Stones of nothing

Yahweh is going to bring a day of vengeance and recompense on behalf of Zion, Isaiah prophesies (Isaiah 34). He will take up Zion’s complaint, her case ( rib ) against the Edomites, and will devastate that nation.

Nothing is left standing when the Lord’s sword has finished its slaughter of Edom. The lambs and goat and rams and oxen are Edomites, whose blood soaks the land and whose fat greases the ground. Edom’s streams are the ones that turn to pitch, and Edom is the land whose smoke rises up forever and ever, like the smoke of Sodom, which rose like a furnace from the city burned with fire from heaven.

Yahweh is going to come with His building tools. He’s going to bring His plumb bob to make sure that the vertical lines are straight. He’s got his stakes and his string lines to make sure that the walls are square. Instead of building, He destroys. He brings the line of tohu , and the stone of bohu , the line of formlessness and the line of emptiness. He constructs chaos, build confusion. He returns Edom to a condition like the condition of the world prior to the organization of the six days of creation. It is heading back to formless, emptiness, and darkness.