Isaiah 14:2

The people shall take them... — Literally, the peoples. In Ezra 1:1; Ezra 6:7, we have what answered, in a measure, to the picture thus drawn; but here, as elsewhere, the words paint an ideal to which there has been as yet no historical reality fully corresponding. No period of later Jewish history has beheld the people ruling over a conquered race; and if we claim a real fulfilment of the last clause of the verse, it is only in the sense in which the Latin poet said that Grœcia capta ferum victorem cepit (Horat. Ep. II. i. 156). The triumph of Israel has, so far, been found in that of its leading ideas, and in the victory of the faith of Christ. In Isaiah 56:3 the proselyte appears as admitted on terms of equality, here on those of subjugation.