Who Is This Who Comes From Edom?
1 Who is this who comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? Who is this who is glorious in his clothing, marching in the greatness of his strength? “It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.” 2 Why is your clothing red, and your garments like him who treads in the wine vat? 3 “I have trodden the wine press alone. Of the peoples, no one was with me. Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath. Their lifeblood is sprinkled on my garments, and I have stained all my clothing. 4 For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and the year of my redeemed has come. 5 I looked, and there was no one to help; and I wondered that there was no one to uphold. Therefore my own arm brought salvation to me. My own wrath upheld me. 6 I trod down the peoples in my anger and made them drunk in my wrath. I poured their lifeblood out on the earth.”
A figure comes up the road in stained clothing, and the answer to what stained it is the hardest image in the book.
Who is this who comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? Who is this who is glorious in his clothing, marching in the greatness of his strength? “It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.”
A watchman's challenge, and the scene is a lone figure coming up the road from the south. The questions are asked from a distance, by someone who can see the color of the clothes before he can see the face.
"It is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save."
The answer names two things and the second is the one the chapter is about to complicate.
Why is your clothing red, and your garments like him who treads in the wine vat?
The second question is the obvious one. Grape treading was done barefoot in a stone trough, and it splashed — a man came out of it stained to the waist. The watchman recognizes the pattern of the staining before he knows what caused it.
“I have trodden the wine press alone. Of the peoples, no one was with me. Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath. Their lifeblood is sprinkled on my garments, and I have stained all my clothing.
The answer confirms the image and changes what is in the vat. And the word alone is the chapter's insistence: nobody helped, and nobody is implicated.
Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath. Their lifeblood is sprinkled on my garments.
The passage is the most violent in the book and it should not be softened into metaphor it is not. What is described is judgment carried out personally, and the last book of Scripture takes up the image of one whose robe is dipped in blood Revelation 19:13.
Three things hold it inside the frame this book has been building. The one doing it is the same figure described two verses earlier as mighty to save. The occasion is stated as the day of vengeance was in my heart, and the year of my redeemed has come Isaiah 63:4 — the two are one event, and the redeemed are why it happens. And what is being trodden is named as the peoples, in a book that has spent sixty chapters inviting the peoples in.
I looked, and there was no one to help; and I wondered that there was no one to uphold. Therefore my own arm brought salvation to me. My own wrath upheld me.
The verse repeats Isaiah 59:16 almost word for word. Twice in five chapters God looks for a human agent, finds none, and does it himself — and in the fifty-ninth chapter what his own arm brought was salvation, and here it is this.
The book places the two side by side and does not choose between them. The arm that was revealed in a servant who did not break a bruised reed is the arm in the winepress, and nothing in Isaiah explains how.
held with reason What this mark means