There shall the owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the kites also be gathered, everyone with her mate.
All Commentaries on Isaiah 34:15 Go To Isaiah 34
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
It is rightly said by the prophet, under the similitude of Judea, against the soul that sins and excuses itself, “There has the hedgehog had its hole.” Here the term hedgehog symbolizes the duplicity of the insincere mind that craftily defends itself. For when the hedgehog is discovered, its head is seen, its feet are obvious, its whole body revealed; but the moment it is captured, it gathers itself up into a ball, draws in its feet, hides its head, and the thing disappears in the hands of him who holds it, whereas before all the parts were visible.
Such, indeed, is the case of insincere minds when detected in their transgressions. The head of the hedgehog is seen in that one perceives from what beginnings the sinner approaches his crime. The feet of the hedgehog are visible, because one sees by what steps the evil was done. Then by quickly giving excuses, the insincere mind gathers up its feet, inasmuch as it tries to hide every vestige of its sin. It withdraws its head, because it claims through strange pleas that no evil ever began. The thing [i.e., the sinner] remains, as it were, in the hand of him who holds it like a ball. The one who reproves the evil suddenly no longer sees the sins that he had known earlier and holds the sinner enfolded in his own mind. The one who had seen everything at the moment of capturing the sinner (like a hedgehog) loses all knowledge of the sinner, being deluded by the subterfuges of his wicked pleas. Therefore the hedgehog has its nest in the wicked, that is, the duplicity of a malicious mind that conceals itself in the obscurity of its self-defense by drawing itself into a ball.
