splendor on show: beauty that catches the eye and brings honor to whoever wears, owns, or gives it
This is the showy side of glory. The more common Hebrew word for glory (כָּבוֹד) starts from the idea of weight, the solid honor a person carries. This word starts from beauty: gold thread on a robe, jewels at the throat, a temple faced with precious stone, a crown on a head. What is splendid here is meant to be seen, and the seeing is the point, because the admiration comes back to its owner as honor.
From there the word stretches out from objects to people and peoples. The same splendor that hangs on a robe can rest on a life, a family, a city, or a whole nation as the thing it is famous for. Across the Old Testament it names:
- fine clothing, jewelry, and ornament that make someone splendid to look at
- the crowning distinction a person or family is admired for, such as gray hair on a righteous old man
- the good name a people carries among the nations around it
- the radiance that belongs to God himself, in his sanctuary and in his acts
- the boasted magnificence of a proud power on the edge of losing it
Isaiah uses the word more than any other book, and works the whole range on purpose. The splendor Assyria wears in its haughty eyes, and the splendor drunken Ephraim wears like a fading flower, are named with the very word used for the crown of beauty God becomes for the survivors. That is not loose writing. It is the prophet insisting that splendor is real, that it belongs finally to God, and that whoever seizes it for himself is wearing something that will wilt.