Verse 2
2. Speak… comfortably That is, carry the message in the tenderest way to the very heart. This is a thrice-told charge, rendering the meaning still more intense.
Jerusalem Another name for God’s beloved Zion or people. Wherever they are the prophet is to give them cheer. Officially sent of God, he has declared that her warfare ( צבא , tsaba,) or the allotted time of her captivity is accomplished. Here it is service and hardship implied in exile, of which God’s people have a double suffering, and for which there shall be provided twofold comfort in the form of pardon.
Delitzsch calls their trouble “that unsheltered bivouac, as it were, of the people who had been transported into a foreign land, and were living there in bondage, restlessness, and insecurity.” See Job 7:5; Job 14:14; and Daniel 10:1.
No doubt there is a Messianic idea underneath here that of a gloriously better day at hand; and if allusion is also made, as some think, to a past ritualistic hard life in the word “warfare,” above, then the deliverance by Messiah is the freedom of the Gospel, which thought in the prophet’s mind underlies the Babylonian deliverance.
These verses (one and two) open up the subject of the prophecies which now follow to the end of the book, and the two verses are the key words to them all.
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