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As a dream - This is the beginning of the comparison, which is pursued and applied in the next verse. Sennacherib and his mighty army are not compared to a dream because of their sudden disappearance; but the disappointment of their eager hopes is compared to what happens to a hungry and thirsty man, when he awakes from a dream in which fancy had presented to him meat and drink in abundance, and finds it nothing but a vain illusion. The comparison is elegant and beautiful in the highest degree, well wrought up, and perfectly suited to the end proposed. The image is extremely natural, but not obvious: it appeals to our inward feelings, not to our outward senses; and is applied to an event in its concomitant circumstances exactly similar, but in its nature totally different. See De S. Poes. Hebr. Praelect. 12. For beauty and ingenuity it may fairly come in competition with one of the most elegant of Virgil, greatly improved from Homer, Iliad 22:199, where he has applied to a different purpose, but not so happily, the same image of the ineffectual working of imagination in a dream: -
Ac veluti in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
Nocte quies, necquicquam avidos extendere cursus
Velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri
Succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
Sufficiunt vires, nec vox, nec verba sequuntur.
Aen., 12:908.
"And as, when slumber seals the closing sight,
The sick wild fancy labors in the night;
Some dreadful visionary foe we shun
With airy strides, but strive in vain to run;
In vain our baffled limbs their powers essay;
We faint, we struggle, sink, and fall away;
Drain'd of our strength, we neither fight nor fly,
And on the tongue the struggling accents die."
Pitt.
Lucretius expresses the very same image with Isaiah: -
Ut bibere in somnis sitiens quum quaerit, et humor
Non datur, ardorem in membris qui stinguere possit;
Sed laticum simulacra petit, frustraque laborat,
In medioque sitit torrenti flumine potans.
As a thirsty man desires to drink in his sleep,
And has no fluid to allay the heat within,
But vainly labors to catch the image of rivers,
And is parched up while fancying that he is drinking at a full stream.
Bishop Stock's translation of the prophet's text is both elegant and just: -
"As when a hungry man dreameth; and, lo! he is eating:
And he awaketh; and his appetite is unsatisfied.
And as a thirsty man dreameth; and, lo! he is drinking:
And he awaketh; and, lo! he is faint,
And his appetite craveth."
Lucretius almost copies the original.
All that fight against her and her munition "And all their armies and their towers" - For ומצדתה צביה tsobeyha umetsodathah, I read, with the Chaldee, ומצדתם צבאם tsebaam umetsodatham .
And the multitude of all the nations - The Assyrians, and their allied hosts.
And her munition - Her fortresses, castles, places of strength 2 Samuel 5:7; Ecclesiastes 9:14; Ezekiel 19:9.
Shall be as a dream of a night vision - In a dream we seem to see the objects of which we think as really as when awake, and hence, they are called visions, and visions of the night Genesis 46:2; Job 4:13; Job 7:14; Daniel 2:28; Daniel 4:5; Daniel 7:1, Daniel 7:7, Daniel 7:13, Daniel 7:15. The specific idea here is not that of the “suddenness” with which objects seen in a dream appear and then vanish, but it is that which occurs in Isaiah 29:8, of one who dreams of eating and drinking, but who awakes, and is hungry and thirsty still. So it was with the Assyrian. He had set his heart on the wealth of Jerusalem. He had earnestly desired to possess that city - as a hungry man desires to satisfy the cravings of his appetite. But it would be like the vision of the night; and on that fatal morning on which he should awake from his fond dream Isaiah 37:36, he would find all his hopes dissipated, and the longcherished desire of his soul unsatisfied still.