Isaiah 41:19 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Bible Comments

I will plant in the wilderness. — A picture as of the Paradise of God (Isaiah 51:3), with its groves of stately trees, completes the vision of the future. The two groups of four and three, making up the symbolic seven, may probably have a mystic meaning. The “shittah” is the acacia, the “oil tree” the wild olive, as distinguished from the cultivated (Romans 11:17), the “fir tree” is probably the cypress, the pine” stands for the plane, always — as in the opening of Plato’s Phœdrus, and the story of Xerxes in Herod. vii. 31, — the glory of Eastern scenery and the “box-tree” is perhaps the larch, or a variety of cedar. The “myrtle” does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament till after the exile (Nehemiah 8:15; Zechariah 1:8; Zechariah 1:10-11), but then it appears as if indigenous. It supplies the proper name Hadassah (Esther) in Esther 2:7.

Isaiah 41:19

19 I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah tree, and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree together: