The darkness; either affliction and misery, a known metaphor; or ignorance and idolatry; as also all kinds of errors and immoralities, with which all that are out of the church are smutted and polluted: compare Ephesians 4:18,19. Shall cover the earth; either,
1. General, all the inhabitants of the earth, such as through ignorance reject the gospel. Or rather,
2. More particular, the Babylonians, by a synecdoche of the whole for a part, in that dismal condition being harassed by Cyrus, whereby the Jews were delivered; this being also a type of the deliverance of God's people by the Messiah, which this text principally intends. Gross darkness; an allusion to that Egyptian darkness, Exodus 10:21, &c.; palpable ignorance, the inlet and nursery to gross idolatry and all profaneness. The Lord, i.e. Christ, Zechariah 4:2 Luke 1:77-79. His glory shall be seen; shall be wonderfully conspicuous: as the Lord's arising answers to the darkness covering the earth, so the glory being seen answers to that gross darkness. The sense is, that whereas the time was, that the people of God were under great calamities, while their enemies were in ease and prosperity, now it shall be quite contrary; now these shall be in adversity, and those in prosperity, a great turn of providence; and withal implies that this light of grace is a peculiar to his people, in respect of which all other prosperity is but darkness and misery; as light was peculiar to Goshen, when darkness was in all the Egyptian houses, Exodus 10:23.