What Does Isaiah 11:6 Mean?

(6) **The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb . . .**—It is significant of the prophet’s sympathy with the animal world that he thinks of that also as sharing in the blessings of redemption. Rapine and cruelty even there were to him signs of an imperfect order, or the consequences of a fall, even as to St. Paul they witnessed of a “bondage of corruption” (Romans 8:21). The very instincts of the brute creation should be changed in “the age to come,” and “the lion should eat straw like the ox.” Men have discussed the question whether and when the words shall receive a literal fulfilment, and the answer to that question lies behind the veil. It may be that what we call the laws of animal nature in these respects are tending to a final goal, of which the evolution that has tamed the dog, the bull, the horse, is as it were a pledge and earnest (Soph., *Antig., *342-351). It may be, however, that each form of brute cruelty was to the prophet’s mind the symbol of a human evil, and the imagery admits, therefore, of an allegorical rather than a literal interpretation. The classical student will remember the striking parallelism of the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, which, in its turn, may have been a far-off echo of Isaiah’s thoughts, floating in the air or embodied in apocryphal Sibylline Oracles among the Jews of Alexandria and Rome.