Who are “my worshipers, the daughter of my dispersed ones”?

Does my worshipers refer to the converted nations or to God’s exiled covenant people? Are these the same group as the daughter of my dispersed ones?

This verse could be taken to refer to three different possibilities.

1. Gentiles dispersed abroad by their sin (Isaiah 18:7; Isaiah 45:14; John 11:51–52) will bring offerings to God (understood as worshiping or paying homage to him) each in its place, in their own lands, per Zephaniah 2:11.

2. Judeans dispersed by the day of the Lord return to Jerusalem, offering themselves to God or renewing the Jewish sacrificial system.

3. Converted Gentiles who, as in Isaiah 66:20, bring scattered Judeans back to their homeland as a thanksgiving offering for what God has done for them.¹

Regarding the first interpretation, that my worshipers are dispersed Gentiles, this has weight because of the allusions in these verses to the Tower of Babel story, where the verb to disperse or to scatter (פוץ) plays an important role. The dispersed ones would be the nations scattered from Babel (see Genesis 11:8–9). This verbal link with the Babel account would suggest that Zephaniah is referring not to a gathering of a far-off dispersion of the scattered remnant of Israel, but to the gathering of Gentile dispersed ones from Cush and, by implication, the whole world, those who have always belonged to the Lord though until now they neither knew nor responded to him (see also John 11:52).² The daughter of my dispersed ones will be returned to a special relationship with the Lord, wherein they worship him.³