From the eleventh chapter of Isaiah:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
[...]
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
[...]
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
[...]
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

The earth itself shall be full of the knowledge of God. The very animals will refrain from preying on one another, and eat vegetation instead. As a vision of a world set completely right, with true justice being delivered to the meek, the poor and the wicked, I would guess it is hard to beat these verses from Isaiah.

It’s a vision that you could say is echoed in Bob Dylan’s song When The Ship Comes In. Nature itself becomes one with the bringers of justice that the ship is carrying, as “the sun will respect every face on the deck,” “the seagulls will be smiling,” and the very “rocks on the sand will proudly stand.”

Joan Baez has famously (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly) attributed this song of Dylan’s to his annoyance at a hotel clerk. I don’t know that the record shows who may have similarly aggravated Isaiah.

It’s not a song that Dylan has sung live on very many occasions, if I’m not mistaken (the old Dylantree database that allowed instantaneous searching of past performances is sadly defunct).*

One occasion on which he did sing it was certainly a doozy, and that was at the culmination of the Live Aid concert in 1985 (previously written about at this link). This clip includes the remarks he made after singing The Ballad of Hollis Brown, i.e. those consternation-causing remarks about putting some of the Live Aid money towards paying off the bank debts of small American farmers .

…

*Addendum: Thanks to John R. for the e-mail regarding His Bobness Info: The Bob Dylan Database. My ignorance knows no bounds. However, a search in that database at least backs up my assertion. According to the records there, Dylan has only publicly performed When The Ship Comes In on four occasions: twice in 1963, once in 1964, and once on that July night in 1985 when the whole wide world was watching.

It’s amazing when you think about it, that an artist could have a song like that in his repertoire and only sing it four times in the past forty-four years. It also illustrates to what extent he reached back and very deliberately picked his material for that Live Aid appearance.

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