12:12 “The prince 1 who is among them will raise his belongings 2 onto his shoulder in darkness, and will go out. He 3 will dig a hole in the wall to leave through. He will cover his face so that he cannot see the land with his eyes.
8:18 Look, I and the sons whom the Lord has given me 4 are reminders and object lessons 5 in Israel, sent from the Lord who commands armies, who lives on Mount Zion.
1 sn The prince is a reference to Zedekiah.
2 tn The words “his belongings” are not in the Hebrew text but are implied.
3 tc The MT reads “they”; the LXX and Syriac read “he.”
4 sn This refers to Shear-jashub (7:3) and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (8:1, 3).
5 tn Or “signs and portents” (NAB, NRSV). The names of all three individuals has symbolic value. Isaiah’s name (which meant “the Lord delivers”) was a reminder that the Lord was the nation’s only source of protection; Shear-jashub’s name was meant, at least originally, to encourage Ahaz (see the note at 7:3), and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz’s name was a guarantee that God would defeat Israel and Syria (see the note at 8:4). The word מוֹפֶת (mofet, “portent”) can often refer to some miraculous event, but in 20:3 it is used, along with its synonym אוֹת (’ot, “sign”) of Isaiah’s walking around half-naked as an object lesson of what would soon happen to the Egyptians.