The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
Hear, heavens, and listen, earth; for Yahweh has spoken: “I have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows his owner, and the donkey his master’s crib; but Israel doesn’t know. My people don’t consider.”
Ah sinful nation, a people loaded with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken Yahweh. They have despised the Holy One of Israel. They are estranged and backward.
Why should you be beaten more, that you revolt more and more? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.
From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no soundness in it: wounds, welts, and open sores. They haven’t been closed, bandaged, or soothed with oil.
Your country is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Strangers devour your land in your presence and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.
The daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a field of melons, like a besieged city.
Unless Yahweh of Armies had left to us a very small remnant, we would have been as Sodom. We would have been like Gomorrah.
Hear Yahweh’s word, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!
“What are the multitude of your sacrifices to me?”, says Yahweh. “I have had enough of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed animals. I don’t delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of male goats.
When you come to appear before me, who has required this at your hand, to trample my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings. Incense is an abomination to me. New moons, Sabbaths, and convocations: I can’t stand evil assemblies.
My soul hates your New Moons and your appointed feasts. They are a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves. Make yourself clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil.
Learn to do well. Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow.”
“Come now, and let’s reason together,” says Yahweh: “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured with the sword; for the mouth of Yahweh has spoken it.”
How the faithful city has become a prostitute! She was full of justice. Righteousness lodged in her, but now there are murderers.
Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water.
Your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves. Everyone loves bribes and follows after rewards. They don’t defend the fatherless, neither does the cause of the widow come to them.
Therefore the Lord, Yahweh of Armies, the Mighty One of Israel, says: “Ah, I will get relief from my adversaries, and avenge myself on my enemies.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 That is, a revelation or prophecy, which was one…
That is, a revelation or prophecy, which was one of the two means whereby God declared himself to his servants in old time, as Num. 12:6, and therefore the Prophets were called Seers, 1 Sam. 9:9.
Isaiah was chiefly sent to Judah and Jerusalem, but not only: for in this book are prophecies concerning other nations also.
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Called also Azariah, 2 Kings 15:1, of these Kings, read 2 Kings 14-21, and 2 Chron. 25-33.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–24 Isa 1:1 The vision of Isaiah the son of…
Isa 1:1 The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, [and] Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
Ver. 1. The vision of Isaiah.] That which was not unfitly affirmed of a modern expositor, {a} that his commentaries on this prophecy of Isaiah are mole parvi, eruditione mangni, small in bulk, but great in worth, may much more fitly be spoken of the prophecy itself, which is aureus quantivis precii libellus, worth its weight in gold. A "great roll" or "volume" it is called, {Isa 8:1} because it is magnum in parvo, much in a little; and it is said there to be "written with a man’s pen," that is, plainly and perspicuously; so little reason was there that John Haselbach, professor at Vienna, should read twenty-one years to his auditors upon this first chapter only, and yet not finish it. {b} I confess there is no prophecy but hath its obscurity - the picture of prophecy is said to hang in the Pope’s library like a matron with her eyes covered - and Jerome saith that this of Isaiah containeth all rhetoric, ethics, and theology. But if brevity and suavity, which Fulgentius maketh to be the greatest graces of a sentence - if eloquence of style, and evidence of vision may carry it with the reader, here they are eminently met in this seraphical orator, of whom we may far better say than the learned critic doth of Livy, Non ita copiosus ut nimius; neque ira suavis ut lascicus; nec adeo lenis ut remissus: non sic tristis ut horridus; neque ita simplex ut nudus; aut adeo comptus ut affectata compositione calamistris videatur inustus. Par verbis materia, par sententia rebus, &c. {c} A courtier he was, and a master of speech; a man of noble birth, and as noble a spirit; not the first of the holy prophets, and yet worthily set in the first place - as St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is for like cause set before the rest - because in abundance of visions he exceedeth his fellows; and in speaking of the Lord Christ, he delivereth himself more like an evangelist than a prophet, and is therefore called the evangelical prophet. {d} In the New Testament he is cited by Christ and his apostles sixty different times at least; and by the more devoted heathens he was not a little respected, as appeareth by the history of that Ethiopian eunuch. {Act 8:26-40}
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The vision.] That is, The several visions or doctrines so certainly and clearly revealed to him by God, as if he had seen them with his bodily eyes. See Isa 2:1 Nah 1:1. For they are not to be hearkened to who hold that these seers, the prophets, understood not their own prophecies, {1Pe 1:10-11} though it is true that those "holy men of God spake as they were moved," acted, and powerfully carried on (φερομενοι) to see and say as they did, by the Holy Ghost. {2Pe 1:21}
Of Isaiah.] Which signifieth "God’s health." He would indeed have healed that perverse people to whom he was sent; but they "would not be healed," as he sadly complaineth, {Isa 44:4; Isa 53:1} turning them over to God with a Non convertentur; They will not repent, let them therefore perish. When there is no hope of curing, there must be cutting.
The Son of Amoz.] Who likewise was a prophet, say the Hebrews, and of royal extraction.
Which he saw.] Not which I saw; thus he speaketh for modesty sake. Luther {e} wittily saith, that Haec ego feci, haec ego feci, shows men to be nothing else but faeces, dregs.
Concerning Judah and Jerusalem.] The inhabitants whereof lived in God’s good land, but would not live by God’s good laws; to them was objected, as afterwards to the Athenians, Eos scire quae recta sunt, sed facere nolle, that they knew what was right, but had no mind to do it, though this and other prophets used their best oratory in inviting those of them that did rebel, inciting those that did neglect, hastening those that did linger, and recalling those that did wander, to sue out their pardons, and make their peace with their Maker.
In the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.] And longer too, if that be true which the Hebrews tell us, that at the age of one hundred twenty-six years he was sawn asunder by Manasseh (his grandson by the mother’s side) with a wooden saw. {f} Sure it is that Manasseh was a most bloody persecutor, and perhaps not inferior to Dioclesian, in whose days such cruelty was exercised toward the Christian bishops and others, Ut totum orcurn dicas in orbem effusum, ubi nemo nisi tortus vel terror sit, {g} as if hell had been broken loose, and all men turned either torturers or tortured.
{a} Snepfius.
{b} Mercat. Atlas.
{c} Casaub.
{d} Jerome. Est in fragmentis Demadis, orationes Demosthenis esse ονομαστι καλας. De Isaiae visionibus idem puta. Conciones habet poenitentiales, comminatorias et consolatorias.
{e} Luth. in Ps. cxxvii.
{f} Jerome, lib. xv. in Isa. in fine.
{g} Bussieres.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 The vision, or, the visions; the word being here…
The vision, or, the visions; the word being here collectively used, as it Isa 22:1; 1Sa 3:1. The sense is, This is the book of the visions or prophecies. As prophets were called seers, 1Sa 9:9, so prophecies are called visions, because they were as clearly and certainly represented to the prophets' minds as bodily objects are to men's eyes.
Amoz; either the brother of Amaziah king of Judah, as the Hebrew writers fancy; or rather, some other person then well known.
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Saw, i.e. foresaw and foretold. But he speaks, after the manner of the prophets, of things to come as if they were either past or present.
Concerning Judah and Jerusalem; principally, but not exclusively. For he prophesieth also concerning Egypt and Babylon, and divers other countries; which yet he doth with respect to Judah.
In the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah; in the time of their reign; whence it may be gathered that Isaiah exercised his prophetical office above fifty years together: see 2Ki 15; 2Ki 16.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 10, 16, 21 Here is, I. The name of the prophet, Isaiah,…
Here is, I. The name of the prophet, Isaiah, or Jesahiahu (for so it is in the Hebrew), which, in the New Testament is read Esaias. His name signifies the salvation of the Lord - a proper name for a prophet by whom God gives knowledge of salvation to his people, especially for this prophet, who prophesies so much of Jesus the Saviour and of the great salvation wrought out by him. He is said to be the son of Amoz, not Amos the prophet (the two names in the Hebrew differ more than in the English), but, as the Jews think, of Amoz the brother, or son, of Amaziah king of Judah, a tradition as uncertain as that rule which they give, that, where a prophet's father is named, he also was himself a prophet. The prophets' pupils and successors are indeed often called their sons, but we have few instances, if any, of their own sons being their successors.
II. The nature of the prophecy. It is a vision, being revealed to him in a vision, when he was awake, and heard the words of God, and saw the visions of the Almighty (as Balaam speaks, Num 24:4), though perhaps it was not so illustrious a vision at first as that afterwards, Amo 6:1. The prophets were called seers, or seeing men, and therefore their prophecies are fitly called visions. It was what he saw with the eyes of his mind, and foresaw as clearly by divine revelation, was as well assured of it, as fully apprised of it, and as much affected with it, as if he had seen it with his bodily eyes. Note 1. God's prophets saw what they spoke of, knew what they said, and require our belief of nothing but what they themselves believed and were sure of, Joh 6:69; Jo1 1:1. 2. They could not but speak what they saw, because they saw how much all about them were concerned in it, Act 4:20; Co2 4:13.
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III. The subject of the prophecy. It was what he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, the country of the two tribes, and that city which was their metropolis; and there is little in it relating to Ephraim, or the ten tribes, of whom there is so much said in the prophecy of Hosea. Some chapters there are in this book which relate to Babylon, Egypt, Tyre, and some other neighbouring nations; but it takes its title from that which is the main substance of it, and is therefore said to be concerning Judah and Jerusalem, the other nations spoken of being such as the people of the Jews had concern with. Isaiah brings to them in a special manner, 1. Instruction; for it is the privilege of Judah and Jerusalem that to them pertain the oracles of God. 2. Reproof and threatening; for if in Judah, where God is known, if in Salem, where his name is great, iniquity be found, they, sooner than any other, shall be reckoned with for it. 3. Comfort and encouragement in evil times; for the children of Zion shall be joyful in their king.
IV. The date of the prophecy. Isaiah prophesied in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. By this it appears, 1. That he prophesied long, especially if (as the Jews say) he was at last put to death by Manasseh, to a cruel death, being sawn asunder, to which some suppose the apostle refers, Heb 11:37. From the year that king Uzziah died (Isa 6:1) to Hezekiah's sickness and recovery was forty-seven years; how much before, and after, he prophesied, is not certain; some reckon sixty, others eighty years in all. It was an honour to him, and a happiness to his country, that he was continued so long in his usefulness; and we must suppose both that he began young and that he held out to old age; for the prophets were not tied, as the priests were, to a certain age, for the beginning or ending of their administration. 2. That he passed through variety of times. Jotham was a good king, and Hezekiah a better, and no doubt gave encouragement to and took advice from this prophet, were patrons to him, and he a privy-counsellor to them; but between them, and when Isaiah was in the prime of his time, the reign of Ahaz was very profane and wicked; then, no doubt, he was frowned upon at court, and, it is likely, forced to abscond. Good men and good ministers must expect bad times in this world, and prepare for them. Then religion was run down to such a degree that the doors of the house of the Lord were shut up and idolatrous altars were erected in every corner of Jerusalem; and Isaiah, with all his divine eloquence and messages immediately from God himself, could not help it. The best men, the best ministers, cannot do the good they would do in the world.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–24 The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz,.... This…
The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz,.... This is either the particular title of the prophecy contained in this single chapter, as Jarchi and Abarbinel think; seeing the second chapter Isa 2:1 begins with another title, "the word that Isaiah saw", &c. or rather it is the common title of the whole book; since it is the vision which Isaiah saw in the reign of four kings, as is later affirmed; and so is no other than in general "the prophecy of Isaiah", as the Targum renders it; called a "vision", because it was delivered to him, at least the greatest part of it, in a vision; and because he had a clear perception of the things he prophesied of, as well as delivered them in a clear and perspicuous manner to others: hence the Jews say (m), that Moses and Isaiah excelled the other prophets, seeing they understood what they prophesied of. The name of Isaiah, the penman of this book, signifies either "the Lord shall save", according to Hilleras (n); or "the salvation of the Lord", as Abarbinel, Jerom, and others; and is very suitable to the message he was sent with to the people of God; to acquaint them that the Lord had provided a Saviour for them, and that he would come and save them. He is said to be "the son of Amoz"; not of Amos the prophet; the names differ; the name of the prophet that stands among the twelve lesser prophets is "Amos"; the name of Isaiah's parent is "Amoz". It is a tradition with the Jews (o), that Amoz, the father of Isaiah, was brother to Amaziah, king of Judah, so that Isaiah was of the royal family. Abarbinei endeavours to confirm it from that greatness of mind, freedom and boldness, he used in reproofs, and from his polite and courtly way of speaking; and this is mentioned by Aben Ezra as a reason why the Jews did not harm him, as they did Jeremiah: but this tradition is not equally regarded by the Jewish writers; and though Kimchi takes notice of it, yet he says the genealogy of Isaiah is not known, nor of what tribe he was. If he was of the seed royal, this is an instance of God's calling some that are noble, not only by his grace, but to office in his church; and it is with a view to this tradition, no doubt, that Jerom (p) calls him "vir nobilis", a "nobleman". It is also a rule with the Jews (q), that where the name of a prophet's father is mentioned, it is a sign that his father was a prophet; and so they say this Amoz was, though the king's brother; and that he is the same with the man of God that came to Amaziah (r), Ch2 25:7 but Aben Ezra suggests, that this rule does not always hold good.
Which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem; that is, chiefly and principally; for though Ephraim, or the ten tribes of Israel, are mentioned, yet very rarely; and though there are prophecies concerning other nations in it, yet these relate to the deliverance of the Jews from them, or to God's vengeance on them for their sake. Judah is put for the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and is particularly mentioned, because the Messiah, so much spoken of in this book, was to spring from thence, whose title is the Lion of the tribe of Judah; and though Jerusalem was in it, yet that is also particularly taken notice of, because not only the temple, the place of divine worship, was in it, and it was the metropolis of the land; but because the Messiah, when he came, was often to appear here, and from thence the Gospel was to go forth into all the world; and this was a figure of the Gospel church state to the end of the world, which often bears this name: and many things are said in this prophecy not only concerning the coming of Christ, but of the Gospel dispensation, and of various things that should come to pass in it; concerning the glory of the church in the latter day, the calling of the Gentiles, the conversion of the Jews, the destruction of antichrist, and the new heavens and new earth.
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In the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah: if Isaiah began to prophesy in the first year of Uzziah's reign, as Kimchi and Abarbinel think, relying pretty much on Ch2 26:22 and lived out the reign of Hezekiah, as he must, if he was put to death by Manasseh, according to the tradition of the Jews, he must prophesy a hundred and twelve or thirteen years; for Uzziah reigned fifty two years, Jotham sixteen, Ahaz sixteen, and Hezekiah twenty nine; but as this seems to begin his prophecy too soon, since so small a part of it was in or concerns Uzziah's reign; so it seems too late to fix the date of his prophecy from the year that King Uzziah died, when he had the vision in Isa 6:1 and desired to be sent of the Lord; which is the opinion of Jarchi, Aben Ezra, and others; but Dr. Lightfoot's opinion is more probable, who places the beginning of his prophecy in the twenty third year of Uzziah; though perhaps it may be sufficient to allow him only ten years of Uzziah's reign: and as he lived through the two reigns of Jotham and Ahaz, so it is certain that he lived through more than half of the reign of Hezekiah; his whole reign was twenty nine years; and therefore it was when he had reigned fourteen years that he was taken sick, and then fifteen years more were added to his days; and the year after this came the messengers from Babylon to congratulate him on his recovery; all which Isaiah gives an account of Isa 38:1 but how long he lived and prophesied after this cannot be said: had his days been prolonged to the times of Manasseh, it would have been written, as Aben Ezra observes, and who pays but little regard to the tradition of the Jews concerning Isaiah's being put to death by Manasseh; if the thing, says he, is "cabala", a tradition, it is truth; but he seems to call in question its reality; however, it is not to be depended on.
(m) R. Eleazar in Yalkut, pars 2. fol. 118. 2. (n) Onomastic. Sacr. p. 319. (o) T. Bab. Megilla, fol. 10. 2. & Sota, fol. 10. 2. & Seder Olam Zuta, p. 104. Juchasin, fol. 12. 1. Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 11. 2. (p) Ad Paulam, fol. 8. M. tom. 3. (q) T. Bab. Megilla, fol. 15. 1. (r) Kimchi in 2 Chron. xxv. 7.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23 Judah's sins, ver. 1-4. Her judgments, ver. 5-9. Her…
Judah's sins, ver. 1-4. Her judgments, ver. 5-9. Her worship is rejected, ver. 10-15. Exhortations to repentance, promises of grace and mercy, threatenings of sore judgments, and complaints by reason of their backsliding, ver. 16-31
Vision - Or, the visions; the word being here collectively used: the sense is, this is the book of the visions or prophecies. As prophets were called Seers, 1 Sam. ix, 9, so prophecies are called visions, because they were as clearly and certainly represented to the prophets minds, as bodily objects are to mens eyes. Saw - Foresaw and foretold. But he speaks, after the manner of the prophets, of things to come, as if they were either past or present. Judah - Principally, but not exclusively. For he prophecies also concerning Egypt and Babylon, and divers other countries; yet with respect to Judah. The days - ln the time of their reign. Whence it may be gathered, that Isaiah exercised his prophetical office above fifty years altogether.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 Chronological Notes relative to the commencement of Isaiah's prophecy
THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH
Chronological Notes relative to the commencement of Isaiah's prophecy
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-Year from the Creation of the World, according to the computation of Archbishop Usher, 3244.
-Year from the Deluge, according to the generally received Hebrew text, 1588.
-Year from the vocation of Abram, 1161.
-Year from the foundation of Solomon's Temple, 251.
-First year of the fifth Olympiad.
-Year before the building of Rome, according to the Varronian computation, 7.
-Fifteenth year of the reign of Thurimas, king of Macedon.
-Eleventh year of the reign of Theopompus, king of Lacedaemon.
-Second year of the reign of Alyattes, king of Lydia.
-Eighteenth year of AEschylus, perpetual archon of the Athenians.
-Second year of the reign of Pekahiah, king of Israel.
-Fifty-first year of the reign of Azariah, or Uzziah, king of Judah.
-Epoch of the establishment of the Ephori at Lacedaemon by Theopompus.
CHAPTER I
The prophet, with a boldness and majesty becoming the herald of
the Most High, begins with calling on the whole creation to
attend while Jehovah speaks, 2.
A charge of gross insensibility and ingratitude is then brought
against the Jews, by contrasting their conduct with that of
the ox and ass, the most stupid of animals, 3.
This leads to an amplification of their guilt, 4;
highly aggravated by their slighting the chastisements and
judgments of God, though repeated till they had been left
almost like Sodom and Gomorrah, 5-9.
The incidental mention of those places leads to an address to
the rulers and people of the Jews, under the character of
princes of Sodom, and people of Gomorrah, which is no less
spirited and severe than elegant and unexpected, 10.
The vanity of trusting to the performance of the outward rites
and ceremonies of religion is then exposed, 11-15;
and the necessity of repentance and reformation is strongly
enjoined, 16, 17,
and urged by the most encouraging promises as well as by the
most awful threatenings, 18-20.
But neither of these producing the proper effect on that people
who were the prophet's charge, he bitterly laments their
degeneracy, 21-23;
and concludes with introducing God, declaring his purpose of
inflicting such heavy judgments as would entirely cut off the
wicked, and excite in the righteous, who should also pass
through the furnace, an everlasting shame and abhorrence of
every thing connected with idolatry, the source of their
misery, 24-31.
ISAIAH exercised the prophetical office during a long period of time, if he lived to the reign of Manasseh; for the lowest computation, beginning from the year in which Uzziah died, when some suppose him to have received his first appointment to that office, brings it to sixty-one years. But the tradition of the Jews, that he was put to death by Manasseh, is very uncertain; and one of their principal rabbins, Aben Ezra, Com. in Isa 1:1, seems rather to think that he died before Hezekiah, which is indeed more probable. It is however certain that he lived at least to the fifteenth or sixteenth year of Hezekiah; this makes the least possible term of the duration of his prophetical office about forty-eight years. The time of the delivery of some of his prophecies is either expressly marked, or sufficiently clear from the history to which they relate; that of a few others may with some probability be deduced from internal marks; from expressions, descriptions, and circumstances interwoven. It may therefore be of some use in this respect, and for the better understanding of his prophecies in general, to give here a summary view of the history of his time.
The kingdom of Judah seems to have been in a more flourishing condition during the reigns of Uzziah and Jotham, than at any other time after the revolt of the ten tribes. The former recovered the port of Elath on the Red Sea, which the Edomites had taken in the reign of Joram. He was successful in his wars with the Philistines, and took from them several cities, Gath, Jabneh, Ashdod; as likewise against some people of Arabia Deserta, and against the Ammonites, whom he compelled to pay him tribute. He repaired and improved the fortifications of Jerusalem; and had a great army, well appointed and disciplined. He was no less attentive to the arts of peace; and very much encouraged agriculture, and the breeding of cattle. Jotham maintained the establishments and improvements made by his father; added to what Uzziah had done in strengthening the frontier places; conquered the Ammonites, who had revolted, and exacted from them a more stated and probably a larger tribute. However, at the latter end of his time, the league between Pekah, king of Israel, and Retsin, king of Syria, was formed against Judah; and they began to carry their designs into execution.
But in the reign of Ahaz his son not only all these advantages were lost, but the kingdom of Judah was brought to the brink of destruction. Pekah king of Israel overthrew the army of Ahaz, who lost in battle one hundred and twenty thousand men; and the Israelites carried away captives two hundred thousand women and children, who however were released and sent home again upon the remonstrance of the prophet Oded. After this, as it should seem, (see Vitringa on Isa 7:2,) the two kings of Israel and Syria, joining their forces, laid siege to Jerusalem; but in this attempt they failed of success. In this distress Ahaz called in the assistance of Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, who invaded the kingdoms of Israel and Syria, and slew Rezin; but he was more in danger than ever from his too powerful ally; to purchase whose forbearance, as he had before bought his assistance, he was forced to strip himself and his people of all the wealth he could possibly raise from his own treasury, from the temple, and from the country. About the time of the siege of Jerusalem the Syrians took Elath, which was never after recovered. The Edomites likewise, taking advantage of the distress of Ahaz, ravaged Judea, and carried away many captives. The Philistines recovered what they had before lost; and took many places in Judea, and maintained themselves there. Idolatry was established by the command of the king in Jerusalem, and throughout Judea; and the service of the temple was either intermitted, or converted into an idolatrous worship.
Hezekiah, his son, on his accession to the throne, immediately set about the restoration of the legal worship of God, both in Jerusalem and through Judea. He cleansed and repaired the temple, and held a solemn passover. He improved the city, repaired the fortification, erected magazines of all sorts, and built a new aqueduct. In the fourth year of his reign Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, invaded the kingdom of Israel, took Samaria, and carried away the Israelites into captivity, and replaced them by different people sent from his own country; and this was the final destruction of that kingdom, in the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah.
Hezekiah was not deterred by this alarming example from refusing to pay the tribute to the king of Assyria, which had been imposed on Ahaz: this brought on the invasion of Sennacherib in the fourteenth year of his reign, an account of which is inserted among the prophecies of Isaiah. After a great and miraculous deliverance from so powerful an enemy, Hezekiah continued his reign in peace. He prospered in all his works, and left his kingdom in a flourishing state to his son Manasseh-a son in every respect unworthy of such a father. See Lowth.
NOTES ON CHAP. I
Verse 1. The vision of Isaiah] It seems doubtful whether this title belongs to the whole book, or only to the prophecy contained in this chapter. The former part of the title seems properly to belong to this particular prophecy; the latter part, which enumerates the kings of Judah under whom Isaiah exercised his prophetical office, seems to extend it to the whole collection of prophecies delivered in the course of his ministry. Vitringa-to whom the world is greatly indebted for his learned labours on this prophet and to whom we should have owed much more if he had not so totally devoted himself to Masoretic authority-has, I think, very judiciously resolved this doubt. He supposes that the former part of the title was originally prefixed to this single prophecy; and that, when the collection of all Isaiah's prophecies was made, the enumeration of the kings of Judah was added, to make it at the same time a proper title to the whole book. As such it is plainly taken in 2Ch 32:32, where the book of Isaiah is cited by this title: "The vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz."
The prophecy contained in this first chapter stands single and unconnected, making an entire piece of itself. It contains a severe remonstrance against the corruptions prevailing among the Jews of that time, powerful exhortations to repentance, grievous threatenings to the impenitent, and gracious promises of better times, when the nation shall have been reformed by the just judgments of God. The expression, upon the whole, is clear; the connection of the several parts easy; and in regard to the images, sentiments, and style, it gives a beautiful example of the prophet's elegant manner of writing; though perhaps it may not be equal in these respects to many of the following prophecies.
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Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 24 Isa 1:1. The vision of Isaiah — “It seems…
Isa 1:1. The vision of Isaiah — “It seems doubtful,” says Bishop Lowth, “whether this title belongs to the whole book, or only to the prophecy contained in this chapter. The former part of the title seems properly to belong to this particular prophecy: the latter part, which enumerates the kings of Judah, under whom Isaiah exercised his prophetical office, seems to appropriate it to the whole collection of prophecies delivered in the course of his ministry. Vitringa, to whom the world is greatly indebted for his learned labours on this prophet, has, I think, very judiciously resolved this doubt. He supposes, that the former part of this title was originally prefixed to this single prophecy; and that when the collection of all Isaiah’s prophecies was made, the enumeration of the kings of Judah was added, to make it, at the same time, a proper title to the whole book. And such it is plainly taken to be, 2Ch 32:32; where the book of Isaiah is cited by this title.” Thus understood, the word vision is used collectively for visions, and the sense is, “This is the book of the visions, or prophecies, of Isaiah.” The reader must observe, the two usual ways, whereby God communicated his will to the prophets, were visions and dreams: see Num 12:6. In visions, the inspired persons were awake, but their external senses were bound up, and, as it were, laid asleep in a trance. Thus Balaam describes them as to himself, Num 24:16. They are called visions, not from any use made of corporal sight, but because of the clearness and evidence of the things revealed, and the conformity of this kind of inspiration to the information which the mind receives by the sight of the bodily eyes. Hence, also, prophets were called seers, 1Sa 9:9. Sometimes, however, visions were accompanied with external representations. See Isa 6:1; Eze 40:2; Rev 21:10. See notes on Isaiah, by Wm. Lowth, B.D. Which he saw — Foresaw and foretold. For he speaks, after the manner of the prophets, of things to come, as if they were either past or present. Concerning Judah — Principally, but not exclusively. For he prophesies also concerning Egypt and Babylon, and divers other countries; yet with respect to Judah. In the days of Uzziah, &c. — In the time of their reign. This, probably, was not the first vision which Isaiah had, but is placed at the beginning of his book, because, together with the four following chapters, it contains a general description of the state of the Jews, under the several judgments which God had brought upon them, and is a fit preface or introduction to the rest of his prophecy.
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Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1–24 The vision - The first verse evidently is a…
The vision - The first verse evidently is a title, but whether to the whole book or only to a part of it has been questioned. As it stands here, however, it seems clearly intended to include the entire book, because it embraces all that was seen during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah; that is, during the whole prophetic life of the prophet. The same title is also given to his prophecies in 2Ch 32:32 : ‘Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and his goodness, behold they are written in the vision of Isaiah.’ Vitringa supposes that the former part of this title, ‘the vision of Isaiah,’ was at first affixed to the single prophecy contained in the first chapter, and that the latter part was inserted afterward as an introduction to the whole book. This might have been done by Isaiah himself if he collected his prophecies into a volume, or by some other inspired man who collected and arranged them; see the Introduction to Isa. 36.
The word “vision,” חזון chăzôn, denotes properly that which is seen, from the verb, חזה châzâh, “to see, to behold.” It is a term which is often used in reference to the prophecies of the Old Testament; Num 12:6; Num 24:4; 1Sa 3:1; Psa 89:19; Dan 2:19; Dan 7:2; Dan 8:1; Nah 1:1; Gen 15:1; Isa 21:2; Isa 22:1. Hence, the prophets were anciently called “Seers,” as those who saw or witnessed events which were yet to come; compare 1Sa 9:9 : ‘He that is now called a prophet was beforetime called a “Seer;”’ 1Sa 9:11, 1Sa 9:18-19; 1Ch 9:22; 1Ch 29:29; 2Ki 18:13. In these visions the objects probably were made to pass before the mind of the prophet as a picture, in which the various events were delineated with more or less distinctness, and the prophecies were spoken, or recorded, as the visions appeared to the observer. As many events could be represented only by symbols, those symbols became a matter of record, and are often left without explanation. On the nature of the prophetic visions, see Introduction, Section 7. (4.)
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Of Isaiah - The name Isaiah ישׁעיהו yesha‛yâhû from ישׁע yesha‛ - salvation, help, deliverance - and יהוה yehovâh or Jehovah, means ‘salvation of Yahweh,’ or ‘Yahweh will save.’ The Vulgate renders it “Isaias”; the Septuagint has: Ησαΐ́ας Eesaias, “Esaias.” This is also retained in the New Testament; Mat 3:3; Mat 4:14; Mat 12:17; Mat 15:7; Mar 7:6; Luk 4:17; Joh 12:39; Act 8:28; Rom 9:27, etc. In the book of Isaiah itself we find the form ישׁעיהו yesha‛yâhû, but in the inscription the rabbis give the form ישׁעיה yesha‛yâh. It was common among the Hebrews to incorporate the name Yahweh, or a part of it, into their proper names; see the note at Isa 7:14. Probably the object of this was to express veneration or regard for him - as we now give the name of a parent or friend to a child; or in many cases the name may have been given to record some signal act of mercy on the part of God, or some special interposition of his goodness. The practice of incorporating the name of the God that was worshipped into proper names was common in the East. Thus the name “Bel,” the principal idol worshipped in Babylon, appears in the proper names of the kings, as Belshazzar, etc.; compare the note at Isa 46:1. It is not known that the name was given to Isaiah with any reference to the nature of the prophecies which he would deliver; but it is a remarkable circumstance that it coincides so entirely with the design of so large a portion of his predictions. The substance of the latter portion of the book, at least, is the salvation which Yahweh would effect for his people from their oppressers in Babylon, and the far mightier deliverance which the world would experience under the Messiah.
The son of Amoz - See the Introduction, Section 2. “Concerning Judah.” The Jews after the death of Solomon were divided into two kingdoms; the kingdom of Judah, and of Israel, or Ephraim. The kingdom of Judah included the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Benjamin was a small tribe, and it was not commonly mentioned, or the name was lost in that of Judah. The kingdom of Israel, or Ephraim, included the remaining ten tribes. Few of the prophets appeared among them; and the personal ministry of Isaiah does not appear to have been at all extended to them.
Jerusalem - The capital of the kingdom of Judah. It was on the dividing line between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. It is supposed to have been founded by Melchizedek, who is called king of Salem Gen 14:18, and who is supposed to have given this name “Salem” to it. This was about 2000 years before Christ. About a century after its foundation as a city, it was captured by the “Jebusites,” who extended its walls and built a citadel on Mount Zion. By them it was called Jebus. In the conquest of Canaan, Joshua put to death its king Jos 10:23, and obtained possession of the town, which was jointly occupied by the Hebrews and Jebusites until the latter were expelled by David, who made it the capital of his kingdom under the name of “Jebus-Salem,” or, for the sake of easier pronunciation by changing the Hebrew letter ב (b) into the Hebrew letter ר (r), “Jerusalem.” After the revolt of the ten tribes, it of course became the capital of the kingdom of Judah. It was built on hills, or rocks, and was capable of being strongly fortified, and was well adapted to be the capital of the nation. For a more full description of Jerusalem, see the notes at Mat 2:1. The vision which is here spoken of as having been seen respecting Judah and Jerusalem, pertains only to this chapter; see Isa 2:1.
In the days of Uzziah - In the time, or during the reign of Uzziah; 2 Chr. 26; compare the Introduction, Section 3. He was sixteen years old when he began to reign, and reigned fifty-two years. It is not affirmed or supposed that Isaiah began to prophesy at the commencement of his reign. The first part of the long reign of Uzziah was prosperous. He gained important victories over his enemies, and fortified his kingdom; 2Ch 26:5-15. He had under him an army of more than three hundred thousand men. But he became proud - attempted an act of sacrilege - was smitten of God, and died a leper. But though the kingdom under Uzziah was flourishing, yet it had in it the elements of decay. During the previous reign of Joash, it had been invaded and weakened by the Assyrians, and a large amount of wealth had been taken to Damascus, the capital of Syria; 2Ch 24:23-24. It is not improbable that those ravages were repeated during the latter part of the reign of Uzziah; compare Isa 1:7.
Jotham - He began to reign at the age of twenty-five years, and reigned sixteen years; 2Ch 27:1-2.
Ahaz - He began to reign at the age of twenty, and reigned sixteen years. He was a wicked man, and during his reign the kingdom was involved in crimes and calamities; 2 Chr. 28.
Hezekiah - He was a virtuous and upright prince. He began his reign at the age of twenty-five years, and reigned twenty-nine; 2 Chr. 29; see the Introduction Section 3,
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Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24 Amos. His name is written in a different manner,…
Amos. His name is written in a different manner, in Hebrew, from that of the third among the minor prophets, (Worthington) though St. Augustine has confounded them. --- Ezechias. He wrote this title towards the end of his life, or it was added by Esdras, &c.
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Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v1 1The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which…
1. THE TITLE
Isa_1:1
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1The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, Kings of Judah.
TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL
Isa_1:1. חזה .אשׁר חזה is the proper word for prophetic seeing in the double sense named below; whence הֹזֶה is used synonymously with רֹאֶה ,נָבִיא (1Sa_9:9; 2Ki_17:13). Thence also the expressions הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר חָזָה Isa_2:1; דִּבְרֵי אֲשֶׁר חָזָה Amo_1:1; דְּבַר י׳ אֲשֶׁר הָזָה Mic_1:1; מַשָּׂא אֲשֶׁר הָזָה Isa_13:1; Hab_1:1. These are the only places where חָזָה occurs as part of a superscription.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
We must consider this title in reference to three things, viz., in its relation to chap. 1 and to chap. 2, where a title essentially like this recurs, and to the entire collection. That the superscription belongs to the entire collection, is evident at once from the words, “in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” That the title is comprehensive enough to apply to the entire book is clear when we consider that חָזוֹן“the vision” has a collective meaning, (comp. Hos_12:10; Eze_7:26; Lam_2:9, etc.), and that Judah and Jerusalem represent the centre of the prophetic view, around which also the prophecies that relate Ephraim and the world potentates are grouped as radii servi. In this connection Caspari says very appropriately: “Jerusalem, Judah, Israel, are, from Isaiah 7 on, the centre of prophecy in such a way that they form three concentric circles, of which Jerusalem is the smallest. Jerusalem and Judah the wider, while Jerusalem, Judah and Israel is the widest. To these three the heathen world joins on as a fourth circle.” (Beitr. z. Einleit. in, d. B. Jes., p. 231 sq.). Therefore both חָזוֹן and “concerning Judah and Jerusalem” make a denominatio a potiori. The first, because prophetic sight, in the double sense of more or less bodily vision, (comp. chap. 6) and of pure spiritual knowing, gave origin to the nucleus of the book, so that about this nucleus doctrine, warning, comfort and history should find their place. The latter because, as has already been remarked, Judah and Jerusalem must be regarded as those to whom the prophet speaks first of all, and for whose sake he speaks of others.
But it has seemed strange, especially to Vitringa, that in Isa_2:1 a superscription of almost the same sound recurs; and he would infer from it that originally in this title the date (בִּימֵי וגו “in the days of”) was wanting, and the remaining words were only a title to the first chapter. Against this the following is to be remembered: 1) The two superscriptions are not quite alike. In this one we have הָזוֹן; in Isa_2:1חָזוֹן—.הַדָּבָר is plainly a word of weightier import. It is better fitted, therefore, for the beginning of the book, and in a certain measure for its title; wherefore we see (2Ch_32:32), that the book even at that time was known under that title. 2) That a superscription almost alike occurs twice, has its reason in the fact that Isa_2:1 is the title of the second introduction. For the book of Isaiah has a threefold portal, as said above; and that the superscription “vision or word that Isaiah saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem” occurs only Isa_1:1, and Isa_2:2, and not again afterwards, is precisely proof, that with chap. 2 we enter the second portal which comprehends chapters 2–5
Finally, as regards the relation of this superscription to chap. 1, we may fittingly say that the entire Isa_1:1, date included, is the title of chap. 1 For chap. 1. is just the whole prophecy of Isaiah in nuce, as he delivered it under the four kings; an assertion whose correctness can only appear indeed as the result of exposition.
At the beginning of prophetic books as here we find הָזוֹןOba_1:1, Nah_1:1.—Isaiah the son of Amoz. For the meaning of the name and the lineage of the prophet see the Introduction.—Concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Jerusalem, as the holy city and centre of the theocracy is made equal to the entire region of Judah, and distinguished from it, which also happens elsewhere; Jer_9:2; Jer_17:20, etc.;2Ki_18:22, etc.;2Ch_34:3; 2Ch_34:5, etc.; and in a reversed order, Jer_36:31; 2Ki_24:20; Ezr_2:1. We have already remarked that the naming of Judah and Jerusalem presents no incongruity between the superscription and the whole book. It is worthy of special remark, that only in Isa_2:1 beside this does the expression form part of the title, and that it occurs in chap. 2–5 relatively with most frequency. For it is found beside Isa_2:1, also Isa_3:1; Isa_3:8; Isa_5:3. Beside this only in Isa_22:21; Isa_36:7; Isa_44:26. Comp. remarks at Isa_2:1.—In the days of, etc. That Isaiah lived and labored under these four kings cannot be doubted. Comp. the Introduction. The time designated is identical with that given Hos_1:1, and with that in Mic_1:1, only that in the latter the name of Uzziah is wanting. Even the asyndeton and the form יְחִזְקִיָּהוּ instead of חִזְקִיָהוּ (about which comp. Drechslerin loc.) are to be found in both the places named.
2. THE MOURNFUL PRESENT
Isa_1:2-9
2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth:
For the Lord 1hath spoken,
I have nourished and brought up children,
And they have rebelled against me.
3 The ox knoweth his owner,
And the ass his master’s crib:
But Israel doth not know,
My people doth not consider.
4 Ah sinful nation, a people 2laden with iniquity,
A seed of evil-doers, children that are corrupters:
They have forsaken the Lord,
They have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger,
They are 3gone away backward.
5 Why should ye be stricken any more?
Ye will 4revolt more and more:
5The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.
6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it;
But wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores:
6They have not been closed, neither bound up,
Neither mollified with 7ointment.
7 Your country is desolate,
Your cities are burned with fire:
Your land, strangers devour it in your presence,
And it is desolate, 8as 9overthrown by strangers.
8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a 10cottage in a vineyard,
As 11a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,
As a besieged city.
9 Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant,
We should have been as Sodom,
And we should have been like unto Gomorrah.
TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL
Isa_1:2. The formula כִּי י׳ דִבֵּר, is found Joe_3:8; Oba_1:18; Mic_4:4; Jer_13:15. Beside these, in Isaiah partly in the simple form as here (Isa_22:25; Isa_25:8), partly somewhat extended (Isa_21:17; Isa_24:3). The more extended form כּי פִי י׳ דִּבֵּר is found in Isaiah only, Isa_1:20, and Isa_40:5; Isa_58:14.——גִדֵֹּל, is often used by Isaiah especially, for bringing up children, Isa_23:4; Isa_49:21; Isa_51:18 : comp. Isa_44:14; Hos_9:12.——It is to be seen from the exposition that we take רוֹמַמְתִּי in an emphatic sense. Although elsewhere (Isa_23:4; Eze_31:4) it means the same as גִּדֵּל, yet our construction (which is found in Luther, Knobel, et al.) is justified here because רוֹמֵמ, does not stand in a parallel phrase to גִדֵּל, but follows with epexegetical emphasis. For if רוֹמַמְתִּי is taken as meaning just the same as גִּדַּלְתִּי, it would be empty repetition. Besides, Vitringa refers appropriately to Deu_32:6. [Eze_31:4. The same words occur: Children I have made great and set on high.—M. W. J.]
Isa_1:3. קֹנֶה properly “the buyer,” (comp. Isa_24:2) then, “the owner, the possessor,” (Lev_25:50; Zec_11:5). אֵבוּם is found only in Job_39:9; Pro_14:4, beside this place. From these places it is not evident whether “stall” or “crib” is the correct meaning. As little decisive is the root meaning “fatten” (1Ki_5:3, (Eng. Bib. 1Ki_4:23), Pro_15:17). Still in the later Hebrew, which uses the word for the platter of the laborer (see Buxtorf Lex., p. 16. Gesenius and Delitzsch in loc.) the meaning “crib” seems to prevail. The earliest versions, moreover, all give this rendering. The context demands that the object of יָדַע and הִתְבּוֹנֵן be supplied from what precedes. For would one take the words absolutely (Rosenmueller, Fuerst) then the two members of the comparison do not harmonize. Just what ox and ass do notice, Israel does not notice. התבונן is used as verb. trans. by Isaiah, also Isa_43:18; Isa_52:15. As substantially parallel we may compare (Jer_8:7)
Isa_1:4. הוֹי, (frequent in Isaiah, also in the 2d part; Isa_45:9-10; Isa_55:1; he uses it twenty-one times, whereas in the rest of the prophets it occurs twenty-eight times; for it is only found in the prophetic books, with the exception of 1Ki_13:30) is distinguished from אוֹי in that the latter is more substantive, the former more adverb. Hence it is that אוֹי, with few exceptions (Num_24:23; Eze_24:6; Eze_24:9) has לִ after it, whereas הוֹי is followed by לְ only Eze_13:18, and by עַל, Eze_13:3; Jer. 1:27, and by אֶל, Jer_48:1; everywhere else (e. g. 1Ki_13:30; Isa_5:8; Isa_5:11, etc.) it is used without a connecting proposition. הוי therefore has more the character of a prepositive exclamation, though in regard to the meaning no essential difference is noticeable. It is taken for granted that an intentional paronomasia influenced the selection of the word גוי. On the other hand it is clear that a synonym of עַם was meant, as after this זֶרַע and בָּנִים correspond to one another.——כֶּבֶד עָוֹן is “guilt-encumbered.” Regarding the meaning, comp. Gen_13:2; Exo_4:10; Eze_3:5-6; regarding the form (the construct-form, כֶּבֶד along with כְּבַד, like עֶרֶל along with עֲרַל, only here).——A בֵּן מַשְׁחִית is not one who destroys another, but one that acts ruinously (direct causative Hiphil, 2Ch_27:2). The expression is partly stronger, partly more general than the kindred ones: בָּנִים סוֹרְרִים Isa_30:1; בָּנִים כֶּחָשִׁים לֹא אָבוּ שְׁמוֹעַ Isa_30:9. בָּנִים שׁוֹבָבִיּם Jer_3:14; Jer_3:22; Jer_4:22. Comp. בָּנִים לֹא יְשַׁקֵּרוּ Isa_63:8. We see that this form of expression is especially current with Isaiah, for, excepting the phrase just quoted from Jeremiah, it is to be found in no other prophet.
Isa_1:5. סָרָה, Isa_1:5, declinatio, defectus only in Deu_13:6; Deu_19:16; Jer_28:16; Jer_29:32 and Isa_14:6; Isa_31:6; Isa_59:13.——It is true that כֹּל without the article sometimes has the meaning of “whole” (Isa_9:11; Eze_29:7; Eze_36:5; 2Ki_23:3; see Delitzsch in loc.; Ewald § 290, c). But a comparison of these passages shows that the expressions in question are partly proverbial, (see Drechsler in loc.) partly do not admit of the meaning “all” in any wise. In the present case both meanings are in themselves possible. If, then, the prophet would convey the meaning “whole,” he must use the article. לָֽחֳלִי must, any way, be regarded as dependent on הָיָה understood. But it is doubtful whether that is to be taken in the sense of “belongs, is fallen to,” or as meaning “is become.” The latter is the more probable, because הָיָה לָֽחֳלִי bears analogy to expressions like הָיָה לָמַם ,לָבוּז. It is a strong expression, stronger than חָלָה. חֳלִי is then to be taken as abstractum pro concrete. Apart from this concrete meaning of the word, we may compare the construction of הָיָה with לְ with passages like 1Sa_4:9 (וִהְיוּ לַֽאֲנָשִׁים) and 1Sa_18:17 (הֱיֵה־לי לְבֶן־חַיִל).—וכל־לבב דוי. לֵב דַּוָּי is found also Jer_8:18, and Lam_1:22. דַּוָּי does not occur again in Isaiah.
Isa_1:6. The expression מכפ־רגל ועד־ראש is found only here. Every where else it reads וְעַד קָדְקֹד, (Deu_28:35; 2Sa_14:25; Job_2:7).—אין בו. We would expect בָּבֶם, as in Isa_1:5. But such changes in person and number occur frequently in Hebrew, comp. Isa_17:13; Psa_5:10.—מְתֹם integrum, sanum, is found beside only Jdg_20:48; Psa_38:4; Psa_38:8.—כֶּצַע (from פָּצַע fidit) is fissura, a wound that comes from tear or scratch; found in Isaiah only here. חַבּוּרָה (joined to פֶּצַע, also Pro_20:30) is “the extravasated stripe or swelling,” (see Delitzsch in loc.); only here in Isaiah. מַכָּח טְרִיָּהּ (טָרִי from טָרָה = טָלָה recent fuit, found beside only in Jdg_15:15) is the raw wound of a cut. זֹרוּ with accented penult cannot be derived from זָרָה dispersit: nor can it be the same as זֹרוּ in Psa_58:4. It is either an intensive form analogous to אֹרוּ ,בּשׁוּ, 1Sa_14:29; טֹבוּ, Num_24:5; Son_4:10; or an archaic passive form from זוּר (comp. רֹמּוּ, Job_24:24). The latter seems to me likely for הַזּוּרֶהָ, Isa_59:5, “the squeezed, crushed” (egg), תְּזוּרֶהָ (the foot shall crush it, Job_39:15) וַיָּֽזַר (he squeezed out the fleece, Jdg_6:38), as well as the substantive מָזוֹר compressio, compressum, vulnus, (Jer_30:13; Hos_5:13) prove that there is a root זוּר with the meaning “press together” (comp. צָרַר), to which then our זֹרוּ would serve as a passive, like רֹמּוּ to רוּם; comp. Gesenius Thesaur., p. 412.——חָבַשׁ in Isaiah beside this Isa_3:7; Isa_30:26; Isa_61:1.—The first two verbs are in the plural, which shows that the substantives are to be understood collectively: the third verb is fem. singular. No grammatical necessity appears for this. It seems as if the prophet wanted to vary the form of expression and the fem. sing, with its quality of taking a neuter construction offered the handle for it. Pual רֻכַּךְ only found here; Kal of it is found Isa_7:4.
Isa_1:7. שְׁמָמָה occurs in Isa also Isa_6:11; Isa_17:9; Isa_62:4; Isa_64:9. The expression שְׂרֻפוֹת אֵשׁ (Psa_80:17) is only found here.——The following וּשְׁמָמָה does not belong as a second predicate to אדמתכם, for then הִיא ought not to be absent. But it is itself subject, to which הָֽיתְה must be supplied. The last, then, has the words כְּמַהְפֵּכַת זָרִים as attribute. These last-named words are explained quite variously. But as it is established that the first word is used only in reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the meaning of it cannot be doubtful. From the original passage, Deu_29:22 (23) we find the words cited in Amo_4:11, and in Isa_13:19 and Jer. 1:40 exactly alike. In Jer_49:18 we find them as in Deut.
Isa_1:8. ונותרה בת־צ׳. The ו here is not conversive but simple conjunctive, as the whole context proves, which is only a representation of things present.——סֻכָּה from סָכַךְ, “to weave together,” the lair of the lion as well as the foliage of the feast of tabernacles, Lev_23:34 sqq., or the booth of the watchman, Job_27:18; found again Isa_4:6.——מלְוּנהָ synonym of מָלֹון locus pernoctandi, night lodging Isa_10:29, is used Isa_24:20, for the watchman’s sleeping rug, that swings to and for, having been hung up and spread out.——מִקְשָׁה, from קִשֻׁא cucumis, “field of cucumbers,” found also only Jer_10:5.
Isa_1:9. The expression הוֹתִיר שָׂרִיד as to its meaning, is borrowed from the usus loquendi of the Pentateuch and Joshua. Only there it always reads, הִשְׁאִיר שָׂרִיד, Num_21:35; Deu_2:34; Deu_3:3; Jos_8:22; Jos_10:28 sq.—Jer_44:7 reversed הוֹתִיר שְׁאֵרִית.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. The prophet first introduces Jehovah Himself speaking, (Isa_1:2-3). He calls heaven and earth to witness in order to enhance His lament over the people Israel. For His beneficence the Lord had only a harvest of disobedience, (Isa_1:2). The ox and ass are attached to their lord. Israel is not, (Isa_1:3). Therefore the prophet pronounces a war against the people that had forsaken the best and the greatest Lord, the Holy One of Israel, (Isa_1:4). Had the Lord been wanting in discipline? No. He had chastised the people so much, that for the future He hopes for nothing more from that. Israel is (inwardly, morally) incurably sick, vers. (5, 6). While outwardly (from the chastisement) it is reduced to a minimum, (Isa_1:7-8). Thus far, (directly and indirectly) the address of Jehovah. In the last verse, (9), the prophet himself confirms the fact, that still a little remnant exists on which to build the hope of a better future.
2. Hear heaven—do not consider it, Isa_1:2-3. When the Lord of the world speaks, the world must hear in silence. Comp. Deu_32:1; Psa_50:1; Psa_50:4; Mic_1:2; Mic_6:1-2. But here, as elsewhere, (Deu_4:26; Deu_30:19; Deu_31:28; Psa_1:4) the world is not invoked as simply an audience, but as a witness, before whom the Lord would make good His claim of right. For it concerns a matter of universal interest. The world must react with Jehovah against Israel’s infraction of law, that the מוֹסְדֵי אֶרֶץ, foundations of the earth, Psa_82:5, may not totter. At the same time one must assent to the remark of Delitzsch: “heaven and earth were present and participants when Jehovah gave His people the law (comp. Deu_4:36, and the places cited above)—so then must they hear and witness what Jehovah, their Creator and Israel’s God, has to say and complain of,” [after seven centuries.—M. W. J.]
As Isaiah begins his book of prophecy with almost the words of Deu_32:1, he indicates that he had that prophetic song before his eyes, which, with Delitzsch, may be called, “the compendious outline and the common key to all prophecy.” He does not indeed quote verbatim, for the predicates הֶֽאְֶזִין and שָׁמַע are transposed (comp., too, Isa_28:23; Isa_32:9). But the thought is the same. The same is true in regard to the causal phrase, כִּי י׳ דִבֵּר. In Deut. it reads: הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וַאֲדַבֵּרָה וְתִשְׁמַע הָאָרֶץ אִמְרֵי פִי. What Isaiah assigns as the reason, is in Deut. designated as object and effect. The difference is substantially a formal one. Jehovah is indeed Father of all men and all creatures. He is even called (Num_16:22; Num_27:16) “God of the spirits of all flesh;” and Psa_145:15 sq.—comp. Psa_104:27 sqq.—we read that the eyes of all wait on the Lord, and that He fills everything that lives with satisfaction (comp. Rom_3:29; Rom_9:24 sqq.; Isa_10:12 sqq.). But among the many children that He has, there is one race that He has not only brought up to maturity, but has elevated to high honor. The Lord did not suffer all peoples to attain the grown-up state; or rather, not all sons of the original Father, became the fathers of nations. But to Abraham precisely this was granted as the first promise: “I will make of thee a great nation,” Gen_12:2; and, “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt, unto the great river, the river Euphrates,” Gen_15:18. And this promise was fulfilled. Abraham’s seed became a great and numerous people. But this people also were the recipients of high honor. For it is the holy nation, Deu_7:6, to whom the Lord drew near and revealed Himself in an especial manner, Deu_4:6 sqq.; 32 sq.; Psa_147:19 sq. It is therefore the peculiar people (עָם סְגֻלָּה, Deu_7:6; Deu_14:2) through whom the blessing of Jehovah shall come on all nations (Gen_12:2 sq.; Isa_22:18; Jer_4:2). And in consequence of all this, it is called “high above all nations,” Deu_26:19; Deu_28:1; comp. 2Sa_7:23. The time of David and Solomon, and Uzziah’s and Jotham’s time, the echo of the former, are to be regarded as forerunner and type of these promises. And they have rebelled against me.—According to well-known Hebrew usage, what in substance stands related as opposite is designated as equivalent in form. פָשַׁע is a current word in Isa_1:28; Isa_43:27; Isa_46:8; Isa_59:13, etc. Expositors inquire whether only idolatry is meant, or also every kind of transgression. But we can’t see why every thing should not be meant that could be called opposition to the Lord; or rather, why every transgression should not be regarded as idolatry. [They have broken away from me.—M. W. J.] The ox knoweth his owner.—An ox knoweth his owner, any ox. The words explain the rebelling, Isa_1:2, by a rhetorical contrast that sets this in clearer light. The unthinking brutes, even those of lowest degree, as the ox and ass, still know their masters that feed them, and the crib out of which they eat, and acquire a certain attachment for master and crib, so that they do not voluntarily forsake them.
3. Ah, sinful nation—besieged city.
Isa_1:4-8. Jehovah’s benefactions have not sufficed to awaken in Israel the feeling of grateful attachment. On the contrary this nation forsakes its God, rejects Him, and sinks back into the darkness of heathendom, out of which He had rescued them. The three verbs in Isa_1:4 b express the positive consequences of the negative “doth not know,” Isa_1:3; and Isa_1:3-4 together contain the more particular signification of “rebelled against me,” Isa_1:2. Thus a climax occurs in Isa_1:2-4. The outward construction of the language also corresponds to this. Isa_1:2-3 consist of four members, and Isa_1:4 of seven, of which the first begins with an impressive assurance. But in the first four members of Isa_1:4 the reason is given why Israel became untrue to its God. The reason is a subjective one. Israel itself is good for nothing—it is a bad tree with bad fruit. The meaning heathen nation need not be pressed, and so much the less, seeing the singular is often used for Israel without any secondary idea of reproach (Exo_19:6; Jos_3:17, etc.), and also parallel with עַם. We have translated it “Woe world” in order to re-echo the consonance of the original as nearly as possible. It has been justly remarked besides that Israel is called here גוֹי חֹטֵא, “sinful nation,” in contrast with גוֹי קָכוֹשׁ, “holy nation,” which it ought to be according to Exo_19:6; Deu_7:6; Deu_14:2; Deu_14:21; and עַם כֶּבֶד עָוֹך in contrast with עַם נְשֻׂא עָוז, which it is called Isa_33:24. Israel is called moreover “a seed of evil doers,” though it ought to be “a holy seed” (Isa_6:13; Ezr_9:2). Many expositors (e. g., Drechsler) scruple to render these words as in the Genitive relation, because then the ancestors themselves would be called reprobates. They therefore take מרעים as in apposition with זרע. But, apart from the fact that then it must rather read זָּרע מֵרֵעַ, as in Isa_57:3, זֶרַע מְנָאֵף, that scruple is entirely groundless. For זֶרַע מְרֵעִים is not only a posterity from reprobates, but also a posterity that consists of reprobates, as Isa_65:23, זֶרַע בְּרוּכֵי י׳, means, not the descendants of blessed ones, but those themselves blessed, and like the expressions, בְּנֵי נָבָל בְּנֵי צֹאן ,בְּנֵי הַנְּבִיאִים ,בּנֵי בְלִיַּעַל, etc., do not mean the sons of fools, of worthless fellows, of prophets, of sheep, but sons that are themselves fools, worthless, prophets, sheep. But as the idea זֶרַע points to the essential identity in fruit and seed, and to the former being conditioned by the latter, so one must think, not of the original ancestors of the nation, but rather of the generation immediately preceding, chiefly, however, of an ideal ancestry, a notion that even underlies the expression γεννήματα ἐχιδνῶν, “generation of vipers,” Mat_3:7. זרע מרעים is therefore a genitive relation, in which the ideas of causality and of the attribute are combined. The expression is found again Isa_14:20.—Finally, the Israelites are called בָּנִים מרעים, “children that are corrupters,” although, according to Isa_1:2, they are children whom the Lord has brought up and made high; for, although any one may be called בֵּן מַשְׁחִית, who as a man (not as a son) is מַשְׁחית, all reference must not be denied to Isa_1:2, and all the places that express Israel’s filial relation to Jehovah, e. g.Deu_14:1.
In three phrases, now, the bad fruits are declared that the bad tree has borne. They have (negative) forsaken Jehovah, they have (positive) rejected with scorn (Isa_5:24; Isa_52:5; Isa_60:14), the Holy One of Israel (an expression peculiarly Isaiah’s, that occurs fourteen times in the first part, and fifteen times in the second, and in other parts of the Old Testament only six times), and they have turned themselves backwards. This turning backwards can only mean the turning to idols. For the Lord had turned Israel from idols to Himself, comp. Jos_24:2; Jos_24:14. If the nation then turned their backs to Him, it was precisely that they might return to their idols. This is confirmed by Eze_14:5, the only place beside the present in which the expression occurs.
Isa_1:5-6 seem to respond to an objection. For after the description in Isa_1:3-4, of the nation’s deep depravity, the prophet proceeds to portray the impending chastisement of it, Isa_1:7. But before he does so, he removes an objection that might be raised from the stand-point of forbearing love, viz. had sufficient discipline been exercised on Israel? if not, might not the renewed application of it ward off the judgment? The inquiry is negatived. For the uselessness of the smiting has long been proved by the ever-repeated backsliding of the nation. It is seen that we render the beginning of Isa_1:5 : “To what purpose shall one smite you still more?” For there are three expositions of these words. The first is: “On what part of the body shall one still smite you?” (thus Jerome, Saada,
Gesenius, Rosenmueller, Umbreit, Knobel and others [J. A. Alexander, Barnes].
This rests chiefly on what follows, where the body is described as beaten all over. However, four things are to be objected to this view: a) it could not then read עַל־מֶה, but אֵי זֶה הֻכּוּ עוֹד, or the like. For מָה is purely the general, abstract “what?” never the partitive, distinguishing one part from another: “which?” Job_38:6 cannot be appealed to. For the meaning of that place is not: On which foundations do the pillars of the earth rest?” But: do they rest at all on anything? b) Were the rendering: “where shall we smite?” correct, then the intermediate phrase, תּוֹסִיפוּ סָרָה, were out of place. For then one would right off look for the answer: “nowhere, for all is beaten to pieces.” The insertion of those words in this form plainly indicate that they themselves contain the answer to the inquiry, על־מה וגו׳, and that what follows is only to be viewed as the nearer explanation of this reply. It would be very different if the words were in apposition with the subject of תֻּכּוּ. c) It is remarked by Luzzatto (see in Delitzsch) that the fact that the body was beaten all over would not hinder its being smitten more d) The phrase, Isa_1:6 b, לא זרוּ. etc., “they have not been closed,” shows that not the being wounded itself was the matter of chief moment, but the being wounded without application of curatives. The latter, however, as little hinders the smiting as the binding up and healing would provoke it. If על־מה = “where?” then the whole phrase, Isa_1:6 b, would be superfluous.—A second exposition (Delitzsch) takes על־מה = לָמָה, and תֻּכּוּ = ye want to be smitten. Then the remote thought would be: “That were an insane delight in self-destruction.” But the “that were” must not be adopted as the underlying thought, but: “that is indeed delight in self-destruction.” For: “that were” would involve the thought that this delight is not presupposed, consequently there can be no question about a wanting to be smitten. But if we supply “that is,” etc., that would impute too much to the simple Imperfect. The idea of wanting it must then be more strongly indicated, say by חָפֵץ, or the like.—According to the third rendering, which seems to me the correct one. על־מה means “to what purpose?” Comp. Num_22:32; Psa_10:13; Jer_16:10. The imperfect Passive is then simply a briefer expression for the Active: why should I, or should one smite you more? with which at least a suffix were needed. תּוֹסִיפוּ סָרָה need not then be taken as a dependent adverbial phrase; as if, “in that ye add revolt,” which involves a certain grammatical harshness, that might be easily avoided by a participial construction. But תו׳ סָרָה is principal phrase and reply to the inquiry: to what purpose shall one smite you more?
However, the following words give the reason for the saying. That is: Israel adds revolt to revolt, because it is thoroughly sick, and does not even use curatives for its sickness. We therefore construe the words כָּל־רֹאשׁ to בַּשָּׁמֶן not as describing a condition resulting from the previous smiting, much as this seems to answer the inquiry, על־מה וגו, but as a figurative expression for the moral habit of the nation. כָּל־רֹאשׁ ,כָּל־לֵבָב, especially seem to favor this view. This does not mean “the whole head, the whole heart,” but “every head, every heart.” If it read כָּל־הָרֹאשׁ וגוי, the meaning might easily enough be that head and heart were already so sore and sick that no spot remained for a blow. But every head, every heart only expresses that no head, no heart remained intact.
The context closely considered forbids our understanding by head and heart “all that exercise indispensable functions in spiritual and temporal offices” (Drechsler). For by Isa_1:6 it plainly appears that not only the heads, but all individuals of the nation, are described as seriously sick. Head and heart are rather the central and dominant organs in the life of every single person, whereas Isa_1:6 speaks also of the structure of the outward manifestation of the life. From a comparison of לבב דוי with Isa_1:6, it seems to me that by חֳלִי not an outward wounding of the head is meant, but an internal disorder (comp. 2Ki_4:19).—From the sole of the foot,etc. Isa_1:6. As has been remarked, these words describe the moral condition as to its outward manifestation, as Isa_1:5 b described its inward form. We must not press too far the figurative language of the prophet in regard to this inward and outward disorder, and especially the wounds of Isa_1:6 must not be regarded as presenting something additional.
The three substantives חַבּוּרָה ,פֶּצַע and מַכָּה ט׳ are followed by three corresponding verbs, and one is tempted to construe them as if those occupying the same relative position belonged to each other. But such strict parallelism cannot be carried out. It is rather to be said that each of the three sorts of wounds referred to requires all the three means of healing. Each wound must be pressed together, and treated with healing stuffs. The former process is two-fold: first it is done by the hand in order to cleanse the wound from blood and matter, and then by the bandage, that prevents further bleeding and promotes the growing together of the several parts. Thirdly, mollifying, healing oil (see Luk_10:34; Herzog’s R. Encyc. X., p. 548) must be superadded as organic means of cure.
The words of Isa_1:6 b moreover contain another proof for the assertion that from כָל־רֹאשׁ, “every head,” on, only the moral habit of the nation is described. For is not the want of all bodily therapeutics a figure for the want of the spiritual; i. e. repentance? Not only is Israel inwardly sick, but also in its outward life it presents the picture of a torn and distracted existence without one trace of discipline or effort at improvement. If the chief thought of Isa_1:5-6, were that Israel cannot be smitten any more because it is beaten all to pieces, then, as already remarked, the phrase לֹא־זֹרוּ וגו׳, “not closed up,” would be quite without meaning. For may a bandaged-up person be sooner smitten than one not bound up? But this phrase becomes very significant if we regard the words: “every head,” etc., as portraying the moral condition of things. For it is most important in regard to a man’s moral state whether the proper curatives for the moral disorder are used or not.
Your land, etc. The outward state of the nation answers to the moral state. The nation had already begun to reap the fruits of their revolt. The country is desolate; only the metropolis still remains intact, yet isolated in the midst of a land that has been made a desert. Therefore it may be said that the train of thought that began with Isa_1:5 ends with Isa_1:8. The Lord declares, Isa_1:5, that for the present He will smite Israel no more. For there is no use. This is because Israel is still sick inside and out, spite of having suffered chastisement almost to annihilation. It seems to me therefore that Isa_1:7-8 stand in contrastive relation to the two preceding, although this contrast is indicated by no particle. Israel is morally sick, the country is turned into a desert. Had things taken a normal course, then the country had been desolated, but Israel would have been in health. Then Israel had received instruction, Pro_8:10; Pro_19:20. But now that the country is waste, and Israel still sick, one sees that whipping is of no use. Comp. Jer_2:30; Jer_5:3; Isa_9:13; Isa_42:25. Thus I construe Isa_1:7-8, not as a mere change from figurative language (Isa_1:5-6) to literal, because, as was shown, both Isa_1:5 b and 6b contain thoughts that do not answer to purely outward circumstances. Moreover, according to our explanation, it is clear that Isa_1:7 sqq. does not speak of future, but of present affairs. These verses do not contain threats of judgment, but a portrait of judgment already accomplished. If it were otherwise, then surely the threatenings of judgment would not stop outside of the gates of the metropolis, which yet was crater and fountain of all the revolt. This is not opposed by Jer_4:27; Jer_5:10; Jer_5:18 : “Yet will I not make a full end,” which some adduce against our view. For threats of Judgment only for the country, but that spare the capital, are not to be found in any prophet.—The words: “your land waste,” etc., are quoted from Lev_26:33, where it is said: “Your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.”
Your ground before, etc. Here, too, imprecations from the Law are in the mind of the prophet, and particularly Deu_28:33 : “The fruit of thy land, and all thy labors, shall a nation which thou knowest not, eat up.” Comp., too, 1:51; Lev. 21:16, 32. From Deu_28:33; Deu_28:51, it is seen what is meant by זָר. It is one that Israel does not know, and whose language is not understood. That the word “stranger” includes also the idea of “enemy,” is manifest from the parallel passages in Lev_26:16; Lev_26:32, where for זָרִים we have זָר .אֹיִבְים occurs Isa_17:10; Isa_25:2; Isa_25:5; Isa_28:21; Isa_29:5; Isa_43:12; Isa_61:5. The participle אֹכְלִים confirms our view that the prophet speaks of present and still continuing circumstances. The metonymy (the enemies eat the land) is as in Isa_36:16; Gen_3:17, etc.—לְנֶגְדְּכֶם, according to the accents and the sense, relates to what follows. Before your eyes, without your being able to hinder them, the enemies devour your land.
In our passage it is evident the prophet would compare the destruction of the land of which he speaks to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He calls the Jewish country a second destroyed Sodom, only with the difference that that was a destruction of God, this of strangers. The question whether we have here a genitive of the subject or of the object thus settles itself. It is the genitive of the subject. For then God was the destroyer; here it is the strangers. If זָרִים, “strangers,” be taken as object, it will not suit the context. For immediately before the strangers were named as destroyers. How shall they suddenly be named the destroyed?—From the connection it appears that the “daughter of Zion” means Jerusalem. Zion is originally the mountain, then the castle, then the quarter built about it (2Sa_5:6-9; 1Ki_8:1); then in an extended sense the city without the inhabitants (Lam_2:8) or the inhabitants without the city (Mic_4:10), or as both together, as in our passage.
Jerusalem with its inhabitants lying isolated in the midst of a desolated country is now compared to: a) a booth in a vineyard; b) to a hanging mat [hammock] in a cucumber field, which like the booth of the vineyard-keeper, is a lonely and scanty dwelling-place for men; c) to a besieged city. But why is Jerusalem only compared to a beleagured city? After all that Isa_1:7-8 say of it, is it not such itself? First of all we must investigate the meaning of נְצוּרָה. The verb נָצַר means primarily observare, which can be said of commandments, Psa_78:7, and of covenants, Deu_33:9, as well as of the overseeing of a protector or keeper, Isa_27:3; 2Ki_17:9, and of the attention of a besieger, Jer_4:16; comp. 2Sa_11:16; Jer_5:6. An עִיר נְצוּרָה is therefore either a watched or a beleaguered city. But the first does not suit the connection. The latter is equally unsuitable if Jerusalem at the time of writing was actually besieged. But Isa_1:7 speaks only of the desolating of the country. That Jerusalem itself was besieged or blockaded is not said directly. At the moment of saying this, therefore, the position of Jerusalem seems to have been that the enemy enclosed the city, not yet in its immediate neighborhood, but still so as to restrict all intercourse with it, so that it lay there isolated like a blockaded town No one ventured out or in, for the enemy was near, though his forces were not seen encamped around the walls of the city. The other renderings: “as a rescued city” (Gesenius,in loc.;Maurer,etc.), “as a devastated city” (Rabbins, Vulg., Luther), “as a watch tower” (Hitzig, Tingstad, Gesenius in his Thesaurus, p. 908), etc., which are to be found in Rosenmueller, either conflict with the requirements of the language or the context.
4. Had not—we were like, Isa_1:9. We must regard it, not as accidental, but as an evidence of the artistic design of this address, that in Isa_1:2-3, Jehovah Himself speaks, in Isa_1:4-8 the prophet in the name of Jehovah, and in Isa_1:9 the prophet in his own and the people’s name. It is therefore a climax descendens. The first word belongs to Jehovah the Lord. After that Jehovah’s prophet speaks in His name to the people. Last of all the prophet, who is in a sense the mediator of the people, speaks in their name to Jehovah. In this scheme is prefigured in a certain degree the direction of all prophetic discourse. For it is either Jehovah speaking, directly or indirectly, or it is a speaking to Jehovah. But Isa_1:9 is joined by a double band to what precedes: by הוֹתִיר, “had left,” and by the comparison to Sodom and Gomorrah. As to the former, it is recognized that something remains in Israel, ונותרה, Isa_1:8, and that this remnant is owing to the grace of Jehovah. But so the clear consciousness is expressed, that but for the grace of God, the resemblance to Sodom and Gomorrah, which in Isa_1:7 was only slightly intimated, would have been a notorious one. This is, on the one hand, an humble confession, for this comparison is not honorable for Israel; but on the other hand there is the opposite thought that underlies the hypothetic reflection: “he has, however, left something remaining; therefore we are still not like Sodom and Gomorrah;” and that forms a comforting germ of hope for the future.
The expression יהוה צבאות, Jehovah Sabaoth, is not to be found in the Pentateuch, nor in Josh., Jud., Ezek., Joel, Obad., Jonah. In Exo_12:41כָּל־צִבְאוֹת י is said of the Israelites. If one may regard the completest form as the original one, then we must designate Hosea as the originator of the expression. For in Hos_12:6 we find וַיחוֹה אֱלֹהֵי הַצְּבָאוֹת יהְוָֹה זִכְרוֹ; similarly Amo_3:13; Amo_6:14; Amo_9:5. Here it is seen that צְבָאוֹת is still construed as appellative. They are not the צִבְאוֹת י׳, Exo_12:41, but כֻל־צְבָא הַשָּׁמַיִם, Isa_34:4, whose relation to the stars may be debated. Comp. Delitzsch,The Divine Name Jahve Zebaot, in der Zeitschrift f. d. ges. luth. Theologie u. Kirche 1874, Heft 2, p. 217.—But “Hosts” becomes gradually a proper name. It is so beyond doubt in God of Hosts, Psa_59:6; Psa 80:5, 8, 15, 20; Psa_84:9, and Lord of Hosts, Isa_10:16. Probably it is to be so rendered in “Jehovah of Hosts,” which is very frequent in the first and second parts of Isaiah. Also Jer, Zech., Mal., use it very often.—כִּמְעַט is not added to the verb here adverbially with the meaning “almost,” but united to it substantively, and as in 2Ch_12:7, is object (as apposition with the object). In Pro_10:20; Psa_105:12, it is similarly a predicate. In respect to its sense, it is a dimished מעֲט, i. e. not paulum, but quasi paulum. I do not think with Delitzsch that referring to Psa_81:14 sq.; Job_32:22, it may be construed with what follows. For with the supposition that is expressed in the first clause of the verse, they had been, not almost, but altogether a Sodom and Gomorrah. Moreover, it is affecting to observe how the man penetrates through the prophet. He began as the mouth of God, that does not distinguish himself from God; he proceeds as servant of God, that clearly distinguishes himself from God; he concludes as citizen of Jerusalem, that comprehends himself with the men against whom he directs his words of threatening.
[Isa_1:7. כמהפכת ז׳, like the overthrow of strangers, J. A. Alexander, “i. e. as foreign foes are wont to waste a country in which they have no interest, and for which they have no pity.” Barnes, similarly.
Isa_1:9. “The idea of a desolation almost total is expressed in other words, and with an intimation that the narrow escape was owing to God’s favor for the remnant according to the election of grace, who still existed in the Jewish Church. That the verse has reference to quality, as well as quantity, is evident from Rom_9:29, where Paul makes use of it, not as an illustration, but as an argument to show that mere connection with the Church could not save men from the wrath of God. The citation would have been irrelevant if this phrase denoted merely a small number of survivors, and not a minority of true believers in the midst of the prevailing unbelief.” J. A. Alexander].
3.THE MEANS FOR OBTAINING A BETTER FUTURE
Isa_1:10-20
10 Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom;
Give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.
11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord:
I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts;
And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of12he goats.
12 When ye come13to appear before me,
Who hath 14required this at your hand, 15to tread my courts?
13 Bring no more 16vain oblations;
Incense is an abomination unto me;
The new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with;17
It Isaiah 18 iniquity, even the solemn meeting.
14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth:
They are a trouble unto me;
I am weary to bear them.19
15 And when ye spread forth your hands,
I will hide20 mine eyes from you:
Yea, when ye 21make many prayers, I will not hear:
Your hands are full of 22blood.
16 Wash you, make you clean;
Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes:
17 Cease to do evil; learn to do well;
Seek judgment, 23relieve the oppressed,
Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:
Though your sins be as scarlet,24 they shall be as white as snow;
Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
19 If ye be willing and obedient,
Ye shall eat the good of the land:
20 But if ye refuse and rebel,
Ye shall be devoured with the sword:
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL
Isa_1:10. קָצִין is found in Isa. also; Isa_3:6-7; Isa_22:3.
Isa_1:12. In regard to the construction כי תבאו לראות פני, it is to be noticed especially that we have here an old, solemn form of expression. It is found first, Exo_23:17, where it is said: יֵרָאֶה כָּל־זְכוּרְךָ אֶל־פְּנֵי הָאָדֹן—”All thy males shall appear before the Lord;” also Psa_84:8. This is the customary, and besides very frequent construction of the Niphal נִרְאָה, Gen_12:7; Gen_35:1; Exo_3:16, etc. But then the form נִרְאָה אֶת־פְּנֵי י׳ is found in five places: Exo_34:23 sq.; Deu_16:16; Deu_31:11; 1Sa_1:22. Here the question arises, whether אֵת is nota accusatavi, or preposition with the meaning “cum, coram;” or finally, whether the accusative, as in חֶרֶב תְּאֻכְּלוּ: “Ye shall be devoured by the sword,” Isa_1:20, is to be taken in an instrumental sense, as if it ought to be rendered: “was seen of God’s face” (so Ewald, Gram. § 279, c). This last rendering commends itself the least. For in חרב תאכלו, the חרב is conceived of as adverbial. It is as one would say in Latin: gladiatim devorabimim, “Ye shall be sword-fashion devoured.” It is essential to this construction that the substantive so used be without suffix, or a genitive following. In לֵרָאוֹת פָּנַי or נִרְאָה אֶת־פְּנֵי י׳, however, this adverbial use is not admissible. It is to be objected against the first rendering that אֵת always marks distinctly the definite object, and never is used after the question “where?” On the other hand it is admitted that אֶת־פְּנֵי means coram facie, e. g. Gen_27:30 : יָצָא יַעֲקֹב מֵאֵת פְּנֵי יִצְחַק. Comp. 2Ki_16:14 : Gen_19:13. “The cry of them is waxen great, אֶת־ פְּנֵי י׳ before the face of the Lord.” Comp. 1Sa_22:4; Gen_33:18. According to that we must translate the expression in question: “appear before the presence of Jehovah.” It may be remarked, in passing, that Deu_16:16, לֹא יֵרָאֶה אֶת־פְּנִי י׳ רֵיקָם, is to be translated; “the face of the Jehovah is not seen empty,” i. e. without the presentation of a gift: where the passive, according to well-known usus loquendi, is construed as active. This latter form of expression is, as to sense, like those found Exo_23:15; Exo_34:20,—Lastly, in two places, viz. Psa_42:3 and in our text נִרְאָה with פְּנֵי י׳ is found without אֵת. In both places בּוֹא stands before the Niphal of רָאָה. Here, without doubt, פְּנֵי י׳ is the accusativus localis. In itself, this accusative can depend on בּוֹא as well as on the Niphal נִרְאָה. However, the original sense of the formula favors decidedly the last supposition. Thus the expression, as found in our text and in Isa_42:3, is to be taken as a modification of the older formula, and as having the same meaning. פָּגַי therefore is here accusativus localis in the same sense as אֶת־פְּנֵי י׳ in the places cited above.—בֵּקִּשׁ מִיַּד, Gen_31:39; Gen_43:9; 1Sa_20:16.—(רְמֹם ח׳ is in restrictive apposition with זֹאת. Isaiah uses רָמַם pretty often: Isa_16:4; Isa_26:6; Isa_28:3; Isa_41:25; Isa_63:3. Moreover, the substantive מִרְמָם is used by him relatively oftener: Isa_5:5; Isa_7:25; Isa_10:6; Isa_28:18.
Isa_1:13. It is debated whether the following קְטֹרֶת, incense, is to be taken as stat. absol. as distinct from מִנְחָה, or as stat. construct., and as designating that which the מִנְחַת־שָׁוְא is to Jehovah (“it is abominable incense to me”). Grammatically both renderings are admissible. It is not decisive for the latter rendering that the Masorets have pointed קְטֹ֧רֶת with the conjunctive Darga. It seems to me important to our inquiry, that with the exception of Psa_66:15 (which confessedly dates after the exile), neither burnt-offerings nor meat-offerings are ever called קְטֹרֶת, although הִקְטִיר is the solemn word employed for the consumption of both. Rather it is always said, that the sacrifice shall be רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ, “a sweet savor” to the Lord. I believe, therefore, that the prophet must have written רֵיחַ תּוֹעֵבָה had he wished to express what the defenders of the second rendering take the words to mean.—The combination of חֹדֶשׁ and שַׁבָּת, beside the text, is to be found also 2Ki_4:23; Hos_2:13.—The expression קְרֹא מִקְרָא is only found here. Everywhere else we read: מִקְרָא קֹדֶשׁ, “a holy convocation,” Exo_12:16; Lev_23:3 sqq.; Num_28:18 sq.; Isa_29:1 sqq. As regards the meaning of the phrase, it is not indictio sancti, i. e. the publication of a feast, but convocatio, the assembling of the nation to the feast. For only on the principal feast-days was the nation obliged to appear in the sanctuary, (comp. the citations immediately above, and Oehler in Herzog’s R. Encycl. IV., p. 385). The three substantives stand before as casus absoluti, and represent a premise, to which לֹא אוּכַל וגו׳ forms the conclusion: as for new moon, Sabbath, solemn assembly, I can’t bear them, etc. The word עֲצָרָה is found beside only in 2Ki_10:20 and Joe_1:14. In the Pentateuch only the form עֲצֶרֶת (stat. absol. and constr.) is used: Lev_23:36; Num_29:35; Deu_16:8. It is absolutely parallel with מִקְרָא קֹדֶש, “holy convocation;” comp. 2Ch_7:5; Neh_8:18; Amo_5:21. The fundamental idea of עָצַר is cogere, conciere, continere, to draw together, to keep together. The noun, therefore, denotes coactio, concio. The fundamental idea of אָוֶן (אוּן, spirare) is halitus, breath. It is thus synonym with הֶבֶל.
Isa_1:14. Of the verb שָׂנֵא only the Kal (comp. Psa_11:5) partcps. occur in our book after this: Isa_60:15; Isa_61:8; Isa_66:5. טֹרַח, burden (from טָרַח, fatigari, Job_37:11) is found also Deu_1:12. Niphal נִלְאָה again in Isa_16:12; Isa_47:13. The infinitive נְשׂא is only found in Isa. again Isa_18:3; comp. beside Gen_4:13; Psa_89:10.
Isa_1:15. The spreading out of the hands for prayer (comp. Hoelemann, Bibelstudien I., The Scriptural Form of Worship, p. 137, Æneid. I. 93, duplices tendens ad sidera palmas) is designated here by פָּרַשׂ in the Piel, and so occurs also Jer_4:31; Lam_1:17; Psa_143:6. Usually Kal is used: Exo_9:29; Exo_9:33; 1Ki_8:22, etc.—Only the Hithpael of עָלַם occurs beside in our book, Isa_58:7.—The meaning of אֵינֶבִּי שׁ׳ is “not continually hearing,” in distinction from לֹא אֶשְׁמַע, Jer_7:16; Jer_11:14; Jer_14:12.—Comp. this passage, Isa_1:11-15, with the similar one, Amo_5:21 sqq.
Isa_1:16. On account of the accent, הִזַּכּוּ can only be Hithpael from זָכָה, not Niphal of זָכַךְ; comp. Gesen., Thesaur., p. 413. The word is not used again by Isaiah; and this Hithpael occurs nowhere else.—The expression רֹעַ מַעַלְלֵיכֶם (which occurs first Deu_28:20, and afterward especially frequent in Jer_4:4; Jer_21:12; Jer_23:2; Jer_26:3; Jer_44:22), calls to mind the Latin usus loquendi, that makes a conception prominent by designating it by means of the abstract idea hovering, so to speak, over the single, concrete manifestation of it: agricolœ non dolent, prœterita verni temporis suavitate œstatem auctumnumque venisse (comp. Naegelsbach, Stilistik, § 74).
Isa_1:17. לִמְדוּ הֵיטֵיב (inf. nominascens like הָרֵעַ, Isa_1:16, because standing in the accusative).—As nouns of the form קָטוֹל, all have an active meaning (comp. בִּהֵן = בָּחֹון ,גָּדֹוֹל ,אָדוֹם ,גָּבוֹהַּ, etc.) so חָמוֹץ, which occurs only here, must have the same sense as חוֹמֵץ, Psa_71:4, i. e.=vialentus, violent (comp. חָמַם). The Piel אִשֵּׁר means then, just as Isa_3:12; Isa_9:15; Pro_23:19, “make direct, make go right, conduct aright.” The verbs שָׁפַט and רִיב, as so often elsewhere (Isa_1:23; Psa_10:18; Psa_82:3; Jer_5:28, etc.), signify not merely a formal judging, but also rendering material justice, that is, so rendering judgment that what is just shall actually be done. רִיב, moreover, here stands for the more usual דִּין. For רִיב is not properly “judge,” but “strive,” and first attains the meaning of “helping one to justice” in the connection ריב ריב פ׳ “to manage some one’s quarrel.” It is therefore with a derivative sense that ריב is used when it means “judging,” which it does, sometimes in malam partem, as Deu_33:3; Job_10:2, again in bonam partem, as Deu_33:3; Job_10:2, again in bonam partem, as here and Isa_51:22; and in either sense it is joined to the accusative.
Isa_1:18. The Niphal נוֹכַח that occurs here, is found elsewhere only in the participle; Gen_20:16; 2Sa_15:3; Pro_24:26; Job_23:7. The meaning is “disceptare, διαλέγεσθαι,” argue. The word is evidently used in a friendly sense. Regarding the Hiphil in הִלְבִּין (comp. Psa_51:9 (6), the word does not again occur in Isa.) and הֶאְדִּים (ἅπαξ λεγ.) and their direct causative meaning (producing whiteness, redness, i. e, becoming white, red).
Isa_1:19. The fundamental meaning of אָבָה, (which it is worthy of note always has לֹא before it except here and Job_39:9, where it stands in a negative question), is “ready, to be willing.” (Psa_81:12; 1Ki_20:8). Accordingly the construction with vav and perfectum consecutivum is explained; when ye are willing, so that ye hearken (comp. the otherwise usual construction with just the infinitive or לְ; Isa_28:12; Isa_30:9; Eze_3:7; Eze_20:3; Lev_26:21). The construction מֵאֵן Isa_1:20 is evidently copied from this.—The expression טוּב הָאָרֶץ, good of the land, is first found Gen_45:18; Gen_45:20, where it stands parallel with חֵלֶב־הָאָרֶץ fat of the land, (comp. Deu_6:11; 2Ki_8:9; Ezr_9:12).
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. This section refers to the future, as Isa_1:2-9 did to the past and present. For the theme is how to escape out of the misery of the present and attain a better future. The people had hitherto employed false means; outward ceremonies that were an abomination to the Lord, (Isa_1:10-15). Instead of these the people must bring the genuine fruits of repentance, (Isa_1:16-17). Then conference may be held with the people; then will God’s grace be greater than all guilt, (Isa_5:18). This is the right road. If the people will go that road they shall find salvation; if they will not, they shall find destruction, (Isa_1:19-20). It is seen that a simple and clear order of thought occurs in this section. Isa_1:18-20 must not be severed and joined to what follows. For they contain exactly the indispensable conclusion, viz.: the promise of grace in case of obedience, on the other hand denunciation of wrath in case of disobedience.
2. Hear—Gomorrah, Isa_1:10.—As regards the verbs, “hear,—hearken,” this beginning is like that of the preceding section, Isa_1:2. But the subjects are different: there heaven and earth, here the Sodom-judges and the Gomorrahnation. The dividing into judges and nation is occasioned partly by the double idea Sodom and Gomorrah, by which this section is connected with the foregoing one, partly by the contents of the positive demand, Isa_1:17. For, as regards its general contents, this is directed against the entire nation, but especially also against the princes and judges of the nation. Expositors correctly call attention to the fact that after Isa_1:9, the prophet supposes a reply on the part of the people to this effect; how have they deserved so hard a fate, seeing they had been so zealously diligent, to observe all the ceremonies of the worship of Jehovah. To this it is replied, that they are not unjustly become like Sodom and Gomorrah because for a long time they were inwardly like them. What Sodom-judges and a Gomorrahnation may be, can be learned from Eze_16:48 sqq. “As I live, saith the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters. Behold this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her, and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me; therefore I took them away as I saw good.” Comp. Gen_13:13; Gen_18:20. Therefore, rude, violent selfishness, joined with sensual abomination was the sin of Sodom, and is the sin of Judah. Consequently, and in reference to our passage, the earthly Jerusalem is called in Rev_11:8 pνευματικῶς Σόδομα και Αἵγυπτος. The prophet does not understand by תורת אלהינו, “the law of our God,” a simple parallel with דבר י׳, “the word,” etc. institutio, or תּוֹכֵהָה (chastisement) in general, but the Mosaic “Law, especially, corresponding to the context, which treats of the difference between a true and a false observance of the law. Thus the second member marks an advance in reference to the first, and תּוֹרָה is to be construed synedochically. “Docebovos,” &c., says Vitringa, “I will teach you what is the cum of the law of Moses; not this, assuredly, which ye hypocritically exhibit, but to worship God with a pure heart, and manifest zeal for justice, equity, honor and every virtue.”
3. To what purpose—full of blood, v. 11–15.—Vitringa calls attention to a gradation in these verses. Bloody sacrifices, attendance at the temple, unbloody sacrifices, feasts, prayers, make the series of religious formalities which approach step by step to a truly spiritual worship. And yet they may all of them not satisfy the Lord as Israel observed them: for the nation, notwithstanding, does not rise above the level of mere outward ceremonial service. The זְבָחִים are a comprehensive expression for bloody sacrifices, as is often the case in writers of later date than the Pentateuch, see 1Sa_2:29; 1Sa_3:14. Isa_19:21; HerzogR. Encycl. X. p. 621, 637. This appears from the prominence of the word in Isa_1:11, and from its being made parallel with מִנְחָהIsa_1:13. That the discourse of Jehovah must not be regarded as the first and only one of the sort spoken in this matter, but as a member of a continuous chain of words of the same purport, is indicated by the Imperfect.
Without exactly intending completeness, or an especially significant order of the classes of beasts and sacrifices, the prophet still enumerates the chief sorts of those sacrifices that were taken from צֹאן and בָּקָר (flocks and herds). The עוֹלוֹת as the principal sacrifice is named first: (it is קֹדֶשׁ קָדָשִׁים comp. ŒhlerinHerzog’sR. Encycl. X. p. 634). That only עֹלוֹת אֵילִים are named, is accidental. For burnt-offerings were not presented only of rams, see Leviticus 1. nor were offerings of rams especially holy. In all enumerations of the sacrificial beasts rams are in the second place, after bullocks. Exodus 29; Leviticus 8; Num_7:15 sqq.; Isa_29:2 sq., etc. In as much as, with the exception of the whole burnt-offering, only the fat and the blood were offered, (comp.Œhler Herzog’sR. Encycl. X. p. 632), Lev_3:16 sq.; Isa_7:23 sqq.; Eze_44:15, it is natural that these should have especial prominence in this place. By מְרִיאִים we are not to understand a particular species of beast, as many have thought. The word is only found elsewhere in 2Sa_6:13; 1Ki_1:9; 1Ki_1:19; 1Ki_1:25; Isa_11:6; Eze_39:18; Amo_5:22. The meaning is not made out with certainty. But in this place it seems to mean fed beasts in general. If the fat were all that was offered of the solid matter of the beast, then must a beast be the better suited for an offering according as it had more fat. Thence the being fat is named as a desirable quality in the sacrificial animal, Psalms 22; Gen_4:4. A further proof that the prophet does not intend an exact classification is seen in the fact that he speaks only of the blood of bullocks, of sheep, (כֶּבֶשׂ the male sheep Lev_14:10) and of he-goats (עַתּוּד the younger, שָׂעִיר the older he-goat), although neither the blood of only these beasts, nor yet of these beasts was only the blood offered.
Isa_1:12. When ye come to appear,etc.—A grade higher than the rude bloody sacrifice, this personal appearance at the place of worship stands on the platform of spirituality. It also is an homage that is paid to the divinity. But it does not suffice. Hence it may be said of the mere bodily presence, that the Lord has not demanded that.
Who hath required.—Jehovah does not require the mere bodily presence, so far as this is nothing but an useless wearing out of the courts by the feet of those that stand in them.
The unbloody sacrifices and the solemn assembles represent again a different and still higher grade of worship. No more lying meat-offerings shall they bring, (Comp. Isa_5:18; Isa_30:28) i. e., such, in which the disposition of the one sacrificing does not correspond to the outward rite. I do not believe that the text has to do only with the performances of the λαός, “laity,” as Delitzsch supposes. For the prophet rejects the entire outward ceremonial service, which, in fact, the priests solemnized only in place of the nation which ideally was itself a priestly nation, Exo_19:6. Moreover, there would be an omission in the enumeration of the parts of worship if that very important and most holy incense offering were left out (Exodus 30, especially Isa 1:36). The Lord says, therefore, that incense, otherwise so like the fragrant blossom of the sacrificial worship, was itself an abomination, when offered in the false way as hitherto.
The new moon and Sabbath.—The observance of the holy days and seasons appointed by the Lord Himself was an essential part of the obedience demanded from the nation, comp. Exo_23:10-17; Leviticus 23; Numbers 28; Numbers 29.; Deuteronomy 16. Yet even such performance is of no account in God’s sight, but, on the contrary, offensive and vexatious when it does not proceed from that disposition He would have. The new moons, “were so to speak the first born among the days of the month,” and the fixing of the other feast days that occurred in the month depended on them (“From the moon is the sign of feasts,” Sir_43:7; comp.Saalschuetz,Mos. R., p. 402 sqq.). Concerning their celebrations, see Num_10:10; Num_28:11-16; 1Sa_20:5; 1Sa_20:18 sq. By שַׁבָּת is to be understood the weekly Sabbath, as appears from the fact that, in what follows, the feasts and therefore the feast Sabbaths are especially mentioned; see Herzog’sR. Encycl. IV. p. 385. אוּכַל is used here in the pregnant sense of “surmounting, enduring, being able to hold out,” like we too could say; “nicht vermag ich Frevel und Festversammlung.” “I can’t (stand) outrage and solemn assembly,” i. e., the combination of the two, both at once surpasses my ability. In a similar sense יָכֹל is used Hos_8:5; Psa_101:5 sq.; Isa_13:5; Pro_30:21. God cannot put up with this combination of concentration and decentralization, of centripetal and centrifugal forces. He opposes to them a non possumus. In the following verse the prophet repeats the same thought with still stronger expressions. For he names again the new moons. But what in Isa_1:13 he designates by the words, “Sabbath, calling assembly and solemn meeting,” he comprehends here in the one conception מוֹעֲדִים (מוֹעֵד “the most general word for the holy seasons that occurred by established order.” ŒhlerinHerzog’sR. Encycl. IV. p. 383, comp. Lev_23:2). What he says to them Isa_1:13, in one word לֹֽא־אוּבַל, “I can’t bear,” he now expresses by three verbs. He explains his non possumus in that he says he hates those ceremonies, that they are a burden to him and a subject of loathing.
But prayer, too, although it is the fragrant blossom of the soul’s life (comp. Rev_5:8; Rev_8:3 sq.), and therefore stands high above the previously named elements of worship in regard to immateriality and spirituality, is not acceptable to the Lord in the mouth of this people. For it also is only empty lip and hand service. Jehovah shuts His eyes at the caricature of prayer; comp. 1Sa_12:3; Pro_28:27; and also much praying does not help the matter, for Jehovah does not go on hearing constantly.
Your hands are full of blood.“—In this short phrase, which is added emphatically without connecting particle, the reason is given why Jehovah cannot endure all the ceremonial observances of the nation. They are offered by hands stained with blood. It is thus a revolting lie, Isa_29:13.
4. Wash ye—plead for the widow, Isa_1:16-17.—Heart cleansing, turning away from evil, proper fruits of repentance,—such is the divine service that the Lord requires. There are nine demands made on the people; four negative, Isa_1:16, and five positive, Isa_1:17. The first two of the four negative expressions are figurative. רָחַץ is indeed often used of bodily washing (and in a medial sense as here: Exo_2:5; Lev_14:8; Lev_15:5 sqq. etc.). זָכָה is used only of moral purity, but, according to its fundamental idea, must be regarded as a figurative expression. In what follows the prophet says the same thing without figure of speech: they must let the Lord see no more wicked works, i. e., they must cease to sin.
The five positive demands proceed from the general to the particular. For in advance stands the quite general “learn to do well.” Then follows the exhortation to “seek judgment,” (the phrase is found again only Isa_16:5). The Old Test. צְדָקָה, “righteousness,” consists essentially in conformity to מִשְׁפָּט, “judgment.” Whoever, under all circumstances, does what is right, even when he has the power to leave it undone, is a צַדִּיק, “righteous one.” When the powerful, then, spite of his power, suffers the poor, the wretched, the widow and the orphan to enjoy their rights, then this justice appears subjectively as gentleness and goodness, objectively as salvation. Hence צַדִּיק has so often the secondary meaning of “kindness, mercy” (comp. Psa_37:21; Pro_12:10; Pro_21:26) and צֶדֶק or צְדָקָה that of “salvation” (Psa_24:5; Psa_132:9; Psa_132:16; Isa_41:10; Isa_45:8, etc.). The Old Test. צְדָקָה contrasts, therefore, on the one hand with grace, that gives more than can justly be demanded, on the other hand, with oppressive unrighteousness, (comp. מְרֵצֵּחַ ,חָמוֹץ ,עָרִיץ and others) that gives less. Comp. my comment, on Jer_7:5.—Whoever exercises strict justice will quite as much restrain the oppressor from doing injustice, as aid those seeking their rights to the enjoyment of them. The prophet expresses the former by the words אַשְּׁרוּ חָמוֹץ, “righten [marg. Eng. vers.] the oppressor.”
5. Come now—hath spoken it, Isa_1:18-20. As in Isa_1:15 the phrase “your hands are filled with blood” is loosely strung on without connecting particle, so also the complex thought of Isa_1:18-19, as to its sense, refers back to Isa_1:15 b. For the prophet evidently would say: your hands are indeed full of blood, but if ye truly become converted, all debts shall be forgiven, etc. Verse 18 therefore contains the necessary consequences of the premises laid down in what precedes. The discourse gains in brevity and vivacity by its members being strung together without conjunctions.—“Come, now,” etc., comp. Isa_2:3; Isa_2:5. The prophet would say: when ye shall have truly repented, then come, and then we shall easily come to an understanding. Gesenius and others would have the sense to be, not that Jehovah is represented as forgiving, but that the taking away of the blood-red guilt consists in an extirpation of the sinner. They support this view by reminding that נִשְׁפָּט and דִּבֶּר מִשְׁפָּטִים אֵת always designate God as the punitive Judge; comp. Isa_66:16; Joel 4 (3) 2; Jer_25:31; Eze_20:35, etc. But it is precisely for this reason that Isaiah does not employ the usual expression for “litigate,” but a word that does not elsewhere occur, in order to indicate that he has in mind a litigation altogether different from the usual sort. Besides, it contradicts not only the sense and the connection of our passage, but the spirit of the Holy Scriptures generally, for one to assume that pardon may not follow the fulfilling of the conditions proposed in Isa_1:16, or that this pardon may consist in the extirpation of the outrageous offenders and the “cleansing and clearing away” thus effected. No! just those, whose hands are full of blood, may, if they cleanse themselves, be pure and white; comp. Isa_43:24 sq.; Isa_44:22; Psalms 32, 51.—שָׁנִי and תּוֹלַעַת are one and the same color, viz., bright red, crimson. Here, evidently, it means the color of blood. In many places, as Exo_28:5-6; Exo_36:8, etc.;Jer_4:30, we find תּוֹלַעַת שָׁנִי or הַשָּׁנִי; Lev_14:4; Lev_14:6; Lev_14:49; Lev_14:51-52; Num_19:6שְׁנִי תוֹלַעַת, Lam_4:5 only תּוֹלָע. The last word means “worm,” (comp. Exo_16:20, and תּוֹלֵעָהIsa_14:11; Isa_66:24; Job_25:6). What the תּוֹלַעַת שָׁנִי is we are well informed. It is the female cochineal (coccus ilicis,Linne) which lays its eggs on the twigs of the holm oak, and, expiring upon them, covers them with its body. The egg nests so formed were pulverized and the color prepared therefrom. It is less certain why the color is named שָׁנִי. Comp. Leyrer,Art. crimson inHerzog’sR. Encycl. XXI., p. 606. The plural שָׁנִים is found only here and Pro_31:21. It seems to me in both places to mean more probably “scarlet stuffs.” That sin is here called red, has its reason in the evident reference to the bloody hands, Isa_1:15 b. But that the righteous estate is compared to white color, happens according to the natural and universal symbolism of colors; comp. Psa_37:6; Mal. 3:20 (Mal_4:2); 1Jn_1:5; 1Jn_1:7; Rev_1:14; Rev_3:4; Rev_19:14, etc.
If ye be willing, Isa_1:19. The exhortation Isa_1:16-17 is followed Isa_1:18 by a similar promise, i. e., by one that similarly confines itself to the inward, spiritual domain. To this is now joined a twofold word of a) promise also of outward felicity, Isa_1:19; b) of threatening of bodily destruction, Isa_1:20. The conclusion “ye shall be devoured of the sword,” Isa_1:20, corresponds to “ye shall eat the good of the land,” not only as to sense, but also, as near as may be, as to sound. On the formula “for the mouth,” etc., comp., at Isa_1:2.
[Isa_1:13. “The last clause, meaning of course, I cannot bear them together, is a key to the preceding verses. It was not religious observance itself, but its combination with iniquity, that God abhorred.” J. A. Alexander.
Oblations, מִנחַת. “This word properly denoted a gift of any kind, (Gen_32:13), then especially a present or offering to the Deity. Gen_4:3-5.—The proper translation would have been meal or flour-offering, rather than meat-offering, since the word meat with us now denotes animal food only. Lev_2:1; Lev_6:14; Lev_9:17.” Barnes.
Isa_1:16. Wash.—”It is used here in close connection with the previous verse, where the prophet says that their hands were filled with blood. He now admonishes them to wash away that blood, with the implied understanding, that, then their prayers would be heard.” Barnes.
From before mine eyes. “As God is omniscient, to put them away from before His eyes is to put them away altogether.” Barnes.
Isa_1:18. “God has been addressing magistrates particularly, and commanding them to seek judgment, etc., all of which are terms taken from the law. He here continues the language, and addresses them as accustomed to the proceedings of courts, and proposes to submit the” (their) “case as if on trial.” Barnes.
Scarlet.—”There is another idea here. This was a fast or fixed color. Neither dew, rain, nor washing, nor long usage would remove it. Hence it is used to represent the fixedness and permanency of sins in the heart. No human means will wash them out. No effort of man, no external rites, no tears, no sacrifice, no prayers are of themselves sufficient to take them away. An almighty power is needful to remove them.” Barnes.
Like the wool.—Instead of the wool becoming like the crimson, the crimson shall become like the wool. Regarding the sequence of Isa_1:16-17, and Isa_1:18; comp. Mat_5:22-24.—Tr.
Isa_1:19. Ye shall eat.—”Instead of seeing them devoured by strangers, as in Isa_1:7.” J. A. Alexander].
4. COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Isa_1:21-31
21 How is the faithful city become an harlot!
It was full of judgment;
Righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.
22 Thy silver is become dross,
Thy wine mixed with water:
23 Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves:
Every one loveth gifts, and 25followeth after rewards:
They judge not the fatherless,
Neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.
24 Therefore saith the Lord,
The Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel,
Ah, I will 26ease me of mine adversaries,
And avenge me of mine enemies:
25 And I will turn my hand upon thee,
And27 28purely purge away thy dross,
And take away all thy 29tin:
26 And I will restore thy judges as at the first,
And thy counsellors as at the beginning:
Afterward thou shalt be called,
The city of righteousness, the faithful city.
27 Zion shall be redeemed with judgment,
And 30her converts with righteousness.
28 31And the 32destruction of the trangressors and of the sinners shall be together,
And they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed.
29 For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired,
And ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen.
30 For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth,
And as a garden that hath no water.
31 And the strong shall be as tow,
33And 34the maker of it as a spark,
And they shall both burn together,
And none shall quench them.
TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL
Isa_1:21. Concerning the distinction between צֶדֶק ,צְדָקָה and מִשְׁפָּט comp. Drechsler in loc. I will only remark that the grammatical form צֶדֶק requires as its primitive, fundamental meaning “the being righteous, integrity,” therefore the idea of the verb צָדַק in its abstract generality (comp. אַבְנֵי צֶדֶק ,מֹאזְנֵי צֶדֶק), whereas צְדָקָה, although also abstract, signifies integrity as the moral quality of a person, and as the prerequisite of right doing. Comp. also Ewald, § 143 a; 150 b.—מִשְׁפָּט on the other hand, involves the idea of right per se, and in every respect of its concrete realization. It is thus at once normal right, and also rightful claim, legal proceeding, verdict, and judgment. It is natural that in application the three conceptions should blend with one another.—לִין, related by root to לַיִל is properly pernoctare, then “to stay, to dwell” generally: comp. Psa_25:13; Pro_15:31; Job_19:4.—The verb רצח does not again occur in Isaiah; its participle Piel only 2Ki_6:32.—Regarding the construction of Isa_1:21, מלאתי מ׳ is not in a manner in apposition with נאמנה, as one might be tempted to think, out of liking for the easier grammatical connection, for the sense is decidedly against it.
Isa_1:22. סִיגים because of the derivation from סוּג more correct than סִגִּים, comp. Eze_22:18 sq.; Psa_119:119; Pro_25:4; Pro_26:23; only in Isaiah again, Isa_1:25. סֹבֶא, only found again Hos_4:18, comp. Isa_56:12, that with which one carouses, intoxicates himself, in French, ce qui soule. מָהוּל ά̔π. λεγ., is kindred to מוּל circumcised, cut, comp. juglare Falernum, Martial Eph_1:18; castrare vinum, Plin. Hist. Nat.
Isa_1:23. שׂריז and סוררים (comp. Isa_30:1; Isa_65:2; Jer_6:28; Hos_9:15) is a play on words and indicates the relation of those men to God (1. Table), as the following (חברי ג׳) does their relation to men (2. Table, comp. Pro_29:24).—The singular כֻּלּוּ embraces the שָׂרִים as unity, as rank. שׁלמנים is ά̔π. λεγ. שֹׁחַד is in Isa_5:23; Isa_33:15; Isa_45:13.
Isa_1:24. On הוֹי comp. Isa_1:4. The Niphal נִחַם is used here in the sense “to breathe again refreshed,” i. e., “refresh oneself,” as Isa_57:6; Jer_31:15; Eze_31:16, etc. This meaning, however, changes to the kindred one of נָקַם to revenge, Niphal, to revenge oneself. For revenge is a refreshment. Therefore also is נִחַם joined here with מִן, which construction is the usual one for נִקַם, ultionem capere, Jdg_16:28; 1Sa_14:24; Jer_15:15; Jer_46:10, etc.
Isa_1:25. Whereas הֵשִׁיב יָד means either “to draw back the hand,” Gen_38:29; Jos_8:26; 1Sa_14:27; 1Ki_13:4; Isa_14:27; or “to return the hand to a place,” Exo_4:7, or “to bring the hand repeatedly somewhere” Jer_6:9, הֵשִׁיב יָד עַל in most places of its occurrence (Eze_38:12 : Amo_1:8; Zec_13:7; Psa_81:15; comp. 2Sa_8:3)—to turn one’s hand in a figurative sense, i. e., to turn in an hostile way against any one. בְּדִיל stannum or plumbum nigrum, only used this once in Isa.בֹּרִית = בֹּר vegetable alkali, only here in Isa., comp. Job_9:30. As the alkali does not effect the smelting process, but only promotes it, כַּבֹּר must not be construed as nominative, but as an accusative that supplies the preposition that is wanting after כְּ (alkali fashion, comp. on חרב Isa_1:20; Isa_1:12), comp. Gesenius, § 118, 3 Anm; the plural בְּדִילִים, lead pieces, is the only form of the word, which occurs only here; comp. Eze_22:18; Eze_22:20; Eze_27:12.—Kindred passages, whose authors may have had our text in mind, are Jer_6:29 sq.; Zec_13:7 sqq.
Isa_1:26. The beginning with ואשׁיבה has almost the appearance of a rhyme in relation to the same word, Isa_1:25. Evidently the prophet intends to emphasize the difference of sense by the similar sound of the words. The construction is an adverbial prolepsis. For whereas otherwise, in prolepsis that, which is the effect of the transaction, is adjoined to the object in the form of adjective, the adjoining occurs here in adverbial form; (comp. Jer_33:7; Jer_33:11; and 1Ki_13:6).
Isa_1:28. As regards the sense, it does not matter whether we take שֶׁבֶר (properly fractura Isa_15:5; Isa_30:26) as predicate, as Hitzig does, or, like most others, as the object of an exclamatory phrase. As in this chapter several such nominatives occur absolutely, and representing a phrase (Isa_1:7; Isa_1:13), the latter may be more correct.
Isa_1:29. The singular of אֵלִים occurs only once Gen_14:6 in the proper name אֵיל פָּארָן. As singular אֵלָה (Isa_1:30) is always used elsewhere. The meaning “Terebinth,” which, parallel with meanings “strength,” and “ram” (comp. the Latin robur), develops out of the fundamental meaning torquere, is now admitted by all expositors, whereas many of the older ones, following the LXX.
and Vulgate, took the word in the sense of “Idols.” Isa. mentions the אֵלִים as objects of idolatrous worship, also Isa_57:5, whereas, Isa_61:3, he opposes to these idolatrous ones the אֵילֵי צֶדֶק, trees (Terebinths) of righteousness. with plainly a pregnant meaning.—The word גַּנֹּות only Isa., uses of the groves of idols, Isa_65:3; Isa_66:17; comp. also Herzog’s R. Encycl. V. p. 474, Art. Haine.” The abrupt change of person in animated address cannot be thought strange. As חָמַד (Isa_44:9;) and בָּחַר (Isa_66:3 sq.; Jos_24:15; Jos_24:22, etc.), are often used of religious deciding, so, still more frequently בּוֹשׁ (Isa_20:5; Jer_2:36; Jer_48:13, etc.), and חָפֵר (Isa_24:23; Mic_3:7, etc.), are used for the confounding results of the assurance reposed in idols.
Isa_1:30. עָלֶה may be construed as the accusative of closer definition (a terebinth falling away in regard to its leaves), because נֹבֶלֶת as feminine connects more easily with אֵלָח than with the masculine עָלֶח. Yet to me it seems more probable that נבלת is to be joined to עלה, not as adjective, however, but as substantive. For, as we see from Isa_28:1; Isa_28:4; Isa_34:4, the participle Kal of נָבַל becomes a noun both in the masculine and in the feminine. In that case it would be rendered; a terebinth, foliage that falls, (are) its leaves. עָלֶח is to be taken collectively = foliage. Comp. Jer_17:8; Psa_1:3; Eze_47:12. As the plural occurs only in the later Hebrew, (Neh_8:15), the reading עָלֶיהָ is to be rejected.
Isa_1:31. The word חָסֹן occurs beside here only in Amo_2:9. According to this passage, and Psa_89:9 (where the form חֲסִין occurs) and according to the noun חֹסֶן (Isa_33:6; Jer_20:5, etc.), whence the Niphal יֵחָסֵן (Isa_23:18), the meaning can only be opulentus, opibus validus. The punctuation פֹּעֲלֹו does not conflict with our explanation; see Exeg. and Crit. For, apart from the fact that it is not without analogy, the use of חָסֹן for idols would be quite unusual, and the idea that the idolater plunges his idols in ruin would not only be strange, but also wholly without motive in the context.—The formula ואין מכבה occurs in Isa., only here; elsewhere Amo_5:6; Jer_4:4; Jer_21:12.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. The prophet first looks back into the past. What were the people formerly? They were a people in whom faithfulness and righteousness flourished. But then he asks: what are they now? A ruined nation, in which unrighteousness and violence hold the sceptre. (Isa_1:21-23). The Lord will subject this people to a severe process of purifying, (Isa_1:24-25): whose consequences will be a future, two-fold in form; a) the good elements will attain their original supremacy, Jerusalem will again become a city of justice, and by justice become partaker of salvation (Isa_1:26-27); b) but the bad elements, the apostates that have forsaken Jehovah and served idols, shall by their own works be pitiably destroyed (Isa_1:28-31).
2. How is the faithful city—widow come unto them.
Isa_1:21-23. Delitzsch justly remarks that Isa_1:21 calls to mind the tone of the קִינָה, the Elegy. And I have myself, in the comment on Lam_1:1, pointed to the dependence of that passage on this. The tone of lament, the אֵיכָה (occurring four times in Lam.), the archaic form מְלֵאֲתִי made this passage appear to the author of Lam. a suitable prototype and point of departure.—By reason of many expressions in the Pentateuch, that designate idolatry as whoredom (Exo_34:15 sq.; Lev_17:7; Lev_20:5 sqq.; Num_15:39; Deu_31:16). Isa., here calls Jerusalem זוֹנה on account of its apostacy from Jehovah by grosser and more refined idolatry. Comp. Hos_1:2; Hos_2:6 sqq.; Hos_4:10 sqq.; Jer_2:23 sqq.; Isa_3:1 sqq.; Eze_16:15 sqq., etc.). It was become such, however, only in process of time. For originally, so to speak, in its paradisaical or golden age it was נֶֽאֱמָנָה, faithful. It may be asked; does the prophet by this golden age mean the time of wandering in the wilderness, as Hos_11:1; Jer_2:2, or the period of David and Solomon? But as the prophet speaks here of the city (קִרְיָה) by which he can only mean Jerusalem, so one can only think immediately of the beginning period of the kingdom. The prophet seems to have especially in mind the early days of Solomon. For this, without doubt, was in respect to the administration of justice the golden age of Israel. For in answer to Solomon’s prayer for “an understanding heart, to judge the people and to discern between good and bad,” the Lord had given him “a wise and understanding heart, so that there was none like him before him, neither after him should any be like him.” 1Ki_3:9; 1Ki_3:12. And by the celebrated judgment Solomon rendered (ibid Isa_1:16 sq.), the people “saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment (ibid. Isa_1:28). And, moreover, as “Solomon loved Jehovah” (ibid Isa_1:3), he was permitted also to build the Lord “an house,” and thereby to join the Lord and the people together by an important outward tie. Hence could Jerusalem, in reference to that time, be justly named a “fixed city” (comp. מָקוֹם נֶאֶֽמָן22:23, 25; בִַּית נ׳1Sa_2:35; 1Sa_25:28), that “was full of justice,” and in which righteousness had, not a transitory, but a permanent abode. It is therefore doubtful whether, in addition to this elevated point represented by Solomon, we may regard the reign of Jehoshaphat, with its reformation of justice, 2Ch_19:5 sq., that came an hundred years later, as referred to in this place. For that effort can only be looked on as a momentary check of the downward course that the nation began with Rehoboan. It may be asked with more justice; did not Isaiah have in mind here also an earlier age than that of Solomon? If only the city, and not the nation, is in question here, that age could only be Melchisedec’s. This occurred to Vitringa, but with a “non ausim” he left the matter in suspenso. I believe that the reference to Melchisedec’s time is not to be rejected, and shall give the reason for this at Isa_1:26. The phrase צדק ילין בה, “righteousness lodged in it,” is only another turn and at the same time the establishing of the sentiment “full of judgment.” For if Jerusalem is full of the concrete manifestation of a truly right-living, then this comes only from the fact that the idea of right has, so to speak, taken up its permanent abode in Jerusalem. The words “full of judgment,” therefore, belong to what follows, and stand absolutely, at the beginning (comp. Isa_1:13), the one full of right,—righteousness dwelt in her; but now murderers. The antithesis is, of course, not quite complete. Either מלאה must be wanting or else a corresponding adversative be found. It must either say: as regards justice, righteousness formerly dwelt in it, but now murderers,—or; full of justice, righteousness dwelt in it; devoid of justice, murderers swarm in it. But the prophet, evidently influenced by an effort at brevity, expresses in the second member of the adversative phrase only that thought that corresponds to the thought of the first member, and easily joins on to it. That one may not translate, “it was full of justice” arises from the absence of the pronomen separatum. For only in cases where this may be supplied of itself may it be dispensed with.
Thy silver is become.—With these words the prophet passes from the region of the inward and general to that of the concrete outward appearance. The silver of Jerusalem has become dross, the noble wine mixed with water. The noble metal, the noble wine can only mean the noble men. And it appears from Isa_1:23, which explains the figurative language, that the prophet has the princes of the people in mind. “Dicitur argentum,” etc. “The silver is said to be turned into dross, and the pure wine to be mixed with water, when judges and senators turn from purity and grave manners, from integrity, sincerity and candor, and prostitute their own dignity.” Vitringa.
As dross is related to silver, the emblem of moral purity (comp. Leyrer in Herzog’sR. Encycl. XV. p. 111, 114) so the diluting with water to the strong wine.—On the matter of the ver. comp. Jer_6:28; Eze_22:18 sqq.
Thy princes, etc.—By these words the prophet himself shows, as he often does, the meaning of his figurative language. On the change of number comp.Psa_5:10. “It is not שָׁלֹום, that they chase after, but שַׁלְמֹנִים, not peace, but pacifying their greed.” Delitzsch. Comp. Isa_1:23 b with Isa_1:17 b, and the comment there.
3. Therefore—all thy tin.
Isa_1:24-25. From the contemplation of the past and present the prophet now turns to consider the future. The transition to it shall be made by a grand act of judgment and purifying. The prophet introduces his discourse with solemn language, especially by employing in detail all the titles of the Lord. He uses the solemn נְאֻם, which is found in Isa. much more seldom than in Jer., and Ezek. Also הָאָדוֹן occurs in Isa. relatively, not often; comp. Isa_1:9, on “of hosts;” אֲבִיר יִשׂ׳ “the mighty one, of Israel,” is found first Exod. 49:24, where however it reads א׳ יַעֲקֹב. The latter form appears in all the rest of the places where it is used, Isa_49:26; Isa_60:16; Psa_132:2; Psa_132:5.—“Ah! I will ease,” etc. The Lord announces His intervention in terms that make known His determination to obtain satisfaction.
I will turn, etc.—In the passages cited (see Text. & Gram.) the hand of the subject is not said to have been previously on the object named, and as little is such the case here. The translation of Umbreit, therefore, “let come afresh” is not admissible. And for the same reason we must not, with Vitringa, who appeals to Isa_11:11, refer, השׁיב יד to the sanans et benefica manus, the healing and beneficent hand of God. The totality of the nation shall be subjected to a purifying process which the prophet compares to the process by which silver ore is freed from the mixture of ignoble metal, and rendered solid silver (כֶּסֶף צָרוּף or מְּזֻקָּקּPsa_12:7). The separation of the lead ore is promoted by applying alkali, comp. WinerR. W. B., word, Metals.
4. And I will restore—with righteousness.
Isa_1:26-27. With these words the prophet indicates the positive good that shall arise from this purifying process; such judges and counsellors as shall resemble those of the early age (Isa_1:21) and by whose agency Jerusalem shall become a righteous and faithful city. It is seen that the prophet ascribes a decisive effect to the influence of the chiefs of the state. He must very well have known, by what he observed in his times, how great must have been this influence for evil. This place reminds us much of Jer_23:3-6; Jer_33:15-16. For as Isa. in this place, so there Jer., promises the restoration of a good administration that shall exercise righteousness, and procure a name that shall be significant of that righteousness. Here as there, that name shall be an ideal one (not a name actually employed, comp. my comment on Jer_23:6). The glorious end shall correspond to the glorious beginning, (comp. “faithful city,” “righteousness lodged in it,” Isa_1:21). It is, moreover, to me very probable that by the original and first times Isa. understands, not only Solomon’s time, but also Melchizedec’s. For עִיר צֶדֶק and מַלְכִּיצֶרֶק (city of righteousness and king of righteousness) comp. Heb_7:2, look quite too much alike. Also the name Adoni-zedec, Joshua 10; (comp. Adoni-bezek, Jdg_1:5; 1Sa_11:8), proves that not only one king of Salem had a name composed of Zedec. It can only be objected that Melchizedec does not belong to the beginning of the Israel Jerusalem. Yet he does belong to the beginning of the Jerusalem of the history of grace. This city had not become the capital city of Israel, had it not before that been the city of Melchizedec; and all the glory and significance of the Israel Jerusalem is only a transitional fact, that would restore that ancient glory of Melchizedec. (comp. my Art. Melchizedec inHerzog’sR. Encycl. IX. p. 300 sq.). We are so much the more justified in this reasoning as the ideal fact of the future that the prophet has in view is, without doubt, identical with the Messianic future (comp. Isa_11:3-5; Psa_72:1 sq.); the Messiah, however Psa_110:4 (comp. Heb_5:6; Heb_5:10; Heb_6:20; Heb_7:1 sqq.), is expressly designated as the antitype of Melchizedec.
Isa_1:27, is difficult. The question is; by whose righteousness is Zion redeemed? To this three answers are given. Some say by the righteousness of the Israelites. Thus the Rabbins especially, “Because in it there shall be those who exercise justice, it is redeemed from its iniquities.” Raschi. But that conflicts with Isa_1:24-25; for according to these declarations the Lord Himself vindicates the cleansing and deliverance of Israel as His own judging and sifting operation. Others regard the judgment and righteousness in question as God’s. Against this idea there is, in itself, naturally nothing to object, in as much as there are plenty of passages in which saving effect is ascribed to the righteousness of God. Delitzsch, who adopts this view, cites especially Isa_4:4; Isa_5:16; Isa_28:17. But then Isa_1:27 would, in substance, say only in other words what is already contained in Isa_1:24-25. It is to be considered moreover,—and therein is seen the third answer to our inquiry—that in many passages, to which this is nearest kindred in its description of Messianic salvation, the righteousness of the administration of justice forms an essential element of that glorious time. Thus Isa_9:6 it is said, the Messiah shall order and support the kingdom of David with judgment and righteousness. Thus Isa_11:3-5 it is said of the rod out of Jesse, that he shall judge the poor with righteousness, and that righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. And Isa_16:5 we read that upon the throne and in the tabernacle of David one shall sit, “judging and seeking judgment, and hastening righteousness.” But in Jeremiah’s celebrated prophecies, Isa_23:5 sq. and Isa_33:15, it is emphatically said that the Lord will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and that this one shall restore judgment and righteousness in the land, and shall procure to him the name Jehovah our righteousness. And, to prevent our thinking that this righteous government is to be only the prerogative of the Messiah, it is said Isa_32:1, expressly of the “princes” too, “they shall rule, in judgment.” Our passage, also, which does not at all mention the person of the Messiah, speaks of judges and counsellors in the plural, which may remain undetermined whether the abstract pluralis generalis, is meant or an actual pluralis multitudinis. In the former case the plural would include the Messiah, and this is in the end, the more probable; in the latter case the righteous judges and counsellors would be distinguished from the Messiah, who is only presented in idea. In any case, by our construction, Isa_1:27 is a corollary of Isa_1:26. The righteous judges named in Isa_1:26, shall fulfil as the task set before them just that which is mentioned Isa_1:27; by righteous rule they shall procure deliverance from the evils under which Zion and the שָׁבִים (those returning, Eng. vers “converts”) had to suffer hitherto on account of the unrighteousness of their rulers.
This שׁבים, by reference to the שָׁבֵי פֶשָׁע (those turning from transgression) Isa_59:20 has been translated “converts;” [so Eng. ver.]. But to me it seems more likely that Isa., whose manifold use of שׁוּב is a prelude to Jeremiah’s use of the word, uses the word here in the double sense of the spiritual and bodily return, that it so often has in Jer. (comp. my comment on Jer_31:22). To be sure Isa., does not, in what precedes, speak expressly of the Exile. But this notion is impliedly contained in Isa_1:25. For, of course the exile belonged essentially to that mighty smelting and purifying process to which the people must be subjected. Let a comparison be made of the passages that give a survey of the Messianic salvation, and it will be seen that precisely the return to the holy land, which of course cannot be conceived of without the spiritual reform, forms a principal element (see my comment Jer_3:18). If therefore our text is related to later passages like the germ to the developed plant, then we are right in regarding the latter as a commentary on it, and accordingly in taking the שָׁבֶיהָ in the double sense of a spiritual and bodily return (Ezr_6:21; Neh_8:17).
5. And the destruction—none shall quench them.
Isa_1:28-31. The reverse side of the smelting process, the fate of the “dross” is presented to us here. It is difficult to say what difference there is between פשְׁעִים, (transgressors) and חַטָּאִים (sinners). At all events the former is the more particular, (see Isa_1:2), the latter the more general word. Both words signify inimical conduct, the former more toward the person of Jehovah, the latter more to the idea of the good. At the same time חַטָּא as Piel form, contains an intensive force in comparison with חֹטֵא Isa_1:4.—The עֹזְבֵי י׳, “they that forsake,” are related to “the transgressors,” as negative to positive. Whoever does evil conducts himself, in some fashion, aggressively against the Lord. But whoever deserts from the Lord is an idolater. In this sense the expression עָזַב אֶת־י׳ is often used; so Isa_1:4; still more plainly Isa_65:11, the sole place in Isa., beside this where the participle occurs in connection with י׳; comp. Hos_4:10; Jer_2:13; Jer_16:11; Jer_17:13 (in which place Jer., had our text before him); Isa_22:9; 1Ki_9:9, etc.
For ye shall be ashamed, etc.—The general declaration that “the transgressors,” etc., shall be destroyed, is more particularly established by two connected sentences, each of which begins with “for,” and the second is subordinated to the first. Those that forsake the Lord would not be destroyed if they found the expected help from those to whom they deserted. But they are destroyed because they do not find in idols this help; consequently are brought to shame in the hopes they entertained in this direction. I understand, therefore, “the oaks” and “gardens” to be synecdochical for the idols that were worshipped in them. It is past comprehension how Drechsler can say that “nothing whatever in the text itself or in the context suggests the explanation of idolatry” He could only say so because he has utterly disregarded the specific meaning of עֹזְבֵי י׳, “they that forsake.”
For ye shall be as an oak, etc.—This explains how the becoming ashamed Isa_1:29 shall be realized. The “for” of Isa_1:30, is therefore not co-ordinate with the “for” of Isa_1:29, but subordinate to it. Thus the prophet retains his figure of speach. Those that clung with their hearts to treacherous trees and gardens, and forsook the living waters, (Jer_2:13; Jer_17:13), shall themselves become withered trees and driedup gardens. The Terebinth is not evergreen, as is commonly asserted (comp. Arnold in Herzog’sR. Encycl. XI. p. 26). Therefore not the normal falling of the leaves is meant, but their abnormal wilting.
And the strong shall be, etc.
Isa_1:31. But the idols are not only powerless, they are positively ruinous. For this sin against the first commandment includes in itself all the elements of spiritual as well as bodily ruin. The prophet would say that the idolater, even if he be no poor, powerless man, resembling the withered tree, or the garden devoid of water, if, on the contrary, he is rich, and mighty, and like the tree abounding in sap, or a well watered garden, nevertheless, by the ruinous influences of idolatry he shall be destroyed. He compares such an idolater to the tow (Jdg_16:9); his work, however, i.e., the idols to a spark (נִיצוֹץἄπ-λεγ.)
[Isa_1:21. The faithful city (“including the ideas of a city and a state, urbs et civitas, the body politic, the church of which Jerusalem was the centre and metropolis.”) “The particle at the beginning of the verse is properly interrogative, but like the English how is used also to express surprise, ‘How has she become?’ i.e., how could she possibly become? How strange that she should become!” J. A. Alexander.
Isa_1:23. They judge not—doth not come unto them.—“They are not simply unjust judges, they are no judges at all, they will not act as such, except when they can profit by it.” J. A. Alexander.
Isa_1:24. “I will ease me.—This refers to what is said in Isa_1:14, where God is represented as burdened with their crimes.”—“It means that He had been pained and grieved by their crimes; His patience had been put to its utmost trial; and now He would seek relief from this by inflicting due punishment on them. Comp. Eze_5:13; Deu_28:63,” Barnes.
Isa_1:27. “This verse means that the very same events by which the divine justice was to manifest itself in the destruction of the wicked, should be the occasion and the means of deliverance to Zion, or the true people of God,” J. A. Alexander.
“With judgment.—In a righteous, just manner. That is, God shall evince His justice in doing it; His justice to a people to whom so many promises had been made, and His justice in delivering them from long and grievous oppression. All this would be attended with the displays of judgment, in effecting their deliverance.” “With righteousness.—This refers to the character of those who shall return. They would be a reformed, righteous people,” Barnes].
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. On Isa_1:1. Concerning Judah and Jerusalem.—Jerome here pronounces decidedly against Chiliasm, in that he says: Scio quosdam Judaeam, etc. “I am aware that some explain Judah and Jerusalem of celestial things, and Isaiah under the person of the Lord Jesus, that He foretells the captivity of that province in our land, and the after return and ascending the sacred mount, in the last days. Which things we make no account of, holding them to be wholly contrary to the faith of Christians.”
Whether Jerome understands by these fidei Christianorum contraria, which the universa despises, Chiliasm generally, or only the giving this passage a chiliastic significance may be doubted. For, on Jer_19:10, he says in regard to the Jewish expectation of a restitution of Israel to the earthly Canaan; Quæ licet non sequamur,” etc.
“Which we may not follow, nor yet can we condemn it; for many churchmen and martyrs have said that. And each is strong in his opinion and the whole may be reserved to the judgment of the Lord.” We see from this he inclined more to reject Chiliasm.
2. On Isa_1:1. In the days of, etc.—Sciamus quoque, Ezechiam, etc. We know, moreover, that Hezekiah began to reign in Jerusalem in the twelfth year of Romulus, who erected a city of his own name in Italy, so that it is very apparent how very much more ancient our history is than that of other nations. Jerome, comp. his Epist. ad Damasum, where it is said: Regnavit Ozias annis 52, etc. “Uzziah reigned 52 years, in the time Amulias ruled among the Latins, and Agamester 12th among the Athenians. After whose death Isaiah the prophet saw this vision, i.e., in that year that Romulus, founder of the Roman empire, was born.”
3. On Isa_1:2. Theodoret remarks that heaven and earth were qualified witnesses to the ingratitude of Israel because the people “received through them the most manifold benefits. For heaven extended to them from above the food of manna. For he commanded, says Psa_78:23-24, the clouds from above, and opened the doors of heaven, and rained down manna upon them to eat, and he gave them bread from heaven. But the earth brought them in the desert the needed water, and in Palestine it afforded them a superabundance of all sorts of fruits.” That heaven and earth, however, can actually bear their testimony he proves by reference to the display at the death of the Lord; “for when the Jews had nailed the Saviour to the cross, the earth quaked mindful of the testimony; but heaven, unable to convey this sensation owing to its position overhead, displayed the sun in his course, robbed of his beams and brought in darkness as testimony against the impious deed.”
4. On Isa_1:3. “There God tells them to go to the beasts’ school and uncover their heads before the oxen and asses as their teachers, who though the stupidest and slowest beasts, still submit to their lords and drivers, and are therefore presented to us by God that we may learn from their example, how we should have reverence before our God. Is not that the greatest shame that, according to divine declaration, an ox and ass are, I will not say contrasted with us, but preferred to us because they do their duty toward their lord? Shall we not observe our duty toward God? This is expressly the wisdom and piety of men, that they are more stupid than an ox and ass, although in their own eyes they fancy they are wiser than all men. For what sort of wisdom can be left when one does not know God?” Heim and Hoffmann, “The great prophets according to Luther.”
5. On Isa_1:4. “A sinful people is one that altogether sticks in sin (Joh_9:34), that makes of sin a real trade, and its best amusement;—of the people that is loaded with iniquity, the impostures and trespasses are so great and so many, that they load their conscience therewith as with a burden (Psa_38:5); the evil seed (Joh_8:39) has not the disposition of Abraham, but is of Cain’s and the serpent’s kind.” Starke. In peccato originali, etc. “In original sin are two evils: evil itself and punishment (Augustin, De civ. Dei. Isa_22:24). Parts of sin itself are imperfection and concupiscence (Augustin), as Gerson says: “impotent toward good, potent toward evil.” Foerster.
6. On Isa_1:5-9. “God has two ways by which to bring His ill-advised and disobedient children to obedience; goodness and severity (Rom_11:22).—That many men become only worse and more hardened by the divine judgments comes about, not from God, but from their own guilt (Jer_2:30; Rom_2:5). The desolation of whole cities and lands is the result of sin, hence there is no better means against it than true repentance (Jer_2:19; Jer_18:7-8).—God is gracious even in the midst of wrath (Psa_138:7), and does not utterly consume (Lam_3:22). The true Church must not be judged by outward appearance for often things look very bad within it (1Ki_19:14).—God is never nearer His own than in cross and misfortune (Isa_43:2; Psa_91:15).”—Starke.
7. On Isa_1:10-15. “We learn here plainly, that God did not command them to offer sacrifices because of pleasure He had in such things, but because He knew their weakness. For as they had grown up in Egypt, and had learned there to offer sacrifices to idols, they wished to retain this custom. Now in order to divert them from this error, God put up with the sacrifices and musical instruments (sic!) in that He overlooked their weakness, and directed their childish disposition. But here, after a long course of years, He forbids the entire legal observance.”—Theodoret.—“Hostiœ et,” etc. “Sacrifices and the immolation of victims are not principally sought by God, but lest, they may be made to idols, and that from carnal victims we may, as by type and image pass over to the spiritual sacrifice.”—Jerome.
8. On Isa_1:10. Jerome observes: “Aiunt Hebrœi,” etc. “The Jews say that Isaiah was slain on two accounts: because he had called them princes of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, and because the Lord having said to Moses, ‘thou canst not see my face,’ he had dared to say, ‘I saw the Lord sitting’ (Isa_6:1).”
9. Isa_1:10-15. “What Isaiah says here is just as if one in Christendom were to say: What is the multitude of your assemblies to me? I don’t want your Lord’s suppers. My soul loathes your feast days, and if you assemble for public prayer, I will turn my eyes from you. If one were to preach so among us, would he not be regarded as senseless and a blasphemer because he condemned what Christ Himself instituted? But the prophet condemns that which was the principal matter of the law, and commanded by God Himself, viz., sacrifices; not as if sacrifices in themselves were evil, but because the spirit in which those people sacrificed was impious. For they cast away reliance on the divine compassion, and believed they were just by the sacrifice, by the performance of the bare work. But sacrifices were not instituted by God that the Jews should become righteous through them, but that they might be signs through which the pious testified that they believed the promises concerning Christ, and expected Christ as their Redeemer.”—Heim and Hoffmann. The Great Prophets, according to Luther.
10. Isa_1:16-20. “A generali reformatione,” etc. “He begins with a general reformation, lest, having finished with one part, they might think it opposed a veil to God. And such in general must be the treatment of men alienated from God. Not one or other of the vices of a morbid body is to be dealt with, but, if one cares to have a true and entire recovery, they are to be called to renovation, and the contagion thoroughly purged, that they may begin to please God, who before were hateful and nauseous. And by the metaphor of washing there is no doubt but that they are exhorted to cleanse away inward filth; a little later indeed he adds the fruits of works.”—Calvin.
11. Isa_1:18. “My art is wonderful. For, whereas the dyers dye rose-red, and yellow and violet and purple, I change the red into snow white.”—Theodoret. “Opera crucris,” etc. “Works of blood and gore are exchanged for a garment of the Lord, which is made of the fleece of the Lamb whom they follow in the Revelation (Isa_3:5; Isa_6:11), who shine with the whiteness of virginity.”—Jerome.
12. Isa_1:21-23. “From the condition of Jerusalem at that day, one may see how Satan often exercises his lordship in the Church of God, as if all bands were dissolved. For if anywhere, then the church was at that time in Jerusalem. And yet Isaiah calls it a den of murderers and a cave of robbers. If Satan could so rage in it, we must not wonder if the same thing happens in our day. But we must take pains that we be not seduced by so bad an example.”—Heim and Hoffmann.
13. Isa_1:23. “It is great consolation for pious widows and orphans that God knows when rulers and judges will pay no heed to their want (Psa_68:6).—Starke.
14. Isa_1:24-25. “God proceeds very unwillingly to punishment (Gen_6:3).—Not only those are the enemies of God that defiantly reject His word, but those also who hypocritically glory in it.—Although one may not carnally rejoice at the misfortune of his enemies, yet it is allowable to praise the righteousness of God in it (Psa_58:11).—If God wishes to avenge Himself on His enemies, every thing is ready for the exercise of His will (Sir_39:5 sq. ).—It is a blessing when God by persecution purifies His church from dross (Mat_3:12).—What is tin and what silver can be easily found out by fire. So by the fire of affliction is soon made plain who has been a hypocrite and who a true Christian.”—Starke.
15. Isa_1:26. Regarding the fulfilment of this prophecy, many, e. g., Musculus, have found in it the promise of a return of the days of the Judges, i. e., the days of a Jephtha, Gideon, Samuel, etc. Others understand the language of the restitution of the kingdom. Others again refer the language to the return out of the Babylonish captivity under Zerubabbel, Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah. Still others see the Apostles in the promised judges. But all these explanations are evidently too narrow and one-sided. The fulfilment has its degrees. And if Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah are justly regarded as the representatives of the first feeble beginnings of the great restitution of Israel; if, further, the Apostles are justly regarded as the founders of the new Zion on a higher plain, still by all this the prophecy is not at all fulfilled. It will only then be fulfilled when the Lord comes “into His kingdom” (Luk_23:42).
16. Isa_1:27. The happiness of a people is not secured by sword and spear, nor by horse and chariot, nor even by industry, flourishing commerce or any sort of outward institution. Only justice and righteousness in Christ’s sense can give true peace and true well-being.
17. Isa_1:27-31. “Precisely from that quarter shall ruin come upon the godless, where they looked for salvation. For their images and idols are the tinder for God’s wrath by which an unquenchable conflagration shall be kindled.”—Heim and Hoffmann.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
1. Isa_1:2-9. The judicial process of the Lord is no secret one, but public. Yea, He gives it the greatest publicity that can be imagined. He invites heaven and earth, and all creatures that are in it, to attend the great trial He has with His people.—He is a true Father. He has let it cost Him a great deal to bring up His children. He has raised them from small beginnings to a high degree of honor and dignity.—For that they ought to be grateful to Him.—How God wrestles for human souls: 1. He nourishes and trains them with true paternal love. 2. They reward His love with ingratitude and apostasy. 3. He chastises them as they deserve. 4. They become little in order renewedly to grow up to true greatness.
4. Isa_1:27-31. “Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people.” Pro_14:34. Therefore every policy that is contrary to the commands of God, can only have God for opponent.—Now wherever the chastisements of God are disregarded, there will His judgment also go forth until He exterminates those that oppose Him. “Then it goes on to the judgment of being hardened, and sin itself must become the man’s scourge, so that he is as the tow and his work as the spark, that it may consume himself.” (Tholuck, Hours of Christian Devotion, p. 131).—False and true progress. 1. False progress is in fact a retrograde, for a) it consists in turning back from God’s command (mostly under guidance of over-shepherds); b) it necessarily occasions outward ruin. 2. True progress is a) apparently a going backwards, in that it first of all rests on a return to the eternal foundations of salvation; b) in fact, however, is a genuine movement forward; a) to a deeper comprehension of the truth; b) to an inalienable possession of true salvation.
From M. Henry on the whole chapter
[Isa_1:4. “Children that are corrupters.” If those that are called God’s children, that are looked upon as belonging to His family, be wicked and vile, their example is of the most malignant influence.
Isa_1:11-15. When sinners are under the judgments of God they will more easily be brought to fly to their devotions, than to forsake their sins and reform their lives.
“Your sacrifices.” They are your sacrifices and none of mine; I am full of them, even surfeited with them.
Dissembled piety is double iniquity. Hypocrisy in religion is of all things most abominable to the God of heaven.
Isa_1:16-20. Let them not say that God picks quarrels with them; no, He proposes a method of reconciliation.
“Cease to do evil; learn to do well.” 1. We must be doing; not cease to do evil and then stand idle. 2. We must be doing good, the good which the Lord requires, and which will turn to good account. 3. We must do it well, in a right manner, and for a right end; and 4. We must learn to do well: we must take pains to get the knowledge of our duty, etc.
“Let us reason.” 1. Religion has reason on its side: there is all the reason in the world that we should do as God would have us do. 2. The God of heaven condescends to reason the case with those who contradict Him, and find fault with His proceedings, for He will be justified when He speaks. Psa_51:4. The case needs only to be stated (as here it is, very fairly), and it will determine itself.
Isa_1:21-23. Corruptio optimi est pessima. That which originally was the best, when corrupted becomes the worst, Luk_11:26; Ecc_3:16; Jer_23:15-17. This is illustrated 1, By similitudes, Isa_1:22. 2, By some instances, Isa_1:23.
Isa_1:24-26. Two ways in which God will ease Himself of this grievance: 1. By reforming His church and restoring good judges in the room of those corrupt ones. 2. By cutting off those that hate to be reformed, that they may not remain either as snares or as scandals to the faithful city.
Isa_1:30. Justly do those wear no leaves that bear no fruit: as the fig tree that Christ cursed.
Isa_1:10. “There could have been no more severe or cutting reproof of their wickedness than to address them as resembling the people whom God overthrew for their enormous crimes.”—Barnes.
Isa_1:11. “Hypocrites abound in outward religious observances just in proportion to their neglect of the spiritual requirements of God’s word. Comp. Mat_23:23.—Barnes.
Isa_1:31. “The principle in this passage teaches us the following things. (1). That the wicked, however mighty, shall be destroyed. (2). That their works shall be the cause of their ruin—a cause necessarily leading to it. (3). That the works of the wicked—all that they do and all on which they depend—shall be destroyed. (4). That this destruction shall be final. Nothing shall stay the flame. No tears of penitence, no power of men or devils shall put out the fires which the works of the wicked shall enkindle.”—Barnes.
Footnotes:
[1]Speaks.
[2]Heb. of heaviness.
[3]Heb. alienated, or, separated.
[4]Heb. increase revolt.
[5]Every head, every heart,
[6]Not pressed out.
[7]Or, oil.
[8]Heb. as the overthrow of strangers.
[9]a Sodom of stranger.
[10]a booth.
[11]a hanging mat.
[12]Heb. great he goats.
[13]Heb. to be seen.
[14]Requires.
[15]Trample.
[16]Oblations, the sacrilege—incense that is abomination to me.
[17]I cannot bear sacrilege and solemn meeting.
[18]Or, grief.
[19]I bear them no longer.
[20]I hide.
[21]Heb. multiply prayer.
[22]Heb. bloods.
[23]Or, righten.
[24]scarlet stuffs.
[25]chases.
[26]refresh myself on, and avenge me on.
[27]Heb. according to pureness.
[28]will melt out thy dross with lye.
[29]lead.
[30]Or, they that return of her.
[31]But.
[32]Heb. breaking.
[33]Or, And his work.
[34]his work a spark.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2–24 The very words of Moses (Deu 32:1); this implies…
The very words of Moses (Deu 32:1); this implies that the law was the charter and basis of all prophecy (Isa 8:20).
Lord--Jehovah; in Hebrew, "the self-existing and promise-fulfilling, unchangeable One." The Jews never pronounced this holy name, but substituted Adonai. The English Version, LORD in capitals, marks the Hebrew "Jehovah," though Lord is rather equivalent to "Adonai" than "Jehovah."
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children-- (Exo 4:22).
rebelled--as sons (Deu 21:18) and as subjects, God being king in the theocracy (Isa 63:10). "Brought up," literally, "elevated," namely, to peculiar privileges (Jer 2:6-8; Rom 9:4-5).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24 1. The vision — This is a programme word…
PREFATORY.
1. The vision — This is a programme word — a title applying to this entire book of prophecies, spoken or written during the reigns herein mentioned. The word denotes a supernatural perception, inspiration, revelation, prophecy; here taken collectively for a body of prophecies.
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Isaiah the son of Amoz — Or Isaiah’s origin nothing is certainly known beyond what is stated in this verse. Nothing whatever is known of his father, Amoz, though many of the Church Fathers supposed him to be the prophet Amos, an error caused, possibly, by the Greek word in the Septuagint being “Amos” for both Amoz and Amos. So noble a character had little need to be known other than as simple “Isaiah.” To this prophet has always been assigned the pre-eminence among the so-called prophets of the Old Testament scriptures. Till the time of Semler (1725-1791) his sole authorship of this book was little called in question. The portion then questioned is the last twenty-seven chapters. Eichhorn and others vigorously continued the dispute, resting their objections on internal reasons purely, such as philological peculiarities, archaisms, and words used once only, and that in the questioned chapters. Gesenius, Ewald, and some lesser lights, have pressed this evidence also against the genuineness of other chapters; for an example, Isa_13:1 to Isa_14:23; also, Isa_21:6-10. The ground of opposition is largely the supernatural element in prophecy. It is claimed that what is herein predictive can be accounted for by mere statesmanlike prevision; that, at least, the last twenty-seven chapters are a later production, written at or after the Babylonian captivity. Other pieces of this collection, beside those named, on one or another ground of criticism are denied to Isaiah as the author. Against all this, Drechler, Delitzsch, Hengstenberg, Alexander, Prof. Harman, and others, protest staunchly; and with candour, great learning, and acute criticism, utterly overthrow the opposition. Keil, in his Introduction to the Old Testament, (Eng. trans, in Clark’s Theol. Library,) and Kay, in his Introduction to Isaiah, (Speaker’s Commentary,) give excellent aid to one in search of the facts on this subject: the one discusses generally, but thoroughly, in the interest of unity of authorship in Isaiah; and the other is a valiant demolisher of philological difficulties raised against this unity of authorship.
Concerning Judah and Jerusalem — These prophecies all had a bearing, direct or remote, on the people of Judah. Though several were uttered with reference to immediately outlying peoples and to foreign nations, they also had alternate reference to the Jews.
The question as to what time this chapter relates, is difficult to settle. Is it the first prophecy written by Isaiah? Or is it rather a comprehensive introduction, covering by anticipation the average character of the people and age for the entire term of the prophet’s career? The latter is more likely to be the true view, because the more reasonable one.
Throughout the chapter the prophet’s central thought is God’s covenant with Israel as a nation, as seen in Leviticus 26, in Deuteronomy 28-32, and in Solomon’s prayer, 1Ki_9:9.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 Ch. Isa_1:1. The Superscription
Ch. Isa_1:1. The Superscription
The verse is probably best understood as the heading of the first great collection of prophecies, ch. 1–12. The contents of these chapters are described with sufficient accuracy for the purposes of a title; whereas the phrase concerning Judah and Jerusalem is unsuitable to many of the later prophecies, and the note of time forbids us to limit the reference to ch. 1. The second difficulty (but not the first) might be removed by accepting Vitringa’s ingenious suggestion that the first half of the verse (down to “Jerusalem”) was originally the title of ch. 1, the latter part having been added in order to extend its scope to the whole book. Since, however, there is reason to suppose that ch. 1–12 once formed a separate volume (see General Introduction, p. lxxii), it is better to adopt the view which most fully accounts for all the particulars of the superscription.
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The word vision is used here in the wide sense of a collection of prophetic oracles (cf. Nah_1:1; Oba_1:1). As the prophet was called a “seer” (ḥôzeh), and his perception of divine truth was called “seeing,” so his message as a whole is termed a “vision” (ḥâzôn). See further on ch. Isa_2:1, Isa_30:10.
Isaiah the son of Amoz] On the name and parentage of the prophet, see General Introduction, p. xxii.
concerning Judah and Jerusalem] as distinguished from prophecies on foreign nations, ch. 13 ff.
in the days of Uzziah … Judah] The words indicate generally the period covered by Isaiah’s public ministry. The author of the title probably understood that the vision of ch. 6 took place in the lifetime of Uzziah. It is not necessary to suppose that he assigned other prophecies to the reign of that king.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 (1) The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz…
(1) The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz . . .—The term “vision,” as descriptive of a prophet’s work (1Sa_3:1), is the correlative of the old term “seer,” as applied to the prophet himself (1Sa_9:9). The latter fell into disuse, probably because the pretenders to the clairvoyance which it implied brought it into discredit. The prophet, however, did not cease to be a “seer;” and to see visions was still one of the highest forms of the gift of the spirit of Jehovah (Joe_2:28). It describes the state, more or less ecstatic, in which the prophet sees what others do not see, the things that are yet to come, the unseen working of the eternal laws of God. As compared with “the word of the Lord,” it indicates a higher intensity of the ecstatic state; but the two terms were closely associated, and, as in Isa_2:1, a man was said to see “the word of the Lord.” Judah and Jerusalem are named as the centre, though not the limit, of the prophet’s work.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1–24 TITLE OF THE WORK. It is questioned whether the…
TITLE OF THE WORK. It is questioned whether the title can be regarded as Isaiah"s, or as properly belonging to the work, and it is suggested that it is rather a heading invented by a collector who brought together into a volume such prophecies of Isaiah as were known to him, the collection being a much smaller one than that which was made ultimately. In favor of this view it is urged
(1) that the prophecies, as we have them, do not all "concern Judah and Jerusalem;
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(2) that there is a mistake in the title, which Isaiah could not have made, none of the prophecies belonging to the reign of Uzziah. But it may be answered, that, in the scriptural sense, all and Jerusalem, prophecy "concerns Judah and Jerusalem," i.e. the people and city of God; and, further, that it is quite impossible to prove that no part of the "vision" was seen in the reign of Uzziah. There are no means of knowing whether Isaiah collected his prophecies into a volume himself or whether the collection was the work of others. In either case, the existing title must be regarded as designed for the entire work. All the earlier prophecies those of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, and Zephaniah have some title introducing them.
The vision. (comp. Oba_1:1 Nah_1:1) The term is probably used in a collective sense, but is also intended to suggest the intrinsic unity of the entire body of prophecies put forth by Isaiah. As prophets were originally called "seers", (1Sa_9:9) so prophecy was called "vision;" and this latter use continued long after the other. (1Ch_17:15 Eze_12:27 Dan_9:23 Oba_1:1, etc.) Isaiah the son of Amoz. (comp. Isa_2:1 Isa_13:1 Isa_37:2; etc.; 2Ki_20:1 2Ch_32:32) The signification of the name Isaiah is "the salvation of Jehovah." The name Amen (Amots) is not to be confused with Amos ( Amos), who seems to have been a contemporary. (Amo_1:1) Concerning Judah and Jerusalem. The prophecies of Isaiah concern primarily the kingdom of Judah, not that of Israel. They embrace a vast variety of nations and countries; (see especially Isa 13:, Isa 15:-21:, Isa 23:, Isa 23:47) but these nations and countries are spoken of "only because of the relation in which they stand to Judah and Jerusalem" (Kay), or at any rate to the people of God, symbolized under those names. Jerusalem occupies a prominent place in the prophecies. (see Isa_1:8, 21 3:16-26 4:3-6 29:1-8 31:4-9, etc) In the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Uzziah (or Azariah, as he is sometimes called) reigned fifty-two years probably from B.C. 811 to B.C. 759; Jotham sixteen years from B.C. 759 to B.C. 743; Ahaz also sixteen years from B.C. 743 to B.C. 727; and Hezekiah twenty-nine years from B.C. 727 to B.C. 698. Isaiah probably prophesied only in the later years of Uzziah, say from B.C. 760; but as he certainly continued his prophetical career tin Sennacherib"s invasion of Judaea, (Isa_37:5) which was not earlier than B.C. 705, he must have exercised the prophet"s office for at least fifty-six years. The lowest possible estimate of the duration of his ministry is forty-seven years from the last year of Uzziah, B.C. 759, to the fourteenth of Hezekiah. (Isa_38:5) The highest known to us is sixty-four years from the fourth year before Uzziah"s death (B.C. 762) to the last year of Hezekiah (B.C. 698). (See "Speaker"s Commentary," vol. 5. p. 5.)
HOMILETICS. "The vision of Isaiah which he saw.
The modern theory, that the prophetical gift was a mere "presentiment, "or" insight, "closely akin to that by which clear-sighted men of all times and nations have been able, in many respects, to forecast the coming course of events, is not very easily reconcilable with these words, the vision of Isaiah which he scow." As a commentator whose freedom from the shackles of tradition is beyond dispute observes, "With Isaiah, it" (i.e. prophecy) "is not a mere presentiment; it is a calm and settled conviction, based on a direct revelation, and confirmed by a deep insight into the laws of the Divine government" (Cheyne, "Prophecies of Isaiah," vol. 1. p. 233, note). Isaiah "sees" that which he announces. It is placed distinctly before him, as that which is about to be. He no more doubts it than he doubts that which is presented to his bodily vision. Hence it may be concluded
I That the prophetic inspiration was absolutely convincing to those who were favored with it, and precluded all feeling of doubt.
II That it was wholly different in kind from that power of prevision which all men more or less possess, resting, not upon grounds of reason or experience, but upon an inward spiritual conviction that the substance of the prophetic announcement had been communicated to the prophet by God.
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON Vers. 1-9. Jehovah arraigns his people.
I INGRATITUDE THE BASEST OF SINS.
He, the Father, has been faithlessly forsaken by ungrateful sons. This is the worst form of ingratitude. "Filial ingratitude! Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand For lifting food to it?" ("King Lear.")
It has been said that The wretch whom gratitude once fails to bind, To truth or honor let him lay no claim, But stand confess"d the brute disguised in man.
But the brutes are grateful; while Jehovah"s sons seem to have neither memory nor understanding. Man, by his nature, if he does not rise above, must sink below, the level of the beast. There is nothing more hateful, then, because more radically amiss and evil, than ingratitude. It is, great men have said, the sum of guilt and evil, worse than any taint of the blood, more odious than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,
II THE PEOPLE HAVE ADDED REBELLION TO INGRATITUDE. They have forsaken, reviled, "gone backward" from him. This is a climax of sin. Our passions are ever in movement; there is no stagnation. Insensibility to God"s goodness soon leads to antipathy, antipathy to active hatred, and this to open revolt. "Be ye thankful." The neglect of the heart and its proper attitude to God is certain to lay us open to every sin. The greatest physical pests of the city, and not less its moral corruptions, may be traced to neglect. Some "covenant" of God made known to us in natural or in spiritual law has been broken; hence sin and sorrow, and hence alone, as the prophets ever teach.
III HEAVEN AND EARTH WITNESSES OF MAN"S GUILT. The whole language and style call up to mind the court of justice. All human events form part of a drama, of which God and the angels are spectators. We in all our thoughts and deeds are surrounded by a great cloud of spectators. The great solid mountains, for example, seem the very symbols of those fixed laws by which our actions must be judged. Napoleon in Egypt called his soldiers to reflect that "forty centuries were looking down upon them from the pyramids." By a similar figure, Micah summons the people to trial in the presence of the mountains; (Mic_6:2) the Deuteronomist appeals to heaven and earth to listen to his words. (Deu_32:1) So does a psalmist (Ps 1) represent Jehovah as demanding the attention of earth from east to west. All our acts run out into a universal significance.
IV THE EXTREMITY OF NATIONAL RUIN. The people have run the whole course of sin, have left no stone unturned in the attempt to defeat Jehovah; and lo! the result. The body corporate is one mass of disease and wounds, fresh and bleeding. The land is devastated and fire-scarred. Barbarians are devouring it; it reminds of awful Sodom"s ruin. Jerusalem, indeed, is as yet unscathed; but she stands alone in the midst of the dread silence. Like "a booth in the vineyard, a hammock in a cucumber-field, "is she? Thus, when appeals to the car have been repeatedly neglected, God paints the truth upon the field of vision. If we heed not the voice, we must feel the weight of the hand, of the Lord. Yet there is still a spark of hope. Jerusalem is all but, yet not quite, a Sodom or Gomorrah. There is still a remnant of people left. Thank God, while there is life there is hope. At the very moment when we are tempted to say of the ruined nation, the broken life, "All is lost!" a voice is heard, "All may yet be restored! J.
HOMILIES BY W. CLARKSON Vers. 1, 2. Ingratitude and intervention.
The "vision of Isaiah" during the reigns of four kings of Judah (ver. 1), and the declaration (ver. 2) that "the Lord hath spoken" (or speaketh), suggests
I THE FACT THAT GOD HAS INTERVENED AND DOES INTERVENE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS.
1. Such Divine intervention ought not to have been necessary. For God has so ordered everything around us, and has so constituted us ourselves, that there were abundant sources of truth and heavenly wisdom without it. All visible nature; (Rom_1:20) the bounties of Divine providence; (Act_14:17) the manifestations of Divine pleasure and displeasure in the events and issues of life; (Psa_34:15, Psa_34:16) the conscience that speaks and strikes within the soul the moral judgment of which our spiritual nature is capable; these (Pro_20:27 Act_24:16 Rom_2:15) should have sufficed for man"s instruction, integrity, perfection. But we find, from the religious history of our race, that these sources of enlightenment and influence have not been sufficient.
2. There has been needed, and there has been granted, special intervention from God. "The Lord hath spoken" to mankind:
(1) From the Fall to the Incarnation, God intervened, "at sundry times and in divers manners by such visions as those he gave to Isaiah, and which the prophet communicated to the people; by creating and ordaining men of illumination and leadership, such legislators as Moses and Nehemiah, such kings as David and Hezekiah, such prophets as Elijah and John Baptist; by the institutions and precepts of the Law; by parental chastisements.
(2) At and in the Incarnation itself: when the eternal Father said to the human race, "This is my beloved Son, hear him; "by the words, the works, the sorrow, the death, the resurrection, of that Son of man who was the Son of God.
(3) From the Ascension to this present time: by the Word of his truth; by the ministry of the gospel; by the corrections of his disciplinary hand; by the quickening influences of his Spirit. By these things "the Lord is speaking" to us still, is speaking to us all.
II HUMAN INGRATITUDE THE OCCASION OF THE DIVINE INTERVENTION. What is it that calls forth the Divine utterance? It is the shameful ingratitude of his own sons. "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me." There are great and terrible crimes which have to be recorded against the human race; there are evil and shameful wrong-doings which stain and darken many individual lives; but there is one common and inexcusable wrong, to which all people and all souls must plead guilty, one common sin, with which we have all to reproach ourselves, it is that with which God himself reproaches Israel heinous and aggravated ingratitude.
1. God has done everything to attach us to himself. He has closely related us to himself; he has made us his children; he has expended upon us the lavish love, the patient care, the multiplied bounties, of a Father"s heart, of a Father"s hand.
2. We have broken away from his benignant rule. We "have rebelled against him;" our rebellion includes forgetfulness, inattention, dislike, insubmissiveness, disobedience. To whom we owe everything we are and have, to him we have rendered nothing for which he has been looking, everything which has been grievous in his sight.
III OUR FITTING ATTITUDE WHEN GOD IS SPEAKING. When God speaks, let every voice be hushed; let all things everywhere, even the greatest and most majestic of all, lend their reverent attention. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth." There are
(1) those who mock;
(2) those who are deliberately deaf, who close their ears by filling them with noisy activities or absorbing pleasures;
(3) those who are persistently unconcerned;
(4) those who pay a passing and fruitless consideration;
(5) those who bring a reverent and obedient inquiry. C.
HOMILIES BY R. TUCKThe times and mission of Isaiah.
God raises up the man for the age, giving him gifts for the particular work which the age may demand. History is not a mere faithful record of things done, but a wise and sympathetic estimate of men doing. A man has more power on us than a truth. A man is grander than any doctrine or any book. Christianity, as a mere system, is a powerless thing; it never quickened anybody from his death of trespasses and sins. The personal Christ is our life. In the sphere of philanthropy we are interested in the doings of Howard and Wilberforce and Nightingale; in politics we trace the influence of Pitt and Burke and Cobden; and in the field of patriotism you kindle into enthusiasm all America when you speak of Washington and Lincoln, and all Scotland when you speak of John Knox. But it is not an easy thing for us to reproduce the men of a long bygone history. The men of one period must not be judged by the ideas and manners and social sentiments of another period; and yet it makes a surpassing demand on us if we have to create, with our imaginations, times wholly differing from our own. If we could be set down amidst the ruins of the buried Pompeii, and see around us the rooms, the furniture, the pictures, the ornaments, and the utensils, we think that, with their help, it would be easy to reproduce the life of old Rome; we could fill banqueting-hall, and theatre, and baths, and marketplace with the men and women of that age. With old Israel we can have no such helps; we are dependent on the historical and imaginative faculties.
I THE PROPHET HIMSELF. "The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amotz." Little is known of his private life, and nothing of his personal appearance. He resided in Jerusalem; he was married, and his wife is spoken of as a prophetess. They had two sons; both were named with prophetic names, the two taken together embodying the substance of Isaiah"s message. The one was called "Maher-shalal-hash-baz hasteth to the prey indicating the swift desolating forces that were coming on the people of Judaea; the other was called "Shear-Jashub a "remnant shall return indicating the mercy of God towards some, the mercy with which so much of the Book of Isaiah deals. It appears that the prophet wore a garment of haircloth or sackcloth, the ordinary symbol of repentance among Eastern nations; and so his very appearance reminded the people of his message. Isaiah prophesied for nearly fifty years. No record is left of his death, but Jewish traditions represent him as martyred in the reign of Manasseh sawn asunder with a wooden saw. He was a prophet, not necessarily foretelling future events, but a directly inspired man; one who received communications from God which he was to address to the people. The prophet had three things to do:
(1) to awaken the nation to a sense of sin in disobeying and forsaking the Lord their God;
(2) to counteract the delusion that an external observance of rites and ceremonies is sufficient to satisfy God; and
(3) to oppose the delusions of those who imagined that their election as a nation, and their covenant with Jehovah, formed an absolute security against overwhelming national judgments.
II THE TIMES IN WHICH THE PROPHET LIVED. They were times of national decline and decay. Isaiah saw four kings upon the throne of Judah. He saw the flickering of the candle ere it went out in the darkness. There was some appearance of prosperity; but Isaiah knew that it did but gloze over deep national corruption that called for national judgments. During the time of Isaiah the neighboring kingdom of the ten tribes did actually fall the corruptions of idolatry and sensuality, in their case, running a swifter course; and the prophet holds up their case as a solemn warning to the people of Judah. The first six chapters of Isaiah have been referred to the reign of Uzziah, a king whose prosperity developed a strong self-will and masterfulness, which led him to attempt a sad act of sacrilege. Jotham was a pious king; but Ahaz plunged into all the idolatries of the surrounding nations, making molten images for Baal, and sacrificing his children by passing them through the burning hands of Moloch in the valley of Hinnom. The people were only too ready for this debasing change. But judgment quickly followed on the heels of iniquity. Pekah of Israel and Rezin of Damascus attacked and injured the country, though they failed to take Jerusalem. Soon other enemies came Syrians in front, Philistines behind. Ahaz sought help from Tiglath-Pileser, King of Assyria, who soon turned upon him, and Assyria became the gravest enemy of Israel.
III THE WORK WHICH THE PROPHET HAD TO DO.
1. His first work was to make men understand that their sufferings were actual Divine judgments on their sins, and therefore calls, like thunder-peals, to awaken them to repentance. God will not leave men in their troubles to imagine that some evil chance has befallen them, that they are the victims of accident. By the mouth of some prophet he will assuredly vindicate the connection between sin and suffering.
2. But Isaiah had also to bring comfort to the people of God in the time of national calamity. Godly people are often bowed down by the pressure of surrounding evil, and in their despairing they sometimes say, "God hath forgotten to be gracious." God will never leave his faithful few to sink under discouragements.
3. Isaiah"s work may be more precisely stated as this: he was to prepare the way for the spiritual kingdom of God, in the person of Messiah the crucified yet glorified Redeemer. The old theocracy was breaking up, and God"s rule in the world might be lost. Isaiah was to say that it was only passing into a spiritual theocracy, giving place to the spiritual and eternal reign of God in souls. In Isaiah messages of severity and of mercy are most graciously blended. The following passage precisely represents his mission: "Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. R.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz
Isa_1:1
The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz
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Isaiah the son of Amoz
This is not Amos the inspired herdsman.
It is his glory simply that he was the father of Isaiah. Like many another he lives in the reflected glory of his offspring. The next best thing to being a great man is to be the father of one. (S. Horton.)
Isaiahs father
The rabbis represent his father Amoz as having been a brother of King Amaziah; but, at any rate, if we may judge from his illustrious sons name, which means salvation is from Jehovah, he was loyal to the national faith in days clouded by sore troubles, political danger threatening from without, and deep religious decay pervading all classes of the community. (C. Geikie, LL. D.)
The vision of Isaiah
The word vision is used here in the wide sense of a collection of prophetic oracles (Nah_1:1; Oba_1:1). As the prophet was called a seer, and his perception of Divine truth was called seeing, so his message as a whole is termed a vision. (Prof. J. Skinner, D. D.)
The time when Isaiah prophesied
Why does the Bible tell us so particularly the time when Isaiah prophesied? Does not the thinker belong to all the ages Does not the poet sing for all time? Why weight the narrative with these thronelogical details? Because you can only judge either a man or his message by knowing the circumstances of his time. If you take a geologist a new specimen he not only wants to know its genus and species, but the matrix out of which it was hewn. The best men not only help to make their times, but their times help to make them. He who is moulded entirely by his surroundings is a human jelly fish--of no account. He who is not influenced at all by the play of popular passion--the set of public opinion--is an anachronism, a living corpse. (S. Horton.)
Isaiahs manly outspokenness
It is a living man who speaks to us. This is not an anonymous book. Much value attaches to personal testimony. The true witness is not ashamed of day and date and all the surrounding chronology; we know where to find him, what he sprang from, who he is, and what he wants. (J. Parker, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v1 Isaiah 1-His General Preface
CHAPTER I
THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD AND ITS CONCLUSION
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Isaiah 1-His General Preface
THE first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its position not to its date, but to its character. It was published late in the prophets life. The seventh verse describes the land as overrun by foreign soldiery, and such a calamity befell Judah only in the last two of the four reigns over which the first verse extends Isaiahs prophesying. In the reign of Ahaz, Judah was invaded by Syria and Northern Israel, and some have dated chapter 1 from the year of that invasion, 734 B.C. In the reign again of Hezekiah some have imagined, in order to account for the chapter, a swarming of neighbouring tribes upon Judah; and Mr. Cheyne, to whom regarding the history of Isaiahs time we ought to listen with the greatest deference, has supposed an Assyrian invasion in 711, under Sargon. But hardly of this, and certainly not of that, have we adequate evidence, and the only other invasion of Judah in Isaiahs lifetime took place under Sennacherib, in 701. For many reasons this Assyrian invasion is to be preferred to that by Syria and Ephraim in 734 as the occasion of this prophecy. But there is really no need to be determined on the point. The prophecy has been lifted out of its original circumstance and placed in the front of the book, perhaps by Isaiah himself, as a general introduction to his collected pieces. It owes its position, as we have said, to its character. It is a clear, complete statement of the points which were at issue between the Lord and His own all the time Isaiah was the Lords prophet. It is the most representative of Isaiahs prophecies; a summary is found, perhaps better than any other single chapter of the Old Testament, of the substance of prophetic doctrine, and a very vivid illustration of the prophetic spirit and method. We propose to treat it here as introductory to the main subject and lines of Isaiahs teaching, leaving its historical references till we arrive in due course at the probable year of its origin, 701 B.C.
Isaiahs preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize. Ewald calls it "The Great Arraignment." There are all the actors in a judicial process. It is a Crown case, and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers both the Complaint in the beginning (Isa_1:2-3) and the Sentence in the end. The Assessors are Heaven and Earth, whom the Lords herald invokes to hear the Lords plea (Isa_1:2). The people of Judah are the Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish, ingrate stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The Witness is the prophet himself, whose evidence on the guilt of his people consists in recounting the misery that has overtaken their land (Isa_1:4-9), along with their civic injustice and social cruelty-sins of the upper and ruling classes (Isa_1:10, Isa_1:17, Isa_1:21-23). The peoples Plea-in-defence, laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice, is repelled and exposed (Isa_1:10-17). And the Trial is concluded-"Come now, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord"-by Gods offer of pardon to a people thoroughly convicted (Isa_1:18). On which follow the Conditions of the Future: happiness is sternly made dependent on repentance and righteousness (Isa_1:19-20). And a supplementary oracle is given (Isa_1:24-31), announcing a time of affliction, through which the nation shall pass as through a furnace; rebels and sinners shall be consumed, but God will redeem Zion, and with her a remnant of the people.
That is the plan of the chapter-a Trial at Law. Though it disappears under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.
That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God reasons with man-that is the first article of religion according to Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God works upon man first through conscience.
Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this same chapter the popular-religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were not idolaters. Hezekiahs reformation was over. Judah worshipped her own God, whom the prophet introduces not as for the first time, but by Judahs own familiar names for Him-Jehovah, Jehovah of Hosts, the Holy One of Israel, the Mighty One, or Hero, of Israel. In this hour of extreme danger the people are waiting on Jehovah with great pains and cost of sacrifice. They pray, they sacrifice, they solemnise to perfection. But they do not know, they do not consider; this is the burden of their offence. To use a better word, they do not think. They are Gods grown-up children (Isa_1:2) - children, that is to say, like the son of the parable, with native instincts for their God; and grown-up- that is to say, with reason and conscience developed. But they use neither, stupider than very beasts. "Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." In all their worship conscience is asleep, and they are drenched in wickedness. Isaiah puts their life is an epigram-Wickedness and worship: "I cannot away," saith the Lord, "with wickedness and worship" (Isa_1:13).
But the pressure and stimulus of the prophecy lie in this, that although the people have silenced conscience and are steeped in a stupidity worse than ox or ass, God will not leave them alone. He forces Himself upon them. He compels them to think. In the order and calmness of nature (Isa_1:2), apart from catastrophe nor seeking to influence by any miracle, God speaks to men by the reasonable words of His prophet. Before He will publish salvation or intimate disaster He must rouse and startle conscience. His controversy precedes alike His peace and His judgments. An awakened conscience is His prophets first demand. Before religion can be prayer, or sacrifice, or any acceptable worship, it must be a reasoning together with God.
That is what mean the arrival of the Lord, and the opening of the assize, and the call to know and consider. It is the terrible necessity which comes back upon men, however engrossed or drugged they may be, to pass their lives in moral judgment before themselves; a debate to which there is never any closure, in which forgotten things shall not be forgotten, but a man "is compelled to repeat to himself things he desires to be silent about, and to listen to what he does not wish to hear, yielding to that mysterious power which says to him, Think. One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. With the sailor this is called the tide; with the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean." Upon that ever-returning and resistless tide Hebrew prophecy, with its Divine freight of truth and comfort, rises into the lives of men. This first chapter of Isaiah is just the parable of the awful compulsion to think which men call conscience. The stupidest of generations, formal and fat-hearted, are forced to consider and to reason. The Lords court and controversy are opened, and men are whipped into them from His Temple and His Altar.
For even religion and religiousness, the common mans commonest refuge from conscience-not only in Isaiahs time-cannot exempt from this writ. Would we be judged by our moments of worship, by our temple-treading, which is Hebrew for church-going, by the wealth of our sacrifice, by our ecclesiastical position? This chapter drags us out before the austerity and incorruptibleness of Nature. The assessors of the Lord are not the Temple nor the Law, but Heaven and Earth-not ecclesiastical conventions, but the grand moral fundamentals of the universe, purity, order, and obedience to God. Religiousness, however, is not the only refuge from which we shall find Isaiah startling men with the trumpet of the Lords assize. He is equally intolerant of the indulgent silence and compromises of the world, that give men courage to say, We are no worse than others. Mens lives, it is a constant truth of his, have to be argued out not with the world, but with God. If a man will be silent upon shameful and uncomfortable things, he cannot. His thoughts are not his own; God will think them for him as God thinks them here for unthinking Israel. Nor are the practical and intellectual distractions of a busy life any refuge from conscience. When the politicians of Judah seek escape from judgment by plunging into deeper intrigue and a more bustling policy, Isaiah is fond of pointing out to them that they are only forcing judgment nearer. They do but sharpen on other objects the thoughts whose edge must some day turn upon themselves.
What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere rhetoric which opens the Lords controversy: "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken." All the world changes to the man in whom conscience lifts up her voice, and to the guilty Nature seems attentive and aware. Conscience compels heaven and earth to act as her assessors, because she is the voice, and they the creatures, of God. This leads us to emphasise another feature of the prophecy.
We have called this chapter a trial-at-law; but it is far more a personal than a legal controversy; of the formally forensic there is very little about it. Some theologies and many preachers have attempted the conviction of the human conscience by the technicalities of a system of law, or by appealing to this or that historical covenant, or by the obligations of an intricate and burdensome morality. This is not Isaiahs way. His generation is here judged by no system of law or ancient covenants, but by a living Person and by His treatment of them-a Person who is a Friend and a Father. It is not Judah and the law that are confronted; it is Judah and Jehovah. There is no contrast between the life of this generation and some glorious estate from which they or their forefathers have fallen; but they are made to hear the voice of a living and present God: "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me." Isaiah begins where Saul of Tarsus began, who, though he afterwards elaborated with wealth of detail the awful indictment of the abstract law against man, had never been able to do so but for that first confronting with the Personal Deity, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Isaiahs ministry started from the vision of the Lord; and it was no covenant or theory, but the Lord Himself, who remained the prophets conscience to the end.
But though the living God is Isaiahs one explanation of conscience, it is God in two aspects, the moral effects of which are opposite, yet complementary. In conscience men are defective by forgetting either the sublime or the practical, but Isaiahs strength is to do justice to both. With him God is first the infinitely High, and then equally the infinitely Near. "The Lord is exalted in righteousness!" yes, and sublimely above the peoples vulgar identifications of His will with their own safety and success, but likewise concerned with every detail of their politics and social behaviour; not to be relegated to the Temple, where they were wont to confine Him, but by His prophet descending to their markets and councils, with His own opinion of their policies, interfering in their intrigues, meeting Ahaz at the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fullers field, and fastening eyes of glory on every pin and point of the dress of the daughters of Zion. He is no merely transcendent God. Though He be the High and Holy One, He will discuss each habit of the people, and argue upon its merits every one of their policies. His constant cry to them is "Come and let us reason together," and to hear it is to have a conscience. Indeed, Isaiah lays more stress on this intellectual side of the moral sense than on the other, and the frequency with which in this chapter he employs the expressions know, and consider, and reason, is characteristic of all his prophesying. Even the most superficial reader must notice how much this prophets doctrine of conscience and repentance harmonises with the metanoia of New Testament preaching.
This doctrine, that God has an interest in every detail of practical life and will argue it out with men, led Isaiah to a revelation of God quite peculiar to himself. For the Psalmist it is enough that his soul come to God, the living God. It is enough for other prophets to awe the hearts of their generations by revealing the Holy One; but Isaiah, with his intensely practical genius, and sorely tried by the stupid inconsistency of his people, bends himself to make them understand that God is at least a reasonable Being. Do not, his constant cry is, and he puts it sometimes in almost as many words-do not act as if there were a fool on the throne of the universe, which you virtually do when you take these meaningless forms of worship as your only intercourse with Him, and beside them practise your rank iniquities, as if He did not see nor care. We need not here do more than mention the passages in which, sometimes by a word, Isaiah stings and startles self-conscious politicians and sinners beetle-blind in sin, with the sense that God Himself takes an interest in their deeds and has His own working plans for their life. On the land question in Judah: {Isa_5:9} "In mine ears, saith the Lord of Hosts." When the people were paralysed by calamity, as if it had no meaning or term: {Isa_28:29} "This also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in effectual working." Again, when they were panic-stricken, and madly sought by foolish ways their own salvation: {Isa_30:18} "For the Lord is a God of judgment"-i.e., of principle, method, law, with His own way and time for doing things-"blessed are all they that wait for Him." And again, when politicians were carried away by the cleverness and success of their own schemes: {Isa_31:2} "Yet He also is wise," or clever. It was only a personal application of this Divine attribute when Isaiah heard the word of the Lord give him the minutest directions for his own practice-as, for instance, at what exact point he was to meet Ahaz; {Isa_7:3} or that he was to take a board and write upon it in the vulgar character; {Isa_8:1} or that he was to strip frock and sandals, and walk without them for three years (chapter 20). Where common men feel conscience only as something vague and inarticulate, a flavour, a sting, a foreboding, the obligation of work; the constraint of affection, Isaiah heard the word of the Lord, clear and decisive on matters of policy, and definite even to the details of method and style.
Isaiahs conscience, then, was perfect, because it was two-fold: God is holy; God is practical. If there be the glory, the purity as of fire, of His Presence to overawe, there is His unceasing inspection of us, there is His interest in the smallest details of our life, there are His fixed laws, from regard for all of which no amount of religious sensibility may relieve us. Neither of these halves of conscience can endure by itself. If we forget the first we may be prudent and for a time clever, but will also grow self-righteous, and in time self-righteousness means stupidity too. If we forget the second we may be very devotional, but cannot escape becoming blindly and inconsistently immoral. Hypocrisy is the result either way, whether we forget how high God is or whether we forget how near.
To these two great articles of conscience, however-God is high and God is near-the Bible adds a greater third, God is Love. This is the uniqueness and glory of the Bibles interpretation of conscience. Other writings may equal it in enforcing the sovereignty and detailing the minutely practical bearings of conscience: the Bible alone tells man how much of conscience is nothing but Gods love. It is a doctrine as plainly laid down as the doctrine about chastisement, though not half so much recognised-"Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." What is true of the material pains and penalties of life is equally true of the inward convictions, frets, threats, and fears, which will not leave stupid man alone. To men with their obscure sense of shame, and restlessness, and servitude to sin the Bible plainly says, "You are able to sin because you have turned your back to the love of God; you are unhappy because yon do not take that love to your heart; the bitterness of your remorse is that it is love against which you are ungrateful." Conscience is not the Lords persecution, but His jealous pleading, and not the fierceness of His anger, but the reproach of His love. This is the Bibles doctrine throughout, and it is not absent from the chapter we are considering. Love gets the first word even in the indictment of this austere assize: "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me." Conscience is already a Fathers voice: the recollection, as it is in the parable of the prodigal, of a Fathers mercy; the reproach, as it is with Christs lamentation over Jerusalem, of outraged love. We shall find not a few passages in Isaiah, which prove that he was in harmony with all revelation upon this point, that conscience is the reproach of the love of God.
But when that understanding of conscience breaks out in a sinners heart forgiveness cannot be far away. Certainly penitence is at hand. And therefore, because of all books the Bible is the only one which interprets conscience as the love of God, so is it the only one that can combine His pardon with His reproach, and as Isaiah now does in a single verse, proclaim His free forgiveness as the conclusion of His bitter quarrel. "Come, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Our version, "Come, and let us reason together," gives no meaning here. So plain an offer of pardon is not reasoning together; it is bringing reasoning to an end; it is the settlement of a dispute that has been in progress. Therefore we translate, with Mr. Cheyne, "Let us bring our reasoning to an end." And how pardon can be the end and logical conclusion of conscience is clear to us, who have seen how much of conscience is love, and that the Lords controversy is the reproach of His Fathers heart, and His jealousy to make His own consider all His way of mercy towards them.
But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins. The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, the princes, and counsellors who are denounced. Judahs disasters, which she seeks to meet by worship, are due to civic faults, bribery, corruption of justice, indifference to the rights of the poor and the friendless. Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much of the religion of today, a cul de sac, into which the Lord chases a man and shuts him up to Himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man out upon the world and its manifold need of him. There is little dissection and less study of individual character with Isaiah. He has no time for it. Life is too much about him, and his God too much interested in life. What may be called the more personal sins-drunkenness, vanity of dress, thoughtlessness, want of faith in God and patience to wait for Him-are to Isaiah more social than individual symptoms, and it is for their public and political effects that he mentions them. Forgiveness is no end in itself, but the opportunity of social service; not a sanctuary in which Isaiah leaves men to sing its praises or form doctrines of it, but a gateway through which he leads Gods people upon the world with the cry that rises from him here: "Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow."
Before we pass from this form in which Isaiah figures religion we must deal with a suggestion it raises. No modern mind can come into this ancient court of the Lords controversy without taking advantage of its open forms to put a question regarding the rights of man there. That God should descend to argue with men, what license does this give to men? If religion be reasonable controversy of this kind, what is the place of doubt in it? Is not doubt mans side of the argument? Has he not also questions to put-the Almighty from his side to arraign? For God has Himself here put man on a level with Him, saying, "Come, and let us reason together."
A temper of this kind, though not strange to the Old Testament, lies beyond the horizon of Isaiah. The only challenge of the Almighty which in any of his prophecies he reports as rising from his own countrymen is the bravado of certain drunkards (chapters 5 and 28). Here and elsewhere it is the very opposite temper from honest doubt which he indicts-the temper that does not know, that does not consider. Ritualism and sensualism are to Isaiah equally false, because equally unthinking. The formalist and the fleshly he classes together, because of their stupidity. What does it matter whether a mans conscience and intellect be stifled in his own fat or under the clothes with which he dresses himself? They are stifled, and that is the main thing. To the formalist Isaiah says, "Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider"; to the fleshly (chapter 5), "My people are gone into captivity for want of knowledge." But knowing and considering are just that of which doubt, in its modern sense, is the abundance, and not the defect. The mobility of mind, the curiosity, the moral sensitiveness, the hunger that is not satisfied with the chaff of formal and unreal answers, the spirit to find out truth for ones self, wrestling with God-this is the very temper Isaiah, would have welcomed in a people whose sluggishness of reason was as justly blamed by him as the grossness of their moral sense. And if revelation be of the form in which Isaiah so prominently sets it, and the whole Bible bears him out in this-if revelation be this argumentative and reasonable process, then human doubt has its part in revelation. It is, indeed, mans side of the argument, and, as history shows, has often helped to the elucidation of the points at issue.
Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiahs horizon. He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, to know and to consider-viz., as instruments of moral search and conviction. Had he lived now he would have been found among those few great prophets who use the resources of the human intellect to expose the moral state of humanity; who, like Shakespeare and Hugo, turn mans detective and reflective processes upon his own conduct; who make himself stand at the bar of his conscience. And truly to have doubt of everything in heaven-and earth, and never to doubt ones self, is to be guilty of as stiff and stupid a piece of self-righteousness as the religious formalists whom Isaiah exposes. But the moral of the chapter is plainly what we have shown it to be, that a man cannot stifle doubt and debate about his own heart or treatment of God; whatever else he thinks about and judges, he cannot help judging himself.
NOTE ON THE PLACE OF NATURE IN THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD
The office which the Bible assigns to Nature in the controversy of God with man is fourfold-Assessor, Witness, Mans Fellow-Convict, and Doomster or Executioner. Taking these backward:-
1. Scripture frequently exhibits Nature as the domster of the Lord. Nature has a terrible power of flashing back from her vaster surfaces the guilty impressions of mans heart; at the last day her thunders shall peal the doom of the wicked, and her fire devour them. In those prophecies of the book of Isaiah which relate to his own time this use is not made of Nature, unless it be in his very earliest prophecy in chapter 2 and in his references to the earthquake. {Isa_5:25} To Isaiah the sentences and scourges of God are political and historical, the threats and arms of Assyria. He employs the violences of Nature only as metaphors for Assyrian rage and force. But he often promises fertility as the effect of the Lords pardon, and when the prophets are writing about Nature, it is difficult to say whether they are to be understood literally or poetically. But, at any rate, there is much larger use made of physical catastrophes and convulsions in those other prophecies which do not relate to Isaiahs own time, and are now generally thought not to be his. Compare chapters 13 and 14.
2. The representation of the earth as the fellow-convict of guilty man, sharing his curse, is very vivid in Isaiah 24-27. In the prophecies relating to his own time Isaiah, of course, identifies the troubles that afflict the land with the sin of the people, of Judah. But these are due to political causes-viz., the Assyrian invasion.
3. In the Lords court of judgment the prophets sometimes employ Nature as a witness against man, as, for instance, the prophet Micah. {Mic_6:10, ff} Nature is full of associations; the enduring mountains have memories from old, they have been constant witnesses of the dealing of God with His people.
4. Or lastly, Nature may be used as the great assessor of the conscience, sitting to expound the principles on which God governs life. This is Isaiahs favourite use of Nature. He employs her to corroborate his statement of the Divine law and illustrate the ways of God to men, as in the end of chapter 28 and no doubt in the opening verse of this chapter.
CHAPTER XIX
AT THE LOWEST EBB
Isa_1:1; Isa_1:22
IN the drama of Isaiahs life we have now arrived at the final act-a short and sharp one of a few months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth year of Isaiahs ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of Hezekiahs reign. The background is the invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib. The stage itself is the city of Jerusalem. In the clear atmosphere before the bursting of the storm Isaiah has looked round the whole world-his world-uttering oracles on the nations from Tyre to Egypt and from Ethiopia to Babylon. But now the Assyrian storm has burst, and all except the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet is obscured. From Jerusalem Isaiah will not again lift his eyes.
The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the action one of the most critical in the history of Israel, taking rank with the Exodus from Egypt and the Return from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing for, forgetting and again preparing for, her first and final struggle with the Assyrian. Now she is to meet her foe, face to face across her own walls. For forty years Isaiah has predicted for the Assyrian an uninterrupted path of conquest to the very gates of Jerusalem, but certain check and confusion there. Sennacherib has overrun the world, and leaps upon Zion. The Jewish nation await their fate, Isaiah his vindication, and the credit of Israels religion, one of the most extraordinary tests to which a spiritual faith was ever subjected.
In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the Assyrian, Jerusalem was saved, the prophet was left with his remnant and the future still open for Israel. But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by no means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy almost prevented the Divine purpose, and Isaiah went near to breaking his heart over the city, for whose redemption he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure as ever that this redemption must come, but a collapse of the peoples faith and patriotism at the eleventh hour made its coming seem worthless. Jerusalem appeared bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral suicide. Despair, not of God but of the city, settled on Isaiahs heart; and in such a mood he wrote chapter 22. We may entitle it therefore, though written at a time when the tide should have been running to the full, "At the Lowest Ebb."
We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this chapter, because it is one of the most unexpected and startling of all Isaiahs prophecies. In it "we can discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the prophet to behold a future "stretching very far forth," this chapter suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness of despair and the absolute sentence which it passes on the citizens of Zion we have had nothing like it from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft by such a crevasse, and of course the official Assyrian annals, full as they are of the details of Sennacheribs campaign in Palestine, know nothing of the moral condition of Jerusalem. Yet if we put the Hebrew and Assyrian narratives together, and compare them with chapters 1 and 22 of Isaiah, we may be sure that the following was something like the course of events which led down to this woeful depth in Judahs experience.
In a Syrian campaign Sennacheribs path was plain-to begin with the Phoenician cities, march quickly south by the level coastland, subduing the petty chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end, and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable foe, turn to the more delicate task of warfare among the hills of Judah-a campaign which he could scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on his flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In my third campaign, to the island of Syria I went. Luliah (Elulaeus), King of Sidon-for the fearful splendour of my majesty overwhelmed him-fled to a distant spot in the midst of the sea. His land I entered." City after city fell to the invader. The princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast, and even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him their submission. He attacked Ascalon, and captured its king. He went on, and took the Philistine cities of Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka, and Azor, all of them within forty miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible from her neighbourhood. South of this group, and a little over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay Ekron; and here Sennacherib had so good reason for anger, that the inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, prepared a stubborn defence.
Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal of his own, as king over Ekron; but the Ekronites had risen against Padi, put him in chains, and sent him to their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem. "These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified in their hearts; the shadows of death overwhelmed them." Before Ekron was reduced, however, the Egyptian army arrived in Philistia, and Sennacherib had to abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He defeated them in the neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, returned to Ekron, and completed its siege. Then, while he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the Egyptians, he detached a corps, which, marching eastwards through the mountain passes, overran all Judah and threatened Jerusalem. "And Hezekiah, King of Judah, who had not bowed down at my feet, forty-six of his strong cities, his castles and the smaller towns in their neighbourhood beyond number, by casting down. ramparts and by open attack, by battle - zuk, of the feet; nisi, hewing to pieces and casting down (?)- I besieged, I captured . . . He himself, like a bird in a cage, inside Jerusalem, his royal city, I shut him up; siege-towers against him I constructed, for he had given commands to renew the bulwarks of the great gate of his city." But Sennacherib does not say that he took Jerusalem, and simply closes the narrative of his campaign with the account of large tribute which Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh.
Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of Jerusalem and her populace, when chapters 1 and 22 were uttered by Isaiah.
At Jerusalem we are within a days journey of any part of the territory of Judah. We feel the kingdom throb to its centre at Assyrias first footfall on the border. The nations life is shuddering in upon its capital, couriers dashing up with the first news; fugitives hard upon them; palace, arsenal, market, and temple thrown into commotion; the politicians busy; the engineers hard at work completing the fortifications, leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within the walls, levelling every house and tree outside which could give shelter to the besiegers, and heaping up the material on the ramparts, till there lies nothing but a great, bare, waterless circle round a high-banked fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their retinues; soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to meet the foe, returning without even the dignity of defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and remnants of grain in disorder; women and children; the knaves, cowards, and helpless of the whole kingdom pouring their fear, dissoluteness, and disease into the already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the walls opposing political factions and a weak king; idle crowds, swaying to every rumour and intrigue; the ordinary restraints and regularities of life suspended, even patriotism gone with counsel and courage, but in their place fear and shame and greed of life. Such was the state in which Jerusalem faced the hour of her visitation.
Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty miles which lay between the capital and the border. Signs of the Assyrian advance were given in the sky, and night after night the watchers on Mount Zion, seeing the glare in the west, must have speculated which of the cities of Judah was being burned. Clouds of smoke across the heavens from prairie and forest fires told how war, even if it passed, would leave a trail of famine; and men thought with breaking hearts of the villages and fields, heritage of the tribes of old, that were now bare to the foot and the fire of the foreigner. "Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as the overthrow of strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers. Except Jehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, we should have been like unto Gomorrah." {Isa_1:7-9} Then came touch of the enemy, the appearance of armed bands, vistas down Jerusalems favourite valleys of chariots, squadrons of horsemen emerging upon the plateaus to north and west of the city, heavy siege-towers and swarms of men innumerable. "And Elam bare the quiver, with troops of men and horsemen; and Kir uncovered the shield." At last they saw their fears of fifty years face to face! Far-away names were standing by their gates, actual bowmen and flashing shields! As Jerusalem gazed upon the terrible Assyrian armaments, how many of her inhabitants remembered Isaiahs words delivered a generation before!-"Behold, they shall come with speed swiftly; none shall be weary or stumble among them; neither shall the string of their loins be lax nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a lion: they shall roar like young lions. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still."
There were, however, two supports on which that distracted populace within the walls still steadied themselves. The one was the Temple-worship, the other the Egyptian alliance.
History has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion. It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon as panic has passed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves to the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice, Isaiah denounced this as hypocrisy and futility. "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith Jehovah…I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear Isa_1:11-15."
Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the people to desist from worship. Soon afterwards they abandoned it of their own will, but from motives very different from those urged by him. The second support to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian alliance-the pet project of the party then in power. They had carried it to a successful issue, taunting Isaiah with their success. He had continued to denounce it, and now the hour was approaching when their cleverness and confidence were to be put to the test. It was known in Jerusalem that an Egyptian army was advancing to meet Sennacherib, and politicians and people awaited the encounter with anxiety.
We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten at Eltekeh; the alliance was stamped a failure; Jerusalems last worldly hope was taken from her. When the news reached the city, something took place, of which our moral judgment tells us more than any actual record of facts. The Government of Hezekiah gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism had been identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all hope for their country, and fled, as Isaiah puts it, en masse. {Isa_22:3} There was no battle, no defeat at arms (Isa_22:2-3); but the Jewish State collapsed.
Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell her religion too. The Egyptian disappointment, while it drove the rulers out of their false policies, drove the people out of their unreal worship. What had been a city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers. Formerly all had been sacrifices and worship, but now feasting and blasphemy. "Behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (id. Isa_22:13. The reference of Isa_22:12 is probably to chapter 1).
Now all Isaiahs ministry had been directed just against these two things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely formal observance of religion trust in the world and trust in religiousness. And together both of these had given way, and the Assyrian was at the gates. Truly it was the hour of Isaiahs vindication. Yet-and this is the tragedy-it had come too late. The prophet could not use it. The two things he said would collapse had collapsed, but for the people there seemed now no help to be justified from the thing which he said would remain. What was the use of the citys deliverance, when the people themselves had failed! The feelings of triumph, which the prophet might have expressed, were swallowed up in unselfish grief over the fate of his wayward and abandoned Jerusalem.
"What aileth thee now"-and in these words we can hear the old man addressing his fickle child, whose changefulness by this time he knew so well-"what aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops"-we see him standing at his door watching this ghastly holiday-"O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous town?" What are you rejoicing at in such an hour as this, when you have not even the bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are without that pride which has brought songs from the lips of defeated people as they learned that their sons had fallen with their faces to the foe, and has made even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate lips of triumph, calling to festival! "For thy slain are not slain with the sword, neither are they dead in battle."
"All thy chiefs fled in heaps;
Without bow they were taken:
All thine that were found were taken ill heaps;
From far had they run.
Wherefore I say,
Look away from me;
Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping.
Press not to comfort me
For the ruin of the daughter of my people."
Urge not your mad holiday upon me! "For a day of discomfiture and of breaking and of perplexity hath the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain." These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic elegy, have a finer pathos still. The cumulative force of the successive clauses is very impressive: disappointment at the eleventh hour; the sense of a being trampled and overborne by sheer brute force; the counsels, courage, hope, and faith of fifty years crushed to blank perplexity, and all this from Himself-"the Lord, Jehovah of hosts"-in the very "valley of vision," the home of prophecy; as if He had meant of purpose to destroy these long confidences of the past on the floor where they had been wrestled for and asserted, and not by the force of the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it all; every spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there is nothing left but an appeal to the hills to fall and cover us-"a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain."
On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for a moment, to describe with some of his old fire the appearance of the besiegers (Isa_22:6-8 a). And this suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made for her foe-every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme one. The arsenal, Solomons "forest-house," with its cedar pillars, had been looked to (Isa_22:8), the fortifications inspected and increased, and the suburban waters brought within them (Isa_22:9-11 a). "But ye looked not unto Him that had done this," who had brought this providence upon you; "neither had ye respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago," whose own plan it had been. To your alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course of calamity lay. And therefore, when your engineering and diplomacy failed you, your religion vanished with them. "In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." It was the dropping of the mask. For half a century this people had worshipped God, but they had never trusted Him beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks. And so when their allies were defeated, and their walls began to tremble, their religion, bound up with these things, collapsed also; they ceased even to be men, crying like beasts, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out no promise; it is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and for it there is no forgiveness. "And Jehovah of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts."
Back forty years the word had been, "Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed." What happened now was only what was foretold then: "And if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption." That radical revision of judgment was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their sin to condemn even them to death.
Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate survival of a remnant. How firmly he believed in it could not be more clearly illustrated than by the fact that when he had so absolutely devoted his fellow-citizens to destruction he also took the most practical means for securing a better political future. If there is any reason, it can only be this, for putting the second section of chapter 22, which advocates a change of ministry in the city (Isa_22:15-22), so close to the first, which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State (Isa_22:1-14).
The mayor of the palace at this time was one Shebna, also called minister or deputy (lit. friend of the king). That his father is not named implies perhaps that Shebna was a foreigner; his own name betrays a Syrian origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the leader of the party then in power, whose policy was the Egyptian alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah had so frequently denounced as the root of Judahs bitterness. To this unfamilied intruder, who had sought to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the manner of those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah brought sentence of violent banishment: "Behold, Jehovah will be hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and crumpling, crumpling thee together. He will roll, roll thee on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball" (thrown out) "on broad level ground; there shalt thou die, and there shall be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord. And I thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do they pull thee down." This vagabond was not to die in his bed, nor to be gathered in his big tomb to the people on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue a rolling-stone. For him, like Cain, there was a land of Nod; and upon it he was to find a vagabonds death.
To fill this upstarts place, Isaiah solemnly designated a man with a father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The formulas he uses are perhaps the official ones customary upon induction to an office. But it may be also, that Isaiah has woven into these some expressions of even greater promise than usual. For this change of office-bearers was critical, and the overthrow of the "party of action" meant to Isaiah the beginning of the blessed future. "And it shall come to pass that in that day I will call My servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with thy robe, and with thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine administration will I give into his hand, and he shall be for a father to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will set the key of the house of David upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and none shut: and he shall shut, and none open. And I will hammer him in, a nail in a firm place, and he shall be for a throne of glory to his fathers house." Thus to the last Isaiah will not allow Shebna to forget that he is without root among the people of God, that he has neither father nor family.
But a family is a temptation, and the weight of it may drag even the man of the Lords own hammering out of his place. This very year we find Eliakim in Shebnas post, {Isa_36:3} and Shebna reduced to be secretary; but Eliakims family seem to have taken advantage of their relatives position, and either at the time he was designated, or more probably later, Isaiah wrote two sentences of warning upon the dangers of nepotism. Catching at the figure, with which his designation of Eliakim closed, that Eliakim would be a peg in a solid wall, a throne on which the glory of his fathers house might settle, Isaiah reminds the much-encumbered statesman that the firmest peg will give way if you hang too much on it, the strongest man be pulled down by his dependent and indolent family. "They shall hang upon him all the weight of his fathers house, the scions and the offspring" (terms contrasted as degrees of worth), "all the little vessels, from the vessels of cups to all the vessels of flagons. In that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, shall the peg that was knocked into a firm place give way, and it shall be knocked out and fall, and down shall be cut the burden that was upon it, for Jehovah hath spoken."
So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened nail is as grievous as that of the rolling-stone. It is easy to pass this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully analysed each verse, restored to the words their exact shade of signification, and set them in their proper contrasts, we perceive the outlines of two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination to invest with engrossing moral interest.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24 Isa_1:1. The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz,…
THE PROPHET OF THE LORD
Isa_1:1. The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
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I. The nature of the prophet’s endowment: a “vision” into the very heart of things, a power of distinguishing between the seeming and the real.
II. The sadness and the joy of the prophet’s life: sadness arising from his “vision” of human sin (Isa_1:2-15); joy arising from his “vision” of the wondrousness of the Divine mercy (Isa_1:18).
Application.—
1. In these latter days the prophetic endowment, to a greater or lesser extent, is possessed by all God’s people (1Jn_2:20).
2. The Church should pray that it may be possessed to the fullest extent by all who are called to minister in holy things. Prophets of clear and penetrating “vision” are among the greatest gifts which God can confer upon the Church [126]
3. This great endowment must be used not merely for the detection and exposure of human sin, lest we become cynical and inhuman, but also for the discovery of the abounding evidence of the Divine compassion (as in Isa_1:9), that we may be brought into more perfect sympathy with Him who hates sin but desires and seeks to save the sinner.
[126] A preacher who is not in some way a seer is not a preacher at all. You can never make people see religious realities by correct definitions. They will not believe in the reality of God on the word of a man who merely demonstrates it to them. You must see such things yourself if you are going to help others to see them. This is the secret of all the preaching that ever was good since preaching began.—Beecher.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 Isa 1:12-13
Isa 1:12-13
Such texts as this ought to terrify us. For they speak of religious people and of a religious nation, and of a fearful mistake which they were making, and a fearful danger into which they had fallen.
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I. Isaiah tells the religious Jews of his day that their worship of God, their church-going, their Sabbaths, and their appointed feasts were a weariness and an abomination to Him. That God loathed them and would not listen to the prayers which were made to Him. That the whole matter was a mockery and a lie in His sight. These are awful words enough—that God should hate and loathe what He Himself had appointed; that what would be, one would think, one of the most natural and most pleasant sights to a loving Father in heaven—namely, his own children worshipping, blessing, and praising Him—should be horrible in His sight.
II. The text should set us on thinking, Why do I come to church? Because it is the fashion? Because I want to hear the preacher? No; to worship God. To adore God for His goodness, and to pray to Him to make us good, is the sum and substance of all wholesome worship. Then is a man fit to come to church, sins and all, if he carry his sins into church not to carry them out again safely and carefully, as we are all too apt to do, but to cast them down at the foot of Christ’s cross, in the hope (and no man ever hoped that hope in vain) that he will be lightened of that burden, and leave some of them at least behind him.
C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p. 51.
References: Isa 1:13.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 365. Isa 1:16.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 263. Isa 1:16, Isa 1:17.—J. Keble, Sermons from Advent to Christmas Eve, pp. 424, 435, 446; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 228; D. Burns, Ibid., vol. xxix., p. 83.
Isa 1:16-18
As early then as the time of Isaiah we find the doctrine of the reformation of character dependent on forgiveness of sin distinctly taught.
Consider:—
I. The demand made. (1) The nature of the demand. It is for a reformation of practice. Put in one word, it is Reform. This is the one Divine call to fallen man. At one time it is an old commandment, at another a new one. Whether it be faith or love, hope or patience, that are enjoined, they are all to issue in the moral elevation of man’s character. (2) The word "learn" suggests a further thought, namely, the ground of this demand for reform. The ground of the demand is the perversity of the human will. (3) Consider the justice of the demand. It is God who makes it. But He could not have made it unless it were just to do so; nor would He have made it unless it were possible for man to meet it.
II. How to meet God’s demand for reform. (1) The answer of nature. The belief in the ability of man to reform himself is founded either on ignorance of the real nature of his moral condition, as was the case in the pagan world, or on a deliberate refusal to recognise the truth when it is presented concerning that condition, as was the case in Judaism, and is the case at the present day with those who persuade themselves to a belief in the infinite intrinsic capability of human nature. (2) The answer of grace. A power from without is absolutely necessary to enable man to meet the demand for reform. This power is God’s forgiveness. (a) Pardon is an inducement to repentance, which is the first step in the reformation of character, (b) Pardon removes, or rather is itself, as its name implies, the removal of sin. When sin itself is removed in forgiveness, all its consequences, too, will soon vanish; and lightened of our burden, we shall feel free and ready to undertake the duties of the new life.
R. E. Morris, The Welsh Pulpit of To-Day, p. 295.
Isa 1:18
What are a few of the leading lines of God’s instruction to the soul?
I. He teaches through conscience. Conscience is a "necessary idea." Nothing is so certain as that; from east to west, from north and south, comes testimony to that fact. The poems of Homer, the awful hints and warnings of the tragic poets of Greece, the religious teachings of the farthest East, the ethical form of the strong Egyptian faith in immortality,—all combine to record the existence of this "necessary idea." Let each of us obey the invitation by keeping an ear ready for the warnings of conscience; let us lose no time. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord."
II. The soul is instructed by the providence of God. The Bible, from beginning to end, is ever exhibiting this blessed truth. The beautiful stories of the earlier patriarchs, the incidental episodes (such as that sweet picture of dutiful devotion in the Book of Ruth), the proclamations of the Prophets, the tender verses of the Psalms, as well as the whole history of the chosen people, conspire to witness to the consoling fact that "the Lord careth for His people." To learn, with ready mind, the lessons of Divine providence is to listen to the Divine invitation, "Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord." Among His many lessons, surely there are two that He would teach us: (1) the blessing of a bright and patient spirit in those who are trying to serve God; (2) seek earnestly God’s guidance in all times of difficulty, and confidently trust in Him.
III. God instructs the soul of the creature by the revelation of Jesus Christ. What does Jesus Christ teach? (1) In His example, as exhibited in the Gospel, He shows us a righteousness so transcendent that it corroborates the teachings of conscience, a course of action of such unvarying tenderness that it illustrates and manifests the providence of God. (2) He gives the most vivid, the most appalling, revelation of human sin; but with it, what conscience could never do of the most loving, most complete forgiveness to the penitent, and the brightest hope (after sorrow) as to human destiny, in the tragedy—the love-marked tragedy—of the Passion. (3) And beyond that, He displays to us a prospect and a power of attainment to the heights of spiritual longing, by revealing the method and confirming the promise of the implanting of His own life, of His own image, ever more and more fully in the soul of His creature, which is the daily, hourly work of God’s blessed Spirit in those who diligently seek Him.
W. J. Knox-Little, Manchester Sermons, p. 1.
I. God, having made this proposition, proceeds on the assumption that He knows Himself to be right in this case.
II. God proceeds on the assumption that man ought to be prepared to vindicate his conduct by reasons.
III. The sinner is invited to take his case to the fountain-head. It is God who invites us to state the case directly to Himself.
IV. From a proposition of this kind, what can I infer but that God’s purpose is, in making it, to mingle mercy with judgment?
V. The sinner is left absolutely without excuse.
Parker, City Temple, vol. iii., p. 49.
References: Isa 1:18.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 366, and vol. xxii., No. 1278; Ibid., My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 213; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 33; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 117; S. Cox, Expositions, 3rd series, p. 427; R. W. Evans, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii., p. 193. Isa 1:22-26.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 228. Isa 1:31.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. v., p. 207.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 16 Isa 1:1 - Isa 1:9; Isa 1:16 - Isa…
Isaiah
THE GREAT SUIT: JEHOVAH VERSUS JUDAH
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Isa 1:1 - Isa 1:9; Isa 1:16 - Isa 1:20.
The first bars of the great overture to Isaiah’s great oratorio are here sounded. These first chapters give out the themes which run through all the rest of his prophecies. Like most introductions, they were probably written last, when the prophet collected and arranged his life’s labours. The text deals with the three great thoughts, the leit-motifs that are sounded over and over again in the prophet’s message.
First comes the great indictment {Isa 1:2 - Isa 1:4}. A true prophet’s words are of universal application, even when they are most specially addressed to a particular audience. Just because this indictment was so true of Judah, is it true of all men, for it is not concerned with details peculiar to a long-past period and state of society, but with the broad generalities common to us all. As another great teacher in Old Testament times said, ‘I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt-offerings, to have been continually before me.’ Isaiah has nothing to say about ritual or ceremonial omissions, which to him were but surface matters after all, but he sets in blazing light the foundation facts of Judah’s {and every man’s} distorted relation to God. And how lovingly, as well as sternly, God speaks through him! That divine lament which heralds the searching indictment is not unworthy to be the very words of the Almighty Lover of all men, sorrowing over His prodigal and fugitive sons. Nor is its deep truth less than its tenderness. For is not man’s sin blackest when seen against the bright background of God’s fatherly love? True, the fatherhood that Isaiah knew referred to God’s relation to the nation rather than to the individual, but the great truth which is perfectly revealed by the Perfect Son was in part shown to the prophet. The east was bright with the unrisen sun, and the tinted clouds that hovered above the place of its rising seemed as if yearning to open and let him through. Man’s neglect of God’s benefits puts him below the animals that ‘know’ the hand that feeds and governs them. Some men think it a token of superior ‘culture’ and advanced views to throw off allegiance to God. It is a token that they have less intelligence than their dog.
There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the fact that Judah is not directly addressed, but that Isa 1:2 - Isa 1:4 are a divine soliloquy. They might rather be called a father’s lament than an indictment. The forsaken father is, as it were, sadly brooding over his erring child’s sins, which are his father’s sorrows and his own miseries. In Isa 1:4 the black catalogue of the prodigal’s doings begins on the surface with what we call ‘moral’ delinquencies, and then digs deeper to disclose the root of these in what we call ‘religious’ relations perverted. The two are inseparably united, for no man who is wrong with God can be right with duty or with men. Notice, too, how one word flashes into clearness the sad truth of universal experience-that ‘iniquity,’ however it may delude us into fancying that by it we throw off the burden of conscience and duty, piles heavier weights on our backs. The doer of iniquity is ‘laden with iniquity.’ Notice, too, how the awful entail of evil from parents to children is adduced-shall we say as aggravating, or as lessening, the guilt of each generation? Isaiah’s contemporaries are ‘a seed of evil-doers,’ spring from such, and in their turn are ‘children that are corrupters.’ The fatal bias becomes stronger as it passes down. Heredity is a fact, whether you call it original sin or not.
But the bitter fountain of all evil lies in distorted relations to God. ‘They have forsaken the Lord’; that is why they ‘do corruptly.’ They have ‘despised the Holy One of Israel’; that is why they are ‘laden with iniquity.’ Alienated hearts separate from Him. To forsake Him is to despise Him. To go from Him is to go ‘away backward.’ Whatever may have been our inheritance of evil, we each go further from Him. And this fatherly lament over Judah is indeed a wail over every child of man. Does it not echo in the ‘pearl of parables,’ and may we not suppose that it suggested that supreme revelation of man’s misery and God’s love?
After the indictment comes the sentence {Isa 1:5 - Isa 1:8}. Perhaps ‘sentence’ is not altogether accurate, for these verses do not so much decree a future as describe a present, and the deep tone of pitying wonder sounds through them as they tell of the bitter harvest sown by sin. The penetrating question, ‘Why will ye be still stricken, that ye revolt more and more?’ brings out the solemn truth that all which men gain by rebellion against God is chastisement. The ox that ‘kicks against the pricks’ only makes its own hocks bleed. We aim at some imagined good, and we get-blows. No rational answer to that stern ‘Why?’ is possible. Every sin is an act of unreason, essentially an absurdity. The consequences of Judah’s sin are first darkly drawn under the metaphor of a man desperately wounded in some fight, and far away from physicians or nurses, and then the metaphor is interpreted by the plain facts of hostile invasion, flaming cities, devastated fields. It destroys the coherence of the verses to take the gruesome picture of the wounded man as a description of men’s sins; it is plainly a description of the consequences of their sins. In accordance with the Old Testament point of view, Isaiah deals with national calamities as the punishment of national sins. He does not touch on the far worse results of individual sins on individual character. But while we are not to ignore his doctrine that nations are individual entities, and that ‘righteousness exalteth a nation’ in our days as well as in his, the Christian form of his teaching is that men lay waste their own lives and wound their own souls by every sin. The fugitive son comes down to be a swine-herd, and cannot get enough even of the swine’s food to stay his hunger.
The note of pity sounds very clearly in the pathetic description of the deserted ‘daughter of Zion.’ Jerusalem stands forlorn and defenceless, like a frail booth in a vineyard, hastily run up with boughs, and open to fierce sunshine or howling winds. Once ‘beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, . . . the city of the great King’-and now!
Isa 1:9 breaks the solemn flow of the divine Voice, but breaks it as it desires to be broken. For in it hearts made soft and penitent by the Voice, breathe out lowly acknowledgment of widespread sin, and see God’s mercy in the continuance of ‘a very small remnant’ of still faithful ones. There is a little island not yet submerged by the sea of iniquity, and it is to Him, not to themselves, that the ‘holy seed’ owe their being kept from following the multitude to do evil. What a smiting comparison for the national pride that is-’as Sodom,’ ‘like unto Gomorrah’!
After the sentence comes pardon. Isa 1:16 - Isa 1:17 properly belong to the paragraph omitted from the text, and close the stern special word to the ‘rulers’ which, in its severe tone, contrasts so strongly with the wounded love and grieved pity of the preceding verses. Moral amendment is demanded of these high-placed sinners and false guides. It is John the Baptist’s message in an earlier form, and it clears the way for the evangelical message. Repentance and cleansing of life come first.
But these stern requirements, if taken alone, kindle despair. ‘Wash you, make you clean’-easy to say, plainly necessary, and as plainly hopelessly above my reach. If that is all that a prophet has to say to me, he may as well say nothing. For what is the use of saying ‘Arise and walk’ to the man who has been lame from his mother’s womb? How can a foul body be washed clean by filthy hands? Ancient or modern preachers of a self-wrought-out morality exhort to impossibilities, and unless they follow their preaching of an unattainable ideal as Isaiah followed his, they are doomed to waste their words. He cried, ‘Make you clean,’ but he immediately went on to point to One who could make clean, could turn scarlet into snowy white, crimson into the lustrous purity of the unstained fleeces of sheep in green pastures. The assurance of God’s forgiveness which deals with guilt, and of God’s cleansing which deals with inclination and habit, must be the foundation of our cleansing ourselves from filthiness of flesh and spirit. The call to repentance needs the promise of pardon and divine help to purifying in order to become a gospel. And the call to ‘repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ,’ is what we all, who are ‘laden with iniquity,’ and have forsaken the Lord, need, if ever we are to cease to do evil and learn to do well.
As with one thunder-clap the prophecy closes, pealing forth the eternal alternative set before every soul of man. Willing obedience to our Father God secures all good, the full satisfaction of our else hungry and ravenous desires. To refuse and rebel is to condemn ourselves to destruction. And no man can avert that consequence, or break the necessary connection between goodness and blessedness, ‘for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it,’ and what He speaks stands fast for ever and ever.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 Jehovah's Arraignment of His People
Jehovah's Arraignment of His People
This chapter is general in character, and much of it (e.g. Isa_1:10-17) might refer to almost any period. This general character of the prophecy renders it especially suitable as an introduction, and may account for its position at the beginning of the book. It gives us a picture of the internal condition of Judah in Isaiah's age, and not only brings out his characteristic teaching, but more than any other OT. passage indicates the general line of prophetic doctrine. Owing to the corrupt state of the nation Jehovah will avenge Himself by a judgment, through which, while it proves the destruction of sinners, the people will be purified, and its ideal character realised by the remnant that shall be left (Isa_1:24-26 : cp. Isa_1:9). Some indication of date is afforded by Isa_1:7-9, where the prophet states that the land is wasted by foreign invaders and the capital cut off from outside help. The prophecy might accordingly be assigned to (1) the invasion by Rezin and Pekah in the reign of Ahaz (Isa_7:1), 735 b.c.; (2) an invasion by Sargon (Isa_20:1), 711 b.c.; or (3) the invasion by Sennacherib (Isaiah 36, 37) in Hezekiah's reign, 701 b.c. It is in favour of (1) that the prophecy occurs in connexion with others belonging to the reign of Ahaz (Isaiah 2-5), and perhaps the rebuke of formal worship suits this period best; the 'strangers' of Isa_1:7 would then be Pekah's Syrian allies. Most recent commentators, however, assign the prophecy to date (3). There is a similar rebuke of formal religion in Isa_29:13 (same period), though the tone of this chapter is unlike that of those prophecies which undoubtedly refer to Sennacherib's invasion (e.g. Isaiah 29, 30).
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2-9. Judah's unnatural conduct and its consequences.
10-17. Sedulous worship of Jehovah is no defence, because a merely formal service is displeasing to Him.
18-23. Jehovah offers reconciliation on condition of amendment.
24-31. The gracious offer being refused, sentence is passed.
1. See Intro.
2. Children] Jehovah claimed Israel as His son at the exodus (Exo_4:22).
3. The unnaturalness of Israel's conduct is similarly contrasted with the behaviour of the animal creation, in Jer_8:7.
4. Seed of evildoers] i.e. consisting of evildoers (Isa_14:20). Are corrupters] RV 'deal corruptly.' The Holy One of Israel] The use of this title is characteristic of Isaiah, and traceable to the impression made by the vision wherein he received his call and heard the seraphic 'Ter-Sanctus.' See Intro.
5. RV 'Why will ye be still stricken, that ye revolt?' etc. Why expose yourselves to further punishment? Read, 'Every head.. every heart.' The noblest parts of the body stand for the rulers and counsellors of the body politic.
7. As overthrown by strangers] lit. 'as an overthrow of strangers,' i.e. (a) as an overthrow wrought by strangers, or (b) as when strangers (whom God cares not for) are overthrown.
8. Cottage.. lodge] solitary huts where watchmen lived: cp. Lam_2:6 RV. The figures express isolation. Owing to the occupation and devastation of the country by invaders the city is left helpless.
9. The cities of the plain had perished through lack of a righteous remnant (Gen_18:24-32). The possession of such a remnant had proved the salvation of Judah.
10. The rulers of Jerusalem are addressed as rulers of Sodom, and the nation as people of Gomorrah. Thus are emphasised both their wickedness and their peril: cp. Eze_16:48-50.
The law of our God] referring not to the written law, but to the divine teaching which follows, delivered through the prophet: see Isa_2:3; Isa_8:16.
11. I delight not] cp. Psa_40:6; Psa_51:16; Amo_5:21-22; Mic_6:7.
12. Tread] RV trample'; like beasts without understanding. The worship was merely formal.
13. Vain oblations] Not the offerings in themselves, but their hypocritical character is reprobated. Iniquity] lit. 'nothingness,' 'worthlessness.'
14. New moons] referring to the monthly festivals (Num_28:11; 1Sa_20:5).
15. Your hands, etc.] The hands, uplifted in prayer, are stained with blood.
16. 17. Condition of acceptance with God.
17. Judgment] i.e. justice. Relieve the oppressed] RM 'set right the oppressor.'
18. Let us reason] i.e. that the right may appear. Forgiveness will follow obedience and repentance.
21. An harlot] figuratively expressing the faithlessness, through its idolatry, of the nation which had been betrothed to God: cp. Exo_34:15; Deu_31:16. Judgment] i.e. justice, as in Isa_1:17.
22. Mixed] read, 'weakened.' The images describe the degeneracy of the rulers; the best have become debased.
23. Companions of thieves] i.e. conniving at miscarriage of justice: cp. Mic_7:3.
24. Mine adversaries] the evildoers in Jerusalem. God will purge the city of them.
25. Purely purge, etc.] RM 'purge away thy dross as with lye,' lye, or potash, being used as a flux in purifying metals. Tin] i.e. alloy.
27. With judgment.. with righteousness] i.e. (a) through the manifestation of God's justice and righteousness, or (b) through the justice and righteousness which the regenerate people exhibit. Her converts] i.e. those of her who return (to Jehovah).
29. They shall be ashamed.. ye have desired] The subject in each clause is the same in thought, though the person of the verb is changed. Such abrupt change of person is not uncommon in Hebrew, especially in the prophets, e.g. Mic_7:19; Mal_2:15.
29. The oaks] mentioned as connected with idolatrous worship: cp. 2Ki_16:4; 2Ki_17:10. Sacred trees were supposed to be inhabited by a deity, to whom the worship was offered. The prophet indicates that such nature-worship will disappoint its votaries. The gardens] referred to as the scene of heathen rites: cp. Isa_65:3.
30. The fate of the wicked described in imagery suggested by Isa_1:29.
31. Read, 'And the strong' (i.e. the wealthy and powerful man) 'shall be as tow, and his work' (i.e. the idolatrous image) 'as a spark.' The meaning is that his sin will be the cause of his ruin.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv2, 9, 13 Hear, O heavens
Hear, O heavens
The chapter, down to Isa 1:23, states the case of Jehovah against Judah. Chastening, according to Deuteronomy 28-29, had been visited upon Israel in the land (Isa 1:5-8), and now the time of expulsion from the land is near. But just here Jehovah renews the promise of the Palestinian Covenant of future restoration and exaltation Isa 1:26; Isa 1:27; Isa 2:1-4.
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 Analysis and Annotations
Analysis and Annotations
The reader will find that every chapter has been analyzed as to its contents. We have not made copious annotations, because the three lectures on the book of Isaiah as found at the close of the analysis cover the contents of this book in such a manner that detailed annotations for a study of the book can be omitted. We suggest that all who desire to study this great prophecy in a closer way read carefully the introduction, and after that the three lectures on “The Scope of Isaiah,” “The Messianic Predictions” and “Future Glories and Blessings.” These lectures should be carefully studied and every passage should be looked up. After this has been done, take up the book section by section and follow the analysis we give and consult the lectures whenever needed.
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I. THE EARLIER PROPHECIES (1-35)
1. Prophecies under the Reign of Uzziah, Jotham, and Ahaz (1-12)
CHAPTER 1
Jehovah’s Case Against Judah and the Promise Of Restoration
1. The title of the book and contents (Isa 1:1) 2. The moral and religious decline of the nations (Isa 1:2-15) 3. Jehovah’s exhortation and appeal (Isa 1:16-20) 4. The result of obstinate refusal (Isa 1:21-24) 5. The promise of restoration (Isa 1:25-31)The promised restoration of Jerusalem is still future. The “afterward” when the earthly Jerusalem is to be called “The City of Righteousness” refers to the second coming of Christ. Compare with Jer 33:14-26.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 10, 16, 21 The Address
The Address
v. 1. The vision of Isaiah ("The Lord will save"), the son of Amos, which he saw, by special enlightenment and inspiration of the Lord, concerning Judah, the southern kingdom, and Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, the site of the Temple, and therefore the center of theocratic worship, in the days of Uzziah, also known as Azariah, 2Ki 14:21, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
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v. 2. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, the witnesses who were present at the giving of the Law, Deu 4:36, were to hear the complaint of the Lord, as He entered into judgment with His people after seven centuries, Cf Deu 32:1; for the Lord hath spoken, the very words of Jehovah, the self-existing and unchangeable God, being quoted here, I have nourished, brought to maturity, to adult age, and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me, for so Israel, the first-born son of God, Exo 4:22, had rewarded the blessings received at the hand of God during these many years since the deliverance out of the serfdom of Egypt. Rebellion against God, apostasy from God: that is the chief characteristic in the history of Israel since the days of Solomon.
v. 3. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib, the very unthinking brutes acquiring a certain attachment for their master, so that they will not voluntarily leave him; but Israel doth not know, does not realize, My people doth not consider, does not meditate and reflect upon it, continues in deliberate ignorance of its Lord and Provider.
v. 4. Ah! sinful nation, going its way of willful error, a people laden with iniquity, with guilt and corruption of right, burdened with transgressions, a seed of evil-doers, a brood of such as prefer wickedness to the holiness required of them, children that are corrupters, themselves subject to spiritual decay and infecting others with their corruption; they have forsaken the Lord, they are guilty of apostasy in heart and mind, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they have gotten into the habit of blaspheming and mocking or rejecting with scorn, Him who is spotlessly pure and who chose these people to be a holy nation unto Himself; they are gone away backward, following their own corrupt ways, especially in sins of idolatry. Such is the sevenfold woe of the Lord, which may rightly be applied wherever apostasy is found in His Church, also in our days.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24 The vision of Isaiah ... that he saw
The vision of Isaiah ... that he saw
"This is the vision of Isaiah ... that Yahweh showed him" or "This is what God showed Isaiah"
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Amoz
Amoz was the father of Isaiah. (See: How to Translate Names)
Judah and Jerusalem
"Judah" refers to the southern kingdom of Israel. "Jerusalem" was its most important city. The names of the places represent the people who live in them. AT: "those living in Judah and Jerusalem" or "the people of Judah and Jerusalem" (See: Metonymy)
in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah
This is an idiom and refers to the time when each king reigned. They reigned one after the other, not all at the same time. AT: "when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah were kings of Judah" (See: Idiom)
translationWords
vision
Isaiah
Judah
Jerusalem
Uzziah
Jotham
Ahaz
Hezekiah
king
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24 1:1 These are the visions (literally The vision): This…
1:1 These are the visions (literally The vision): This term introduces the book as a unified whole, covering Isaiah’s prophecies over a period of some fifty-five years (about 740–685 BC). • Isaiah son of Amoz: Beyond this, nothing is known of Isaiah’s family background. • Jerusalem, the capital city of Judah, was the center of Isaiah’s ministry. However, some of his prophecies also relate to the northern kingdom, Israel (referred to as Samaria and Ephraim, 9:8-21; 28:1-13), which fell in 722 BC (see 2 Kgs 17).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.