Isaiah 51:9 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Awake, awake. — Who is the speaker that thus bursts into this grand apostrophe? (1) The redeemed and ideal Israel, or (2) the Servant of the Lord, or (3) the prophet, or (4) Jehovah, as in self-communing, after the manner of men, like that of Deborah in Judges 5:12. On the whole the first seems the preferable view; but the loftiness of poetry, perhaps, transcends all such distinctions. The appeal is, in any case, to the great deeds of God in the past, as the pledge and earnest of yet greater in the future. “Rahab,” as in Isaiah 30:7; Psalms 89:10, is Egypt; and the “dragon,” like “leviathan” in Psalms 74:13, stands for Pharaoh. (Comp. Ezekiel 29:3.) Cheyne quotes from Bunsen’s “Egypt,” vol. vi., an invocation to the god Ra, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “Hail, thou who hast cut in pieces the scorner and strangled the Apophis (sc. the evil serpent),” as a striking parallel.