Isaiah 1:8 - Exposition

The daughter of Zion. Not "the faithful Church" (Kay), but the city of Jerusalem, which is thus personified. Comp. Isaiah 47:1 , Isaiah 47:5 , where Babylon is called the "daughter of the Chaldeans;" and Lamentations 1:6 ; Lamentations 2:1 , Lamentations 2:4 , Lamentations 2:8 , Lamentations 2:10 , where the phrase here used is repeated in the same sense. More commonly it designates the people without the city ( Lamentations 2:13 ; Lamentations 4:22 ; Micah 3:8 , Micah 3:10 , 13; Zephaniah 3:14 ; Zechariah 2:10 ; Zechariah 9:9 , etc.). As a cottage ; rather, as a booth (Revised Version; see Le 23:42). Vineyards required to be watched for a few weeks only as the fruit began to ripen; and the watchers, or keepers, built themselves, therefore, mere "booths" for their protection ( Job 27:18 ). These were frail, solitary dwellings—very forlorn, very helpless. Such was now Jerusalem. As a lodge in a garden of cucumbers. Cucumber-gardens required watching throughout the season, i.e. from spring to autumn, and their watcher needed a more solid edifice than a booth. Hence such gardens had "lodges" in them, i.e. permanent huts or sheds, such as those still seen in Palestine. As a besieged city. Though not yet besieged, Jerusalem is as if besieged—isolated, surrounded by waste tracts, threatened.