Isaiah 1:3

The first verse is the heading of the whole book, as Jeremiah 1:1, Hosea 1:1 and Amos 1:1 head theirs. In one sentence it tells us who received the message, what kind of message it is, whom it concerns and when it came.

The word for vision, châzôwn, most often means a revelation from God, and that is its meaning here. The same word can be used of a false vision, as when Jeremiah warns of prophets who “speak a vision of their own heart” (Jeremiah 23:16), so what makes Isaiah’s vision true is the God who gave it. The verb in “which he saw” is châzâh, to gaze at, to perceive, and especially to have a vision. Isaiah perceived what God showed him, and everything that follows carries God’s authority. The LORD had said that he would make himself known to a prophet “in a vision” (Numbers 12:6), and Hebrews opens by recalling that God “spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1).

Isaiah is called “the son of Amoz”, using bên, the ordinary word for a son. Scripture tells us nothing else about Amoz, but the name marks Isaiah as a real man from a real family. Isaiah’s own name means “the LORD is salvation”, which is the message of the book that bears it.

The vision concerns “Judah and Jerusalem”, the southern kingdom and its capital, where the temple stood and David’s sons reigned. These were God’s covenant people, and the book speaks to their sins, their politics and their future.

“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth” is a summons to witnesses. Under the law of Moses, witnesses were called to confirm a covenant or a legal dispute, and Moses had begun his song the same way: “Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth” (Deuteronomy 32:1). The heavens and earth that witnessed the covenant are now called to hear how it has been broken. God brings his people to court as both the one wronged and the Judge. Micah opens the LORD’s controversy with Israel in the same way, telling the mountains and hills to hear (Micah 6:1–8), and later in Isaiah the LORD stands up to plead and to judge the elders and princes of his people (Isaiah 3:13–15). Jeremiah, too, calls on the heavens: “Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this”, and then names the two evils, that Israel forsook the fountain of living waters and dug broken cisterns (Jeremiah 2:12–13).

“For the LORD hath spoken” puts the whole case on God’s authority. The name is Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of Israel’s God, so the charge comes from the very One with whom they made their covenant. Calling all creation to listen tells us that this is public and true, and that God rules the whole world as well as his people.

In a farming country everyone knew the ox and the ass. These animals depended on their owners for food and shelter, and they knew it. The ox knows who it belongs to, and the donkey knows its “master’s crib”, the trough where it is fed. The word for master, baʻal, means master, owner or husband, the one to whom belonging and service are owed.

“But Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.” To know, yâdaʻ, means here to recognize someone and live in a relationship with him, as the animal knows the hand that feeds it. In the covenant, knowing God means acknowledging him as Lord, listening to him and living faithfully with him. To consider, bîyn, is to understand or discern. Israel did not stop to think about who God is, what he had done for them, or where their rebellion was taking them.

The comparison argues from the lesser to the greater. If even an ox and a donkey know where their food comes from, how much more should a people who had seen God’s deliverance from Egypt (Exodus 12) and heard his voice at Sinai (Exodus 19)? Their failure was culpable heedlessness, because they had been given so much. Jeremiah makes the same comparison with birds: “Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the LORD” (Jeremiah 8:7). Hosea gives the result: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6).

And still God says “my people”. He has not disowned them, and that makes their forgetting all the more grievous.

Verse 4 begins with hôwy, “Ah”, an interjection that can mean ah, alas or woe and that here voices grief. Then come four names for the nation, each heavier than the last. They are a “sinful nation”, using gôwy, a word most often used of the other nations, so that Judah is described as living like the peoples around it. They are “a people laden with iniquity”. “Laden” is kâbêd, heavy, and “iniquity” is ʻâvôn, from ʻâvâh, to bend or twist, so it means perversity and the guilt it brings. Their sin has piled up into a load that weighs on the whole people. They are “a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters”, which shows the wickedness passed down the generations and spread by those who practice it.

Then come three charges. “They have forsaken the LORD” is deliberate abandonment of the God of the covenant, the same charge Jeremiah would make about forsaking the fountain of living waters. “They have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger” means that they treated him with contempt. “They are gone away backward” pictures a people who have turned their backs on God and are walking further from him with every step.

“Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more.” The verb for stricken is nâkâh, to strike or smite. Judah had already been struck by God’s discipline, and the verse does not name the blows, which may have included defeats in war, hard times, famine or disease. Each one was meant to turn them back. The question is full of sorrow and exasperation, because every blow only led to more rebellion. “Revolt” is çârâh, turning away from rightful authority, and the verb behind “more and more” is yâçaph, to add. They kept adding revolt to revolt.

Then the nation is pictured as one sick body. “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.” The head, rôʼsh, is often taken to stand for the nation’s leaders and its power to think and judge, so the sickness, chŏlîy, has reached rulers, judges and priests. The heart, lêbâb, is the core of a person, the will, the conscience and the affections, and it is “faint”, davvây, sick and weak. The word “whole” comes twice. From top to center, the nation is ill. Jeremiah says the same of every human heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9).

God’s question shows what he wants. He takes no pleasure in striking his people, and he longs for them to turn. A few verses later he says, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:16–20).

Verse 6 carries the picture to the whole body. “From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it.” Soundness, mᵉthôm, means wholeness or health, and its absence reaches every member of the nation, from the lowliest to the highest. David uses the same picture of his own sin: “There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger,” and “My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness” (Psalm 38:3–5).

Three kinds of injury cover the body. “Wounds” are petsaʻ, cuts or gashes. “Bruises” are chabbûwrâh, weals or black-and-blue marks left by blows, which fit the striking of the verse before. “Putrifying sores” translates makkâh ṭârîy, open, raw wounds that have not healed.

Then come three kinds of care, all missing. People in Isaiah’s day treated a wound by pressing it, binding it and softening it with oil. These wounds “have not been closed”, from zûwr, to press, and are not “bound up”, châbash, wrapped with a bandage, or “mollified with ointment”, râkak (to soften) with shemen (oil). The nation has been left to fester. Judah would not admit how sick it was or go to the One who could heal it. Jeremiah asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:22). Hosea says that when Judah saw his wound, he and Ephraim went to Assyria for help, and the king “could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound” (Hosea 5:13).

All the while the sacrifices and feasts went on, and God’s rebuke of that empty worship follows in Isaiah 1:10–17. The wounds were left open under a covering of religion.

Verse 7 turns from the picture of a body to the land itself. “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire.” Desolate is shᵉmâmâh, devastation or desolation, and the word can also carry horror, the shock of seeing such ruin. It comes twice in the verse, at its start and its end. The cities, where the people’s strength and life were gathered, have gone up in flames.

“Your land, strangers devour it in your presence.” Strangers, zûwr, are foreigners, people from outside Israel and its covenant. They eat up the harvests and plunder the land while its owners stand by and watch, unable to stop them. This is the humiliation the covenant had warned of, when the LORD would bring “a nation against thee from far” to eat the fruit of the land and besiege its cities (Deuteronomy 28:49–52).

“As overthrown by strangers” uses mahpêkâh, an overthrow or overturning. It is the language Scripture uses for the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:25), and it prepares for the mention of those cities two verses later. Judah’s ruin is the judgment of God carried out through foreign hands. Jeremiah describes the destroyer of the nations coming out “to make thy land desolate” (Jeremiah 4:7), and Lamentations mourns that “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned” and is despised by all who honored her (Lamentations 1:8).

“And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.” The daughter of Zion is Jerusalem and its people, pictured as a young woman. “Daughter” is bath, the feminine of bên, and the phrase speaks of a city dear to God, now standing exposed.

“Left” is yâthar, to remain or be left over, and the same word comes again in verse 9 when the LORD “had left” a remnant. Jerusalem is what remains after the land around it has been stripped.

The cottage and the lodge were the shelters watchmen put up in the fields at harvest time. Çukkâh is a booth or hut, and mᵉlûwnâh a hut or lodge. A watchman sat in one to guard the ripening grapes or cucumbers from thieves and animals, and when the short harvest was over the hut was left to fall apart. Jerusalem, once so proud, now stands like one of those flimsy shelters alone in a ravaged field. The third picture leaves the farm for war: “as a besieged city”, surrounded and cut off from help, as Jerusalem was in the days of the Assyrian threat. Isaiah returns to the picture of a vineyard in his song of the vineyard (Isaiah 5), and Lamentations would later mourn, “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1).

“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.” After all the ruin of the verses before, this verse explains why Judah still exists. The survival belongs to God alone.

The title “LORD of hosts” joins Yᵉhôvâh to tsâbâʼ, a word that means an army or host, war, service, and the host of heaven. The God who commands all the armies of heaven and earth decides who is struck and who is spared. He is the one who “left”, yâthar, which in this form means to cause to remain or to leave over. What he left is a “remnant”, sârîyd, a survivor, one who is left after defeat or danger. It is “very small”, a few survivors from a whole nation, and Isaiah says “us”, counting himself among them.

Isaiah’s name, “the LORD is salvation”, fits the One who was named because “he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Where Israel was a rebellious son, Jesus is the obedient Son. The Father said of him, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), and Jesus said, “I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29). He “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). Judah’s rebellion is ours too, for “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Paul says we were “dead in trespasses and sins” and “by nature the children of wrath” until God made us alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:1–5), and to all who receive Christ he gives power “to become the sons of God” (John 1:12).

The grief of verse 3 is heard again in John: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Yet the knowledge Israel lacked is given in Christ. He says, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” (John 10:14–15), and he tells his disciples that to know him is to know the Father (John 14:7). The Spirit gives the understanding that “the natural man” cannot receive (1 Corinthians 2:14).

The sick and wounded body of verses 5 and 6 points to the Physician. Jesus said, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick” (Matthew 9:12, Mark 2:17). Isaiah himself would later write of the Servant who “was wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities”, “and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5–6). Peter applies those words to Christ, “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). He is the balm Jeremiah asked for, and God promises a new heart and a new spirit to replace the sick and faint one (Ezekiel 36:26).

The judgment that fell on Judah fell finally on Christ. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), and “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). God showed his love in this, that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). People who had gone away backward now “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4), and “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Anyone in Christ “is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17), under the better covenant that God promised (Hebrews 8:6–13). Some believers also see in Christ the true remnant of Israel, the one faithful Israelite in whom God’s promises are kept, and in whom a remnant from every nation is gathered.

The lonely city of verse 8 has its answer too. Jesus spoke of his own body as the temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). God promised to raise up David’s fallen tabernacle and build again its ruins, and James quotes that promise at the council in Jerusalem (Amos 9:11, Acts 15:16). Abraham looked for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10), and John saw the new Jerusalem come down from heaven, where God dwells with his people and wipes away every tear (Revelation 21:2–4). That city will never be a hut in a field or a city under siege.

These verses were spoken first to Judah, and through them God speaks to us. The God who nourished and brought up Israel has fed and kept every one of us, and the ox at its master’s crib asks whether we know our Owner as well as it knows its own. It is possible to keep up the forms of worship while the heart has gone away backward, and the remedy is to stop and consider who God is and what he has done.

Wounds that are covered up and left untreated only get worse. God names Judah’s sickness so plainly because he means to heal it, and his invitation follows straight on: “Come now, and let us reason together.” The right response to the hard things God says about our sin is to bring the wounds to him.

And the last verse is a cause for thanks. Whatever we have of life and faith, we have because the LORD of hosts chose to leave a remnant and to save. If you belong to Christ, you are among those he has kept, by grace alone, and the God who spared Judah from Sodom’s end is the God who holds you now.