Isaiah 14:2 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Bible Comments

The people shall take them... — Literally, the peoples. In Ezra 1:1-4; Ezra 6:7-8, we have what answered, in a measure, to the picture thus drawn; but here, as elsewhere, the words paint an ideal to which there has been as yet no historical reality fully corresponding. No period of later Jewish history has beheld the people ruling over a conquered race; and if we claim a real fulfilment of the last clause of the verse, it is only in the sense in which the Latin poet said that Grœcia capta ferum victorem cepit (Horat. Ep. II. i. 156). The triumph of Israel has, so far, been found in that of its leading ideas, and in the victory of the faith of Christ. In Isaiah 56:3 the proselyte appears as admitted on terms of equality, here on those of subjugation.

Isaiah 14:2

2 And 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 captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors.