Isaiah 41:15

הִנֵּה שַׂמְתִּיךְ לְמוֹרַג חָרוּץ חָדָשׁ בַּעַל פִּיפִיּוֹת תָּדוּשׁ הָרִים וְתָדֹק וּגְבָעוֹת כַּמֹּץ תָּשִׂים׃

15 See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, sharp, new, a possessor of double-edged teeth. You will thresh the mountains and crush them; the hills you will make like chaff.

הִנֵּה שַׂמְתִּיךְ לְמוֹרַג See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, שַׂמְתִּיךְ qal perfect, 2nd masculine singular from שִׂים, "put, place, set." A morag (מוֹרַג) "threshing sledge" was a wooden sled pulled by oxen, sometimes fitted with iron teeth.

חָרוּץ חָדָשׁ sharp, new, These words are connected by munah, the conjunctive accent that joins words into a virtually singular term. We might say that the teeth described here were not just sharp, but "factory fresh."

בַּעַל פִּיפִיּוֹת a possessor of double-edged teeth. With tongue in cheek, Isaiah hazards the word "baal" in the sense of "owner, master." פִּיפִיּוֹת is related to פֶּה "mouth," but in this pluralized derivative it means "double-edged." A "toothy baal with factory sharp teeth" doesn't quite express the thought, but it's a provocative idea. An Mp note tells us that this rare word occurs just twice (cf. Psalm 149:6, "a double-edged sword in their hand." The parallelism of that verse transcends and defies a clean translation; "Let throaty praises be in their throats and a toothy sword in their hand").

תָּדוּשׁ הָרִים וְתָדֹק You will thresh the mountains and crush them; Thr qal imperfect תָּדוּשׁ seems to behave like a jussive here; a mild imperative. A waw of result precedes the qal imperfect וְתָדֹק "crush, pulverize." An Mp note says that תָּדוּשׁ occurs twice (cp. Habakkuk 3:12). We might ask when this ever happened in history? The passage is apocalyptic; this is what God will do at the end of the world to his enemies. Yet, when Jesus died on the cross, he crushed the head of the devil (Genesis 3:15), and whenever we fight spiritual battles, God makes us into his wrecking machines to defeat the lies of the devil and his minions, as Paul said: "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete." (2 Corinthians 10:3-6, NIV)

וּגְבָעוֹת כַּמֹּץ תָּשִׂים the hills you will make like chaff. גְבָעוֹת is the plural of the familiar word גִּבְעָה (Gibeah) "hill" as in "Gibeah of Saul" (Isaiah 10:29). Another form of שִׂים "put, place, set" ends the verse in a frame (cf. שַׂמְתִּיךְ above). Another Mp note guards the pointing of כַּמֹּץ, which occurs just here and in Psalm 1:4. The form occurs four other times without the definite article (כְּמֹץ).

God now calls on the Bible's image of a threshing sledge, a heavy farming tool, pulled by a team of animals with sharp metal teeth that ripped apart the harvested grain before winnowing. Then the farmer would toss the threshed grain into the air with a kind of pitch fork so that the wind would carry off the lighter hulls and chaff, and the heavier heads of grain would fall back to earth. (Notice that God does not talk about a summer breeze here, but a full gale taking the chaff away--nothing would be left).

God may also be invoking the people's memory of leviathan, the terrible sea creature from the book of Job, by telling his people, “The leviathan is awesome and destructive--and this kind of unstoppable power is the power that is on your side.” In Job, God had described the leviathan this way: “His undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge” (Job 41:30).

God is on our side. Our sins have made an insurmountable barrier between us and God, and only our Redeemer could and did batter down that barrier of our own sins and rescue us from our own self-destructiveness. Jesus gave up his own life to spare ours—to spare yours. Jesus is more than a hero to each one of us. He is our Redeemer.