Keil & Delitzsch

The prophet now looks upon the members of the church as having grown up, as it were, from childhood to maturity: they suck like a child, and are comforted like a grown-up son. "Like a man whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem." Hitzig says that 'ı̄sh is not well chosen; but how easily could the prophet have written bēn (son), as in Isa 49:15! He writes 'ı̄sh, however, not indeed in the unmeaning sense in which the lxx has taken it, viz., ὡς εἴ τινα μήτηρ παρακαλέσει, but looking upon the people, whom he had previously thought of as children, as standing before him as one man. Israel is now like a man who has escaped from bondage and returned home from a foreign land, full of mournful recollections, the echoing sounds of which entirely disappear in the maternal arms of divine love there in Jerusalem, the beloved home, which was the home of its thoughts even in the strange land.