Isaiah 1:10

The verse is two matching lines. “Hear the word of the LORD” is answered by “give ear unto the law of our God”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with attention, and hearing God in Scripture carries the sense of obeying him. To give ear, ʼâzan, is to listen closely. The word, dâbâr, means a word or speech, and it can also mean a matter or a thing. The law, tôwrâh, is God’s instruction, the teaching and commands of the covenant he made through Moses. What follows is God’s own message, and their trouble came from failing to hear it in this full sense.

The command to hear also leaves a door open. A people told to listen can still listen, and the call to wash and learn to do good comes a few verses later (Isaiah 1:16–17).

“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD.” The question begins with mâh, “what?”, and it expects no answer. It declares the sacrifices pointless as they were being offered. The speaker is the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant God of Israel. The multitude, rôb, is their great number and abundance, and zebach, from a root meaning to slaughter, is a sacrifice of a slaughtered animal. The word often names the peace offerings, part of which the worshippers ate, while the burnt offering, ʻôlâh, was burned whole on the altar.

The list of animals shows what Judah was spending. The rams, ʼayil, and the fed beasts, mᵉrîyʼ, were well-fed and valuable, and the fat, cheleb, was the part of the offering kept for the LORD alone. The blood, dâm, stood at the centre of atonement, purification and the making of covenant, as the sign of life. The bullocks, par, the lambs, kebes, and the he goats, ʻattûwd, full-grown male goats, are the very animals the law of Moses prescribed for offerings, and Leviticus 1 sets out the burnt offering of a male without blemish. God turns away from the sacrifices he himself commanded, and that is the strongest way he could show that the trouble lay with the people offering them.

“I am full” translates sâbaʻ, to be filled or satisfied. The same verb is used of someone “full of days”, who has lived to a great age. Here God has had his fill, and the rest of the passage shows it is the fullness of weariness. “I delight not” uses châphêts, to like, to be pleased with, to desire. God takes no pleasure in these offerings, because the people bringing them were unrepentant and unjust.

Verse 12 moves from the altar to the people’s feet. “When ye come to appear before me” refers to the times when the people presented themselves at the temple, above all at the feasts when pilgrims came up to Jerusalem, a custom spoken of as seeing the face of God. “Who hath required this at your hand” uses bâqash, to seek, to ask for, to require. God had commanded worship and sacrifice, so his question is about this particular kind of coming, which was empty of sincerity and justice. “At your hand” lays it at their door, as their own doing.

“To tread my courts” joins râmaç, which can mean simply to walk and often means to trample, with châtsêr, an enclosed yard, here the courts of the temple where the people gathered for worship, sacrifices and festivals. They stood close to God’s presence while their hearts and lives were far from him, so their feet in his courts were only trampling his holy ground.

“Bring no more vain oblations” tells them to stop. The verb bôwʼ means to go or come, here to bring offerings in, and yâçaph, to add or do again, gives the sense “no more”. The offerings are “vain”, shâvᵉʼ, a word for emptiness, worthlessness and falsehood. They were a show of devotion from hearts far from God, which made them false as well as empty.

Incense, qᵉṭôreth, is the fragrant smoke that went up in worship, often a picture of prayer rising to God. He calls it an abomination, tôwʻêbah, something detestable and utterly wrong, a word also used of idols and usually kept for idolatry, sexual sin and practices against God’s holy character. Using it of incense is meant to shock, and the offence lay in the spiritual state of those who offered it.

Then come the holy days, each of them commanded in the law. The new moons, chôdesh, were monthly feasts at the start of each lunar month, with special sacrifices and trumpets. The sabbaths, shabbâth, were the weekly day of rest and worship. In “the calling of assemblies” the verb qârâʼ, to call, goes with miqrâʼ, a sacred gathering called together for worship, such as the great yearly feasts. “I cannot away with” is old English for “I cannot endure”. The Hebrew verb behind it, yâkôl, means to be able, so God is saying he is unable to bear them.

The verse ends, “it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.” The word ʼâven means wickedness or trouble, and ʻătsârâh is a sacred assembly. Iniquity and the solemn meeting stand side by side, holy gatherings carried on by people who went on doing wrong, and that mixture is exactly what God refuses.

Verse 14 names the feasts again as “your new moons and your appointed feasts”. The appointed feasts, môwʻêd, are the great yearly festivals such as Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, which brought pilgrims to Jerusalem to remember God’s saving acts. The word “your” matters. God gave these days, and by the way they kept them the people had made them their own.

“My soul hateth” uses nephesh, God’s very self, and sânêʼ, to hate, a strong and personal aversion. The feasts are a “trouble”, ṭôrach, a burden or heavy weight, and he is “weary to bear them”, with lâʼâh, to tire or to be disgusted, and nâsâʼ, to carry a load. These are God’s words in human terms. The LORD who made all things speaks of carrying his people’s hollow worship like a heavy load, and that shows how personally their insincerity grieved him. Feasts meant for joy and fellowship with him had become something he could hardly bear, because he cares how his people come to him.

God hated the way Judah kept them. The law, with its sacrifices and feasts, came from God himself as the way for his people to draw near to him, remember his faithfulness and find atonement. What he hated was hypocrisy, worship brought by hands “full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15) from hearts that were far from him. Acceptable worship comes from a repentant heart and goes with a life of obedience, justice and mercy.

Scripture says this again and again. Samuel told Saul that “to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22). God says through Hosea, “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). David knew that the sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit and a contrite heart (Psalm 51:16–17). Through Jeremiah God told the people that obedience was what he had asked of them (Jeremiah 7:21–23). Amos and Micah, prophets of Isaiah’s own time, carried the same message (Amos 5, Micah 6). Through Amos God says that he hates and despises their feasts and wants judgment to run down as waters, and Micah asks what the LORD wants from his worshippers and answers, “what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:6–8).

It names the guilt of violence and injustice that filled Judah’s life. The word dâm is blood shed in death, and in the plural it means bloodshed. It is the same word as “the blood of bullocks” in verse 11, so the people brought the blood of animals in hands already stained with blood. The phrase can include literal killing, and its main sense in this chapter is the guilt of oppression: the poor exploited, widows and orphans wronged, courts bent by bribes, and the weak harmed by those with power. The hands lifted in prayer were the hands that did these things, so the hands had to be washed first. The very next words tell them how (Isaiah 1:16–17).

The phrase shows that their deeds were done in God’s sight and offended him there. God sees everything, for “the eyes of the LORD are in every place” (Proverbs 15:3). In verse 15 he hid his eyes from their prayers, and here he tells them to remove what offends those eyes. He asks for a change of conduct that can be seen.

The washing God commands leads straight into his offer: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). That promise of cleansing comes with the call to obey (Isaiah 1:18–20).

In Israel the fatherless and the widow had no husband or father to protect them, little standing in court and little means of living, so they were the easiest to exploit. The law named them again and again, often together with the stranger. It commanded justice for the stranger, the fatherless and the widow (Deuteronomy 24:17), forbade afflicting any widow or fatherless child and warned that God would hear their cry (Exodus 22:22–24), and describes God himself as the one who does justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:18). By naming these two, God speaks for everyone who is weak and overlooked, and he expects his people to defend them as he does.

Amos puts the same call in one line, “let judgment run down as waters” (Amos 5:24), and James says that pure religion before God includes visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction (James 1:27).

Justice belongs to true worship as the way love for God shows itself in love for our neighbour. God rejected Judah’s sacrifices and feasts because the hands that brought them were full of blood, so in these verses worship and conduct stand or fall together. Jesus teaches the same in the account of the sheep and the goats, where what was done for the least of his brethren was done for him (Matthew 25:31–46).