God never gets furious.
Fury is not in me. Isaiah 27:4
Cited passages
Wrath is not in me, but if I should find briers and thorns, I would do battle! I would march on them and I would burn them together.
Does God ever get furious?
The tension
Isaiah 27:4 has YHWH declare 'fury is not in me' (chemah ein li). At least seven other texts across the prophetic and apocalyptic corpus — Isaiah 34:2, Jeremiah 7:20, Jeremiah 21:5, Jeremiah 30:23, Micah 5:15, Nahum 1:2, Zechariah 8:2 — describe YHWH as repeatedly, often, and copiously furious. Isaiah 27:4 is sitting seven chapters away from Isaiah 34:2 contradicting itself within the same scroll.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
God is often (always?) furious.
Cited passages
For Yahweh is enraged against all the nations, and angry with all their armies. He has utterly destroyed them. He has given them over for slaughter.
Therefore the Lord Yahweh says: “Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, on man, on animal, on the trees of the field, and on the fruit of the ground; and it will burn and will not be quenched.”
I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger, in wrath, and in great indignation.
Behold, Yahweh’s storm, his wrath, has gone out, a sweeping storm: it will burst on the head of the wicked.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Isaiah 27:4 is contextually difficult, and a careful apologetic case should lean there first. The verse sits inside the 'second Vineyard Song' (Isa 27:2-6), a deliberate counterpoint to the judgment-Vineyard Song of Isaiah 5. The Hebrew of 27:4a is genuinely awkward: chemah ein li — 'wrath/fury is not to me / in me.' The following clause shifts to the briers and thorns YHWH would 'march against and burn.' Joseph Blenkinsopp in the AB Isaiah 1-39 reads the unit as a protective oracle and the disclaimer as bounded: YHWH harbors no wrath against the vineyard (Israel), even as wrath remains available for the briers and thorns of v. 5. On this reading 27:4 is not a metaphysical claim that YHWH is wrathless in general; it is a statement of YHWH's present protective disposition toward his people. That is a reasonable contextual steel-man, and it does soften the intra-Isaianic clash.
It does not, however, fully defeat the SAB's point. On the surface — and in essentially every English translation a lay reader meets — 27:4 reads 'Fury is not in me,' with no asterisk. And the contradicting texts are unambiguous and use the very same vocabulary. Isaiah 34:2 pours out YHWH's chemah (the identical noun) on all the armies of the nations: we-chemah al-kol-tseva'am. Jeremiah's portrait is dense with chemah and aph ('anger,' literally 'nostril/snorting'): Jer 7:20 ('mine anger and my fury shall be poured out'), 21:5 ('in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath'), 30:23 ('the whirlwind of the LORD goeth forth with fury'). Jack Lundbom in the AB Jeremiah documents this enraged-deity portrait at length. Micah 5:15 promises vengeance 'in anger and fury,' and Nahum 1:2 is the poetic apex — 'YHWH is a jealous and avenging God; YHWH avenges and is full of wrath (chemah)' — which J. J. M. Roberts in the OTL Nahum reads as a theophanic hymn of divine fury. Zechariah 8:2 has YHWH 'jealous for Zion with great fury.' K.-D. Schunck's TDOT article on chemah catalogues the noun's roughly 120 occurrences and notes that the overwhelming majority depict actual divine rage.
So the contradiction operates at two levels. Intra-Isaianic: chemah ein li (27:4) versus we-chemah al-kol-tseva'am (34:2), separated by seven chapters and using the same word. Brevard Childs in the OTL Isaiah and Otto Kaiser in the OTL Isaiah 13-39 both register the friction and treat it as a deliberate inner-Isaianic theological tension between a wrathful and a salvific God held across the book's layers. Inter-prophetic: Isaiah 27:4 versus the Jeremiah-Micah-Nahum-Zechariah cluster, where YHWH's fury is not occasional but characteristic.
The contextual harmonization succeeds in showing that 27:4 was probably never intended as a universal denial of divine anger, which is why this is rated partially harmonized rather than a flat contradiction. But the deeper observation — and here critical scholarship adds what the apologetic frame cannot — is that the Hebrew Bible's portrayal of YHWH's emotional life is irreducibly multi-vocal. Abraham Heschel's The Prophets argued that the prophetic God is no impassible metaphysical absolute but a covenant-bound figure whose affect tracks Israel's behavior; Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman's Micah similarly stresses the covenantal logic of divine pathos. The juxtaposition of Isaiah 27:4 and Nahum 1:2 is less a puzzle to be solved than the prophetic tradition's refusal to settle on one doctrine of divine emotion.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated as a global 'God is never furious' contradiction (27:4 is contextually bounded), but a real tension in surface reading and in the canon's multi-vocal theology of wrath.
Sources for this reading