toward Me is taught by the precept of men,

— but there are many whose religion is lip-service only, they pretend to be speaking to God, they are pranks, they mix some truths with a thousand foolish things; honouring Astarte from the Egyptians and Mithra from the Persian as they worship the God of Israel according to their own devices;

¹⁴ therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder; for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.”

— therefore, God will proceed to do a marvellous work among these people, perhaps referring to the captivity of Israel for 190 years and Judah 40; even an wonderful work and a wonder:

— for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hidden, because of their disobedience, idolatry and wickedness, their regard to men’s doctrines and commandments, and not to the will and Word of God, therefore he determines “to deal marvellously and a wonder with this people.”

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

For another on the South, The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹⁵ Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord and their works are in the dark, and they say, “Who seeth us?” and, “Who knoweth us?”

— woe unto them, or “O ye” that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord; which though they consulted in private, and formed deep schemes, imagining they were not observed by the Lord, yet he that sits in the heaven saw them and laughed at their vain imaginations, Psalm 2:1;

— and their works are in the dark; in the dark night as if the darkness could conceal them from the all seeing eye of God; such works are truly works of darkness but cannot be hidden, though they flatter themselves;

— and they muse, Who see us? and who know us? as no man, they imagine, but not God himself could; into such atheism do wicked men sink when desirous of bringing their schemes into execution;

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¹⁶ Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay; for shall the work say of him that made it, “He made me not?” Or shall the thing formed say of him that formed it, “He had no understanding?”

— your turning of things upside down is a reinstatement of Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter;

— thus reversing all principles of Godly morality; that is, that excuse the one and reproach the other; that put darkness for light and light for darkness, particularly in palliating the wickedness of sin, in representing avarice, luxury, the lust of the flesh as harmless;

— and pervert the order which God hath appointed; witness what LGBTQIA lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, and asexual (or allies) has progressed!

— “He made me not”? shall the potter be counted as the clay? The words bring out the character of the perversity, the upside-downness of which the prophet denounces; the men whom he condemns were inverting the relations of the Creator and the creature,

— the potter and the clay, acting practically as arrogant atheists, denying that there was a Divine order of which they formed a part.

¹⁷ Is it not yet a very little while and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field, and the fruitful field shall be esteemed as a forest?

— is it not yet a very little while; the projection in time is here foretold, when there would be a strange change and alteration made in the world, and by which it would appear, that the Lord not only knows, but foretells all things;

— when Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field; that is, that the Gentile world, perhaps the times of the Gentiles, and full of fruited trees, should through the preaching of the Gospel be manured, become God’s husbandry and be like a fruitful field, abounding with fruits and be part of the Kingdom of God.

¹⁸ And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness.

— and soon during the Millennium, the deaf shall hear the words of the law; they would also have the Scriptures, its prophecies and concerning the fulfilment of the Messiah; and those who do not understand it, the people who seem to be deaf to all that God says, shall hear and understand it;

— shall see out of obscurity; that is, their eyes closed and ignorant, the darkness being removed, they shall clearly see the truth of God, and discern and love its beauty. Their eyes are now blinded, but then they shall see clearly.

¹⁹ The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.

— during the Millennium, the meek, rather, the afflicted, the idea is, virtuous suffering; poor among men, that is, the pious poor; rejoice when they see the Holy One of Israel.

²⁰ For the terrible one is brought to nought, and the scorner is consumed, and all that watch for iniquity are cut off

— for the terrible one, led by Satan, the violent one, the oppressor, who had exercised cruelty over them, refers to those who held offices of power, and who abused them to oppress the poor and needy;

— and the scorner is consumed; shall be entirely destroyed; and all that watch for iniquity, that is, those who seek anxiously for opportunities to commit iniquity.

²¹ who make a man an offender for a word, and lay a snare for him that reproveth in the gate, and turn aside the just for a thing of nought.

— that make a man an offender, literally, ‘who cause a man to sin’ who hold a man to be guilty, or a criminal;

— the Targum says, they “turn aside the just by false judgment” they that turn away their judgement, decline doing them justice, and condemn them.

²² Therefore thus saith the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob: “Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale.

— the One who redeemed Abraham; that is, who brought him out of a land of idolaters, and rescued him from the abominations of idolatry. The word ‘redeem,’ here properly indicates to ransom, that is, to redeem a captive, or a prisoner with a price paid;

— so Jacob shall not be ashamed, that is, the posterity of Jacob, who had great cause to be ashamed for their infidelity, for their persecutions of God’s prophets and righteous servants,

— and for their rejection of their own Messiah, who also has redeemed them, shall, at last, be brought back unto the God of their fathers and be their Messiah.

²³ But when he seeth his children, the work of Mine hands, in the midst of him, they shall sanctify My name, and sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and shall fear the God of Israel.

— when he sees his children; when the believing seed of Jacob see those children, whom they have begotten to God by the preaching of the gospel, even the Gentiles, converted by their ministry;

— the work of mine hands; the children, not of the flesh, but of the promise, whom I, by my almighty power and grace, have created or regenerated, of stones raising up the children to Abraham. In the midst of him; which Gentiles shall be incorporated with the Jews into one and the same body and Kingdom;

— they shall sanctify my name; the name Yehovah; they shall not despise and hate the Gentiles, but shall praise and glorify God with them and for them, as all the believing Israelites and Gentiles would.

²⁴ They also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmured shall learn doctrine.”

— shall learn doctrine; the doctrines and teachings of the prophets and the Messiah, the truth; they “shall receive discipline” or “instruction,” that is, come to understanding and learn true doctrines of the law and true justice.

Isaiah 30

¹ “Woe to the rebellious children,” saith the Lord, “that take counsel, but not of Me, and that cover with a covering, but not of My Spirit, that they may add sin to sin;

— woe to the rebellious children, of the house of Jacob, saith the Lord, who were the “children” of God, but had turned their backs upon him, and departed from his worship and ordinances; and therefore a woe is pronounced against them;

— that take counsel, but not of me; they met and consulted together about their safety, when in danger, but did not ask counsel of the Lord; they did not consult his word, nor his prophets, nor by Urim and Thummim, as in case of whether to go to war;

— that they may add sin on top of other sins, the sins of rebellion and apostasy: so wicked men, who are enemies in their minds, by wicked works, to God, and commit acts of hostility against him;

² that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at My mouth, to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh and to trust in the shadow of Egypt!

— they strengthen themselves with the might of Pharaoh, by forming an alliance with earthly kings, that thus they hoped to repel the threatened invasion, putting their thrust in the emptiness of shadows.

³ Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.

— therefore they shall be disappointed of the help and assistance they expected from earthly alliances and be ashamed of their ally and the trust in the shadow of Egypt and their confusion; and be confounded.

⁴ For his princes were at Zoan, and his ambassadors came to Hanes.

— for Pharaoh’s princes were at Zoan, known as “the royal city of the Pharaohs” which is the same as Tanis, the metropolis of one of the provinces of Egypt; but both the Targum and Septuagint versions render it, “Tanes;”

— the Jews say there is not a more excellent place in all Egypt than Zoan, because kings were brought up in it, as it is said here, “his princes were at Zoan,”

— and more on Zoan: today, Gypsies are known as Roma, but in Hebrew, their name is derived from the Egyptian city of Zoan, or Tanes, Tanis, at one time the royal and capital of the country; and this is from Wikipedia (Romani people);

The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Middle English gypcian, short for Egipcien.

Hebrew: צוענים‎, romanized: Tzoanim. Derives either from the biblical Egyptian city of Zoan, or from the linguistic root צ־ע־נ‎, meaning “wander.”

— the other called “Hanes” and here the Targum calls it Taphnes; which is the same with Tahapanes in Jeremiah 2:16 and Tahpanhes, Jeremiah 43:7; where Pharaoh had a house or palace; see Jeremiah 43:9;

— and this is the reason of the ambassadors (the Jeremiah’s entourage and the king’s daughters, after escaping from Ishmael, the son of Nethaniah, who smote Gedaliah the governor and who might also kill them) from the “children of God” had gone there;

— but God pursued them there in Egypt:

Ezekiel 29:12 “and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations and will disperse them through the countries.”

⁵ They were all ashamed of a people that could not profit them, nor be a help nor profit, but a shame and also a reproach.”

— they (Judah’s princes that appeared in Zoan; and his ambassadors in Hanes) were all ashamed of a people (Pharaoh and his princes) that could not help them; the princes, the ambassadors that were sent unto them, and the king or people, or both, that sent them, who hoped for and expected great things from them, but being disappointed, were filled with shame;

— nor be an help, nor profit, but a shame, and also a reproach: so far from being of any advantage to them, by helping and assisting them against their enemy, wanting either inclination or capacity, or both, that it not only turned to their shame, but even was matter of reproach to them, that ever they made any application to them, or placed any confidence in them for help.

⁶ The burden of the beasts of the South: Into the land of trouble and anguish, from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and their treasures upon the humps of camels, to a people that shall not profit them.

— the burden of the beasts of the south, the word ‘South’ here refers to the South of Judea; and particularly to Egypt; but could also be Edom; and today as Spain and Mexico/Latin Americas (South of the children of Joseph!)

— from whence come the young and old lion, the viper, and fiery flying serpent; creatures with which Egypt abounded as historians relate and where some of them at least were worshipped and where men also dwelt comparable to these creatures as for craft and cruelty.

⁷ For the Egyptians shall help in vain and to no purpose; therefore have I cried to her concerning this, “Their strength is to sit still.”

— for the Egyptians shall help in vain; that is, if they enter into the alliance, they shall not be able to defend them from the invader, though they may make a show of force and attempted to help them or seemed to do so, yet failed to do it;

— their strength is to sit still; either concerning this embassy, that it would be better for the ambassadors to have spared all their toil and labour and strength and have remained quiet and easy in their own country than going down to Egypt.

⁸ Now go, write it before them on a tablet and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever,

— now go, write it before them; write this prophecy and warning, which Isaiah have now delivered, in their presence; in a table and in a book;

— so it was to be written twice over, once in a table, to be hung up in some public place, for the people then at that time might read it; and again in a book, that it might be kept for the use of posterity; that is to us at a latter day, because prophecies are often dual in purposes;

— that it may be for the time to come, as a witness for me and against them, that God have given them fair warning, and they have wilfully run upon their own ruin;

— so the Targum confirms, “that it may be for a witness before me in the day of judgment forever.”

⁹ that this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord,

— that they are lying children, who tell lies as easily as one breaths; and they lied without feeling any guilt of lying, not only to God but to everyone; they that will not hear the law of the Lord, either contained in the Scriptures, or delivered by the mouth of the prophets, whereby these warnings are expressly concerning them;

¹⁰ who say to the seers, “See not,” and to the prophets, “Prophesy not unto us right things; speak unto us smooth things; prophesy deceits.

— speak unto us smooth things; that is, those things which are in accordance with our good feelings, prejudices and desires; which assure us of prosperity and success and which will not disturb us with the apprehension of punishment;

— prophesy deceits, not that they would openly and avowedly demand to be deceived, but they demanded that which the prophet says would be deceits. No man “professedly” desires to be deceived; yet many a man is willing to put himself under that kind of teaching which is deceit and which he might know to be falsehood if he would examine it.

¹¹ Get you out of the way, turn aside out of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us.”

— get ye out of the way: turn aside out of the path; these two expressions mean one and the same thing; either that the prophets would go out of their usual way of threatening ruin and destruction;

— or that they would go out of the way of the people, and not stand in it to hinder them pursuing their own lusts and pleasures; or that they would go out of the right way, in their ways: cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before them; do not so often make mention of his name,

— or don’t come to us with a “thus saith the Lord;” let us hear no more of him; as the Targum says, “distance from us the Word of the Holy One of Israel.”

¹² Therefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel: “Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stand thereon,

¹³ therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.

— therefore this iniquity shall be “as a falling breach” or contempt of the word of God, rejecting the counsel of God; signified by the breach of a falling wall or by a breach in a wall, by reason of which it is in danger of falling and is just ready to fall.

¹⁴ And he shall break it as the breaking of the potter’s vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare, so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a shard to take fire from the hearth, or to take water out of the pit.”

— that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare; or that is broken in pieces without mercy, as the Targum says; “who is breaking it without compassion;” that is, no pity shall be shown by the enemy nor mercy from the Lord.

¹⁵ For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: “In returning and rest shall ye be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; but ye would not.

— in returning and rest shall ye be saved; or “may be saved” namely, by “returning” from their evil ways and to his worship and ordinances; and so the Targum says, “if ye return to my law, ye shall have rest, and ye shall be redeemed.”

¹⁶ But ye said, ‘No, for we will flee upon horses’; therefore shall ye flee! And, ‘We will ride upon the swift’; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift!

— but ye said, No, for we will flee upon horses to get help and assistance; and then face the enemy;

— therefore shall they that pursue you be swift; yea, swifter than the horses and camels they rode on and overtake them and either put them to death or carry them captive.

¹⁷ One thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one; at the rebuke of five shall ye flee, till ye be left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain and as an ensign on a hill.”

— at the rebuke of one, the number one here is to indicate a very small number; a number in the ordinary course of warfare entirely disproportionate to those who would be vanquished, which is a reference here to Deuteronomy 32:30;

— and as an ensign on a hill; the idea is that those who should escape would be few in number, a remnant and would stand as a beacon in view of all the nations, to testify to them of the justice of God and the realization of his threats, like an ensign floating on a hill that can be seen from afar.

¹⁸ And therefore will the Lord wait, that He may be gracious unto you, and therefore will He be exalted, that He may have mercy upon you. For the Lord is a God of judgement; blessed are all they that wait for Him.

— his waiting is very patient; the divine husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it. How wonderful that in a very real sense he attends on our pleasure, as it were, and lets us determine his time to work.

¹⁹ For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem; thou shalt weep no more. He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry; when He shall hear it, He will answer thee.

— for they shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem, or those that belonged to the fort of Zion should dwell in Jerusalem, or “abide” there, both they and as their inhabitants, at least many of them should quietly continue there, waiting the Lord’s time to appear for them;

— although the time is coming when the people shall be banished from Jerusalem and carried into captivity; yet after a set time they shall return and have a comfortable residence in Jerusalem, the seat of their religion, and metropolis of their Kingdom.

²⁰ And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teacher.

— and though the Lord give you the bread that is eaten in a time of calamity; that is, he would bring upon them sore distress and sorrows; the water of affliction, ‘oppression.’ That is, water drank in times of affliction and oppression, or in the long and weary days of captivity;

— Rashi: your Teacher: The Holy One, blessed be He, who teaches you for your profit.

²¹ And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it,” when ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn to the left.

— it seems best to understand the Scriptures of truth as the word of God, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it; it directs to the Messiah the way, and who is the only way of life and which is the right way; so the Targum paraphrases it, “this is the right way, walk ye in it, and turn ye not from it to the right, or to the left.”

²² Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of silver and the ornament of thy molten images of gold. Thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth; thou shalt say unto it, “Get thee hence.”

— ye shall show your contempt of it; defile the covering of thy graven images; the leaves or plates, wherewith their wooden images were frequently covered: and the ornament of thy molten images; or, the images and altars of idolatry when they became objects of abomination, and when they were induced to abandon them;

— thou shall cast them away as a menstruous cloth, that is, sanitary pads; which is not only filthy and loathsome, but defiling; whoever touched it were unclean by the law for a while; this is used to express the pollution and nauseousness of idols, and of their utter rejection.

²³ Then shall He give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground therewith, and bread of the increase of the earth, and it shall be fat and plenteous. In that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures.

— then during the Millennium shall he give the rain of thy seed; that is, he shall send rain on the seed which is sown; and you will be allowed to cultivate the soil without molestation, and God will give you fruitful seasons and abundant harvests;

— the Targum interprets it thus, “and the just shall be nourished from their cattle, with the marrow of the tender and fat ones” as the earth would be fruitful, the cattle would be well fed; and so there would be plenty of provision for man and beast.

²⁴ The oxen likewise and the young asses that till the ground shall eat clean provender, which hath been winnowed with the shovel and with the fan.

— the Septuagint renders it, “they shall eat chaff mixed with winnowed barley” but if they were to eat chaff with it, there would be no need to winnow it.

²⁵ And there shall be upon every high mountain and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall.

— but before the Millennium, in the day of the great slaughter; when the enemies of the people of God shall have been destroyed; probably in a time subsequent to the slaughter of the army of the Assyrians as a historical type, and so, perhaps, awaiting a prophetic one.

²⁶ Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people and healeth the stroke of their wound.

— moreover, during the Millennium, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun; an supernatural phenomenon, used to set forth the exceeding great light, comparable to the moon, immeasurable as the light of the sun exceeds the light of the moon;

— and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold; as if the light of seven days was collected together; or as if there were seven suns shining together;

— the Targum not only makes it to be seven times seven, that is, forty nine; but multiply forty nine by seven, and make it three hundred and forty three (7 X 49 = 343) or as the light of so many days.

²⁷ Behold, the name of the Lord cometh from far, burning with His anger, and the burden thereof is heavy; His lips are full of indignation and His tongue as a devouring fire.

— behold, the name of the Lord cometh from far, it is introduced with a “behold” as declaring something of importance worthy of attention, and even wonderful;

— burning with anger; against his army, the kings of the earth; his “eyes” shall be “as a flame of fire” and when he comes to judge the world, he will descend in “flaming fire,” Revelation 19:12 the day of the Lord will burn as an oven, Malachi 4:1.

²⁸ And His breath, as an overflowing stream, shall reach to the midst of the neck to sift the nations with the sieve of vanity; and there shall be a bridle in the jaws of the people, causing them to err.

— the breath of his nostrils or the blast of the breath of his nostrils; in both instances it is a sign and effect of God’s anger and the cause of the destruction of those against whom it is directed;

— to sift the nations with the sieve of vanity; that is, the breath, wind or spirit of the Lord, compared to an overflowing stream should have this effect to sift the people of several nations so as to dash them one against another and utterly destroy them;

— for they were to be sifted, not with a good and profitable sieve, which retains the corn and shakes out the chaff or so as to have some taken out and spared; but with a sieve that lets all through and so be brought to nothing.

²⁹ Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept, and gladness of heart as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountain of the Lord, to the Mighty One of Israel.

— ye shall have a song; that is, ye inhabitants of Jerusalem shall rejoice when the army of the Assyrian, or another prophetic one, is destroyed;

— as in the night when a solemnity is kept; the word ‘solemnity’ here (חג châg) indicates a festival, or feast; and refers by way of eminence to the Passover where the “death angels” passed, which is usually designated as “the feast” that is, the principal festival of God’s people.

³⁰ And the Lord shall cause His glorious voice to be heard, and shall show the lighting down of His arm, with the indignation of His anger and with the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering and tempest and hailstones.

— his glorious voice; his thunder, which is Called God’s voice, and said to be full of majesty, Psalm 29:4. But then thunder is metaphorically taken for God’s judgement;

— and tempest and hailstones; it is rare that a storm of hail would be severe enough to destroy an army. But in this case, storms of hail are not unfrequently of sufficient violence to do it if the army were encamped in the open field something could fall from the heavens with a heavy splash; they were large balls of ice falling.

³¹ For through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be beaten down, who smote with a rod.

— which smote with a rod; who was accustomed to smite as with a rod; as an instrument in God’s hand; that is, his government was tyrannical and severe; as he had been accustomed to smite in that manner, so he would now meet the proper reward of his oppression of the nations.

³² And in every place where the grounded staff shall pass, which the Lord shall lay upon him, it shall be with taborets and harps; and in battles of weapon shaking will He fight with it.

— it shall be with tabrets and harps; that is, at every stroke of God’s judgements upon God’s enemies, Israel should raise its song of triumph with the timbrels and harps.

³³ For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared. He hath made it deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much wood. The breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.

— Tophet, literally, “a place of abomination” the valley of the sons of Hinnom, southeast of Jerusalem, where Israel offered human sacrifices to Moloch by fire; hence a place of burning;

— the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it; the pile of fire and wood; the Targum says, “the Word of the Lord, like an overflowing torrent of brimstone, shall kindle it.”

Posted in Isaiah

Study Finds Smartphones Ruining Our Brains

•August 12, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Alarming New Study Finds Smartphones Ruining Our Brains at Unprecedented Speed

Mediaite • August 9, 2025

Any parent with a kid addicted to TikTok or Instagram is familiar with the concern that it’s ruining their brain. I’m of a certain age where I heard that refrain regularly from my Dad as I settled in each summer afternoon to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and The Partridge Family. It was the Golden Age of reruns.

But what was once hyperbole has turned into science, and the results are beyond alarming. The universal addiction to smartphones is actively ruining our brains — especially Generation Z — and at a pace that should absolutely freak everyone out.

The Financial Times recently published a devastating analysis of American personality changes using data from the Understanding America Study, and the findings should stop you cold.

In less than a decade, conscientiousness — the trait most closely linked to responsibility, follow-through, and self-control — has collapsed among young adults. For those aged 16 to 39, it’s not a gradual erosion; it’s a plunge from respectability into the low 30th percentile. Older adults (who aren’t addicted to smartphones), meanwhile, remain essentially unchanged.

A graphic from the post recently went viral:

The FT write up generously sums up the findings, writing:

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting.”

Other charts in the article reveal that attention deficits are not just at issue: a deeper commitment to a digital world over the real world is also evolving at an alarming rate, as is a sharp decline in trust and extroversion. If you need evidence of this just go to any public park and witness the vast majority of people staring into their phones.

Let me tell you why this isn’t just concerning — it’s civilizational.

We are living through a revolution bigger than the printing press. That’s not hyperbole. When Gutenberg’s press arrived in the 15th century, it rewired the world by making knowledge scalable. It took centuries for that transformation to ripple through every corner of human society. The smartphone has done something similar — only it’s moving at light speed, and in the opposite direction.

In less than 15 years, we’ve tethered billions of brains to an always-on, infinitely stimulating “meta-world” — a hybrid of the broader digital ecosystem, the AI-powered feed that tells you what is conventionally known, and social media platforms that distort reality by promoting the loudest, most self-promotional sliver of humanity. This is not a tool for quiet reflection; it’s a behavioral slot machine that lives in your hand.

And the cost is attention. Not just “I get distracted sometimes” attention, but the deep, sustained focus that conscientiousness requires. The skill of delaying gratification, resisting impulse, and staying the course is being replaced by an addiction to novelty, validation, and stimulation. The more we indulge, the less we can resist indulging — and the chart’s freefalling red line for young adults shows exactly where that road leads.

The speed of this shift should terrify us. The printing press transformed literacy, religion, and politics, but it did so over centuries, allowing institutions and cultures to adapt. The smartphone has reshaped cognition, social norms, and mental health in barely a decade — without any meaningful adaptation at all. We didn’t get a century to build guardrails; we got a push notification. Future historian will likely look at this as the era in which humans zombified themselves — presuming of course there are future historians not addicted to their phones.

Is it too late? Maybe. The genie is so far out of the bottle it’s running its own TikTok channel and also attention deficit addled.

Regulation? Don’t hold your breath. Silicon Valley’s incentives are too deeply tied to engagement metrics — and engagement, as currently defined, thrives on keeping you distracted, anxious, and coming back for more.

Anyone who claims there’s a quick fix is selling snake oil. App timers, grayscale screens, “digital detoxes” — these are bandaids on a bullet wound. The deeper reality is that smartphones, as the portal to the digital metasphere, have rewired how an entire generation thinks, feels, and relates to the world. There’s no undo button.

But there is one place to start: recognition.

We must acknowledge that we’ve engineered an attention economy whose most precious raw material is human focus, and we are burning through it like cheap fuel. Until we admit that, there’s no hope of slowing the decline — much less reversing it.

We will consider 2010s the way we look at the dawn of the industrial era: a technological leap that unleashed prosperity, yes, but also pollution, exploitation, and collapse of old ways of life. Only this time, the pollution is in our minds. And while conservation movements helped detoxify our rivers, lakes and oceans, I suspect we will soon need to consider a similar prescription for our collective mind rot.

Maybe it already exists? Let me check TikTok or ChatGPT for what it has to say.

Posted in Cultures

Isaiah (Ch 27-28)

•August 11, 2025 • Leave a Comment

‘NATO is the real troublemaker.’ NATO’s provocative lurch eastward and the ‘supreme fool’ Jens Stoltenberg

When judgement was due, Nebuchadnezzar lost his mind, total; and he was made to dwell among the beasts in the wild; however he regained his sanity after eating grass for seven years.

Now, as another judgement is due, the ‘liberal’ West has already lost their sanity: Stoltenberg admits NATO Began Preparing Ukraine for War with Nuclear Russia Since 2014; although still humans, they are spilling sh!t everywhere and behaving like supreme fools!

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20.

Isaiah 27

¹ In that day the Lord with His sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

— the “dragon” is as in Psalm 74:13-14; Ezekiel 29:3; Ezekiel 32:2, could be the standing emblem of Egypt: the other, so specifically mentioned, the “leviathan” in Job 41:1, there is always a possibility of an endtime revelation, that is, it could be real!

— the verse paints in vivid symbolic language of a judgment on a great world-powers; so could this nation be modern Egypt?

² In that day sing ye unto her, “A vineyard of red wine!

— in that day sing ye to her: a vineyard of red wine; meaning, of the best wine, which this vineyard, that is, the Kingdom would bring forth as pleasing to the Lord.

³ I, the Lord, do keep it; I will water it every moment. Lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.

— I the Lord do keep it; it is understood here or implied as ‘Yehovah said’ (compare Psalm 121:3-5); I will water it every moment; that is, constantly, as a vinedresser does his vineyard.

⁴ Fury is not in Me. Who would set the briers and thorns against Me in battle? I would go through them; I would burn them together.

— fury is not in me; or, wrath have I none; that is, wrath isn’t a natural character of God, but because of briers and thorns (sins and wickedness), symbols of God’s enemies, against me, I am provoked into anger and fury and burn them together.

⁵ Or let him take hold of My strength, that he may make peace with Me; and he shall make peace with Me.”

— let God’s strength or spirits be used, then as the Targum continues, “lay hold on the words of my law,” that they may eventually find and make peace with God.

⁶He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root; Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit. — Or, In the days that come Jacob shall strike root;

— Israel shall blossom with bud and fill the face of the world with fruit; in all parts of the world; or of the great number of converts made everywhere; so the Targum says, by “fruit” to mean children’s children;

— the sense is, that when the Kingdom of God is established and settled, grounded in the right doctrines of truth, it shall be flourishing and be fruitful, abounding in good works and with increased numbers of converts;

— it shall be like the mustard tree, when it becomes so great a tree as that the birds of the air make their nests in it; and as the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, when it becomes a great mountain and fills the whole earth.

⁷ Hath He smitten him, as He smote those that smote him? Or is he slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him?

— that is, “Hath He (Yehovah) smitten him (Israel) as he smote those that smote him; or is he slain according to the slaughter of those that are slain by him?”

⁸ In measure, when it shooteth forth, Thou wilt debate with it; He stayeth His rough wind in the day of the east wind.

— Rashi: when they sent them out, it strove with it: When Egypt sent Israel out, it strove with it, the seah of the measure with its seah; He spoke with His harsh wind: (הָגָה) He spoke with His harsh speech; on the day of the east wind: On the day (concerning which Scripture states) (Exodus 14:21): “And the Lord led the sea with a strong east wind.”

⁹ By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his sin: When he maketh all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten asunder, the Asherah poles and sun images shall not stand up.

— by this therefore; by this manner of God’s dealing with his people shall the iniquity of both houses of Israel be purged;

— the groves and the images shall not stand up; erect to be worshipped; but shall be thrown down, demolished and broke to pieces; and by thus abandoning their idols and idolatrous practices;

— sun images shall not stand up; the world are honouring the host of heaven with more than 98.5 percent of Christians honouring the Sun by observing Sunday worship. They have “their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east;

— and they worshipped the SUN toward the east; whose Godly penalty is to be “cut off” to death (Deuteronomy 17:3-5) – ’till they die’ or ”shall not stand up.”

¹⁰ Yet the fortified city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken and left like a wilderness; there shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down and consume the branches thereof.

— yet the fortified city; singular, most probably this means Jerusalem, shall be desolate.

¹¹ When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off; the women come and set them on fire, for it is a people of no understanding. Therefore He that made them will not have mercy on them, and He that formed them will show them no favor.

— for it is a people of no understanding; as Deuteronomy 32:28, referring to Israel as an apostate with no understanding:

The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel doth not know, My people has no understanding. Isaiah 1:3;

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but My people know not the judgment of the Lord. Jeremiah 8:7;

— will not have mercy; will show them no favor; that is, will not spare. God will have “measure” and “mercy” in his punishment of Israel but will not have so much mercy as not to punish severely.

¹²And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel.

— from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt; from Euphrates to the Nile, which were the two borders of the Land of Promise, Joshua 1:4. All the Israelites which are left in the land; which are here opposed to those of them that are dispersed into foreign parts, such as Assyria and Egypt.

¹³ And it shall come to pass in that day that the great trumpet shall be blown; and they shall come who were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.

— in the land of Assyria, where the ten tribes were carried to II Kings 17:6; and it is probable that some of the other two tribes were also with them. A portion of the ten tribes would also be re-gathered, and would return with the others to the land of their fathers upon the blowing of the trumpet.

In 1897, the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, urges “a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine” for Jews and establishes the World Zionist Organization (WZO).

In November 2, 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration which documented three main ideas:

First, it declared official support from the British Government for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” and promised that the British Government would actively aid in these efforts.
Second, it documented that the British Government would not support actions that would prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish residents of Palestine.
Finally, it confirmed that Jews living in any other country would, similarly, not be prejudiced.

Q. How would the Ten-Tribes be made to return? Could this organization B’ney Yosef North America spearheads the charge? Its mission says:

“B’ney Yosef North America exists to study, to pray, to elucidate, to encourage, to find family, and to await and facilitate the reconstitution of Ephraim, then ultimately the reunion of Ephraim with Judah.”

Isaiah 28

The twenty-eighth chapter concerning the destruction of intoxicated Ephraim, through thirty-third chapter form almost one continuous prophecy concerning the impiety and folly of Judah, and their dangers to make allies with Egypt or Assyria.

Who are the posterity of biblical Jacob? And on the identities of Ephraim and Manasseh, see (1) The Birthrights (2) Ephraim and Manasseh (3) Ephraim as the Thirteenth Tribe (4) Who is this lying Ephraim? (5) The Ox with horns of a Unicorn

¹ Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which is on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!

— that is, the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim, the proud state and kingdom of the ten tribes. This pride is about Ephraim, the United States:

“But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us,” Madeleine Albright

— and the many and excellent vines among them, showing that the prophet’s work was not limited to Judah and Jerusalem, but extended to the northern kingdom, Israel;

— parallel Scriptures in Ezekiel 36: woe to “the drunkards of Israel”

— this prophecy in Ezekiel 36 is concerning the desolations of the United States, UK and France; “and to the hills, to the rivers and to the valleys” these are the hills: Ireland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Finland and Iceland; and the valleys, the low countries: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg;

— shoot forth your branches; that is, the trees that grew upon them should; the vines, and the olive trees, planted on hills and mountains; these are their colonies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa; American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands (US); Anguilla, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Virgin Islands (UK); Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Réunion (France).

— is a fading flower; beauty “whose glorious beauty or ornament is a fading flower” – the image of “drunkards” it was the custom at feasts to wreathe with flowers; so this indispensable Ephraim stood upon the head of the fertile valley,”

— that is, situated on a hill surrounded with the rich valleys as the best of a garland; but that garland is “fading,” and this intoxicated Ephraim is now close to ruin, not to be depended upon, soon to be destroyed and discarded away quickly.

² Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand.

— behold, the Lord hath a mighty and a powerful king with a mighty army; which as a tempest of hail; that beats down herbs and plants, and branches of trees, men and beasts:

— and a destroying storm; which carries all before it, blows down houses and trees, and makes terrible devastation wherever it comes: as a flood of mighty waters overflowing; whose torrent is so strong there is no stopping it;

— the Targum says,

“Behold, plagues, strong and mighty, are coming from the Lord: like a storm of hail, like a whirlwind, like a storm of mighty waters, overflowing, thus the nations shall come upon them, and shall lead them into captivity to another land on account of the sins which are in their hands.”

³ The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet; — the Septuagint says the hirelings of Ephraim;

— so this mighty and powerful prince, the intoxicated Ephraim, the crown of pride, shall be cast down to the ground with a strong hand;

⁴ and the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be a fading flower and as the early fruit before the summer, which when he that looketh upon it seeth; while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.

— and the glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley; meaning the riches and fruitfulness of the ten tribes, and especially of Ephraim the head of them:

— shall be a fading flower; as before declared, Isaiah 28:1 and here repeated to show the certainty of it, and to awaken their attention to it; and as the hasty fruit before the summer; the first ripe fruit, that which is ripe before the summer fruits in common are;

— the Septuagint renders it the early fig; or the first ripe fig as the Targum says: which when he that looks upon it sees it; that it is goodly and desirable, and so gathers it, Micah 7:1;

— as soon as he has got it into his hand, he cannot keep it there to look at, or forbear eating it, but greedily devours and swallows it down at once; indicating what a desirable prey the ten tribes would be to their enemies from the South, and how swift, sudden and inevitable would be their destruction.

⁵ In that day shall the Lord of hosts be for a crown of glory, and for a diadem of beauty unto the residue of His people,

— to the remnant of his people, will be honoured with a diadem of beauty, signifying that the faithful who do not put their trust in any worldly prosperity but made God their glory.

⁶ and for a spirit of judgement to him that sits in judgement, and for strength to them that turn the battle to the gate.

— to him that sit in judgement; that is, the Lord would give honour and glory to his people, so wisdom and prudence, a spirit of judgement and discerning, to those who sit in the Sanhedrin in particular, who sit to do justice, and execute judgement among their subjects;

— and for strength to them that turn the battle to the gate; as wisdom is promised to the king and judges, so strength of body and mind, valour and courage, to the prince and his army; so that they should turn the battle, and cause their enemies to flee before them, and pursue them to the very gates of their cities.

⁷ But they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way. The priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink; they are swallowed up by wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgement.

— but they have erred through wine; through strong drink are out of the way; their priest, their prophet; the teachers, they run into the same excess of wine and strong drink, whereby they besot themselves and fall into numerous errors;

— they err and stumble in judgement; their intoxicated shepherds mistake in the teaching, pronouncing and discharging the sentence of the law.

“Who is blind, but My servant? Or deaf, as My messenger that I sent? Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant?” Isaiah 42:18-19

⁸ For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean.

— the subject is still the drunkards of Ephraim; their chiefs and shepherds, so that there is no place clean or free from vomit and filthiness, no table, or part of one, of prince, prophet, priest, and people;

— the Targum adds, “they have not a spot free from rapine or violence,” that is, they have not a spot free from violent plunder or theft.

⁹ “Whom shall he teach knowledge? And whom shall he make to understand doctrine? Them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts.

— whom shall he teach knowledge? Not their drunken priests or false prophets, who were both unfit for teaching knowledge; but either the true priest or prophet of the Lord, or the Lord himself;

— these are of age and free; and not subjected to false doctrines; there among his people that are capable and willing to be taught the good knowledge of God.

¹⁰ For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little.”

— for precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, signifying, that a single concept must be dealt with as children do, from the letter a and then b when first instructed in the rudiments of a language, then one rule given and then another, and so one after another, until letter z, till they have gone through the whole:

— line upon line, line upon line; who are taught first to write one line, and then another; or to draw one line and write after that and then another; or where to begin one line and when finished where to begin another;

— here a little, and there a little; a verse or two on the same subject here (like studying the subject of Ephraim) out of one book and a similar subject out of another; a little a day and a little the next and so on, that the whole picture may not be overburdened at once.

¹¹ For with stammering lips and another tongue will He speak to this people,

— another tongue by people of a strange language, whom God will bring them into whose power he will deliver them; will he speak to this people; this is because they are not hearing him speaking now by his prophets in their own language;

— they shall hear their enemies speaking to them in a strange language (in Spanish, Russian and Mandarin, perhaps) In misery of the house of Jacob, during their captivity, a time of Jacob’s trouble, that they may then be compelled to understand the language of their enemies.

¹² to whom He said, “This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest,” and, “This is the refreshing” — despite their troubles, yet they would not hear; to whom the Lord himself, or the prophet Isaiah said;

— so the Targum says, “to whom the prophets said” that is, the true prophets of the Lord said to the people, as follows: this is the rest for those weary to rest: and this is the refreshing: that is, by teaching the word of God, the true knowledge of him, and the sound doctrines;

— yet they would not hear; having no regard to the Lord and his prophets; nor any compassion to their countrymen, afflicted and distressed in mind or body; nor to the true knowledge of God.

¹³ But the word of the Lord was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little, that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken and snared and taken.

— but the word of the Lord was unto them precept upon precept; which were despised and derided by them; they took the prophet’s words out of context, and in a scoffing manner repeating them;

— precept upon precept; these words may be rendered, “though the word of the Lord was unto them precept upon precept” which were delivered in a plain and easy a manner to understand, yet so stupid were they, and so perverse and stubborn as willfully to reject them; hence they were given up to judicial blindness and hardness of heart;

— that they might go and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken: that they may fall backward, backslide from God, and be broken; and be ensnared and taken in a net by their enemies and again be carried away into captivity; and then be dispersed among the nations.

¹⁴ Therefore hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem,

— the prophet, Isaiah, now directly attacks the great scornful men of Jerusalem, as being the leaders in crime, and as being eminently deserving the wrath of God.

¹⁵ because ye have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we in agreement. When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.”

— as safe from death and secure from hell or the grave, as if a covenant and compact had been formally entered into between them;

— meaning either their lying prophets and the false doctrines they delivered to them, promising them peace when destruction was at hand; or their idols which are falsehood and lying vanities; or their carnal policy, and crafty methods of acting with their enemies;

— by which they hoped to deceive them; or else their wealth and riches, got by lying, stealing and fraud; and the same may be observed of all outward acts of religion, rites, ceremonies and works of righteousness done by men, in which they place their trust and hope to be saved by them from wrath to come;

— this verse describes America’s most prominent lying secretary of state in history, Mike Pompeo: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole,” former CIA director and then the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on April 15, 2019 at a forum at Texas A&M University, TX. “It was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

“The Judgement hail shall sweep away the refuge of Lies and waters shall flush them out from their hiding places”

— interestingly, a Christian religious news broadcaster picked up on Pompeo’s words and described it with such precision as follows: “that’s not the resume of the Secretary of State… that’s the resume of Satan.”

¹⁶ Therefore thus saith the Lord God: “Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation; he that believeth shall not make haste.

— behold, the one foundation on which building, we can build and be safe as well as secure, is that foundation which is laid in the Messiah, the Son of God, a precious stone, a tested stone, a stone that has borne all the weight that the world has laid upon it, and borne it up;

— cornerstone; uniting the several parts of the building together, making Ephraim and Judah, now sadly divided, one stick; and Jews and Gentiles, now implacable enemies, one church, one people and one Kingdom.

¹⁷ Judgement also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.

— judgement also will I lay to the line; that is, God will execute just judgement, as it were by a line and plummet annexed to it, with exactness and care. I will severely punish and utterly destroy all who reject that stone;

— and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, the lies they made their refuge; God’s judgements, which in the Scriptures are compared to a storm of hail or rain, shall discover the vanity of all their crafty and wicked devices and shall sweep them away by the rushing waters that shall flush them out from their hiding places.

¹⁸ And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.

— disannulled; made void, or of none effect; ye shall be trodden down by death; which you flattered yourselves that it should not come unto you, would be thrown down and trampled upon by it as the mire of the streets.

¹⁹ From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you, for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night; and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.”

— as soon as this overflowing scourge or judgement shall go forth; into the land, it shall take or seize upon you scoffers, or carry you away, which agrees with the metaphor of a flood;

— morning by morning it shall run over; it shall not only come to you, contrary to your presumption, but it shall abide upon you; and when it hath passed over you, morning after morning; and shall follow you day and night, without giving you any rest.

²⁰ For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.

— for the bed is shorter; that is, for those lying refugees, to which they trust, will not be able to give them the protection which they expect from them.

²¹ For the Lord shall rise up as in Mount Perazim; He shall be wroth as in the Valley of Gibeon, that He may do His work, His strange work, and bring to pass His act, His strange act.

— the Lord shall rise up as in Mt Perazim, the point of the reference to David’s victories at Baal Perazim (1 Chronicles 14:11), and at Gibeon (1 Chronicles 14:16) is that then the Lord would interpose on behalf of his people against their enemies. The “new and strange” work, the very paradox of prophecy, was that he would now rise up to overthrow his own people.

²² Now therefore be ye not mockers, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard from the Lord God of hosts a consuming even determined upon the whole earth.

— now therefore be not mockers, for their own sakes do not make a mock of God’s word and threats, lest their bands be made strong, more sure and unavoidable, and more severe and terrible, as bands are when they are tied faster and more strongly upon a prisoner;

— for I have heard from the Lord a consumption; God hath assured Isaiah that he will utterly root out the people of Israel, the kingdom of the ten tribes; and the kingdom of the two tribes, the Jews, even the whole earth.

²³ Give ye ear and hear my voice; hearken and hear my speech.

— therefore, give ear, and hear my voice, so said the prophet because what he was about to say was of importance and required attention.

²⁴ Doth the plowman plow all day to sow? Doth he open and break the clods of his ground?

— do the ploughman plough all day to sow? Or “everyday” he ploughs in order to sow; by ploughing he prepares the ground for sowing; and he does not plough every day in the year; he has other work besides ploughing; such as breaking of clods, sowing seed and threshing the grain after it is ripe, reaped and gathered.

²⁵ When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the dill and scatter the cummin, and cast in the principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rye in their place?

— as the plowman has his appointed time and various instruments for his labour, so has the Lord for his selection: for he selects and punishes some at one time and some at another; some after one sort and some after another, so that his chosen seed is beaten and tried, but not broken as are the wicked.

²⁶ For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him.

— for his God gives the husbandman instruction and discretion how to sow his seed at what time and in a proper place; for this refers to what goes before and after; threshing or beating out of corn, according to his knowledge and discretion God teaches him.

²⁷ For the dill is not threshed with a threshing instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the dill is beaten out with a staff and the cummin with a rod.

— the lesson of the parable is that it comes to nations and individuals in season and in measure in bringing in the minute details and drawing this lesson from them; that the method suitable to one kind of grain would be ruinous to another; and that even the rougher methods are applied with moderation.

²⁸ Bread corn is beaten, because he will not ever be threshing it, nor break it with the wheel of his cart, nor bruise it with his horsemen.

— “bread corn” of the wheat or barley is beaten, for this a severer chastisement, a more thorough threshing is needed; but the end of threshing is the preservation not the destruction of the grain.

²⁹ This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working.

— in counsel and in giving wise counsel like those to king Solomon, this cometh from the Lord of hosts; all this wisdom the husbandman has, in manuring his ground, in sowing it with proper seed and in threshing it out in a manner suitable to it, agriculture or husbandry;

— even among the heathens, is always ascribed to God as an invention of his wisdom and it was the first work which God put man to, and instructed him in all arts and sciences that come from God.

Posted in Isaiah

How Europe is vying for its Rare Earth independence

•August 10, 2025 • Leave a Comment

How Europe is vying for rare earth independence from China

BBC • August 7, 2025

For almost 80 years rare earth metals have been pumped out of this industrial plant in La Rochelle on France’s west coast.

But as the materials become more and more crucial to the global economy, chemicals firm Solvay is expanding its processing plant next to the glistening Atlantic Ocean to meet surging demand across Europe.

This group of 17 metals are essential to huge amounts of modern technology such as smartphones, electric vehicles and wind turbines and MRI scanners.

However, around 70% of rare earths mining, and 90% of refining, happens in China, as a result of years of support from the Chinese government.

Europe, like many other parts of the world, is trying to reduce its dependence on importing these key metals from China. The future of Solvay’s plant will be critical to those ambitions.

“This is a market that is growing fast, and, also, there is a greater demand for shorter supply chains,” says Solvay’s CEO Philippe Kehren.

The Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine have made companies and politicians try to remove some of the vulnerabilities in their supply chains.

“When you have a material that is coming almost 100% from one specific location, if you are dependent on this, you want to diversify your sourcing. This is what we can offer,” explains the boss of the Belgian chemicals giant.

That is why the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act came into force last year. It sets targets for reducing dependence on imports for the extraction, processing and recycling of the most important substances by 2030.

Europe only has two rare earth processing facilities, one in Estonia and this one in western France. It is the only plant outside of China that can process all 17 different rare earths.

The increased investment in the facility comes as it is moving away from focusing on supplying rare earths for catalytic convertors, to instead focus on soaring demand for the magnets that are essential to electric car batteries, advanced electronics and defence systems.

For now the focus is on recycling rare earths that are already in Europe. “We think that we can probably produce 30% of the rare earths needed by Europe just by recycling end of life motors and other equipment,” says Mr Kehren.

As demand continues to grow that will change, and more virgin material will be needed from countries such as Brazil, Canada and Australia.

There are no operational rare earth mines in Europe. Projects in Norway and Sweden are amongst the most advanced, but its likely to be another decade before they are ready.

“I think it’s absolutely necessary to have our own mines, not necessarily a lot of them, because we can have a mix, but it’s important to have our own sourcing,” says Mr Kehren.

It is a complex process to turn those materials into the powders that are the end product of this plant.

It requires approximately 1,500 processes, and given the unique capabilities of this facility, outsiders are rarely allowed in. This is due to concerns about rivals potentially gaining some of the knowledge that is currently otherwise concentrated in China.

However we’ve been granted special access to one of the separation rooms that are a vital part of the closely-guarded know-how built up since this plant started operating in 1948.

“The objective of the liquid separation unit will be to purify cerium on one side, lanthanum on the other side,” explains production manager Florian Gouneau as we walk up a flight of metal stairs.

“It’s basically like if you have a multi fruit juice with orange juice, apple juice, pineapple juice, the objective of the liquid separation unit will be to separate apple juice on one side, orange juice on the other side, and so on.”

China’s ban of rare earth technologies

Rare Earth Reserves: Top 8 Countries

Posted in Europe, Rare Earth & Critical Materials

Isaiah (Ch 25-26)

•August 9, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Something to think about the length of Jacob’s forthcoming Captivity! It’s subjective but a historical precedent from the house of Judah could give us a clue regarding its timeline:

“And I will scatter you among the nations, and will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.

‘Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate and ye are in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest and enjoy her sabbaths” Leviticus 26:33-34

For a more indepth study on this subject, see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline.

Isaiah 25

¹ O Lord, Thou art my God. I will exalt Thee, I will praise Thy name, for Thou hast done wonderful things; Thy counsels of old are faithfulness and truth.

— O Yehovah, thou art my God; in covenant with me: my friend, Our Father, my portion. Isaiah speaks in the name of the whole elect. I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name, Yehovah. Those that have Yehovah for their God are in duty bound to praise him;

— for thou hast done wonderful things. Thy counsels of old, signifying not only counsels long before taken, but which thou hast from time to time revealed to thy prophets, which were of old, being conceived from all eternity, are true and firm, and shall certainly be accomplished;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end).

² For Thou hast made of a city a heap, of a fortified city a ruin, a palace of strangers to be no city; it shall never be rebuilt.

— thou hast made of a city an heap; that is, Nineveh, Babylon or Rome; the city spoken of as “the palace of strangers” was, probably identified with the oppressors and destroyers of his people; but that city was also for him in every age opposes to the Kingdom of God;

— it shall never be rebuilt; their cities and palaces have been or shall be utterly and irrecoverably destroyed. Rome was rebuilt, hence reference probably only to Nineveh and Babylon.

³ Therefore shall the strong people glorify Thee; the city of the terrible nations shall fear Thee.

— therefore shall the strong people fear thee; thy stoutest enemies, observing thy wonderful works, shall be forced to tremble before thee.

⁴ For Thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.

— for thou hast been a strength to the poor; hast defended thy poor and helpless people against the fiercest assaults of their enemies.

⁵ Thou shalt bring down the noise of strangers, as the heat in a dry place, even the heat with the shadow of a cloud; the branch of the terrible ones shall be brought low.

— thou shalt bring down the noise; the tumult; the sound which they make in entering into battle; or the note of triumph, and the sound of revelry.

⁶ And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.

— and in this mountain, that is, in Mount Zion, Jerusalem, very frequently meant by the names of Zion and Jerusalem; a feast of fat things, of the ultimate glory of the saints; which is sometimes represented by a joyous feast;

— and the participation of it, by sitting down with the elect at a table in the kingdom of God, and by drinking wine there.

⁷ And He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations.

— this mountain, in Mount Zion; the covering of the face, or the veil, of their ignorance of God, and of the truth; cast over all people; which then was upon the Gentiles and all people. This is a manifest prophecy concerning the illumination and conversion of the Gentiles;

— for I, brethren, would not have you be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits: that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in:

“For I, brethren, would not have you be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits: that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.” Romans 11:25

⁸ He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces, and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from off all the earth; for the Lord hath spoken it.

— a jump into the Millennium, where the Lord God will swallow up death in victory, or rather, he will abolish death for ever;

— and will wipe away tears; take away from his people all sufferings and sorrows, with all the causes of them, which deliverance is begun here and perfected in heaven. The rebuke of his people; the reproach and contempt cast upon his faithful people;

— for the Lord hath spoken it; therefore doubt it not, though it seem incredible to you.

⁹ And it shall be said in that day: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”

— it shall be said in that day; the speakers are obviously the company of the redeemed, the citizens of new Jerusalem;

— we have waited for him; amidst many trials, persecutions, and calamities, we have looked for the coming of our God to deliver us, in the Millennium, and we will rejoice in the salvation that he brings.

¹⁰ For in this mountain shall the hand of the Lord rest, and Moab shall be trodden down under Him, even as straw is trodden down for the dunghill.

— for in this mountain, in Mount Zion, Jerusalem, God will dwell with men again, in his new Sanctuary;

— and Moab, most likely today’s Jordan, a kingdom that stood on the way to the rebuilding of the Temple and the establishment of Zionism, shall be trodden down under him, even as straw is trodden down for the dunghill; by Moab may also indicates all the enemies of his Kingdom.

¹¹ And He shall spread forth His hands in the midst of them, as he that swimmeth spreadeth forth his hands to swim; and He shall bring down their pride together with the spoils of their hands.

— the Septuagint renders it, ‘Upon whatsoever he lays his hands,’ that is, God shall humble the pride of Moab or anybody else on which he shall lay his hands;

— the word signifies snares, ambushes, craft; and then by the plunder or spoils which he had obtained by snares and ambushes; that is, their “craftily acquired spoils” would all perish with Moab and the land would thus be completely subdued.

¹² And the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall He bring down, lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust.

— and the fortress of the high fort of thy walls; as interpreted to be Moab as the stronghold of a obstacle to the establishment of God’s kingdom; beyond this another destruction for every stronghold, every rock-built fortress of any great world-power of which Moab was for the time was only a type.

Isaiah 26

¹ In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah: “We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks.

— during the Millennium, the prophet Isaiah appears once more as in the character of a psalmist; the walls of the city are not built of stone or brick, but are themselves as a living force; there is no need for other defenses.

² Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in.

— open the gates of the celestial city, New Jerusalem. The righteous nation which keeps the truth; literally, a righteous nation; and these will be a set of men that “will keep the truth”

— or as the Targum renders it,” who keep the law with a perfect heart,” that is, the truth is about keeping the law, the perfect law, which is the truth.

³ Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee.

— thou wilt keep him, etc; literally, the steadfast mind thou wilt keep in peace, in peace; that is “in perfect peace” peace at all times, and under all circumstances; thou shalt preserve (it, namely, the righteous nation) in perpetual peace.”

⁴ Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.

— trust ye in the Lord forever; the Targum is, ‘Be purified by the WORD of the Lord forever and ever; thus shall you be delivered by the WORD, who is the fear of the Lord, the Mighty One of this world.’

⁵ For He bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, He layeth it low; He layeth it low, even to the ground; He bringeth it even to the dust.

— for he will bring down them that dwell on high, the lofty city, so the accents require the words to be rendered; and accordingly to the Targum: “for he humble the inhabitants of the high and strong city.”

⁶ The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor and the steps of the needy.”

— the foot shall tread it down; trample upon it when brought down, laid low, and level with the ground, as mire is trodden in the streets, and straw for the dunghill; as grapes in the winepress, or grass by the feet of cattle;

— the righteous as the Targum paraphrases it; to whom the kingdom and dominion under the whole heaven will now be given, and who will be just come out of great tribulation.

⁷ The way of the just is uprightness; Thou, Most Upright, dost weigh the path of the just.

— the way of the just is righteousness; the just proceed steadily on in the practice of the various duties of righteousness, which they owe to God and man.

⁸ Yea, in the way of Thy judgements, O Lord, have we waited for Thee; the desire of our soul is to Thy name and to the remembrance of Thee.

— to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee; the “name” of God is, as always, that of Yehovah. God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J haven’t been invented but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end).

⁹ With my soul have I desired Thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek Thee early; for when Thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

— with my soul have I desired thee in the night; by desiring God in the night (in captivity), and by seeking him early, is meant that the desire to seek him was unremitted and constant;

— the prophet speaks of the pious Jews who were in captivity in Babylon; and says that it was the object of their unremitted anxiety to please God, and to do his will.

¹⁰ Let favor be shown to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the majesty of the Lord.

— let favour be shown to the wicked; if thou dost spare them, when thou chastise thy own people, and grant them health, prosperity and other blessings;

— yet will they not learn righteousness, they will not be led to repentance by thy goodness; and therefore it is requisite thou shouldest send thy judgements.

¹¹ Lord, when Thy hand is lifted up, they will not see; but they shall see and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire of Thine enemies shall devour them.

— when the arm of the Almighty was simply lifted up for the protection of his people, the evildoers closed their eyes and would not see it. A time will come when judgements shall fall on them, and so they shall be made to see;

— the Targum says,

“O Lord, when thou shall be revealed in thy power to do good to them that fear thee, there will be no light to the enemies of thy people: the wicked shall see it, and shall be confounded. The vengeance of thy people shall cover them; yea, fire shall consume thy enemies.”

¹² Lord, Thou wilt ordain peace for us; for Thou also hast wrought all our works in us.

— Lord, thou wilt ordain peace for us; that is, henceforth thou wilt give us an existence of perfect peace, untroubled by adversaries. For thou also hast wrought all our works for us. The “work” intended seems to be the work of deliverance.

¹³ O Lord our God, other lords besides Thee have had dominion over us; but by Thee only will we make mention of Thy name.

— but by thee only will we make mention of thy name; this may be better rendered, ‘but only thee, thy name will we henceforward commemorate;’

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end)

¹⁴ They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise; therefore hast Thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish.

— they shall not rise; those tyrants and enemies are utterly and irrecoverably destroyed, so as they shall never live or rise again to molest us; the Targum says, “they worship idols, who do not live; and their heroes, who shall not rise;”

— destroyed them and made all their memory to perish; thou hast destroyed both them and theirs, and all the monuments or memorials of their greatness and glory.

¹⁵ Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, Thou hast increased the nation. Thou art glorified; Thou hadst removed it far unto all the ends of the earth.

— thou hast increased the nation in spiritual knowledge, O Lord, thou hast increased the nations in conversion; to join in with the righteous nation, Isaiah 26:2 the Kingdom of God by the numerous conversions of both Israelites and Gentiles; when the Kingdom of God shall be born and the fullness and forces of the Gentiles are brought in.

¹⁶ Lord, in trouble have they visited Thee, they poured out a prayer when Thy chastening was upon them. — O Lord, amidst the various calamities brought upon them for their correction and especially in their captivity, they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them.

¹⁷ As a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain and crieth out in her pangs, so have we been in Thy sight, O Lord.

— like as a woman with child; by this simile are set forth the great distresses and afflictions of the birth of the Kingdom of God before redemption and deliverance before the yoke comes.

¹⁸ We have been with child, we have been in pain; we have, as it were, brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth, neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.

— we have been with child; like women with child, we have been full of hopes and expectations of great things, of deliverance from our enemies, and of the kingdom of God being at hand.

¹⁹ Thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.

— the Valley of Dry Bones, answer to these utterances of disappointed hopes is the promise of the Resurrection. “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,” Ezekiel 37

²⁰ Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee; hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be past.

— when dangers threaten, it is good to retire and lie hid; when we commend ourselves to God to hide us, he will hide us somewhere under heaven at some isolated place on earth;

— thus we shall be safe and happy in the midst of tribulations. It is but for a short time, as it were for a little moment; when over, it will all seem like nothing.

²¹ For, behold, the Lord cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.

— for, behold, the Lord come out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. The earth will vomit and cast out the innocent blood, which it has drunk, that it may care for vengeance against the wicked.

~~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

His name Yehovah is specifically stated and should be used. The following verses translated as the LORD erred in translation. Titles are okay, but sometimes He asked us pointedly to call on His name:

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

Brazil has BRICS partners to lean on

•August 8, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Tectonic Shift in World Order as Beijing fast-tracked clearance for 200 Brazilian firms after the US slapped massive tariffs on the South American country’s products

Sputnik International • August 5, 2025 ~ RT World News

In July 2025, China — bolstered by its economic resilience — signed key cooperation deals with Brazil, covering everything from infrastructure to strategic development.

Brazil-US trade totals around $92 billion, but BRICS trade is far larger. Brazil exports around $121 billion to BRICS — 35% of its total — while importing $88 billion.

“President Lula will no longer accept unequal terms of trade and US intervention because the very nature of the international system has irreversibly changed,” Dr Anuradha Chenoy, retired professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, tells Sputnik.

The US has imposed tariffs and pressured Brazil’s Supreme Court to drop cases against ex-President Jair Bolsonaro — Trump’s ally who refused to concede defeat.

Many Brazilians see it as interference and a threat to sovereignty.

With stronger BRICS ties, Brazil has less need to depend on the US, says financial analyst Paul Goncharoff.

De-Dollarization Accelerates

Lula’s push for an alternative currency makes sense — sticking to the dollar means guaranteed loss in value.

“There’s really no alternative for the world but to get out of the US dollar trap,” Goncharoff stresses.

The shift away from USD is only growing.

PIX, Brazil’s free payment system, bypasses Western firms like Visa and Mastercard — empowering local entrepreneurs, Dr. Vinicius Vieira from the University of São Paulo tells Sputnik.
“And that bothers Trump because those new technologies are a signal that the dollar empire may be coming to an end,” the pundit notes.
The US acts desperately to resist its hegemonic decline, but no empire lasts forever. Just as the British pound fell, the US dollar may be facing the same fate.

“The best that [Washington] could do is to offer honest agreements in order to preserve the minimum level of transactions of US dollars, instead of implying sanctions or what now we call a weaponized interdependence,” Vieira concludes.

China welcomes 183 Brazil coffee sellers in wake of US tariffs

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – August 4, 2025 China has approved 183 new Brazilian coffee companies to export products to the Chinese market, according to a social media post of the Chinese embassy in Brazil on Saturday.

Brazil supplies about a third of the US coffee demand each year, a trade valued at $4.4 billion in the 12 months ended in June.

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

And more South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

“And Esau harbored hatred in his heart against Jacob, his brother, because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him.

“And Esau said in his heart, ‘I will not do as Cain did, who killed Abel during their father’s lifetime and then their father had another son, Seth.

“Rather, I will wait until the days of mourning for my father have passed, and then I will kill Jacob my brother, and I will be the sole heir.’” Genesis 27:42 Jonathan

Posted in BRICS, Latin Americas, US

Isaiah (Ch 23-24)

•August 7, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Who are the enemies that will desolate the house of Israel, identified here as the United States? Many believe Russia was and some still believe it is the main threat of the United States. Others, like warmonger John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, give incredible speeches around the world saying China is the main threat.

And Mearsheimer brilliantly emphasizes the United States are protected by fish to the left and fish to the right, but foolishly negates to address America’s broken border in the South; and that the Scriptures say that America’s main “enemy” comes from the porous South. At least Colonel Douglas Macgregor got his foresight on target! For more on the enemy from the South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South! or Obadiah.

Isaiah 23

¹ The burden of Tyre: Howl, ye ships of Tarshish! For it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in; from the land of Cyprus it is revealed to them. — howl means a long, doleful cry;

— Tyre was a ancient city in Phoenicia, which exceeded in renown and grandeur all the cities of Syria and Phoenicia and was much known for its trade and navigation, for which it was well situated by the sea; and indeed new Tyre stood today.

² Be still, ye inhabitants of the isle, thou whom the merchants of Sidon that pass over the sea have replenished.

— thou whom the merchants of Sidon, that pass over the sea, have replenished; Sidon was a very ancient city of Phoenicia, more ancient than Tyre.

³ And by great waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the river, is her revenue; and she is a mart of nations.

— and by great waters the seed of Sihor; which is the river Nile in Egypt; it had its name from the black colour of its waters;

— harvest of the river—the growth of the Delta; the produce due to the overflow of the Nile: Egypt was the great granary of corn in the ancient world; she is a mart of nations; and she had engrossed the trade nearly all the ancient world.

⁴ Be thou ashamed, O Sidon; for the sea hath spoken, even the strength of the sea, saying, “I travail not, nor bring forth children, neither do I nourish up young men nor bring up virgins.”

— be thou ashamed, O Sidon, a city about twenty five miles from Tyre; Tyre is called the daughter of Sidon, Isaiah 23:12; these two cities were closely allied and traded much with one another, so that the fall of Tyre must be distressing and confounding to Sidon; and besides, Tyre was a colony of the Sidonians.

⁵ As at the report concerning Egypt, so shall they be sorely pained at the report of Tyre.

— the Targum says, “as they heard the plague with which the Egyptians were smitten” so shall they be sorely pained at Tyre; because of their inter-trade and the judgments of Egypt has upon their neighbours.

⁶ Pass ye over to Tarshish; howl, ye inhabitants of the isle! — howl means a long, doleful cry;

— the Tyrians fled to Carthage and elsewhere, both at the siege under Nebuchadnezzar and that under Alexander; pass ye over to Tarshish either to Tartessus in Spain, or to Tarsus in Cilicia, which lay over to the north of Tyre and to which they might transport and trade with greater ease;

— or “to a province of the sea” as the Targum indicates, any other seaport; the Septuagint says to Carthage, which was a colony of the Tyrians.

⁷ Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? Her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.

— is this silent ruin all that is left of your once joyous city (Isa 23:12)? antiquity; the Tyrian priests boasted in Herodotus’ time that their city had already existed 2300 years: an exaggeration, but still implying that it was ancient even then; her own feet—walking on foot as captives to an enemy’s land.

⁸ Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth?

⁹ The Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth.

— the Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to destroy Tyre; who is wonderful in counsel, humanly speaking, capable of forming a wise scheme, being proud of its riches, the extent of its commerce.

¹⁰ Pass through thy land as a river, O daughter of Tarshish; there is no more strength.

— as refugees the Tyrians are bid to pass to the daughter of Tarshish, that is, to Tarshish itself, to make their escape out of their own land and flee for safety.

¹¹ He stretched out His hand over the sea, He shook the kingdoms; the Lord hath given a commandment against the merchant city, to destroy the strongholds thereof.

— that is, the Lord of hosts, who had purposed to destroy Tyre, stretched out his hand over the sea as in Isaiah 23:4 in like manner as he stretched out his hand on the Red Sea and destroyed Pharaoh and the Egyptians in it.

¹² And He said, “Thou shalt no more rejoice, O thou oppressed virgin, daughter of Sidon. Arise, pass over to Cyprus; there also shalt thou have no rest.”

— when her calamity should come upon her, her jovial time, her time of mirth, jollity and revelling would be over;

— O thou oppressed virgin! Tyre is called a “virgin” because of her beauty, pride and lasciviousness and had never being subdued or taken before: and “oppressed” because now deflowered, ransacked, plundered and ruined by Nebuchadnezzar.

¹³ Behold the land of the Chaldeans. This people was not, till the Assyrian founded it for those who dwell in the wilderness. They set up the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces thereof, and he brought it to ruin.

— behold the land of the Chaldeans; this expresses some historical facts of the rise of Babylon; as the prophet Isaiah had foretold the destruction of Tyre and had said that whoever was the agent, it was to be traced to the overruling providence of God.

¹⁴ Howl, ye ships of Tarshish, for your strength is laid waste!

— make a long cry, for your strength is laid waste; meaning Tyre, a strong seaport and so it was the strength and support of their country; but was now destroyed, and therefore was matter of lamentation and mourning.

¹⁵ And it shall come to pass in that day that Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one king; after the end of seventy years shall Tyre sing as a harlot.

— “forgotten seventy years” so it is in the Septuagint version, as the lifetime of a man and after the end of seventy years shall Tyre shall sing as an harlot; being rebuilt and restored to its former state; as a harlot who has been cast off by her lovers.

¹⁶ “Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be remembered.”

— the desolations of Tyre were not to be forever; the Lord will visit Tyre but when set at liberty, she will use her old arts of lasciviousness; the love of worldly wealth is spiritual idolatry; and covetousness is spiritual idolatry.

¹⁷ And it shall come to pass, after the end of seventy years, that the Lord will visit Tyre; and she shall turn to her hire and shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world upon the face of the earth.

— and she shall return to her hire; trade and merchandise; that shall revive, and be as in times past; and shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world, upon the face of the earth; be a mart of nations again, as in Isaiah 23:3;

— that is, trade and traffic with all nations of the earth; this is called committing fornication, in agreement with the simile of a harlot before used, where unto Tyre is compared; as well as to observe the illicit ways and methods used in her commerce;

— the Targum says, “and her merchandise shall be plentiful for all the kingdoms of the nations, which are upon the face of the earth” and the Septuagint, “and shall be a mart to all the kingdoms of the world, on the face of the earth.”

¹⁸ And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the Lord. It shall not be treasured nor laid up, for her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the Lord, to eat sufficiently and for durable clothing.

— after her restoration her merchandise shall be holiness unto the Lord, Yehovah.

Isaiah 24

¹ Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.

— the whole world and “emptying” it; that is, the removal of inhabitants by wars and slaughters, which will be at a latter time, our time, the seven vials of God’s wrath will be poured upon God’s enemies; see Revelation 16;

— this is a prophecy of calamities upon the whole world, turning the earth upside down for their sins; but also a preservation of a remnant.

Judgement upon the whole world, turning the earth upside down for their sins

² And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of interest, so with the giver of interest to him.

— that is, no order or rank of men will fare better than another; their dignity, in things civil or ecclesiastical, will not secure them from ruin; it will be no better with princes and priests than the common people; they shall all alike share in the common destruction.

³ The land shall be utterly emptied and utterly despoiled; for the Lord hath spoken this word.

— the land shall be utterly emptied and utterly spoiled, entirely emptied of its inhabitants and wholly spoiled of its riches and substance; this is repeated and with greater strength to confirm what is said before and which receives a greater confirmation by what follows:

⁴ The earth mourneth and fadeth away; the world languisheth and fadeth away; the haughty people of the earth do languish.

— the earth mourns because of its inhabitants being destroyed; and it fades away, because stripped of its wealth and riches:

— so the kings of the earth and merchants are represented as weeping and mourning at the destruction of Babylon because of its judgements and the loss of its trade and riches.

Goddess Astarte from the Egyptians, celebrated every Easter

⁵ The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.

— because they have transgressed the laws; of God and man, as his shepherds have dispensed with the laws of God and in innumerable instances has transgressed them, casting all contempt upon them and bidding all defiance to them as being not at all bound and obliged by them;

— changed the ordinance; or “ordinances” the singular for the plural, a collective word; the ordinances of divine revelation, of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles to those of

— (1) Astarte, the queen of heaven; from whom Easter is derived; and (2) Mithra, worshipping the sun-god, when a mystical white Christmas Babylon has been well embedded, breaking “the everlasting covenant,” saith the Lord of hosts.

⁶ Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.

— few men are left because the earth hath being cursed, the inhabitants and the fruits alluding to the sin of man, bringing forth the earth with briers and thorns; this may indicate the seven vials of God’s wrath poured upon the earth;

— or by the curse, understand perjury or false swearing; so the Targum says, “because of perjury (or a false oath) the earth hath become a desert.”

Your laughter and merry making would be turned into mourning

⁷ The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh.

— all the merryhearted do sigh; whose hearts wine has formerly made glad shall now mourn; and such who have lived deliciously with the whore of Babylon and have had many a merry bout with her shall now bewail her and lament for her.

⁸ The mirth of taborets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth.

— the mirth of taborets ceaseth; or of drums, or any such musical instruments used at junketings and jovial feasts. So when Babylon is fallen, the voice of harpers and musicians, and of pipers and trumpeters, shall be heard no more.

⁹ They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.

— strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it; they shall have no gust for it or relish of it as they formerly had; either through bodily diseases upon themselves or because of the calamities upon the nations and states in which they dwell.

¹⁰ The city of confusion is broken down; every house is shut up, that no man may come in.

— even the city of Babylon in which there shall be nothing but disorder and irregularity, no truth nor justice; a city of vanity, full of superstition and idolatry; shall be broken to pieces by the judgements of God, to ruin and desolation.

¹¹ There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.

— all joy is turned into the darkness of misery and distress; and men will gnaw their tongues for pain, and yet not repent of their sins, but blaspheme the God of heaven.

¹² In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.

— in the city is left desolation; palaces, houses and temples burnt, inhabitants destroyed; none but devils, foul spirits, hateful and unclean birds inhabiting it.

¹³ When thus it shall be in the midst of the land among the people, there shall be as the shaking of an olive tree, and as the gleaning of grapes when the vintage is done.

— as when an olive tree is shaken, or beaten with a staff, there would be a few left upon the uppermost or outermost branches, which cannot be reached;

— and as, after the vintage is got in, there are some grapes to be gleaned and gathered from the vines; so it is but a few, a remnant;

— the Targum says, “when thus the righteous shall be left alone in the midst of the earth, among the kingdoms, as the shaking of olives, as the gleaning of grapes after the vintage.”

¹⁴ They shall lift up their voice, they shall sing; for the majesty of the Lord, they shall cry aloud from the sea.

— they, those remnant who are left, shall sing for the majesty of the Lord; who has so mercifully preserved them; from the distant lands beyond the sea, wherever they have escaped.

¹⁵ Therefore glorify ye the Lord in the valleys, even the name of the Lord God of Israel in the isles of the sea.

— wherefore glorify ye the Lord, in the fires; these are the words of the remnant, now triumphing and singing, calling upon others also to glorify the Lord in the fires of affliction and tribulation,

— even the name of the Lord God of Israel in the isles of the sea; whose name Yehovah will now be known, not only in Israel or among the Jews only, but in all foreign countries, which are sometimes meant by the isles of the sea; and from even in the most remote to glorify God, whose name Yehovah will now be great in all the earth;

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter J wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end)

¹⁶ From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, “My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me! The treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously, yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously.”

— my leanness! my leanness! Isaiah faint and pine away in grief for the following reason: the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously which were led by both the house of Israel and the house of Judah, “the treacherous dealers” (Jeremiah 5:11);

— who have been frequently guilty of being deceitful toward God, and now Isaiah felt ashamed and voluntarily bearing the blame for the house of Jacob, “Woe unto me!”

¹⁷ Fear and the pit and the snare are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

— fear and the pit and the snare, these are rapid succession of inevitable calamities, in imagery drawn from the several forms of the hunter’s work.

¹⁸ And it shall come to pass that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit, and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare; for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake.

— speaking to both houses of Israel, there shall be fleeing from the terror yet to come; then the pit dug that they might fall into it; then the snare, if they struggled out of the pit, out of which there was no escape (Isaiah 8:15; cf. Amos 5:19). The passage is noticeable as having been reinstated by Jeremiah in his prophecy against Moab (Jeremiah 48:43-44).

¹⁹ The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.

— in the pit and snare those who escaped they shall be utterly broken down; to show the dreadfulness and certainty of these judgements and to ensnare the escaping refugees.

²⁰ The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.

— the people of the world, shall reel to and fro with the earth; the inhabitants of the land, shall be sorely perplexed and distressed, not knowing what to do, or where to flee to;

— like a drunkard in the day of His fierce anger, shaking the earth out of her place; its waves would mean a hundred times the waves of Fukushima over! Cottages fall like dried leaves and gust away like flotsam.

²¹ And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.

— in the latter days, the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones, the proud and those who possess the high places of the earth; the kings and queens, the great elites of the world, who scorn and trample on his people.

²² And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited.

— prison, that is, as in a prison; this sheds light on the “shutting up” like the Jews in Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar, and again under Titus;

— second, the word visited “after many days” could be in the latter days, in his wrath, as in Isaiah 26:14; compare Isaiah 29:6; the punishment being the heavier in the fact of a delay;

— probably a double visitation is intended, deliverance to the elect, wrath to hardened unbelievers; as Isaiah 24:23 plainly contemplates judgements on proud and unrepentant sinners, symbolized by the “sun” and “moon.”

²³ Then the moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of hosts shall reign in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem and before His elders gloriously.

— the moon shall be confounded; the thought implied is that the most glorious forms of created light will become dim, the moon red as with the blush of shame, the sun turning pale, before the glory of the Lord, before the Almighty’s presence;

— his elders could well be the 24 elders of Revelation 4.

~~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

The LORD’s Name is YEHOVAH

•August 6, 2025 • Leave a Comment

A Study of God’s name, Yehovah.

God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah, which are embedded in the Masoretic text over 6000 times, yet when translated into our English language most had been translated as Lord, or LORD, which are titles, but not His name. His name is the Tetragrammaton יהוה‎ Yehovah, or YEHOVAH (but there are no capital letters in Hebrew).

But the Orthodox Jews have gone overboard, so holy is His name, they believe, thus they refrain from even calling His name, referring to him as HaShem, that is, “The Name,” which isn’t His name. His name is Yehovah, and is also not Yahweh, which is the counterfeit Samaritan version of using His name.

It is the same with the name Jesus we used today; His name in the 1611 King James version is Iesus; and further back if His name was used in His time two thousand years ago, He would have been known as Yeshua instead of Iesus. But never mind, as had often been the case, the essence is far more important than the form.

But God, the Father, His name Yehovah, is specifically stated, and should be used. The following verses translated as the LORD erred in translation. Titles are okay, but sometimes He asked us pointedly to call on His name:

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH!

For more, see His Name is YEHOVAH

Posted in LORD, Scriptures Studies

Isaiah (Ch 21-22)

•August 5, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Chapter 21 continues with a prophecy of the burden of Babylon, Edom and Arabia; but in a rare incidence, the Arabians were in prophecy.

How would Jerusalem cope with such a time of Arabian terror? Her men would not necessarily be slain with the sword, but by a Decree of God.

Perhaps this run parallel with A Psalm 83 Prophecy. Something to think about the timing of Jacob’s forthcoming Captivity!

Q. could this fitted into the prophecy of Judah’s iniquity for forty years bored by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 4? For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

“And I will scatter you among the nations, and will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.

‘Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate and ye are in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest and enjoy her sabbaths” Leviticus 26:33-34

Isaiah 21

¹ The burden of the Desert of the Sea: As whirlwinds in the South pass through, so it cometh from the desert, from a terrible land.

— the burden of Babylon, Edom and Arabia; the Targum says, “the burden of the armies which are coming from the wilderness, as the waters of the sea, rushing along as the tempests: yea, they are coming by the way of the south.”

² A grievous vision is declared unto me; the treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Go up, O Elam! Besiege, O Media! All the sighing thereof have I made to cease.

— dealeth treacherously; referring to the military stratagem employed by Cyrus of Persia (Elam being its old name) in taking Babylon; Go up; Isaiah abruptly recites the order which he hears God giving to the Persians, the instruments of his vengeance (Isaiah 13:3,17).

³ Therefore are my loins filled with pain; pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth. I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.

— Isaiah imagines himself among the exiles in Babylon and cannot help feeling pains moved by the calamities which come on it; the pangs of a woman that travails; sharp and strong, which come suddenly and at once.

⁴ My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me; the night of my pleasure hath He turned into fear unto me.

— my heart panted or fluttered about and could hardly keep its place; fearfulness frighted me; the terror of Cyrus’s army seized him; the writing on the wall threw him into a panic and the news of the Medes and Persians having entered the city increased it.

⁵ Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink; arise, ye princes and anoint the shield.

— the night the city was taken: these words are directed to the king (and princes) of Babylon by his courtiers or queen in order to remove his fears.

⁶ For thus hath the Lord said unto me: “Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

— God’s direction to Isaiah to set a watchman to “declare” what he sees. “Come, let him who stands on the watchtower report what he sees.”

⁷ And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed.

— a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; by the former may be meant the Persians, who very much used mules or asses; and the Medes by the latter, who abounded in camels: hence as a whole may signify the whole army of the Medes and Persians.

⁸ And he cried, “A lion! My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set at my post whole nights.

— the lion’s eyelids are short, so that even when asleep, he seems to be on the watch, awake; hence he was painted on doors of temples as the symbol of watchfulness, guarding the place.

⁹ And behold, here cometh a chariot of men with a couple of horsemen!” And he answered and said, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen! And all the graven images of her gods He hath broken unto the ground!”

— Babylon is fallen, is fallen: which is repeated to show the certainty of it. The same words are used of the fall of mystical Babylon, Revelation 14:8; the Targum says, “She is fallen! Yea, it shall come to pass, that Babylon shall fall, and all the images of her idols shall be dashed to pieces to the ground;”

— and so it has two falls, one by the Medes and Persians, and the other by the hand of heaven or God himself: literal Babylon fell by the former; mystical Babylon will fall by the latter, even by the breath of the Messiah and the brightness of his coming and so put an end to idolatry; such as

(1) Astarte, the queen of heaven; from whom Easter is derived; and

(2) Mithra, worshipping the sun-god, when a mystical white Christmas Babylon will be destroyed.

¹⁰ O my threshing and the corn of my floor, that which I have heard of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you.

— O my threshing, and the corn of my floor; which could be understood to be the Babylonians, now threshed or punished by the Lord, and whom he had made use of as instruments for the punishment of others.

¹¹ The burden of Dumah: He calleth to me out of Seir, “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?”

— the burden of Dumah; whether this prophecy concerns the Edomites or Idumeans, or whether the Arabians, particularly the Dumean Arabians, is a question, since Dumah was a son of Ishmael, Genesis 25:14;

— Seir; a mountain inhabited by the Edomites, the posterity of Esau; the principal mountain in Idumea, South of the Dead Sea, a prophecy concerning Edom; that lay to the South:

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

For more from the South, The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹² The watchman said, “The morning cometh, and also the night. If ye will inquire, inquire ye; return, come.”

¹³ The burden upon Arabia: In the forest in Arabia shall ye lodge, O ye traveling companies of Dedanites.

— the burden upon Arabia; which lay heavy upon it, as a burden upon a beast; or “concerning” it, or “against” it, which Arabia or what part thereof is meant may be gathered from the names after mentioned.

— the Targum says “the burden of the cup of cursing, to give the Arabians to drink.”

¹⁴ The inhabitants of the land of Tema brought water to him that was thirsty; they were ready with their bread for him that fled.

— the inhabitants of the land of Tema; this country had its name from Tema, one of the sons of Ishmael, Genesis 25:15

— the Targum calls it the land of the south, also east: these morphed later as, first, the Ishmaelites, the Arabian, then the Mohammedans or Saracens, as a swarm of latter-day and endtime jihadists, are compared to grasshoppers, or locusts: Judges 7:12; “all the other eastern peoples had settled in the valley, thick as locusts.”

¹⁵ For they fled from the swords, from the drawn sword, and from the bent bow and from the grievousness of war.

— they, the fugitive Dedanites and other Arabs; the Mohammedan, fled from the swords; but why? Perahps in the face of the innumerable arrivals of the Zionists?

¹⁶ For thus hath the Lord said unto me: “Within a year, according to the years of a hireling, all the glory of Kedar shall fail.

— and all the glory of Kedar shall fail; they descended from Kedar, a son of Ishmael, Genesis 25:13, these were another sort of Arabians as the Targum calls them, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me: at the end of the years, as the years of an hireling, all the glory of the Arabians shall come to an end.”

¹⁷ And the residue of the number of archers, the mighty men of the children of Kedar, shall be diminished. For the Lord God of Israel hath spoken it.”

— the mighty men of the children of Kedar shall be diminished; their military men, the most expert at the use of the bow, and the most valiant and courageous; the few of those that were left, and did not fall by the sword of the Assyrians, should gradually diminish, and be fewer and fewer;

— “And the strength of the warriors, the mighty, the sons of the Arabians, shall be lessened, because by the WORD of the Lord, the God of Israel, it is thus decreed.” Targum

Isaiah 22

Chapter 22 contains a prophecy of Judah and Jerusalem but none of the house of Israel. Why is Jerusalem in such terror? Their rulers fled, but were overtaken.

All the horrors of a city taken by storm, faintly foreshadowing forth the terrors of the day of wrath.

Q. how could this prophecy runs with the prophecy of Judah’s iniquity for forty years bored by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 4? Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

¹ The burden of the Valley of Vision: What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops?

— the burden of the valley of vision; a prophecy concerning Jerusalem, so called because it lay in a valley, encompassed about with mountains and which was the habitation of the prophets or seers, and the seat of vision and prophecy; and perhaps there is an allusion to its name, which signifies the vision of peace or they shall see peace;

— the Septuagint introduces this chapter as, “the word of the valley of Sion” and the Arabic version, “a prophecy concerning the inhabitants of the valley of Sion, to wit, the fields which are about Jerusalem.”

— While the Targum says, “the burden of the prophecy concerning the city which dwells in the valley, of which the prophets prophesied,” by all which it appears, that not the whole land of Judea is meant.

— that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops? they went up on the flat balustraded roofs to look forth and see whether the enemy was near, and partly to defend themselves from the roofs.

² Thou that art full of stirrings, a tumultuous city, a joyous city; thy slain men are not slain with the sword, nor dead in battle.

— thy slain men are not slain by the sword, nor dead in battle; therefore those that died were put into or through famine or pandemic like what we are having Covid-19 today that make our once joyous cities and high streets desolate.

³ All thy rulers have fled together; they are bound by the archers. All that are found in thee are bound together, who have fled from afar.

⁴ Therefore said I, “Look away from me; I will be bitter in weeping. Labor not to comfort me, because of the despoiling of the daughter of my people.”

— therefore said Isaiah, the prophet to those that were about him, his relations, friends, and acquaintance:

— look away from me; turn away from me, look another way; cease from me, let me alone; leave me to myself, that I may weep in private, take my fill of sorrow, and give full vent to it;

— because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people; Isaiah’s countrymen, which were as dear to him as a daughter to a tender father, now spoiled, plundered and made desolate by the ravages of the enemy, in many cities of Judea.

⁵ For it is a day of trouble and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord God of hosts in the Valley of Vision, breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountains.

— referring to a day of trouble of the valley of vision; a prophecy concerning Jerusalem; could this be the prophecy of Judah’s iniquity for forty years bored by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 4? For more into another Captivity: see Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline

— breaking down the walls: of the fenced cities, with their battering rams, at the time they besieged and took them; and of crying to the mountains: looking and running to them for help and succour,

— for shelter and protection; and crying so loud, by reason of their distress, as that it reached the distant mountains, and made them echo with it.

⁶ And Elam bore the quiver with chariots of men and horsemen, and Kir uncovered the shield. — Elam is the ancient name for Persian, who then morphed into modern Iran;

— Elam and Kir; two nations are named as the chief elements of a composite army when invading Judea; Elam; or the Elamites as the Targum and Septuagint say, that is, the Persians; and Kir uncovered the shield; this was a city in Media, and signifies the Medes;

— the Medes and Persians have never fulfilled this prophecy against the house of Judah in the past, indicating that modern Persia, IRAN, could be the one likely to fulfil this; if not why not; who else?

⁷ And it shall come to pass that thy choicest valleys shall be full of chariots, and the horsemen shall set themselves in array at the gate.

— and it shall come to pass, that thy choicest valleys; the valleys that were near Jerusalem that used to be covered with the choicest corn or vines or with grass and flocks of sheep and used to be exceeding delightful and pleasant:

— shall be full of chariots; where they can be more easily driven than on mountains; these were chariots not for pleasure but for war; chariots full of soldiers to fight against and besiege Jerusalem:

— and the horsemen shall set themselves in array at the gate of Jerusalem: to take them that come out of the city and to force their way into it; as well as to protect and defend the foot while they made the assault and scaled the walls and to be ready when the gates were opened to them.

⁸ And He uncovered the covering of Judah, and thou didst look in that day to the armor of the House of the Forest.

— and he uncovered the covering of Judah, by God himself, who uncloaked them of their sins and secret dealings; or took away his protection of them and expose their weakness;

— and thou, didst look in that day to the armour of the house of the forest; to see what store of ammunition the house of Judah has in their secret warehouses, in what condition they are and to take from hence and be ready to furnish their soldiers with them.

⁹ Ye have seen also the breaches of the City of David, that they are many; and ye gathered together the waters of the lower pool.

— of the city of David; that is, of Jerusalem, so called because it was the royal residence of David. Zion was usually called the city of David, but the name was given also to the entire city;

— and ye gathered together the waters of the lower pool: the Septuagint version is, “and he turned the water of the old pool into the city” but the old pool was another pool hereafter mentioned, and was outside the city, the same with the upper pool; whereas this was the lower, and was in the city;

— the Targum says, “and ye gathered the people to the waters of the lower pool.”

¹⁰ And ye have numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall.

— and ye, thrusting in themselves, have numbered the houses of Jerusalem; to know what number of men were in them, and how many could be spared to do duty, either as watchmen or soldiers; to spread the charge of defending the city;

— and the houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall; either such as were outside the wall, which, had they let them stand would either have been destroyed by the enemy, or have been a harbour for them;

— or those inside the city, with the stones and timber of which houses, when broken down they could strengthen the wall and so served a better purpose than if they had stood.

¹¹ Ye made also a ditch between the two walls for the water of the old pool; but ye have not looked unto the Maker thereof, neither had respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago.

— for the water of the old pool; which, being outside the city, was by this means drained into this ditch or receptacle; and so their then enemy the Ishmaelites were deprived of it, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem more abundantly supplied;

— this was wisely contrived to distress the enemy, and to enable themselves to hold out the siege the longer; and for this and other methods they took they are not blamed;

— but ye have not looked unto the Maker thereof; the Creator of the Universe, the Almighty God, the Lord of Hosts, the Most High, the Mighty One, the Everlasting God, the Eternal, the First and the Last, for help during their distress and calamity which came upon them for their sins, with the will and by the decree of God; or of the water of the pool, which is a creation of his; for who can give rain or water but God.

¹² And in that day did the Lord God of hosts call to weeping and to mourning, and to baldness and to girding with sackcloth.

— call to weeping and to mourning; to confess and mourn over their sins, the cause of these calamities; to lament their unhappy case; to humble themselves under the mighty hand of God and by prayer and supplication with tears to implore his help and assistance and grant them deliverance;

— and to baldness and to girding with sackcloth; these were external signs and tokens of inward sorrow and repentance; the former of which was done by shaving the head or plucking off the hair and was forbidden on private occasions, yet might be allowed in a public case.

¹³ But behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine! “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die!”

— and behold joy and gladness; as if it was a time of rejoicing, after days of weeping and mourning; as if they were at a festival of lamb and wine and in the greatest prosperity and liberty and not besieged by a powerful army.

¹⁴ And it was revealed in mine ears by the Lord of hosts: “Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die,” saith the Lord God of hosts.

— the Targum says, “the prophet said with mine ears I was hearing when this was decreed from before the Lord of hosts”

— surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die; it being of heinous nature, so daring, insolent and affronting, such a contempt of God and his word and discovering such impenitence and hardness of heart; it should not be forgiven; till they died.

¹⁵ Thus saith the Lord God of hosts: “Go, get thee unto this treasurer, even unto Shebna, who is over the house, and say:

— get thee unto this treasurer or governor, as the Targum says; treasurer in the house of King; even unto Shebna, which is appointed over the house; that is, over the king’s house;

— so the steward that had the ordering of all the affairs civil and domestic in it, which was a very high post; he had the keys of the money, stores and provisions of the state.

¹⁶ What hast thou here? And whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulcher here, as he that heweth him out a sepulcher on high and that carves out a habitation for himself in a rock?

— what hast thou here? The prophet’s indignation is roused by Shebna’s last act of arrogance, who had no “sepulchre of his fathers” to deck with fresh stateliness as like the kings had built one for himself, hollowed out a cave on one of the hills of Jerusalem, to be his own everlasting “habitation.”

— Q. Could Shebna be a type for Lucifer, began with being trusted over an estate, but eventually became the fallen one?

¹⁷ Behold, the Lord will carry thee away with a mighty captivity, and will surely cover thee.

— instead of a sepulchre for himself inside a rock, behold, the Lord will carry Shebna with a mighty captivity; as the Targum indicates, the phrase has the signification of flying; and so interprets it: he shall cause thee to fly like a bird into captivity; that is, very speedily and swiftly;

— or as Rashi says, “behold, the Lord shall cause thee to be carried away like a rooster that wanders from place to place.”

¹⁸ He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country. There shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy lord’s house.

— turn violently and toss—literally, “whirling He will whirl thee,” that is, he will whirl thee. “He will whirl thee round and round, and (then) cast thee away,” as a stone in a sling is first whirled round repeatedly, before the string is let go;

— the “large country” is probably one along the plain of Mesopotamia, where Shebna is to end his days in exile; in the land of Medes and Persians? (verse 6)

¹⁹ And I will drive thee from thy station, and from thy state shall he pull thee down.

— shall he pull thee down; that is, “God” shall do it; the prophet here uses the third person.

²⁰ “And it shall come to pass in that day that I will call My servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah.

— my servant Eliakim; on the dignity of this title when given by God himself, that is, prophetically a man who will be faithful to God who will be trustworthy and to whom the interests of God and the city may be safely confided; a man who will not seek to betray it into the hands of the enemy.

²¹ And I will clothe him with thy robe and strengthen him with thy girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.

— and God will clothe Eliakim with Isaiah’s robe; which was a badge and token of his office. If he was a priest, this would be his priestly robe, by which the high priest would be distinguished from others;

— but Eliakim seemed to be a civil officer, who wore a garment distinctive of it; in which he would be a type of Zerubbabel of a kingly office, crowned with glory and honour;

— the Targum takes in both, “and I will give the key of the house of the sanctuary, and the government of the house of David, into his hand.”

— Q. Could Shebna be a type for Lucifer, the fallen one? And Eliakim, my servant, be a type of the Logos, the righteous one?

²² And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open and none shall shut, and he shall shut and none shall open.

— in the sense, the Messiah or Christ is said to have this key, Revelation 3:7 where the following words are applied to him: so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open;

— all which is expressive of the Godly government being on his shoulders, and of his absolute and uncontrollable power over it; who opens the treasures of his Word, of his wisdom and knowledge and communicates them and shuts or hides them from, whom he pleases;

— who opens and shuts the door of the kingdom of heaven, and introduces into it his own people, and excludes others.

²³ And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place, and he shall be for a glorious throne to his father’s house.

— this is an expressive of the strength of the Messiah, the Christ, as the Mighty Son; and as the man of God’s right hand, with a throne in his Father’s house.

²⁴ And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father’s house, the offspring and the issue, all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels of cups even to all the vessels of flagons.

— the glory of building his Father’s house; the Targum says, “and all the glorious or noble ones of his father’s house shall lean upon him, children and children’s children:”

— all vessels of small quantity; from the vessels of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons; meaning those of his family, that were some of lesser, others of greater capacities, for whom he provided places and posts under him, suitable thereunto;

— none were forgotten or neglected by him: this simile, of vessels of various sorts and sizes, is made use of, in perfect agreement with Eliakim’s being compared to a nail, on which vessels in a house are hung by their handles.

²⁵ In that day,” saith the Lord of hosts, “shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed and be cut down and fall, and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off; for the Lord hath spoken it.”

— in that day, saith the Lord of hosts;’ that is, when Eliakim put in his place:

— shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; meaning, not Eliakim before spoken of, who really was a nail fastened in a sure place, and not to be removed;

— but Shebna, who thought himself to be as a nail in a sure place, being put into it by the king, and supported by his authority, and courted by his friends and flatterers; for to him the whole preceding prophecy is directed, which is carried down to this verse;

— for all that is said of the glory and usefulness of his successor Eliakim was to be told to him, which would make it still the more grievous to him, to be degraded and disgraced as he would be, signified by his being removed, cast down, and falling;

— and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off; those that were dependent upon him, his family, his flatterers, and friends, such whom he had raised by his influence and authority to considerable places, and whom he supported in them;

— these would fall with him, as is usual when a royal favourite, or governor and other high officials, falls into disgrace, and is removed; an instance of this may be seen in Haman, whose family and friends were involved in the same ruin with him, Esther 9:12;

— the Targum interprets this prophecy; “At that time, saith the Lord of hosts, there shall be removed the faithful chief governor, who ministered in a firm place, and he shall be cut off, and he shall fall: and there shall be accomplished the burden of prophecy, which was concerning him; because the Word of the Lord hath so decreed it.”

Posted in Isaiah

For many are called but few chosen

•August 4, 2025 • Leave a Comment

For many are called but few chosen Matthew 22:14 (repeated in Matthew 20:16). That means to say, God isn’t calling a large following now, contrary to human thinking, but just a few, a few that are trained to lead others for time to come.

Below is an Old Testament story during the time of the Judges to illustrate this concept:

And when Gilead was asked to fight against the Midianites, there were many who volunteered, but the Lord said:

“The people who are with thee are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against Me, saying, ‘Mine own hand hath saved me;’” or in more modern English “You have too many men in your army. When I put the Midianites under your power, your soldiers may boast about their own strength. They may say that they have won the battle themselves.”

And in Judges 7 we’ll continue the story below:

³So make an announcement to your men. Tell them, ‘Anyone who is afraid may leave Mount Gilead and go back home.’”

At that time 22,000 men left Gideon and went back home, but 10,000 still remained.

⁴Then the Lord said to Gideon, “There are still too many men. Take the men down to the water, and I will test them for you there. If I say, ‘This man will go with you,’ he will go. But if I say, ‘That one will not go with you,’ then he will not go.”

⁵So Gideon led the men down to the water. There the Lord said to him, “Separate the men like this: Those who drink the water by using their tongue to lap it up like a dog will be in one group. And those who bend down to drink will be in the other group.”

⁶There were 300 men who used their hands to bring water to their mouth and lapped it like a dog does. All the other people bent down and drank the water. ⁷The Lord said to Gideon, “I will use the 300 men who lapped the water like a dog. I will use them to save you, and I will allow you to defeat the Midianites. Let the other men go home.”

⁸So Gideon sent the other men of Israel home. He kept the 300 men with him. Those 300 men kept the supplies and the trumpets of the other men who went home.

The Midianites were camped in the valley below Gideon’s camp. ⁹During the night the Lord spoke to Gideon and said, “Get up. I will let you defeat the Midianite army. Go down to their camp. ¹⁰If you are afraid to go alone, take your servant Purah with you. Go into the camp of the Midianites. ¹¹Listen to what they are saying. After that you will not be afraid to attack them.”

So Gideon and his servant Purah went down to the edge of the enemy camp. ¹²The Midianites, the Amalekites, and all the other people from the east were camped in that valley. There were so many people that they seemed like a swarm of locusts. It seemed like they had as many camels as there are grains of sand on the seashore.

¹³Gideon came to the enemy camp, and he heard a man talking. That man was telling his friend about a dream that he had. He was saying, “I dreamed that a round loaf of bread came rolling into the camp of the Midianites. That loaf of bread hit the tent so hard that the tent turned over and fell flat.”

¹⁴The man’s friend knew the meaning of the dream. He said, “Your dream can only have one meaning. Your dream is about that man from Israel. It is about Gideon son of Joash. It means that God will let Gideon defeat the whole army of Midian.”

¹⁵After he heard the men talking about the dream and what it meant, Gideon bowed down to God. Then Gideon went back to the camp of the Israelites and called out to the people, “Get up! The Lord will help us defeat the Midianites.” ¹⁶Then Gideon divided the 300 men into three groups. He gave each man a trumpet and an empty jar with a burning torch inside it. ¹⁷Then Gideon told the men, “Watch me and do what I do. Follow me to the edge of the enemy camp. When I get to the edge of the camp, do exactly what I do. ¹⁸You men surround the enemy camp. I and all the men with me will blow our trumpets. When we blow our trumpets, you blow your trumpets too. Then shout these words: ‘For the Lord and for Gideon!’”

¹⁹So Gideon and the 100 men with him went to the edge of the enemy camp. They came there just after the enemy changed guards. It was during the middle watch of the night. Gideon and his men blew their trumpets and smashed their jars. ²⁰Then all three groups of Gideon’s men blew their trumpets and smashed their jars. The men held the torches in their left hands and the trumpets in their right hands. As they blew their trumpets, they shouted, “A sword for the Lord and a sword for Gideon!”

²¹Gideon’s men stayed where they were. But inside the camp, the men of Midian began shouting and running away. ²²When Gideon’s 300 men blew their trumpets, the Lord caused the men of Midian to kill each other with their swords. The enemy army ran away to the city of Beth Shittah, which is toward the city of Zererah. They ran as far as the border of the city of Abel Meholah, which is near the city of Tabbath.

²³Then soldiers from the tribes of Naphtali, Asher, and all of Manasseh were told to chase the Midianites. ²⁴Gideon sent messengers through all the hill country of Ephraim. The messengers said, “Come down and attack the Midianites. Take control of the river as far as Beth Barah and the Jordan River. Do this before the Midianites get there.”

In Summary, God need only a few to do His Work over the many at times, contrary to human reasoning: hence, Christ said, for many are called but few chosen.

Posted in Scriptures Studies

First lesbian cleric elected archbishop in Britain

•August 3, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Reuters • July 31, 2025 ~ DailyMail

LONDON: Bishop Cherry Vann has been elected as archbishop of the Church in Wales, becoming the first woman and LGBTQ+ cleric appointed to lead any of Britain’s Anglican churches.

While the broader, international Anglican Communion has had openly gay bishops before, most notably Gene Robinson in the US, Vann will be the first lesbian to serve as archbishop globally.

The Church in Wales, which broke away from the Church of England in 1920, elected Vann to the post yesterday.

**“Sodom and Gomorrah” on the way to hell**, says Pravda

Vann was among the first women ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994 and later served as Archdeacon of Rochdale, in northern England, before moving to Wales.

She is affiliated with the Open Table Network, a Christian initiative that offers worship and support for LGBTQ+ people.

According to her official biography, Vann lives with her civil partner, Wendy, and the couple’s two dogs.

While the Church in Wales does not conduct same-sex marriages, it permits clergy to enter into civil partnerships.

Vann will replace Andrew John, who resigned in June following the publication of two internal church reports in May which raised concerns about governance and safeguarding.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that count darkness as light, and light as darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20

Posted in UK

Isaiah (Ch 19-20)

•August 2, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Of significance to Chapter 19 of Isaiah is the identification of the children of the Egyptians, the Pharaohs and all their wise men; who they are and what happened to them, and how they live their lives today.

Since Egypt in history had never experienced the Nile drying up, and perhaps including “a cruel lord and a fierce king shall rule over them,” this chapter could very likely be a prophecy.

Isaiah 19

¹ The burden of Egypt: Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt; and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.

— the burden of Egypt; a judgement of Egypt, prophecy for the end time, our time, a very grievous one, declaring many calamities that should come upon them. The Targum says, “the burden of the cup of cursing, to make the Egyptians drink;”

— behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, coming on light clouds as his chariots, in order to pass sentence, and shall come into Egypt; and the idols of Egypt shall tremble with terror at His presence and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it, namely, for fear of the impending punishment.

² “And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians; and they shall fight every one against his brother and every one against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.

— and the Lord will set the Egyptians against fellow Egyptians, inciting them to civil war and anarchy; and in civil wars, they shall fight every one against his brother and every one against his neighbor; city against city and kingdom against kingdom.

³ And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof; and they shall seek the idols and the charmers, and them that have familiar spirits and the wizards.

— and the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof, particularly to Osiris and Isis, to Apis, Latona and others; so that the courage of the Egyptians would, literally, “be emptied out” and God will destroy the counsel thereof, swallowing all their plans, so that the rulers would be helpless in the situation;

— and they shall seek their idols, appealing to them for help, and to the charmers, literally, “the murmurers, or mutterers,” those who professed to be in touch with the spirit world, magicians and conjurers and to them that have familiar spirits, and the spiritists of those days, and to their wizards;

⁴ And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord, and a fierce king shall rule over them,” saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts.

— and the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord, the reference being either to one of their own tyrannical rulers or to the Assyrian conquerors; and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord of hosts;

— three Pharaohs, namely, Psammetichus, Necho, and Hophra, oppressed the Egyptians so severely that the land never recovered from their tyranny.

⁵ And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.

— and the waters shall fail from the Red Sea, the waters from the Nile shall also be wasted and dried up, perhaps none flow from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam; this drying up would be a calamity for Egypt, since Egypt depended entirely upon the Nile for drinking and irrigation (see also Ezekiel 30:12 and Zechariah 10:11).

⁶ And they shall turn the rivers far away, and the brooks of defense shall be emptied and dried up; the reeds and flags shall wither.

— and they shall turn the rivers far away, rather, “and the rivers shall produce a stench,” being reduced to stagnating pools; and the brooks of defense shall be emptied and dried up,

— that is, the canals of the Nile, especially around its delta and in the irrigation systems, would carry no more water; the reeds and flags, principally the papyrus-plants depending altogether upon the moisture of the river, shall wither.

⁷ The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and every thing sown by the brooks shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.

— the paper-reeds by the brooks, literally, “the naked places,” the meadows on the Nile, by the mouth of the brooks, along the banks of the river, and everything sown by the brooks, the grain-fields along the very edge of the Nile, shall wither, be driven away, scattered by the wind in the form of dust, and be no more;

— since Egypt in history, had never experienced the Nile drying up, this could only been a prophecy; not just here, but perhaps the whole chapter, including “a cruel lord and a fierce king shall rule over them.”

⁸ The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast hook into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish.

— their fishermen shall also mourn, because they would be thrown out of a livelihood, and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish, since the rich fisheries of the Nile or its brooks would no longer exist.

⁹ Moreover they that work in fine flax and they that weave network shall be confounded.

— moreover, they that work in fine flax, fine linen cloth and yarn; and they that weave networks, white cotton cloth, shall be confounded, since neither flax nor cotton would grow, and this important industry would thus be made impossible.

¹⁰ And they shall be broken in the purposes thereof, all that make sluices and ponds for fish.

— and they shall be broken in the purposes thereof, all that make sluices and ponds for fish, literally, “and shall be her foundations ruins, all laborers for hire swamps of the soul,”

— that is, the upper castes of the nation would lose their power, and the poorest people of the country would give way to hopelessness and despair.

¹¹ Surely the princes of Zoan are fools; the counsel of the wise counselors of Pharaoh has become brutish. How say ye unto Pharaoh, “I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings”?

— surely the princes of Zoan (or Tanes as the Targum says), a city of Lower Egypt, known as “the royal city of the Pharaohs, “it was then the royal city and at one time the capital of the country, who claimed “we are the sons of wise men” are fools,

— the counsel of the wise counselors of Pharaoh is become brutish, the priestly counselors of the Egyptian king had lost all their wisdom;

— how say ye unto Pharaoh, I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings? In spite of the fact that they boasted their descent from wise and ancient counselors, even of royalty, they were unable to offer advice in the present crisis;

¹² Where are they? Where are thy wise men? And let them tell thee now, and let them know what the Lord of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt.

— where are they? where are their wise men? Who are their posterity? And, let them tell thee now, in a certain prophecy, and let them know what the Lord of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt, and it has deep consequences;

Where are thy wise men? Where are the Egipciens? Scattered around the world!

— today, Gypsies are known as Roma, but in Hebrew, their name is derived from the Egyptian city of Zoan, or Tanes, at one time the royal and capital of the country; and this is from Wikipedia (Romani people);

Hebrew: צוענים‎, romanized: Tzoanim. Derives either from the biblical Egyptian city of Zoan, or from the linguistic root צ־ע־נ‎, meaning “wander.”

The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Middle English gypcian, short for Egipcien.

Ezekiel 29:12 “and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations and will disperse them through the countries.”

— for more, see a study in Ezekiel 32; Who Are the Gypsies?

¹³ The princes of Zoan are become fools; the princes of Noph are deceived; they have also seduced Egypt, even they that are the stay of the tribes thereof.

— the princes of Zoan are fools in their counsels to Pharaoh; the princes of Noph, of Memphis, on the western bank of the Nile, capital of Lower Egypt, are deceived;

— they have also seduced Egypt, led its people astray by their false claims and foolish counsel, even they that are the stay of the tribes thereof, upon whom the people depended for leadership.

¹⁴The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof; and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.

— the Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst of the princes of Zoan, for the false wisdom of the leading castes acted like a spirit of intoxication; and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof;

— as a drunken man staggered in his vomit, that his head is quite giddy, and cannot walk upright, but staggers as he goes, and vomits as he staggers, and falls down, and is rolled in it;

— as the Targum says; the princes of Tanes have become foolish, the men of Memphis have erred; they caused the Egyptians, the lords of the provinces, to err.

¹⁵ Neither shall there be any work for Egypt, which the head or tail, branch or rush, may do.

— neither shall there be any work for Egypt which the head or tail, branch or rush may do, that is, no person in Egypt, whether of the ruling or of the serving class, whether lofty or humble, will be able to do anything to stop the general destruction;

— the Targum interprets the whole of their chief men thus, “and the Egyptians shall have no king to reign, nor prince, noble, governor, or ruler.”

¹⁶ In that day shall Egypt be like unto women; and it shall be afraid and fear, because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts, which He shaketh over it.

— in that day shall Egypt be like unto women, weak and feeble; fearful and timorous, even their military force; and devoid of wisdom, even their princes and nobles: on account of the greater timidity which usually characterizes the weaker sex;

— and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts which he shakes over it, his judgements and punishments when he lifts up his rod, and holds it over a people, thus being scattered by means of the invaders of Egypt.

¹⁷ And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt; every one that maketh mention thereof shall be afraid in himself, because of the counsel of the Lord of hosts, which He hath determined against it.

— and the judgements of God from the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt, that might be what they would expect? either because the mere mention of the name struck terror to their hearts, or because Judah was now allied with Assyria against the king of Egypt;

— every one that makes mention thereof, namely, of Judah, shall be afraid in himself because of the judgement of the Lord of hosts which he hath determined against it, for they all dreaded the punishment which they felt was now inevitable.

¹⁸ In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called the City of Destruction.

— in that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the Hebrew language and accept the true, revealed religion, and swear to the Lord of hosts, pledging themselves to him with a sacred oath;

— one shall be called the City of Destruction, literally, “Ir-ha-heres,” which may have been the city of the sun, or Heliopolis. The prophecy of Jeremiah 43:13, also means to point to the destruction of this or a similar city.

¹⁹ In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord.

— in that day shall there be a reference to the worship of the God of Judah in Egypt during the Millennium with a foothold which the true religion gained in Egypt at a very early date of a new era;

— the “Altar to Jehovah in the Land of Egypt” (Isaiah 19:19). This Is Appendix 81 from The Companion Bible; perhaps a fulfillment of this prophecy took place in 1 BC is recorded by Josephus (Antiquities xiii.3.1-3;6): Josephus says –

“Onias asked permission from Ptolemy and Cleopatra to build a temple in Egypt like that at Jerusalem, and to appoint for it priests and Levites of his own Nation. This he devised, relying chiefly on the prophet Isaiah, who, 600 years before predicted that a temple must be builded in Egypt by a Jew to the supreme God.”

²⁰ And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and He shall send them a savior and a great one, and He shall deliver them.

— and the altar shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt, so that their contemporaries could see the evidence of their worship and their descendants have this proof of their religion;

— for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a savior, and a great one, a mighty warrior, and he shall deliver them, whose coming was a deliverance to Egypt in various ways.

²¹ And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day and shall do sacrifice and oblation; yea, they shall vow a vow unto the Lord and perform it.

— and the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day, namely, when Yehovah would visit Egypt in judgement and cause the truth to be proclaimed to its people, and shall do sacrifice and oblation, perform the acts of true worship to the only God;

— yea, they shall vow a vow unto the Lord and perform it, pledging themselves to Yehovah and his service.

²² And the Lord shall smite Egypt; He shall smite and heal it; and they shall return even to the Lord, and He shall be entreated by them and shall heal them.

— and the Lord shall smite Egypt, in order to bring its people to repentance; for his purpose is always one of redemption; and they shall return even to the Lord, his punishment having taken the right effect, and he shall be entreated of them and shall heal them. Cf Leviticus 26:44; Deuteronomy 32:36.

²³ In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.

— in that day in the Millennium there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, permitting free and friendly communication, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians, proselytes and Jews from both countries meeting at Jerusalem and elsewhere for the worship of of the true God, Yehovah.

²⁴ In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land,

— in the Millennium there shall Israel be at peace with Egypt and with Assyria, the believers of the three countries being joined by the one religion, even a blessing in the midst of the land, since blessings would go forth from them to the inhabitants of other countries all over the world;

²⁵ whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, “Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.”

— whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt, my people, admitted to all the spiritual privileges formerly held by Israel alone, and Assyria, the work of my hands,

— his workmanship in the spiritual sense, and Israel, mine inheritance, still designated thus as the actual son of the Kingdom of God and head of his kingdom. Altogether, they set a splendid example of the spread of the true religion under the merciful direction of God during the Millennium.

Isaiah 20

In context, as chapter 20 is a continuation of chapter 19, where in verses 5-7 the sea and river of Egypt would dry up; and since Egypt in history, had never experienced the Nile drying up, this could only been a prophecy; not just the sea and rivers drying up, but in 20:4 “a cruel lord and a fierce king shall rule over them.”

Also, a forty years of desolation in the book of Ezekiel remains to be fulfilled:

“And I will make the land of Egypt desolate in the midst of the countries that are desolate, and her cities among the cities that are laid waste shall be desolate forty years; and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations and will disperse them through” Ezekiel 29:12

“‘Yet thus saith the Lord God: At the end of forty years will I gather the Egyptians from the people whither they were scattered.” Ezekiel 29:13

¹ In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him), and fought against Ashdod and took it,

— in the year 711 BC that Tartan, the commander of the Assyrian armies, II Kings 18:17, came unto Ashdod, one of the cities of Philistia which had revolted against the Assyrian supremacy and fought against Ashdod, and took it,

² at the same time spoke the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, “Go, and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot.” And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.

— the Lord spoke to Isaiah, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth, the loose your outer garment of coarse cloth which Isaiah wore, from off thy loins and put off thy shoe from thy foot;

— and Isaiah did so, walking almost naked, that is, with only his tunic or shirt-like garment, and barefoot, presenting the appearance of one who bad been robbed or spoiled, stripped of his possessions, like a captive of war.

³ And the Lord said, “As My servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia,

— and the Lord said, As my servant Isaiah hath walked almost naked and barefoot three years, to bring home with great emphasis the lesson which the Lord wished to convey, for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia,

⁴ so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt.

— so shall a prophesied “king of Assyria” come and lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, as foretold by the symbolic act of Isaiah, even with their buttocks uncovered, as a sign of extreme disgrace, II Samuel 10:4-5, to the shame of Egypt.

⁵ And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation and of Egypt their glory.

— and they, the inhabitants of Palestine, also the Jews, who looked to Egypt as a possible ally against Assyria, shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia, their expectation, finding themselves disappointed in their hopes of help from this quarter, and of Egypt, their glory, of whose power they had boasted and on whose strength they had relied.

⁶ And the inhabitants of this isle shall say in that day, ‘Behold, such is our expectation wherever we flee for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria! And how shall we escape?’”

— and the inhabitants of this isle, of the coastal country along the Mediterranean, including Philistia, Phenicia, and the kingdom of Judah, shall say in that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we flee for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria, that is, such was the lot of those to whom they looked for help and deliverance from the power of Assyria;

— and how shall we escape? The nation which they considered strong and mighty had proved itself powerless against the common enemy; how, then, could the weaker states hope to escape?

Posted in Isaiah

EU capitulates to Trump

•August 1, 2025 • Leave a Comment

A “Dark Day” for Europe as the EU capitulates to Trump in a vassal-state trade deal.

Pact will help restore US unipolar hegemony via lopsided trade deals as it sets its sights on Americas and Asia next

AsiaTimes • July 28, 2025 ~ CNN

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed to a framework deal with the US whereby the EU will be charged 15% tariffs on most imports, commit to purchasing US$750 billion in US energy exports and invest $600 billion in the US economy, some of which will be military purchases.

US tariffs on EU steel and aluminum exports will remain at 50% while the EU agreed not to tariff the US at all. The alternative to this lopsided arrangement was for Trump to impose his threatened 30% tariffs by August 1.

The EU’s macroeconomic strength was greatly weakened over the past 3.5 years as a result of the anti-Russian sanctions that it imposed in solidarity with the US on what had hitherto been its cheapest and most reliable energy supplier.

It was therefore already at a critical disadvantage in any prospective trade war. The EU’s failure to reach a major trade deal with China since Trump’s return to office, evident during their most recent summit late last week, made Sunday’s outcome a fait accompli in hindsight.

The end result is that the EU just subordinated itself as the US’s largest-ever vassal state. The US’s 15% tariffs on most imports will reduce EU production and profits, thus making a recession more likely.

The bloc’s commitment to purchasing more expensive US energy will become more onerous in that event. Likewise, its pledge to buy more US arms will undermine the “ReArm Europe Plan,” with the combined effect of the aforesaid concessions further ceding the EU’s already reduced sovereignty to the US.

Trump lands another big win with EU trade deal, but he can’t dodge the Epstein saga

This, in turn, can embolden the US to press for better terms in its ongoing trade negotiations with other countries. On the North American front, Trump envisages reasserting the US’ hegemony over Canada and Mexico via economic means, which can enable him to more easily expand “Fortress America” southward.

If he succeeds in subordinating Brazil, then everything between it and Mexico will naturally fall in line. This series of deals, along with last week’s one with Japan, would bolster Trump’s hand with China and India.

He ideally hopes to replicate his Japanese and European successes with those two Asian anchors of BRICS, which together represent around a third of humanity, but it can’t be taken for granted that he will.

Trump’s best chance of coercing them into similarly lopsided arrangements requires him to place the US in the most advantageous geo-economic position possible during their talks; hence, the need to rapidly build “Fortress America” through a series of trade deals, and then prove that his tariff threats aren’t bluffs.

As explained in this analysis, this variable and the US’s Kissingerian triangulation policy most significantly determine the future of their trade talks. If he fails, then Trump might not impose 100% tariffs on China and/or India, but some would still be expected.

Nevertheless, with Japan, the EU and likely “Fortress America” on his side, this “Global West” could insulate the US from some of the consequences.

The grand strategic importance of the EU subordinating itself as the US’s largest-ever vassal state is therefore that it places the US on the path of restoring its unipolar hegemony via sequential trade deals as it likely sets its sights on the Americas next before finally taking on Asia.

There’s no guarantee that the US will succeed, and a series of lopsided trade deals with major economies would only partially restore US-led unipolarity, but Trump’s moves still represent a possibly existential threat to multipolarity.

Posted in Europe, US

Isaiah (Ch 17-18)

•July 31, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

Isaiah 17

¹ The burden of Damascus: “Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap. — Damascus is the same city today, the capital of Syria;

— the Targum says, “the burden of the cup of cursing to give Damascus to drink.”

² The cities of Aroer are forsaken; they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.

— Aroer was a city by the river Arnon, on the borders of Moab and Ammon, their inhabitants of these Syrian cities being slain or carried captive or obliged to flee;

— the Syrian civil war started on March 15, 2011 as part of the wider Arab Spring protests which led to much destruction of the country; many Syrians were forced to flee to Turkey or other neighbouring countries or even to Europe as refugees.

³ The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus and the remnant of Syria; they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel,” saith the Lord of hosts.

— Ephraim, including the ten tribes, now in confederacy with the Syrians, whose metropolis or fortress was Samaria, which seems to be intended here; and should be destroyed, at least taken out of the hands of the Israelites, and they be carried captive by Shalmaneser king of Assyria;

— “the fortress also shall cease from Ephraim;” today, the southern border of the United States is extremely porous.

For more about the South, a prophecy of Esau or Edom, see Obadiah

Or, another South, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

⁴ “And in that day it shall come to pass that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean.

— and in that day of judgement, that the glory of Jacob shall be diminished; the same with Ephraim and Israel, the ten tribes, their glory turns into shame;

— in the multitude of their cities, and the inhabitants of them; but now would be thinned, by the vast numbers that should be killed by the Sword, famine or pandemic, with a remnant carried away as captives:

— second; that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin; could this be speaking of Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline Years of iniquity for Israel/Judah;

— and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean: like a man becoming a skeleton, and reduced to skin and bones: the meaning is, that all their health, wealth and riches should be taken away; so the Targum says “and the riches of his glory shall be carried away.”

⁵ And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn and reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the Valley of Rephaim.

— and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the Valley of Rephaim, the fertile plain southwest of Jerusalem; the picture is that of a farmer going into a field of grain and gathering an armful of stalks with his left hand, while he cuts off the grain below with a sickle in his right hand.

⁶ Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof,” saith the Lord God of Israel.

— yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it; that is, a remnant left in the land of Israel, as the shaking of an olive-tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the Lord God of Israel;

— in harvesting olives, the trees were first shaken, whereupon a few berries within reach were knocked down with sticks, but those which hung in the tree-tops, beyond reach, remained hanging. Thus only a few poor inhabitants would be left as remnant in Israel.

⁷ At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect for the Holy One of Israel.

— at that day shall a man look to his Maker, instead of trusting in fortresses and in the strength of man’s arm, as heretofore, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel, for the small remnant of Israel and also of Judah shall return to the true God and his worship;

— that is, this indicates that until ‘that day’ comes both the house of Israel and the house of Judah have very little ‘respect’ for the Holy One of Israel; pretending Christians have no idea of what keeping the law and what judgement truly are; while the Orthodox Jews has no clue that the Scriptures have numerous references to the Son scattered all over the Scriptures they are blinded to.

Assyrian army besieging Lachish, an ancient city in Judah

⁸ And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the Asherah poles or the sun images.

— and the house of Jacob shall not look to their altars, the work of mere hands, which the children of Israel had formerly devoted to idolatry;

— neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the groves, the Asherah-idols picturing one of the Semitic goddesses, very often identified with Venus, or the images, those of Baal, the sun-god, so that all the hosts of heaven were included in this idol-worship. Cf II Kings 21:7; II Kings 23:5.

⁹ In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel; and there shall be desolation.

— in that day shall his strong cities, especially those of Ephraim, be “like the forsaken places in the forests and mountain summits,” having fled from before the enemy, or being slain or carried captive;

— like a bough of a tree, that is forsaken stripped of its leaves, and an uppermost branch of a tree that is dead and dry, and has nothing on it; becoming ruin strongholds in remote parts of the country;

— which they left because of the children of Israel, and there shall be desolation, all the great fortresses and factories of Israel sharing the fate of antiquated castles;

— the prophet now addresses Ephraim directly: that is, the United States, be as a forsaken bough and an uppermost branch, like Cleveland, Newark, Pittsburgh, Detroit and many other sunset cities all along the rust belt, all shall be a desolation.

¹⁰ Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation and hast not been mindful of the Rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set them with strange slips.

— because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, the only one who can bring true redemption, and hast not been mindful of the Rock of thy strength, Yehovah being the one true Rock of Ages, Deuteronomy 32:15-18;

— therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants and shalt set it with strange slips; with strange slip, that is, with strange foreign gods and doctrines, such as are brought from some neighbouring natives:

Astarte from the Egyptians, who earlier learned from the Canaanites and the Phoenicians;

Mithra from the Persian which are also set with strange slips, strange concepts which permeate the house of Israel today.

¹¹ In that day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish; but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.

— in the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow; the northern kingdom, on the whole, had left the true God that its people had, literally, “planted plantings of pleasantness,” had taken up the various heathen cults and had then planted a strange vine in their own garden, namely, by becoming allies of surrounding pagan kings;

— the new plant had then been carefully fenced in, namely, by shrewd political schemes, so that the strange plant grew to maturity very rapidly, like a hothouse plant, for the alliance brought about a plan to attack Judah;

— but the whole scheme was frustrated by the action of the Almighty, who promptly reserved the garden of Ephraim as a heap, heaped up in the harvest, in the day of grief and a day of desperate sorrow.

¹² Woe to the multitude of many people, who make a noise like the noise of the seas, and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!

— woe to the multitude of many nations that teamed up with the Assyrian army under Sennacherib, which consisted of armies from many nations, with the turmoil and tumult of their advance;

— which make a noise like the noise of the roaring seas; the rattling of their armour and chariot wheels and prancing of their horses; and to the hectoring, blustering that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!

— the enemies of Israel, who are also types of the enemies of God’s Kingdom, are pictured as being in a state of seething unrest, anxiously striving to harm Lord’s people.

¹³ The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters; but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.

— the Assyrian army from various nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters, as waves after more tsunami waves; but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, rather, it, the threatening tide of hostility;

— and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, like the open threshing-floors of farmers, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind, or whirling dust or particles of straw from the threshing-floor, as the wind picks them up and flings them away.

¹⁴ And behold, at eventide, trouble; and before the morning, he is no more. This is the portion of them that despoil us, and the lot of them that rob us.

— at the evening or night, horror falling upon the approaching enemies; even before the day dawns, they are destroyed. This is the portion of them that spoil Israel, and the lot of them that rob them. Thus the Lord will finally carry out his sentence of punishment upon all enemies of his Kingdom and its work.

Isaiah 18

¹ Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, — or land beyond the rivers of Egypt;

— the Targum says, “Woe to the land beyond the rivers of India, to which they come in ships from a far country, whose sails are stretched out, as an eagle that flies with its wings;”

² that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, “Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled!”

— that send ambassadors by the Red Sea, traversing the waters of that far country, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, light and fleet boats made of the papyrus-reed, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, rather, extended far and polished, gleaming, or shining;

— to a people terrible from their beginning, a handsome, ruling, and victorious people, one of great hidden beauty and power; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled;

— and treading under foot, under the command some kings beyond Ethiopia, whose rule often bordered upon oppression, and whose land was carried down the sea lanes in the annual inundations; full of excitement on account of making various invasions to spoil other nations.

³ All ye inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when He bloweth a trumpet, hear ye.

— all ye inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth, called upon, either by the Lord, or rather by the prophet, to be eye and ear witnesses of the judgement that should be inflicted upon the above nation;

— see ye, always on the lookout for important events, when he lifts up an ensign on the mountains, when one does this, when this happens; and when he blows a trumpet, hear ye, the trumpet sounding as an alarm of war; all the people concerned should be watching, for something of great event will happen.

⁴ For so the Lord said unto me: “I will take My rest, and I will consider in My dwelling place, like a clear heat upon herbs and like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”

— for the Lord said unto me, I will take my rest and consider in my dwelling-place, for though the Lord may seem sometimes to take no notice of what is done on earth, yet he sees and knows all things, who works all things after the counsel of his own will;

— It seems that the Lord is letting things go on as they please, that he is not actively interested in the affairs of the world; but it only seems so to such as do not know him;

— the Targum says, “blessings and consolations will I bring to them quickly, when the heat is intense through the heat of the sun, then I will be to them a cloud of dew as in the heat of harvest.”

⁵ For before the harvest, when the bud is perfect and the sour grape is ripening in the flower, He shall both cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks, and take away and cut down the branches.

— for before the harvest, when the bud is perfect, after the blossom has withered, and the sour grape is ripening in the flower, while the fruit is slowly maturing, he shall both cut off the sprigs with pruning-hooks and take away and cut down the branches, then the Lord would overthrow their present plans and prevent them from forming any future ones.

⁶ They shall be left together for the fowls of the mountains and to the beasts of the earth; and the fowls shall summer upon them, and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them.

— they shall be left together unto the fowls of the mountains, that is, both sprigs and branches; with the fruit in them, which when unripe, are disregarded by men, and fed upon to birds and beasts;

— the birds of prey feeding on their carcasses, and to the beasts of the earth, to the foxes, hyenas, and jackals; and the fowls shall summer upon them, and all the beasts of the earth shall feast upon them, finding abundance of food the year around on the field of battle.

⁷ In that time shall a present be brought unto the Lord of hosts of a people scattered and peeled, and from a people terrible from their beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden under foot, whose land the rivers have spoiled—to the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, at Mount Zion.

— in that time, before or at the beginning of the Millennium, shall the present, namely, a tribute or sacrificial gift, be brought unto the Lord of hosts, the true God;

— of a people scattered and peeled and from a people terrible from their beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden under foot, whose land the rivers have spoiled, to the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, at Mount Zion, the Kingdom of God;

— in the very midst of a prophecy describing the punishment meted out by God we have a Messianic promise; even the Kingdom of God would gain a foothold in Ethiopia and Egypt, described Isaiah 18:2 as here, who being converted, shall stretch out their hands to God, submit unto him and will flourish there for centuries.

Posted in Isaiah

China sharpening its anti-satellite laser edge

•July 30, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Crystal clear: China sharpening its anti-satellite laser edge

AsiaTimes by Gabriel Hondrada • July 27, 2025

China is using crystals to enhance the power of satellite-destroying lasers in a daring attempt to blind US satellites and gain strategic superiority in space warfare. This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Chinese scientists have revealed the world’s largest barium gallium selenide (BGSe) crystal.

The 60-millimeter-diameter synthetic crystal, developed by a team led by Professor Wu Haixin at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, can reputedly convert short-wave infrared into long-range mid- to far-infrared beams while withstanding laser intensities of up to 550 megawatts per square centimeter. That’s an order of magnitude greater than current military-grade crystals.

The milestone addresses a long-standing challenge in laser weaponry: self-inflicted damage caused by high-power output, which was notably demonstrated by the US Navy’s unsuccessful 1997 MIRACL satellite test.

First discovered in 2010, BGSe initially stunned global researchers but proved difficult to scale outside China. Wu’s team achieved success through meticulous manufacturing—vacuum-sealing ultra-pure materials, month-long crystal growth in dual-zone furnaces, defect-eliminating annealing and precision polishing.

The effort aligns with China’s accelerated pursuit of laser weapons, driven by strategic concerns over Starlink’s military applications and space-based assets.

While intended for military use, the crystal also holds promise for infrared sensors, missile tracking and medical imaging. Since 2020, the material has been integrated into advanced R&D programs, highlighting China’s growing capabilities in laser warfare and advanced photonic materials.

This development highlights China’s effort to weaken US space dominance across all orbital regimes, pushing a shift toward scalable, deniable, layered counterspace tactics, system confrontation doctrines and non-kinetic warfare. These are enabled by US deterrent gaps marked by ambiguous signaling, reliance on resilience denial and limited punishment options.

China is also investing heavily in operational infrastructure to support these technological advances. Asia Times has previously reported on its secretive Korla and Bohu sites in Xinjiang, which are key parts of its ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) program aimed at dazzling or disabling foreign satellites to conceal sensitive military assets.

Satellite imagery from BlackSky reveals that Korla hosts large laser systems in retractable-roof hangars that activate when foreign imaging satellites are overhead. The Bohu site reportedly contains fixed and mobile truck-mounted lasers for satellite ranging and dazzling.

US officials have taken notice. General Bradley Saltzman mentioned in an April 2025 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USSC) hearing that China’s ground-based lasers are intended to “blind and deafen” US forces by targeting critical space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets.

Independent analysts have weighed the operational implications of such a shift. While these systems are currently effective against satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Chinese research suggests aspirations to extend engagement ranges to Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO), potentially threatening navigation and communication assets, Victoria Samson and Laetitia Cesari mention in a June 2025 Secure World Foundation (SWF) report.

That ambition is raised in other assessments. Jonas Berge and Henrik Hiim mention in an August 2024 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Strategic Studies that Chinese analysts see the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) as key asymmetric vulnerabilities and potential counterspace targets, but for distinct reasons.

According to Berge and Hiim, GPS, composed of satellites in MEO, underpins US precision warfare and is viewed as ripe for soft-kill attacks—particularly jamming and cyber operations—which are low-risk, rapidly reversible and hard to attribute. In contrast, they say SBIRS satellites in GEO are central to the US nuclear early warning system.

They note that while China seeks the ability to hold SBIRS at risk to ensure its second-strike capability, it acknowledges that attacking it could trigger nuclear escalation.

However, China may face considerable challenges in countering modern space architectures in practice. Howard Wang and other writers mention in a March 2025 RAND report that Chinese military writings acknowledge the “whack-a-mole” dilemma posed by resilient LEO satellite constellations, noting that disabling a proliferated constellation demands neutralizing dozens or hundreds of satellites to achieve the same operational effect as targeting a single high-value system.

Wang and others say that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) analysts advocate a multifaceted counterstrategy combining electronic warfare, cyberattacks and directed-energy weapons such as ground-based lasers. They note that these non-kinetic tools are viewed as scalable, cost-effective and deniable means to degrade satellite function en masse without overt escalation.

According to Wang and others, this integrated approach reflects China’s shift toward more adaptive and asymmetric counterspace operations aimed at overwhelming resilient US space architectures.

The doctrinal logic behind this approach has been thoroughly studied. Mark Cozad and other writers mention in a 2022 RAND report that China’s ground-based ASAT lasers and other such weapons are tools that directly support its doctrines of systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare.

According to Cozad and others, systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare are foundational to China’s military thinking, viewing future conflict as contests between rival operational systems rather than force-on-force engagements.

They mention that systems confrontation emphasizes the interdependence of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) components, where paralyzing key nodes—particularly space-based ISR—can unravel an adversary’s operational cohesion.

Yet while China appears to be moving aggressively, the US posture may be enabling this momentum. Dennis Rice argues in a 2023 Air University paper that the US faces serious deterrence gaps in space, particularly against China. Rice says that the US’s overemphasis on denial by resilience fails to evoke the fear necessary for deterrence by punishment, weakening its ability to dissuade adversaries.

He notes that ambiguity in US signaling—balancing militarization with restraint—can make it appear risk-averse, especially given its greater reliance on space assets. Such a perceived vulnerability, he says, could incentivize China to strike first. He adds that deterrence by denial alone is insufficient, advocating for a complementary posture that includes credible, observable threats to impose costs.

Other observers of Chinese military space doctrine echo this concern. Kevin Pollpeter and other writers argue in a May 2025 China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) report that deterring China from attacking US space assets is increasingly difficult due to the unique characteristics of the space domain and the latter’s strategic worldview of it as a “new commanding height of war.”

Pollpeter and others identify ten key factors that affect deterrence but find that only two—the global military balance and China’s growing dependence on space—favor the US. They note that most other factors, including the offense-dominant nature of space, ambiguous signaling, asymmetric space reliance and weak international norms, undermine effective deterrence.

Overall, these trends suggest that China’s advancements in directed-energy weapons—driven by breakthroughs like the BGSe crystal—are part of a strategic plan rather than isolated successes. If the US doesn’t respond with a stronger, more coordinated deterrent, it could find itself increasingly at a disadvantage in a domain it has long dominated.

China’s Anti-Drone Microwave to Zap US Drones

Posted in China, Tech Race '25-26, US

Galaxies are much bigger than we thought

•July 29, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Galaxies are much bigger than we thought, study reveals

Fred Schwaller • July 2025

“You may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store,” wrote Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Space is big. We live on one tiny planet orbiting a star that’s tucked away in the far reaches of a galaxy — just one galaxy of around 2 trillion in the known universe. Space is really really big.

Planet Earth is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way (called the Orion Arm) which lies about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy.

We know how big the Earth is — 12,756 kilometers (7,926 miles) across. And we know how big our sun is too — about 1,391,000 kilometers (864,400 miles) across.

But how big is the Milky Way? Until now, the true size of galaxies has remained a mystery.

Galaxies are much bigger than we thought

A new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, has found that galaxies are far bigger than originally thought, perhaps several times bigger.

The spiraled structure of the galaxy we know is only the smaller core of the galaxy. For the Milky Way, this is about 100,000 light-years across.

The starlight from stars nestled in the spiral arms extend to around 7,800 light-years into deep space, which was thought to be where a galaxy ended and deep space began.

The study has revealed that large “halos” of gas extend from the visible spirals of star light far out into deep space.

These gas halos only became visible to astronomers with new imaging techniques. The methods enabled astronomers to detect galaxy gas halos over 100,000 light years into deep space, vastly increasing our estimations of how big galaxies are.

Kissing galaxies

In fact, the halos of gas from galaxies extend so far into deep space that galaxies actually interact with each other.

The findings suggest that our Milky Way is likely interacting with our closest neighbor, Andromeda — around 2.5 million light years away, according to Nikole Nielsen, lead author of the paper, and a researcher with Swinburne University, Australia.

“We’re now seeing where the galaxy’s influence stops, the transition where it becomes part of more of what’s surrounding the galaxy, and, eventually, where it joins the wider cosmic web and other galaxies. These are all usually fuzzy boundaries,” said Nielsen in a press statement.

Scientists say the discovery will help to understand one of the biggest questions in astronomy: how do galaxies evolve?

Studying the gas halos from different types of galaxies — ones that form stars, or those that don’t form stars any longer — will help to understand how galaxies build mass over time, and what impact galaxies have on each another when they interact.

For more, see Our Human Potentials

Posted in Scriptures Studies

Isaiah (Ch 15-16)

•July 28, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Isaiah 15-16 form a whole and contain “the burden of Moab.” But a more complete description of the judgement on Moab can be found in Jeremiah 48 (plus Ammon, Moab & Edom in Ezekiel 25); where there is a restoration for Moab in the end times but that remnant shall remain small and feeble.

Moab is located east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. It corresponds to the present-day country of Jordan. It is a people related to Israel, for Lot, the ancestor of Moab, was a nephew of Abraham.

Who are the Moabites? The descendants of Moab also known as the Moabites had an extensive history dealing with the Israelites. Moab’s beginning was part of Israel’s story but most of the time wasn’t in a good way and is today identified as modern-day Jordan.

Isaiah 15

¹ The burden of Moab: Because in the night Ar of Moab is laid waste and brought to silence, because in the night Kir of Moab is laid waste and brought to silence,

— the burden of Moab, a heavy, grievous prophecy, the nation descended from the elder daughter of Lot, occupying the country southeast of the Dead Sea; the Targum says, “the burden of the cup of cursing, to give Moab to drink.”

² he is gone up to Bajith and to Dibon, the high places, to weep. Moab shall howl over Nebo and over Medeba; on all their heads shall be baldness and every beard cut off.

— he, the king or people of Moab, standing collectively for all the inhabitants of Moab, is gone up to Bajith, to the house of the temple, and to Dibon, a city not far from the Arnon;

— the high places, to weep, before the altars of their idols. Moab shall howl over Nebo and over Medeba, rather, “on Nebo and Medeba of Moab howling is going on;” for in these two towns in the hills toward the west they had sanctuaries. On their heads shall all be baldness and every beard cut off, mutilated, as a sign of deep mourning, Leviticus 21:5.

³ In their streets they shall gird themselves with sackcloth; on the tops of their houses and in their streets every one shall howl, weeping abundantly.

— in their streets they shall gird themselves with sackcloth as well as a token of mourning for the dead thus exhibiting their grief openly; on the tops of their houses, which are flat in the Orient, and in their streets every one shall howl, weeping abundantly, being dissolved in tears.

⁴ And Heshbon shall cry, and Elealeh; their voice shall be heard even unto Jahaz; therefore the armed soldiers of Moab shall cry out; his life shall be grievous unto him.

— and Heshbon, a former Amorite city, but regarded as belonging to Moab, shall cry; the armed soldiers of Moab shall cry out, impelled thereto by the greatness of the horror; his life shall be grievous unto him, literally, “his soul trembles for him,” the entire nation being shaken by the bitterness of the punishment.

⁵ “My heart shall cry out for Moab; his fugitives shall flee unto Zoar, a heifer of three years old; for by the mounting up of Luhith with weeping shall they go up; for in the way of Horonaim they shall raise up a cry of destruction.

— the prophet Isaiah shall cry out for Moab; his fugitives shall flee unto Zoar, that is, the locks or fortified boundaries of Moab reached as far as Zoar, the city of Lot’s refuge, on the peninsula extending into the southeastern end of the Dead Sea.

⁶ For the waters of Nimrim shall be desolate; for the hay is withered away, the grass faileth, there is no green thing.

— for Nimrim shall be desolate; for the hay is withered away, with no water the grass failed, there is no green thing, the entire land being devastated, the vegetation drying up for want of care, and the crops apparently even burned up by the foes.

⁷ Therefore the abundance they have gotten, and that which they have laid up shall they carry away to the Brook of the Willows.

— therefore, whatever the Moabites had hoarded; shall they carry away to the brook of the willows, a small stream on their southern boundary, which the Moabite fugitives forded in order to find refuge with the people of Idumea.

⁸ For the cry is gone round about the borders of Moab; the howling thereof unto Eglaim and the howling thereof unto Beerelim.

— the howling thereof unto Eglaim, a town near the Dead Sea, and the howling thereof unto Beer-elim, in northeastern Moabitis, that is, the cry of distress reaches from one end of the country to the other.

⁹ For the waters of Dimon shall be full of blood; for I will bring more upon Dimon, lions upon him that escapeth from Moab and upon the remnant of the land.”

— for the waters shall be full of blood; for I will bring more further misfortune upon Dimon, lions upon him that escapeth of Moab, and upon the remnant of the land, the reference being either to another enemy among foreign nations;

— or to wild animals whom the Lord would send to complete the devastation of the land; the Targum says, “a king shall ascend with his army, and so spoil the remainder of their land.”

Isaiah 16

¹ Send ye the lamb to the ruler of the land, from Sela to the wilderness, unto the mount of the daughter of Zion. — the context is still around the land of Moab, or Edom;

— send ye the lamb as tribute which started when David conquered them from the land of Moab to the land from Sela to the wilderness, unto the mount of the daughter of Zion;

— Moab, having found refuge in Petra of Idumea, was admonished to send its tribute of lambs to the ruler of the land, to the king reigning at Jerusalem, the road to this capital, whose most important section was Mount Zion, leading through the wilderness south and west of the Dead Sea;

— Sela, or Petra; the capital of Idumea; also the capital of the Nabatheans. To submit to Judah, in both the physical and the spiritual sense, was Moab’s only hope.

² For it shall be that as a wandering bird cast out of the nest, so the daughters of Moab shall be at the fords of Arnon.

— for it shall be that, as a wandering bird cast out of the nest, like birds aimlessly fluttering, like a nest whose occupants have suddenly been turned out; or as a bird that has forsaken its nest;

— so the daughters of Moab shall be at the fords of Arnon; for here, at the boundary of their land, they assemble in huddled bands, looking for help and deliverance.

³ “Take counsel, execute judgement; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth.

— take counsel to decide what is just and right; to decide paying tribute to the king of Judah, execute judgement, planning deliverance instead of oppression, as heretofore; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday;

— hide the outcasts, those who are driven from home as refugees; such as were driven out of their land through the fury and persecution of the enemy, receive and conceal, as Rahab did the spies: betray not him that wandered, betraying him not into the hands of the enemies.

⁴ Let Mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them from the face of the despoiler; for the extortioner is at an end, the despoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.

— let my outcasts or refugees dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler, such as when first the Assyrian monarchs and later king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to ravage Judea, thus giving shelter to all who might become fugitives from Judah in the uncertain circumstances at that time;

— for the extortioner is at an end, the great world-power which made it a practice to destroy and tread under foot was itself overcome, the spoiler ceaseth, destruction is no longer to be found, the oppressors are consumed out of the land;

— Jerusalem was delivered from the Assyrian affliction, which represented, at the same time, all the forces of evil arrayed against the Chosen people.

⁵ And in mercy shall the throne be established; and He shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David, judging and seeking judgement and hastening righteousness.”

— and in mercy shall the throne, that of Judah of the Messiah, be established, prepared and confirmed; and he, the Messiah himself, shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David;

— one in whom the truth of the Lord’s promise is fulfilled, one who himself is the Truth, judging, and seeking judgement, and hasting righteousness for those are the principles of his government;

— there is only one way for Moab to escape the threatening everlasting Judgement, and that is by acknowledging and throwing itself upon the mercy of this King.

⁶ We have heard of the pride of Moab—he is very proud” even of his haughtiness and his pride and his wrath; but his lies shall not be so.

— the nation of Israel has heard of the pride of Moab, its conceit and foolish dependence upon its own strength, Jeremiah 48:14-29; he is very proud; even of his haughtiness and his pride and his wrath, his senseless anger against Israel; but his lies shall not be so, his false boasts would soon be shown to be vain.

⁷ Therefore shall Moab howl for Moab, every one shall howl; for the foundations of Kirhareseth shall ye mourn; surely they are stricken.

— therefore one Moabite shall mourn for another, lamenting its own ruin; every one shall howl; for the foundations of Kir-hareseth, the ruins of its strongest fortress, shall ye mourn, for this citadel of brick would be razed;

— surely they are stricken, rather, the people of Moab, utterly stricken by this calamity, would lament.

⁸ For the fields of Heshbon languish, and the vine of Sibmah; the lords of the heathen have broken down the principal plants thereof. They are come even unto Jazer; they wandered through the wilderness; her branches are stretched out; they are gone over the sea.

— for the fields of Heshbon languish and the vine of Sibmah, their richest products being ruined by the invaders; all the fine plants of the vine whose culture was so extensively carried on in this country; they, namely, the grape-vines in all parts of the country, all were appointed for destruction.

⁹ Therefore I will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of Sibmah; I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh, for upon thy summer fruits and upon thy harvest the shouting has fallen.

— therefore Isaiah will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of Sibmah, the prophet’s tears joining in pity and in lament with those of the rich vineyards of Moab;

— Isaiah will water them with tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh, weeping on account of the hardness of heart shown to the Moabites, which resulted in such a terrible punishment; for the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest is fallen.

¹⁰ And gladness is taken away and joy out of the plentiful field; and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting. The treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses; I have made their vintage shouting to cease.

— and gladness is taken away and joy out of their fields, out of the garden-land; and in their vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting, as when the harvest was gathered in times of peace;

— the treaders shall tread but no wine out in their presses; their destruction wrought by the enemy has brought about the end of all happy harvesting.

¹¹ Therefore my heart shall sound like a harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kirharesh.

— wherefore deep grief Moab shall sound like the sounding-board of a stringed instrument, which vibrates with the depth of his emotion.

¹² And it shall come to pass, when it is seen that Moab is weary on the high place, that he shall come to his sanctuary to pray; but he shall not prevail.

— and it shall come to pass, when it is seen that Moab is weary on the high place, when its people have lamented themselves weary, that he shall come to his sanctuary to pray, but the false gods of Moab are unable to help.

¹³ This is the word that the Lord hath spoken concerning Moab since that time.

— the accurate time of its fulfilment is now added by prophet Isaiah: that is, the prophecy recorded till now had been made some time before.

¹⁴ But now the Lord hath spoken, saying, “Within three years, as the years of a hireling, and the glory of Moab shall be condemned with all that great multitude; and the remnant shall be very small and feeble.”

— the Lord. hath now spoken, saying, Within three years, as the years of an hireling, very carefully measured, the glory of Moab shall be condemned;

— that is, covered with shame, with all that great multitude, the whole mass of its inhabitants; and the remnant shall be very small and feeble,nothing large, there would be but an insignificant remainder of the former mighty nation.

Posted in Isaiah

Trump’s Greenland threat backfires

•July 27, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Trump hit with ‘opposite of what he wanted’ as Greenland threat backfires.

MSN • July 24, 2025

Donald Trump’s flirtation with wanting to take over Greenland has plunged the popularity of the US to a new low among locals and in Denmark.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s overtures to Denmark to assume possession of the protectorate was greeted with dismay and diminished goodwill built up over decades between the two countries.

In the first few months of Trump’s second term, the president launched a curious campaign to take over the country to ensure US national security. Those overtures were rebuffed, but have led to continuing hard feelings in Denmark.

In an interview, senior Danish politician Claus Hjort Frederiksen lamented, “My parents, who had their youth during World War II here, they loved the Americans who came to our rescue in 1945. For me—a person who has been trusting the US all these years since then—it’s very hard to experience that it doesn’t mean anything anymore, that we had fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, in Iraq and many other places, that suddenly we are nothing.”

Uninvited, 41 percent of Danes described the US “as a threat to their nation.”

That feeling extends to his sons, with Frederiksen admitting, “They are very, very angry with the US.”

According to the report, last August, long before Donald Trump was re-elected, the US had a 48 percent approval rating among the Danish people. As of February, it had plummeted to 20 percent.

In a recent poll, 41 percent of Danes described the US “as a threat to their nation.”

Conservative Danish lawmaker Rasmus Jarlov said, “It’s a very big change in a very short time. We have always talked about the US as our closest ally. It’s no longer well-regarded to go on vacation to the United States, it’s now something to be frowned upon.”

With European leaders, led by French President Emmanuel Macron, backing Denmark against US efforts, ex-Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod stated, “We don’t need to do anything now because Trump has actually managed to obtain the opposite of what he wanted. He alienated the Greenlandic people and made many of them afraid.”

Posted in US

Isaiah (Ch 13-14)

•July 26, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

Our challenge is to de-encrypt them, especially as it relates to the latter days, our days.

Isaiah 13

¹ The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw:

— a prophecy concerning Babylon, described as the burden of Babylon, the sentence of judgement revealed by special inspiration of the Lord, which Isaiah the son of Amoz prophesied.

² “Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain; exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.

— lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, raising the standard of battle upon a deforested peak, where it may be visible from all sides, raise up the voice, calling in urgent attention,

— shake the hand, in a beckoning gesture, that they may go into the gates of the nobles, summoned to celebrate a victorious battle, a war against the enemies which would result in a glorious triumph.

³ I have commanded My sanctified ones; I have also called My mighty ones for Mine anger, even them that rejoice in My highness.”

— God has commanded his sanctified ones; meaning Cyrus, Darius and the officers of their armies, with the common soldiers, who were furnished with might and strength to do his will, to which they were called in his providence:

— the Lord himself summoning these warriors consecrated to his work; he have also called his mighty ones for his anger, the heroes who should carry out the purposes to execute his judgement, even them that rejoice in his highness, boasting of the victory won in his might.

⁴ The noise of a multitude in the mountains, as of a great people! A tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together! The Lord of hosts mustereth the host of the battle.

— the noise of a multitude in the mountains; of Media and Persia, like as of a great people, a turmoil as when masses of people, great armies, congregate; a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together, an exceptionally large and powerful host;

— the Lord of hosts, the Commander-in-chief of all heavenly forces, mustereth the host of the battle, ready to carry out his plan of judgement and punishment when the army under Cyrus was marching towards Babylon.

⁵ They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, even the Lord and the weapons of His indignation, to destroy the whole land.

— a far country, from the ends of the earth; the furthermost parts of it, and these are at the end times, “the latter days;”

— and as Persia and Media were not “from a far country” could these new countries be Russia and China; these are from beyond the end of heaven, where the earth appears to be hounded by the sky;

— even the Lord, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land, literally, “to overturn the whole earth” for the entire world, would feel the ravages of the war of destruction determined upon by the Lord of hosts;

— the prophet now turns directly to the nations, the whole land of Chaldea, with Babylon in the lead; the Targum says, “to destroy all the wicked of the earth.”

⁶ Howl ye, for the day of the Lord is at hand! It shall come as a destruction from the Almighty.

— howl ye, in consternation and terror; for the day of the Lord, or the Lord’s Day, is at hand when he intends to carry out his judgement; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty, all the enemies being included in his punishment suddenly, swiftly and irresistibly;

— the Day of the Lord is a day of Judgement, a “Day of His wrath” (Revelation 6:17); for more, see What is the Day of the LORD?

And they shall be afraid; pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them

⁷Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man’s heart shall melt.

— therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man’s heart shall melt, like water, like wax before the fire; be dispirited and lose all their valour and courage have neither power nor heart to resist their enemies, and of an utter lack of courage, of complete hopelessness.

⁸ And they shall be afraid; pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them. They shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth; they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.

— they shall be afraid, troubled, dismayed, frightened, terrified in bewilderment; pangs, convulsions and pains in the bowels shall take hold of them, their terror showing in convulsive movements;

— they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth, Joel 2:6; they shall be amazed one at another, staring with all evidences of extreme terror, their faces shall be as flames, alternately reddening and blanching as their fear drives the blood back and forth in the body.

⁹ Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel, both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate; and He shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.

— behold, the day of the Lord cometh, the day of his vengeance, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, consuming with its heat, to lay the land of the Chaldean desolate; and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it, for the Lord here has the whole earth in mind.

The Day of the Lord will be like another Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

¹⁰ For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light; the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.

— for the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light, the figure of utter darkness pointing to the severity of the punishment;

— the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, ceasing to shine as soon as it rises, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine so that it would be very uncomfortable; day and night, neither sun, moon nor stars appearing. All this, as in Joel 3:4 and Amos 5:8, indicates that all hope would be vain.

¹¹ “And I will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.

— and God will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity; and he will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, so that the voice of boasting is no longer heard, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible, putting down the tyrants and stopping their violence.

¹² I will make a man more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.

— many men would be killed as the scarcity of men in modern Babylon through the slaughter as God made a man more precious than fine gold; even the golden wedge of Ophir, in this manner would the Lord visit the world with his anger, to punish and annihilate it in the extremity of his wrath.

¹³ Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the day of His fierce anger.

— therefore God will shake the heavens, killing all those living along the coastlines for the purpose of punishing the earth and making scarcity men, and the earth shall remove out of her place, being crowded aside, as it were, by the immensity of God’s indignation;

— in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the day of his fierce anger; he is going to shake the earth out of her place, of course literally, which would mean a hundred times the waves of Fukushima over!

¹⁴ And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up; they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land.

— and Babylon and its inhabitants shall be as the chased roe, the timid gazelle, which is so easily startled, and as a sheep that no man taketh up, like a panic-stricken flock which simply cannot be brought together again;

— then shall every man turn to his own community and flee every one into his own land, that is, the great mass of strangers gathered in the great world market, first with Babylonia, then the house of Israel and the house of Judah would, at the Lord’s shakings, the tribes scatter in all directions;

— Q. could “every man every one into his own land” also mean that the house of Israel, the ten-tribes headed by the United States, finally realized their land is in the Promised Land in Palestine; and flee to reclaim, first, with the “West Bank” then the others? Especially what could have happened after Ezekiel 20:45 to 21:5?

Ezekiel 20:45 Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
⁴⁶ “Son of man, set thy face toward the South, and drop thy word toward the South, and prophesy against the forest of the Southland.
⁴⁷ And say to the forest of the South: ‘Hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee and every dry tree. The flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the South to the North shall be burned therein.
⁴⁸ And all flesh shall see that I, the Lord, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched.’”
⁴⁹ Then said I, “Ah, Lord God! They say of me, ‘Doth he not speak parables?’”
Ezekiel 21:1 And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
² “Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem, and drop thy word toward the holy places, and prophesy against the land of Israel;
³ and say to the land of Israel, ‘Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I am against thee, and will draw forth My Sword out of his sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked.
⁴ Seeing then that I will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked, therefore shall My Sword go forth out of his sheath against all flesh from the South to the North,
⁵ that all flesh may know that I, the Lord, have drawn forth My Sword out of his sheath. It shall not return any more.’

— for another “everyone into his own land,” see A Greater “Out of Egypt” Exodus

¹⁵ Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.

— everyone that is found shall be thrust through, and everyone that is joined unto them, rather, intercepted in flight, shall fall by the sword, for it is a general slaughter which will come upon the mixed population of the United States.

¹⁶ Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be despoiled and their wives ravished.

— their parents witnessing their children being dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses looted and spoiled, everything plundered, and their wives ravished, for war ever brutalizes men, reducing them to no better than beasts.

¹⁷ “Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.

— behold, God will stir up the Medes against them, the Medo-Persians being the world power which conquered Babylon; could these be the modern Persians, the Iranians?

— which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it, that is, it would be impossible to bribe them, to buy them off, and thus save the city whose destruction was firmly determined upon by the Lord;

— also the original Medo-Persians had pleasure by their spoiling against the Babylonians, but these don’t have any pleasures, hence it is another scenario;

— Q. Could this be a latter day prophecy of the United States? Could these be the modern Persians, the modern-day Iranians?

¹⁸ Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.

— their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces, a very vivid description of the effect which would attend the wholesale slaughter; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb, not sparing even the unborn children, II Kings 8:12; II Kings 15:16; Hosea 14:1; Amos 1:13; their eye shall not spare children, for the enemies would be devoid of all pity.

¹⁹ And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

— and Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, an ornament of beauty in the midst of conquered nations, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, to which they all pointed with pride as the greatest capital of the world, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, utterly destroyed, an eternal wilderness.

Artwork of the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah

²⁰ It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there, neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

— like Sodom and Gomorrah, it shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabians, the Bedouin nomads, pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there, total desolation should reign there forever.

²¹ But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

— deserted but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, making their dens in the midst of the ruins; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, the howling jackals probably being meant; and owls shall dwell there, rather, ostriches, and satyrs, or wild goats, thought to be possessed of demons, shall dance there.

²² And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces; and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.”

— and the wild beasts of the islands, probably hyenas, shall cry in their desolate houses, in the ruined palaces of the city, and dragons in their pleasant palaces.

Isaiah 14

¹ For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel and set them in their own land; and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob.

— for the Lord will have mercy on the house of Jacob, it is his plan for his people to lead the way for the Kingdom of God; which caused him to bring judgement, punishment and destruction by the rod of Babylon, then the Romans;

— but will yet choose Israel in accordance with his plan of redemption and set them in their own land, on the onset of the Millennium, the Promised Land; his elect being called a peculiar people; and the strangers from the nations, shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob, to be reckoned as members of God’s people.

²And the people shall take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord for servants and handmaids; and they shall take them captive whose captives they were, and they shall rule over their oppressors.

— and the people that take them and bring them to their place, that is, the ‘Chaldeans,’ will have them play a reverse role;

— that is, the Jews that dwelt in Babylon shall rule over their oppressors, the Chaldeans, but never happen in record; hence only during the Millennium, and similarly, the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord that have given to them, the former enemies of the children of Israel surrounding the region will be glad to serve him in this manner.

³And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from thy sorrow and from thy fear and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve,

— and it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from their sorrows from captivity and from thy fear of worse evils, most cruel usage, and death itself, under the terror of which they lived: and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve;

⁴ that thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say: “How hath the oppressor ceased! The golden city ceased!

—during the Millennium that thou shalt take up a new proverb, a song of triumph, against the king of Babylon and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! “Ended is the driving despot, ended the exacting” (of gold), or “the oppression” for the greatest burden which Babylon laid upon the people under her dominion was that of a tribute, a tribute of gold.

⁵ The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked and the scepter of the rulers.

— the Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked and the scepter of its rulers, since it was used only for authority; the “staff” and “Sceptre” are emblems of power and government and “breaking” them signifies the utter destruction and cessation of authority and dominion.

⁶ He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, he that ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, and none hindereth.

— the king of Babylon smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, namely, the scepter of the tyrant, he that ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, and none hindereth, that is, none of the neighbouring kings and nations, either tributary to him, or in alliance with him, give him the least help or assistance.

⁷ The whole earth is at rest and is quiet; they break forth into singing.

— during the Millennium the whole earth is at rest and is quiet, now that the enemy is overthrown, the peace of God’s kingdom being pictured; they break forth into singing song of praise, the believers praising the Lord for his deliverance.

⁸ Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, ‘Since thou art laid down, no hewer has come up against us.’

— even inanimate objects, yea, even the fir-trees, or cypresses, rejoice at thee, at the tyrant’s misfortune, and the cedars of Lebanon, for their wood had been exported and furnish for building houses; saying, Since thou art laid down, Babylon having fallen, no feller is come up against us, to strip the mountainsides of their forests.

⁹ Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.

— those from hell or the “grave” from beneath would move for thee, this could only happen during the Millennium, to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, the specters or giants inhabiting hell, even all the chief ones, literally, “the leaders” of the earth, as many as are in the dominion of darkness;

— MSG “And the underworld dead are all excited,
preparing to welcome you when you come.
Getting ready to greet you are the ghostly dead,
all the famous names of earth.
All the buried kings of the nations
will stand up on their thrones
With well-prepared speeches,
royal invitations to death:
“Now you are as nothing as we are!
Make yourselves at home with us dead folks!”

— Voice “O Babylon, the land of the dead is excited to greet you at its door. Your king will enter the grave with ghastly pomp. It stirs the shadows and spirits of the dead—all long forgotten leaders— it arouses all the dethroned kings of the nations to welcome your arrival.”

— during the Millennium it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations; that is, all these kings and queens would be resurrected and be as astonished and excited at the prospect of seeing the kings of Babylon or the Pharaohs of Egypt, feeble and powerless, emerging from their burial sites or tombs.

¹⁰ All they shall speak and say unto thee: ‘Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?’

— all they shall speak and say unto the kings of Babylon or the Pharaohs of Egypt, not in contempt and mockery but in honest astonishment, Art thou also become weak and human as we are, void of all strength? The Targum says “Art thou become sick as we? Thou hast become like unto us.”

¹¹ Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols; the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.

— thy pomp is brought down to the grave, all Babylon’s and Egypt’s earthly glory and majesty destroyed, and the noise and sound of the harps which accompanied their feasts of merrymaking on earth;

— the worm, the flesh-eating maggot, is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee, the most repulsive creatures, symbols of decay, taking the place of the precious Babylonian carpets, tapestries, and coverings to which the king had been accustomed here on earth.

¹² “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, who didst weaken the nations!

— how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! literally, “O day-star, son of the dawn,” the reference to the fall of Satan, and all his apostate angels, comparing him to the high and influential position occupied by the Babylonian ruler;

— how art thou cut down to the ground, like a giant tree which has been felled, which didst weaken the nations, in conquering and subduing them;

— Lucifer = “light-bearer” however, renders from the Hebrew [hêlēl H1966]; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.’ Isaiah 14:14

¹³ For thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.

— only for Lucifer, not even Nebuchadnezzar, could have said in his heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, the residences of the spirits of God;

— I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the North, this being said according to the hint of the Heavenly Throne where the Lord God is, on the North side of the earth, toward the far North.

¹⁴ I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.’

— only Lucifer could have thought of ascending above the heights of the clouds, considered the chariots and thrones of the ancient deities; I will be like the Most High, many of the emperors of old regarding themselves as the sons or the offspring of God and laying claim to divine honors;

— the Targum says, “I will ascend over all people; I will be higher than them all.’

¹⁵ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. — yet thou shalt be brought down to this sides of the pit, from God’s point of view, there is nothing Great about Satan, a reception is destined for him a place of destruction. In Job 1, he was only an instrument of God, he could not do anything God doesn’t allow; that is, there is nothing great about Satan.

¹⁶ They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee and consider thee, saying, ‘Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms,

— the dead would arise, musing upon the terrible fate which had struck before, asking with great astonishment, Is this the king or Caesar that once made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, as the great Babylonian or Roman empires often did;

¹⁷ that made the world as a wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof, that opened not the house of his prisoners?’

— by destroying the inhabitants of the world and by laying waste cities, towns; that opened not the house of his prisoners, showing no pity by dismissing them to their prisons.

¹⁸ All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.

— every king of the nations who lie in wait for glory; their bodies, properly embalmed for burial, lying in tombs or sepulchers of their ancestors.

¹⁹ But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit, as a carcass trodden under feet.

— but thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, where it lies and rots like a worthless twig or parasite, which hinders the growth of the tree.

²⁰ Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land and slain thy people. The seed of evildoers shall never be renowned.

— thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land and slain thy people, making it the instrument of his tyrannical lust of conquest; the seed of evil-doers shall never be renowned, their name shall be cut off, and their memory shall rot; becoming extinct as godless and cursed.

²¹ Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers, that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.”

— prepare slaughter for children of the wicked for the iniquity of their fathers, on whose account a dynasty shall be destroyed, that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities, preventing them from establishing their dominion and regaining their former power.

²² “For I will rise up against them,” saith the Lord of hosts, “and cut off from Babylon the name and remnant, and son and grandson,” saith the Lord.

— for the Lord of hosts will rise against them, against the children of the Babylonian monarch; and cut off their name and remnant, all their descendants that are left.

²³ “I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water; and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction,” saith the Lord of hosts.

— God will turn the site of Babylon into a desolate possession, inhabited by bitterns, porcupine, and the tortoise, beaver, otter, or other animals which inhabits the wastes of the Euphrates Valley, and pools of water, swamps resulting from the annual overflow of the river.

²⁴ The Lord of hosts hath sworn, saying, “Surely as I have thought, so shall it come to pass, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand;

— the Lord of hosts hath sworn, his word is his oath; saying, Surely as he had disposed or planned, so shall it come to pass, and so shall it stand.

²⁵ that I will break the Assyrian in My land, and upon My mountains tread him under foot. Then shall his yoke depart from off them, and his burden depart from off their shoulders.”

— God had sworn he will break the Assyrian, overthrowing his power within the boundaries of Judah, particularly the mountains which were round about Jerusalem; and upon his mountains tread him under foot;

— then shall his yoke depart from off them, namely, the inhabitants of Jacob, and his burden depart from off their shoulders, so that the design of the invader could not be accomplished.

²⁶ This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth, and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations.

— this is the purpose not just the Assyrians but upon the whole earth; the Targum confirms this, “all the inhabitants of the earth” in the counsel of the Lord, in whose hand is upon all nations of the whole earth;

— and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations, and every decree of the Lord has significance “on all kingdoms” that is, for all men.

²⁷ For the Lord of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it? And His hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?

— if the Lord of hosts has purposed, who can cancel it? Many deceptive wolfy shepherds thought Satan could derail God’s plan, but nope, not a chance! And if his hand is stretched out, who shall turn it back?

²⁸ In the year that King Ahaz died was this burden:

— in about 727 BC the year that King Ahaz died, was this sentence of judgement fell upon the Philistines, who just at this time prepared to regain their ancient power:

²⁹ “Rejoice not thou, whole Philistia, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken; for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth an adder, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.

— warning to the whole of Palestina, that is, Philistia, because the rod of him that smote thee is temporarily broken, the Philistines being an alliance of Syria and the Northern Kingdom, as a consequence of which Ahaz and Judah had become vassals of Assyria, II Kings 16:5-9, had resulted in breaking the power of Judah, which had only just before that been asserted by Uzziah, II Chronicles 26:6;

— for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, that is, an adder, a still more poisonous serpent, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent, the reference probably to Hezekiah, who promptly smote the Philistines and definitely brought about their destruction, II Kings 18:8.

³⁰ And the firstborn of the poor shall feed, and the needy shall lie down in safety; and I will kill thy root with famine, and he shall slay thy remnant.

— and the firstborn of the poor shall feed, and the needy shall lie down in safety, that is, the inhabitants of Judah would enjoy peace and safety under the reign of God over Philistia; but God will kill thy root with famine, thus eradicating the Philistines as a people, and he shall slay thy remnant, thereby carrying out his punishment upon the ancient enemies of Judah.

³¹ Howl, O gate! Cry, O city! Thou, whole Philistia art dissolved! For there shall come from the north a smoke, and none shall be alone in his appointed times.”

— howl, O gate! the strong fortifications of the Philistine cities being meant. Cry, O city! Ashdod and Gaza having retained much of their ancient glory. Thou, whole Palestina, art dissolved, melting away to nothing;

— for there shall come from the North a smoke, namely, the Assyrian hordes with their ruthless devastations, and none shall be alone in his appointed times, literally, “and none is by himself in his armies,” the Assyrian soldiers knowing neither weariness nor insubordination, but all filled with that one idea the lust of conquest.

“Howl, O gate! Cry, O city! Thou, whole Philistia art dissolved!”

³² What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? “That the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall trust in it.”

— what shall one answer the messengers of the nation? What answer do the messengers of the nation bring? What report did the ambassadors of various nations make when they returned to their own land after viewing the results of God’s punishment of Philistia and his protection of Judah?

— that the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall trust in it, the troubled Jewish refugees being safe within its walls. In this way the Lord protects those who believe in him against all enemies, he himself being their Refuge and Strength.

Posted in Isaiah

Is There A ‘Center’ of the Universe?

•July 25, 2025 • Leave a Comment

No, There is No ‘Center’ of the Universe – A Physicist Explains

Story by Ashley Morgan • July 2025 ~ Astronomy Space

For centuries, humans have looked to the stars and wondered about the universe’s vastness, shape, and structure. One question that has long persisted is the concept of the center of the universe. Is there a single point from which everything originated? Can we locate the heart of the cosmos? According to physicist Rob Coyne, the answer is no.

Expanding Universe: A Shift in Understanding

Around a century ago, when Albert Einstein first proposed his theory of general relativity, the prevailing belief was that the universe was static. In this view, the cosmos remained unchanged, never growing or shrinking. Einstein himself believed that the universe’s size and shape were fixed, a view that matched his time’s understanding of the cosmos.

As astronomers began observing distant galaxies with more advanced telescopes, it became evident that the universe was anything but static. In fact, the universe was expanding, and the more distant the galaxies, the faster they seemed to be moving away.

As scientists began to reassess Einstein’s work, they realized that his theory could accommodate an expanding universe. The equations of general relativity supported the idea of a dynamic and evolving cosmos, rather than a stationary one. What followed was a shift in our understanding of the universe’s nature, which ultimately led to the acceptance of the Big Bang theory and the realization that space itself was stretching.

The Misleading Notion of a “Center”

Understanding the expansion of the universe may seem straightforward at first—until we attempt to conceptualize its mechanics. The idea of an ever-expanding universe can be difficult to grasp, especially when considering the absence of a central point from which everything is emanating. We tend to assume that all expansions must originate from a central point, much like the explosion of fireworks. But, this is not how the universe operates.

No, There is No ‘Center’ of the Universe – Rob Coyne, A Physicist Explains

Rather than galaxies themselves moving through space, it’s the very fabric of space-time that is expanding. This means that the space between galaxies is growing, not the galaxies themselves moving in any particular direction.

According to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a useful analogy is to imagine a balloon with dots on its surface. As the balloon expands, the dots move farther apart. While it might look like the dots are moving, they actually remain fixed on the surface. It’s the space between them that grows. Similarly, in our universe, galaxies remain where they are, but the space between them is stretching, causing them to recede from one another.

Space-Time: The Key to Understanding

The notion of an expanding universe also challenges the way we think about dimensions. The balloon analogy, though helpful, is far from perfect. The surface of a balloon is two-dimensional, while the universe exists in four dimensions—three of space and one of time. The universe operates within the fabric of space-time, where space and time are intertwined. This four-dimensional continuum makes it difficult to apply our everyday experiences of space to the larger cosmos.

As Coyne explains, “the thing we think of as the ‘center’ of the balloon is a point somewhere in its interior, in the air-filled space beneath the surface.”

In our universe, there is no such “interior” to anchor a center. Just as there is no center on the surface of a balloon, there is no central point in the universe. If you were to travel in any direction, you would never reach a place that could be called the center.

This may appear as if there is a center of the universe, but the Cosmos has many of these; and much more where light years haven’t reached us

Experts ask where the center of the universe is and there isn’t any

The Limits of Intuition

These concepts are not only challenging because they defy our physical intuition, but they also require us to rethink how space and time are connected. In daily life, we perceive space and time as separate entities—time moves forward, while space remains constant. In the universe, however, time and space are inextricably linked, forming a unified entity.

This union of space and time, known as space-time, explains why the universe behaves so differently from what we expect. As the universe expands, it’s not just stretching space; it’s also influencing how time and space interact, further complicating our understanding.

For more, see Our Human Potentials

Posted in Scriptures Studies

Isaiah (Ch 11-12)

•July 24, 2025 • Leave a Comment

However the following may provide a clue:

“The anger of the Lord shall not return, until He has executed and till He has performed the thoughts of His heart; in the latter days ye shall understand it perfectly” Jeremiah 23:20

Our challenge is to de-encrypt them, especially as it relates to the latter days, soon to be our days.

Now, continuing with chapter 11, which is mainly on the onset of the Millennium where the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and where your grandkids could put their hands into the mouth of a snake!!

Isaiah 11

¹ And there shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

— and there shall come forth a fresh shoot or twig out of the stem of Jesse; he is called a “rod” either because of his unpromising appearance, arising “out of the stem of Jesse” from him, in the line of David;

— out of the stock and a Branch shall grow out of his roots, Zechariah 3:8; Zechariah 4:12; Jeremiah 23:5; Jeremiah 33:15, the root-stock being all that was left of the former grandeur of David’s house, the renewal of his family by this singular Scion would indeed be a miracle;

— the Targum agrees, paraphrasing the words thus, “and a King shall come forth from the sons of Jesse;” and this is speaking of the Messiah, “And a king shall come forth from the sons of Jesse, and from his children’s children the Messiah shall be anointed.”

² And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him—the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;

— and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him; the rod and branch, the King Messiah, so qualifying him for his office, and the discharge of his duty with the fullness of his power;

— the Spirit of wisdom, which searches all things, even the secrets of God, and understanding, able to make the proper distinction concerning all things,

— the Spirit of counsel, by whom the Messiah is endowed to be the Counselor, and might, for Christ is the mighty God, Isaiah 7:6, the Spirit of knowledge, by means of which he is familiar with all the mysteries of God;

— and of the fear of the Lord, yea “the fear of the Lord” even the Son has to pay homage to God the Father, the “only true God” praying to his heavenly Father and seeking his leadership, and he was and is to fear his Father, according to his divine nature united with him in an everlasting union as One;

— that night, the night he was betrayed, he had two desires but both requests were denied (1) his desire to eat the Passover with his disciples; (2) his desire for the “cup” to be removed from him (for more see THAT NIGHT COULDN’T BE THE FOURTEENTH!)

³ and shall make Him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord; and He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of His ears.

— Rashi: and he shall be animated by the fear of the Lord: He shall be filled with the fear of the Lord; that is, even the Son is motivated by the fear of the Lord, Yehovah; the “only true God” John 17:3

— Q, just curious; how did the Son (the only begotten Son) came into being? Also, could there be another ‘son’ that started well but because of arrogance and pride, eventually ended up being disposed?

— he is highly pleased when men bring to him the sacrifice of their fear of God; and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, rendering judgement not according to external appearances, rather according to his understanding of the heart and soul;

⁴ But with righteousness shall He judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; and He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked.

— but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, the defenseless, this would only happen during the Millennium; his Savior’s-interest turning especially to the lowly, to those who bear the enmity of the world on account of their faith with the proper meekness, taking the part of those who are persecuted for their confession;

— and he, the Son, shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth; the ministration of his word, the rod of his strength, rebuking and horsewhipping the the disobedient world, and with the breath of his lips, his Word, which bears almighty power, shall he slay the wicked.

⁵ And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the girdle of His reins.

— and righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins and faithfulness, upon which his believers may rely with full confidence, the girdle of his reins; he was faithful to God, that appointed him as King and Head of the Kingdom; faithful as a Prophet, in declaring his mind and will; and is a faithful High Priest.

⁶ “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

— during the Millennium, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them, a figurative representation of ideal spiritual conditions;

— the Targum introduces in this manner, “in the days of the Messiah of Israel, peace shall be multiplied in the earth.”

⁷ And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

— during the Millennium the cow and the bear shall feed, all the bloodthirstiness of the latter forgotten; their young ones shall lie down together, his nature so completely changed that he is no longer a carnivorous, but a herbivorous animal; thus the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

⁸ And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

— and the sucking child, the unweaned infant, shall play on the hole of the asp, on the entrance of the adder’s cave, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den, or stretch out his arm to touch the sparkling eye of the basilisk, the poisonous serpents having lost all their vicious habits.

⁹ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

— all the members of God’s kingdom, whose former state was characterized by the comparison with the various animals named above, would lose and lay aside their hostile habits toward one another; thus none shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain;

— for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. Knowledge of Yehovah, love and fear of God, is the motive in all acts of all believers; because they fear the Lord, because they know him the one true God,

— and the Messiah, Yeshua or Jesus Christ, whom he has sent as the Savior of the world, therefore they, the inhabitants of his holy mountain, the members of his Kingdom, who previously live in the midst of a hateful and hostile world, now live together in peace and harmony.

¹⁰ “And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, who shall stand for an ensign of the people; to It shall the Gentiles seek, and His rest shall be glorious.”

— and in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, that same wonderful Scion, the Son of David spoken as a most proper person “the Gentiles seek” to be consulted on all occasions, he, not king Hezekiah, being the wonderful Counselor, Isaiah 9:6.

¹¹ And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people who shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.

— and it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time, stretching it out as once before when he led his chosen people out of Egypt, to recover the remnant of his people which shall be left, not, only the believers of Israel and Judah, but those from all the nations of the world;

— for more another out of Egypt Exodus, see A Greater “Out of Egypt” Exodus

— from Assyria, the mighty nation in the valley of the Euphrates, and from Egypt, the empire toward the southwest, and from Pathros, Upper Egypt, and from Cush, or Ethiopia, and from Elam, Southern Media, and from Shinar, Southern Mesopotamia, and from Hamath, the country or province on the Orontes, north of Palestine, and from the islands of the sea, an expression which refers to the entire coast of the Mediterranean and the adjacent countries;

— see also Isaiah 49:22 where will lift up his hand to the Gentiles; to lift up the hand is a sign of beckoning to, or inviting; that God would call the Gentiles to partake of the blessings of the true religion and to embrace the Messiah; could this period also coincide with Ezekiel 4 – 390/40 Years Timeline)

¹² And He shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

— and the Messiah shall set up an ensign for the nations, around which all the believers might rally, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, those of remnant of the house of Israel, his people among the ten tribes;

— and gather together the dispersed from the house of Judah, the Jews, from the four corners or wings of the earth so that they will march under his banner, united in spirit, though outwardly separated by race and language and customs.

¹³ The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off; Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim. — this is a reference to the United States and Israel today;

— the hostility between Ephraim and Judah had been the chief factor in the division of the nation during the time of the kings in the Old Testament, but that soon, Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim, that is, the children of Israel would then be a perfect and harmonious union, its various parts living together in perfect harmony.

¹⁴ But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west; they shall despoil them of the east together. They shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab, and the children of Ammon shall obey them.

— but they, the houses of Israel and Judah, shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west, this nation being the embodiment of the fiercest hostility since the early history of Israel; they, the house of Israel and the house of Judah, shall spoil them of the east together, the Bedouin hordes of Arabia;

— they shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab, which are today’s Spain and Jordan, conquering the country of these ancient enemies; and the children of Ammon shall obey them, literally, “their obedience.”

— these scenarios show the manner in which the Lord, through his Kingdom will judge and destroy his enemies. The Last Day will spell their doom, and the children of Jacob, the remnants left of the Day of the Lord, will be present to celebrate their victory:

For more about Edom, a prophecy of Esau, see Obadiah

More on Edom, see The Flaming Sword and Fire from the South!

¹⁵ And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian Sea; and with His mighty wind shall He shake His hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams and make men go over dryshod.

— the tongue of the Egyptian sea; probably a bay of the Egyptian sea, so called because in the form of a tongue; or the fork of the Arabian Gulf known as the Red Sea as at the time when the children of Israel left the house of their bondage;

— and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, over the Euphrates, and shall smite it in the seven streams, separating it into seven shallow brooks, and make men go over dry-shod, walking through its bed on sandals; in references the Lord here promises to the spiritual people of God a wonderful salvation, like that out of Egypt;

— and so the Targum says, “and the Lord shall dry up the tongue of the Egyptian sea, and shall lift up the stroke of His strength upon Euphrates, by the word of His prophets” and this designs the destruction of the land of the Muslims which is signified by the drying up of the river Euphrates; that is, from the Nile to the Euphrates would the house of Israel and the house of Judah return to.

The tongue of the Egyptian sea; probably the Red Sea

¹⁶ And there shall be a highway for the remnant of His people who shall be left from Assyria, as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt.

— and during the Millennium there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, cast up or purposely built for the believers in the Lord’s Kingdom, which shall be left, from Assyria, permitting the captives to return to their inheritance;

— far more than it was to Israel in the day that the house of Jacob came up out of the land of Egypt. This redemption of his people out of the hand of all enemies and oppressors would be the last great deed of the Messiah, and its completion will usher in the peace and glory of eternity. In this way the despised Branch out of the house of David would establish his kingdom, which, although jeered at from all sides, will still conquer all the land in the end.

Isaiah 12

¹ And in that day thou shalt say: “O Lord, I will praise Thee; though Thou wast angry with me, Thine anger is turned away, and Thou comforted me.

— and in that day, when the redemption of the spiritual Israel, of the Kingdom of God, shall be completed, thou shalt say, the Saviour triumphant breaking forth in a song of praise;

² Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid; for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; He also has become my salvation.”

— behold, my God is my Salvation, literally, “Behold the God of my salvation,” him who planned and carried out the redemption of a world lost in sin; I will trust, placing full reliance upon his promise of help, and not be afraid, not being brought to shame on account of the confidence resting in him;

— for the Lord God is my Strength, giving full evidence of his power in redeeming his people, and my Song, the object of his endless praise; he also is become my Salvation, the blessings of which are now enjoyed by all in the Kingdom of God.

³ Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation;

— therefore with Joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation, partaking of its benefits richly and endlessly. “At the Feast of Tabernacles water was drawn from the fountain of Siloam for a drink-offering. From the priest that so brought it with solemnity into the Temple, another took it, and, while pouring out the water, used the words of our text.”

⁴ and in that day shall ye say: “Praise the Lord! Call upon His name! Declare His doings among the people; make mention that His name is exalted.

— and in that day, while enjoying the fullness of redemption, shall ye say, Praise the Lord, call upon his name, declare his doings among the Gentiles, making them known throughout the earth, make mention that his name, Yehovah, be exalted, their only Saviour and Redeemer, thus giving all glory to him.

— God’s name is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ YHVH Yehovah (not Jehovah since the letter ‘J’ wasn’t around but only after the sixteenth century; more on this at the end).

⁵ Sing unto the Lord, for He hath done excellent things; this is known in all the earth.

— sing unto the Lord, in psalms, hymns and songs, for he hath done excellent things, proving his excellence and majesty in the various acts of his redemption; this is known throughout the earth, it should be announced to all mankind.

⁶ Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion! For great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee.”

— Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion in Jerusalem; singing aloud with the high praises of God in their mouth, from the mountain where the house of true divine worship are located; for great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee, as the Giver of Victory and the Fountain of Life;

— thus this wonderful hymn, modeled after so many psalms of praise in the Old Testament, especially that sung upon the delivery of the children of Israel at the hands of Pharaoh, Exodus 15:1-18, sets forth the joy of the redemption of God, of the Chosen triumphant, when entering upon the blessings of eternal redemption.

~~ 12,24,26,42,52,54 ~~

More on God’s name, Yehovah.

I am the LORD; that is My name. And My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images. Isaiah 42:8

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call. Joel 2:32

“I am sought of them that asked not for Me; I am found of them that sought Me not. I said, ‘Behold Me, behold Me,’ unto a nation that was not called by My name. Isaiah 65:1

When we call our God, the LORD, we err, because his name is not the LORD, which is a title. His name is YEHOVAH! May We all ask for his forgiveness, and may Our merciful God forgive us all.

Posted in Isaiah

Our Human Potentials

•July 23, 2025 • Leave a Comment

If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? John 3:12

Astronomers are testifying that the universe is expanding—that is, the space in between cosmic objects is getting ever more vast

But according to physicist Rob Coyne, there is no center of the Cosmos.

Amidst boils and suffering, God finally confront Job:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it?

“Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof,

when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:4-7

And finally, after you have managed ten cities successfully, you would be given ten universe to manage.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Psalm 19:1

For all of creation is waiting, yearning for the time when the sons of God will be revealed. Romans 8:19; to assist in the perfecting of his creation.

The Lord sees everything in the whole earth; the seven lights are the seven eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth, to see if anyone would put up their hands. Zechariah 4:10. Isaiah did: he put up his hand, and replied, “Here I am; send me,” Isaiah 6:8.

You only need to be “faithful over a few things” Matthew 25:23 emphasizes the importance of some critical matters, one being the Sabbath, which leads to be made ruler over many things.

Posted in Revelation, Scriptures Studies

Battle Over the WORD

•July 22, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Since time memorial there has been numerous attempts to change the Word of God, both covertly and overtly. When they did succeed, they then preach lies in His name, hence the Lord said through Jeremiah: “The prophets prophesy lies in My name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spoke unto them. They prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought and the deceit of their heart.”

In Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, by believing the serpent, there was a corresponding disbelief and rejection as true what God had told them. This same process is still extant today. What God declares to be true, man ends up altering through addition, deletion, or outright rejection and substitution.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, “Yea, hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

²And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden,

³but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it,lest ye die.’”

⁴And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die;

⁵for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

⁶And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and ate, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he ate. Genesis 3:1-6

Deuteronomy 12:32 Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it; you shall not add to it nor take away from it.

Proverbs 30:6 Do not add to His words, Lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar.

Revelation 22:18 For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

A. The Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan Pentateuch varies in the Ten Commandments passages, in that Samaritans count as nine commandments what others count as ten. The Samaritan tenth commandment includes the sanctity of Mount Gerizim for worship, and are also known to be sun-worshippers.

Additions after Exodus 20:1–17 (The Ten Commandments)

And when it so happens that LORD God brings you to the land of Caanan, which you are coming to posses, you shall set-up there for you great stones and plaster them with plaster and you write on the stones all words of this law. And it becomes for you that across the Jordan you shall raise these stones, which I command you today, in mountain Grizim. And you build there the altar to the LORD God of you. Altar of stones. Not you shall wave on them iron. With whole stones you shall build the altar to LORD God of you. And you bring on it ascend offerings to LORD God of you, and you sacrifice peace offerings, and you eat there and you rejoice before the face of the LORD God of you. The mountain this is across the Jordan behind the way of the rising of the sun, in the land of Caanan who is dwelling in the desert before the Galgal, beside Alvin-Mara, before Sechem. — 169 additional words.

Also in Deuteronomy 5:21

And when it so happens that Yahuah God brings you to the land of Caanan, which you are coming to posses, you shall set-up there for you great stones and plaster them with plaster and you write on the stones all words of this law. And it becomes for you that across the Jordan you shall raise these stones, which I command you today, in mountain Grizim. And you build there the altar to the Yahuah God of you. Altar of stones. Not you shall wave on them iron. With whole stones you shall build the altar to Yahuah God of you. And you bring on it ascend offerings to Yahuah God of you, and you sacrifice peace offerings, and you eat there and you rejoice before the face of the Yahuah God of you. The mountain this is across the Jordan behind the way of the rising of the sun, in the land of Caanan who is dwelling in the desert before the Galgal, beside Alvin-Mara, before Sechem.

Q1 If Moses had been so sure where God wants to be worshipped, he shouldn’t be so vague about where the LORD shall choose in Deuteronomy 16:15,16 (Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the LORD thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles: and they shall not appear before the LORD empty). A site for the Temple in Jerusalem was chosen when David was king but it was left for his son Solomon to build it. Also, which mountain is Mount Grizim exactly when the book of Exodus was written, since the Israelites were still wondering in the Sinai peninsular?

Q2 Is it a coincident, the mentioning of the rising of the SUN? Why not just west of the Jordan, before Sechem? Today, they, together with most of the CoGs, keep their Feast of Weeks on Sundays. Always a Sunday! Why to they promote the sanctity of the Sun?

Exodus 20:21

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God [was]. And the Yahuah said to Moses to say: I heard what people have said. All that they have spoken to you, they have spoken wisely. All that they have spoken let them put in their hearts so that they can keep my commandments in all their days, so that it would be good to them and to sons of them forever. Prophet I shall raise up to them from the midsts of their brothers, and I will place words of me into his mouth to speak to them all that I’m commanding them. And it becomes that the man who will not listen to his words that are spoken in my name, I shall require from him. But the prophet who will speak insolently in my name that which I have not instructed him to speak, or if he speaks in the name of other Gods, such prophet shall die. And if you will ask yourself in your heart how you shall know which word God has spoken and which he has not, see if the word spoken comes to pass. And if it shall not come to pass then this is not the word of the Yahuah, in insolence spoken the prophet. Not you shall listen to him. Go now back to your tent and I will speak to you regarding all commandments and ordinances and verdicts that you shall teach them, and what to do in the land that I give them for possession.

(The above addition incorporates Exodus 18:18 and others: I will raise up to them a prophet of their brethren, like thee; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them as I shall command him. Samaritans believes this Prophet was to be from the line of the tribe of Levi, like Moses, not from the line of Judah, which the Jews believes)

B. New Testament

Listed here as B. New Testament are the Difference between those established by the King James version in 1611 AD and those that came later.

“How do ye say, “We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us?” But this is not true because in vain the lying pen of the scribes have turned my words into lies!” Jeremiah 8:8

Altering of the WORD: Even as early as was the King James Version in 1611

CHANGING THE WORD

Genesis 3:15 KJV And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Douay-Rheims (DRA), a Jesuit Bible: I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she [mother Mary? instead of her seed] shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

Jesus says he is the Gate to Life, but the Catholics say the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, is the gate to life, so they pray to Mary; “Hail Mary, full of Grace! . . .”

Hosea 11:12 KJV Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit: but Judah yet ruleth with God, and is faithful with the saints.
NIV Ephraim has surrounded me with lies, Israel with deceit. And Judah is unruly against God, even against the faithful Holy One. — on Judah it is total opposite in meaning

Matthew 5:44 KJV But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
ESV But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

Matthew 18:11 KJV For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost. — many versions have whole verse taken out

Matthew 20:16 KJV So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
ESV and many others: So the last will be first, and the first last. — there is no need to be chosen.

Matthew 20:22 But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are able.
²³ And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.
NIV 22 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
²³ Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.” — baptism deleted, thus changing the Word.

Matthew 25:13 Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.
ESV and many others: Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. — deleting until it doesn’t make any sense

Matthew 24:36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
ESV and many other versions: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. — I and my Father are One, hence Jesus should know His own coming, but in ESV and others, He doesn’t. It also implies that the Son and Father doesn’t work together.

Mark 2:17 KJV When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
ESV and many other versions: And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” — implies as if there is no need for repentance

Mark 6:11 KJV And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.
ESV and many other versions: And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them. — the world doesn’t like to hear of the Day of Judgement, like the Sadducees, but for different reasons: the Catholics believe they are all already in heaven once a person died; the Sadducees don’t believe in any resurrections

Mark 10:21 Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.
ESV and many other versions: And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” — no need to take up the cross

Mark 10:24 And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answered again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!
ESV And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God!
NIV The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! — Abraham, Job and many others were rich, yet they are destined for the Kingdom of God.

Mark 13:14 But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains:
ESV and many other versions: “But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where he ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. — no reference to Daniel’s prophecy

Luke 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
ESV and many other versions: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

Luke 4:4 And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.
ESV and many other versions: And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” — there is no need to live by every word of God. Modern Christians want just to feel what is right or wrong, rather than by every word of God

Luke 9:55-56 But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. ⁵⁶ For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.
ESV 55-56 But he turned and rebuked them. ⁵⁶ And they went on to another village. — the world doesn’t like correction, doesn’t like to be rebuked

1 Cor 10:28 But if any man say unto you, this is offered in sacrifice unto idols, eat not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake: for the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof:
ESV and many other versions: But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience — no reference that the earth is of the Lord’s

Revelation 14:5 And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.
ESV and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless. — no accountability needed before the throne of God

Luke 4:8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
ESV And Jesus answered him, “It is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” — no reference that Satan been always around us, tempting us

Acts 13:42 And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath.
ESV As they went out, the people begged that these things might be told them the next Sabbath. — eliminate the sabbath by deleting the reference that Jew normally met in their synagogue on the sabbaths

1 Corinthians 5:7 Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
ESV Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. — “for us” is eliminated

Hebrews 7:21 (For those priests were made without an oath; but this with an oath by him that said unto him, The Lord swear and will not repent, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek:)
ESV but this one was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever.’” — that Jesus has a higher level of priesthood after the order of Melchizedek” is eliminated

John 5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
ESV You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, — wishy washy translation

Matthew 18:3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
ESV and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. — only need to behave like children, no need to be converted

Ephesians 3:9 And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:
ESV and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, — not reference to all things created by Jesus Christ.

Colossians 1:14 In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:
ESV in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. — “through his blood” eliminated

Revelation 1:7 Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen. AMP Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes (nations) of the earth will mourn over Him [realizing their sin and guilt, and anticipating the coming wrath]
ASV Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall wail on account of him. Even so, Amen. — the change from judgement that they fear and wail than to that of being sorrowful for Christ

Mark 7:19 JKV Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the drain, purging all meats?
ESV since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)
ERV Food does not go into a person’s mind. It goes into the stomach. Then it goes out of the body.” (When Jesus said this, he meant there is no food that is wrong for people to eat.)
NIV For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) — nothing in the original says about the law changing the unclean into clean.

1 Corinthians 7:5 Defraud ye not one the other, unless it be with consent for a time only, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not through your lack of self restraint.
ESV Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. — “fasting” taken out

John 9:4 I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
ESV We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. — changing from I to we: diminished the fact that Jesus has intimate relationship with the Father, also the work of salvation can only be done by Christ

1 Corinthians 11:29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
ESV For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the Judgment:
ESV And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, — the article “the” is eliminated, hence the judgement isn’t a specific one, so purgatory could be established

Luke 1:72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;
NIV to show mercy to our ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, — a total change of meaning, so now you can pray to our ancestors who are already dead; again establishing the concept of purgatory

1 Peter 4:6 For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
RSV For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.
NIV For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.

Acts 24:15 And have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.
ESV having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. — ‘of the dead‘ deleted

Revelation 22:14 Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
ESV Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. — even Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito would also wash their robes; no reference to the fear of the Lord God nor obeying His commandments. This version is favoured by the Universal Church and all her Protesting Harlotry Daughters.

Purgatory incorporated:

Job 26:5 Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.
ESV The dead tremble under the waters and their inhabitants.
NIV “The dead are in deep anguish, those beneath the waters and all that live in them. — establishing the concept of purgatory

2 Peter 2:9 The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:
NIV if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment. — In our hard copy version, the last phase, “while continuing their punishment” was in but the online version taken out! This means the concept of purgatory could be taken in or out!

Revelation 13:8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
ESV and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. — from worshipping him to worshipping it, referring to the beast

1 Corinthians 15:4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: — active voice
ESV that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, — passive voice

1 Corinthians 11:24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.
ESV and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” — eliminate Christ’s body being broken for us, especially on the night of the fourteenth where He was severely beaten and wounded for our sin, and healing.

John 7:8 Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast: for my time is not yet full come.
ESV You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.” — modern version shows He has no intent to go to the Feast, which isn’t right

Isaiah 7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
RSV Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. — this nonsense follows the Masoretic Text

Proverbs 8:22 The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
RSV The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.
NIV “The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; — Strong’s H7069 — could be both possessed or created!

Daniel 3:25 He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.
ESV He answered and said, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.” — maybe the son of numerous pagan gods

Matthew 1:25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus.
ESV but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus. — neglect to indicate that Jesus had brothers

Matthew 19:16 And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? ¹⁷ And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
RSV 16 And behold, one came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” ¹⁷ And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” — change of emphasis to avoid credit to God being good

Matthew 27:35 And they crucified him and parted his garments, casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, “They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.”
ESV And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. — eliminate the fact that Jesus fulfilled prophecy

Mark 15:3 And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing.
RSV And the chief priests accused him of many things. — eliminate the fact that Jesus fulfilled the Isaiah 53:7 prophecy

1 John 4:3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.
ESV and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
NIV but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. — “that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” is the central theme in this verse, so these new versions were written or translated with the spirit of antichrist? or no?

Acts 2:30 Therefore, being a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne;
ESV Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, — reduces the “Christ” impact, also the antichrist criteria pointed out above, that He came in the flesh

Matthew 6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
ESV And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. —

Luke 11:2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
ESV And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. — “which art in heaven” and “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth” taken out, so that you can now pray to the Pope as father, one on earth.

Luke 11:4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.
ESV and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation. — ‘but deliver us from evil’ taken out

Luke 24:40 And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.
— the RSV has the whole verse taken out

John 3:13 And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.
ESV No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. — eliminate the fact that Christ is now in heaven
VOICE No one has ever journeyed to heaven above except the One who has come down from heaven—the Son of Man, who is of heaven. — best translation

John 6:33 For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.
RSV For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.” — reduces Christ emphasize to just bread

John 6:47 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
ESV Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. — believes who or what? The Pope?

John 16:16 A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.
ESV “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me.” — ‘because I go to the Father’ taken out

John 16:23 And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it to you.
RSV In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. — change of meaning altogether.

Acts 9:29 And he (Paul) spake boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus, and disputed against the Grecians: but they went about to slay him.
ESV And he spoke and disputed against the Hellenists. But they were seeking to kill him. — “in the name of the Lord Jesus” taken out

Romans 1:3 Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh;
ESV concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh — de-emphasizing “Jesus Christ our Lord” and was taken out

Romans 14:10 But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.
ESV Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; — impact of Jesus Christ reduced as our God and as the Judge by such change

1 Timothy 3:16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.
ESV Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. —

Revelation 1:11 Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.
ESV saying, “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.” — “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last” deleted

Revelation 5:14 And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.
ESV And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” and the elders fell down and worshiped. — “him that liveth for ever and ever” taken out

DEDUCTIONS: What are those missing verses in your RSV and NIV Bible?

The NIV has removed at least 64,000 words from the Bible …

The NIV and RSV and other versions have also now removed 45 complete verses. Most of us have the Bible on our devices and phones. Changing the Word slowing and consistently, and perhaps by the end of a hundred years or so from now, a new “religion” could be found.

The King James Version is still the most reliable, and for modern versions either the New King James or the KJ21.

Matthew 17:21
“Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” — ESV and many other versions: whole verse taken out

Matthew 23:14 — “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.” — ESV whole verse taken out, reducing the impact of judgement

Mark 7:16 — “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.” — ESV and many other versions: whole verse taken out

Mark 9:44 — “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” — ESV and many other versions: whole verse taken out

Mark 9:46 — “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” — ESV whole verse taken out

Mark 11:26 — “But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.” — ESV whole verse taken out

Mark 15:28 — “And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.” — ESV and many other versions: whole verse taken out, they don’t like the idea that Jesus fulfilled prophecy

Mark 16:9-20 (all 12 verses) — in ESV but not in NIV

⁹ Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.
¹⁰ And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.
¹¹ And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.
¹² After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.
¹³ And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them.
¹⁴ Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.
¹⁵ And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
¹⁶ He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
¹⁷ And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;
¹⁸ They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
¹⁹ So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.
²⁰ And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen. (KJV)

— why the NIV took this out? Perhaps they don’t believe that Jesus was resurrected (raised from the dead).

Luke 17:36 — “Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” — not in NIV and many other versions:

Luke 22:43-44 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. — ESV & NIV and others: whole verses taken out, then they put it back again; not quite wanting to hear that Jesus was human or that He atoned for our sins by shedding His blood

Luke 23:17 — “(For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast.)” — ESV and many others: whole verse taken out, not wanting to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy

John 5:4 — “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” — ESV whole verse taken out

John 7:53-8:11

KJV 7:53 And every man went unto his own house.
KJV 8:1 Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
² And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
³ And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
⁴ They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
⁵ Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
⁶ This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
⁷ So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
⁸ And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
⁹ And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
¹⁰ When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?
¹¹ She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

— ESV whole section taken out, not wanting to hear about repentance; or could these be added so that the Law of Moses be of no effect?

Acts 8:37 KJV And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. — ESV and many other versions where whole verse taken out. Its deletion makes one think that people can be baptized and saved without believing on the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God. They eliminate the fact that Jesus is the only way to be saved.

Acts 15:34 KJV “Notwithstanding it pleased Silas to abide there still.” — ESV and many others: whole verse taken out.

Acts 24:7 KJV “But the chief captain Lysias came upon us, and with great violence took him away out of our hands,” — ESV and many others: whole verse taken out.

Acts 28:29 KJV “And when he had said these words, the Jews departed, and had great reasoning among themselves.” — ESV whole verse taken out.

Romans 16:24 KJV “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” — ESV whole verse taken out

I John 5:7 — “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” — not in the early Greek manuscript

Gal 3:17 KJV And this I say, that the Covenant which was confirmed earlier by God in Christ cannot be annulled by the law, which came four hundred and thirty years after, so as to make the promise of no effect.

ESV This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. — “in Christ” is taken out

Gal 4:7 (KJV) Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.
ESV So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. — so there is no need to go through Christ

Gal 6:17 (KJV) From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
ESV From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. — Jesus is no longer considered as Lord

Eph 3:14 KJV For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
ESV For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, — Jesus is no longer needed nor considered Lord to be bowed

Col 1:2 KJV To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colossae: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
ESV To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father. — Jesus is no longer considered as Lord

Col 1:14 KJV In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:
ESV in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. — and many others: Jesus’ blood is no longer needed

1 Tim 2:7 KJV Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, (I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.
ESV For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth — “in Christ” is not needed

2 Tim 4:22 KJV The Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit. Grace be with you. Amen.
ESV The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you. — the Lord is not identified.

1 Tim 3:16 — KJV And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.
ESV Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, — diminishing the fact that Christ was once God vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

Note: this lists, although long, is not exhaustive

C. New Testament

Listed here as C. New Testament which includes the Great Commission of baptizing in Jesus’ name:

For a detailed Study, see A Study of Matthew 28:19

Matthew 28:18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
¹⁹ Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: — not in the original Hebrew (“Hebrew Gospel of Matthew” by Professor George Howard from the University of Georgia); this verse could only be inserted later.
²⁰ Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Acts 2:38 Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. — need only to baptize in the name of Jesus Christ; that is, need not including the Father and the Holy Ghost as in Matthew 28:19.

Acts 8:16 For as yet He had fallen upon none of them. They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Acts 11:16 Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how He said, ‘John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ — but in Jesus’ name

Acts 19:5 When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. — only need to baptize in the name of Jesus Christ

John 4:1 When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John ² (though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples), ³ He left Judea and departed again to Galilee. — this illustrates what it means when the disciples baptized in Jesus’ name. Baptism is a symbol of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. This should be the model for today.

John 10:38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him. — Jesus always emphasizes the Father and Son relationship; the “Holy Spirit” is being ignored in this verse.

1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. — not in the original Greek but were added later to promote the concept of a trinity.

**Ancient Greek Papyrus On Europe’s Oldest Surviving Book**

CAVEAT: we have limited sources of manuscripts to examine what went on from the time when the Catholics under Emperor Constantine the Great, who was from a different religion, and was ‘converted’ into another, and took over the church from around 300 AD.

To unify his old pagan religion with the new ‘Nazarene Judaism’ the ‘copying’ or rather, the layer upon layers of editing of the manuscripts, under the sole authority of a mother church continued under his charge, until numerous passages are often self-contradictory or else they just don’t make any sense, to when the King James were published from 1611; over an enormous time gap of over 1300 years.

The earlier papyruses from Egypt they wrote on, where most manuscripts were written, they were fragile and susceptible to both moisture and excessive dryness, pliable to fold as scroll but often they went bad with fading or cracking. Unless these papyruses were of perfect quality, the writing surface were irregular, and the range of storage over time could be limited. Hence covert alteration resulted amidst those numerous copying and re-copying.

Although papyruses were eventually overtaken in Europe by a more lasting writing surface known as parchment, which were made from animal skins, the copying and recopying were the same. The mother church, with her self-given authority as sole custodian over these manuscripts, and believing whatever they unbind on earth would be unbind in heaven, has had given themselves the liberty to christianize the whole world in her own motherly image; and on such divine mission, any who stood their way were silenced by pains of deaths.

Thus over the 1300 years of void there would have been innumerable changes but we and all her confused protesting daughters are left helpless exactly what they are. Nevertheless given that such a huge expanse of time for the two religions to merge into one universal church could explain why often the precepts promoted in the “New Testament” often contradict with those of the Old Testament.

Mithraism, the Sun Goddess, born on December 25, being viewed as a rival of early Christianity, now being worshipped every Christmas

Posted in Gospel, Miscellaneous, Old Testament, Samaritans, Scriptures Studies

The EU Depends On China & Russia For Rare Earths

•July 21, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Rare earth are indeed not rare, only the technology to extract them cleanly and efficiently is rare

ZeroHedge • July 18, 2025

Almost half of the European Union’s imports of rare earths came from China last year, according to the latest data from the European Union’s statistical office (Eurostat).

As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, Russia followed in second place with a share of around 29 percent, while Malaysia was in third at around 20 percent.

In order to reduce dependence on China and other individual countries, the EU passed the Critical Raw Materials Act 2024.

The aim is to extract 10 percent of rare earths in the EU itself and cover 15 percent of demand from recycling.

In addition, no single third country is to cover more than 65 percent of demand.

The 17 metals of the so-called rare earths are used in many of today’s key technologies.

Terbium is essential for the production of permanent magnets, important for wind turbine generators and electric vehicle motors. The rare earths cerium and lanthanum are also needed in the context of electromobility, for example, as components of catalytic converters as well as in hybrid vehicles’ batteries. Meanwhile, europium and yttrium are essential components of LED lamps and smartphone displays.

The rarity of these elements is based on the fact that they occur in the form of oxides in a variety of rocks, but their concentrated occurrence in commercially exploitable deposits is rather rare.

China’s ban of rare earth technologies

Rare Earth Reserves: Top 8 Countries

Posted in China, Europe, Rare Earth & Critical Materials, Russia