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Chapter 27

The Judgment and Deliverance of Israel

    On that day,
The Lord will punish with his sword
    that is cruel, great, and strong,
Leviathan the fleeing serpent,
    Leviathan the coiled serpent;
    he will slay the dragon[a] in the sea.(A)

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Footnotes

  1. 27:1 Leviathan…dragon: the description of Leviathan is almost identical to a passage from a much earlier Ugaritic text. The sea dragon became a symbol of the forces of evil which God vanquishes even as he overcame primeval chaos; cf. notes on 30:7; 51:9–10; Jb 3:8; 7:12; no power can challenge God. Leviathan is even spoken of playfully in Ps 104:26.

When my sword has drunk its fill in the heavens,
    it shall come down upon Edom for judgment,
    upon a people under my ban.(A)
The Lord has a sword sated with blood,
    greasy with fat,
With the blood of lambs and goats,
    with the fat of rams’ kidneys;
For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah,
    a great slaughter in the land of Edom.(B)

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36 Then the angel of the Lord went forth and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. Early the next morning, there they were, all those corpses, dead![a](A)

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Footnotes

  1. 37:36 The destruction of Sennacherib’s army is also recorded by Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century B.C. It was possibly owing to a plague, which the author interprets as God’s activity.