Isaiah 45:7 we read, “I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil.” The Hebrew word translated “evil” means both moral offense (“sin”) and calamity. Here, the phrase itself, along with the parallelism in the verse, makes the choice between the two meanings for us. The evil in the passage is “trouble” or “calamity,” since it must be the opposite of peace, just as darkness is the opposite of light. Here, an understanding of rhetorical form enables us to interpret correctly.
