Isaiah 26:20

“Ye that dwell in dust” is a gentle way of speaking of the dead who lie buried in the grave. God speaks straight to them with a command, “Awake and sing”, as though they could already hear him. The grave becomes a place of waking and praise, and the first thing the risen do is sing. Worship is the right answer to God’s great acts of rescue, and the song of chapter 26 ends with the dead joining it.

The middle line, “together with my dead body shall they arise”, is the hardest in the verse. The words “together with” are printed in italics in the KJV because the translators supplied them to make the sense clear, and they make the line speak of many rising together. The Hebrew word for “dead body” is nᵉbêlâh, here in the form nivlati, “my dead body”. It comes from the root nâbêl and means a carcase, the body of a person or an animal after death, and it is often used of many bodies together. Elsewhere it can also stand for an idol. It is a stark word for a lifeless, decaying body, and setting it beside the promise of rising shows how complete God’s power is: he gives life to what has none left.

Believers differ on what the phrase points to. On one reading, the dead body is the nation of Israel, lying as if dead in exile and affliction, and God promises to raise his people as a whole, as he does in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). On the other reading, the phrase speaks of the bodies of the faithful themselves, raised alongside one another, and the word gathers them as one. On either reading, the line promises that God’s people will rise in the body and rise together.

“For thy dew is as the dew of herbs” gives the reason the dead will rise. The word is ṭal, dew, the moisture that settles on plants. In Israel, where the dry season is long, dew kept plants alive when rain was scarce, and so it became a picture of life, refreshing and God’s provision. God’s dew is like the dew that falls on the herbs and makes them spring up out of dry ground. In the same way his life-giving power falls on the dust where his people lie, and the earth brings them out. The picture also shows how surely and how easily he will do it, as surely as green shoots come up after the dew.

This promise comes to its fullness in Jesus Christ, who rose bodily from the dead. Paul calls him “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20), and his rising is the pledge that all who belong to him will rise. Paul also says that he who raised up Christ from the dead “shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you” (Romans 8:11). Jesus says of himself, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25), which takes up Isaiah’s “Thy dead men shall live” with his own authority. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and by his death and rising he opened the way to eternal life for everyone who believes.

The word means a real room, and the picture is of people sheltering indoors. In this prophecy of the last things it also stands for the refuge God himself gives his people in the time of his judgment. Scripture speaks of that refuge often. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1), and “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust” (Psalm 91:4). Zephaniah calls the meek to seek the LORD, for “it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the LORD’s anger” (Zephaniah 2:3), and Christ promises his faithful church, “I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world” (Revelation 3:10).

“Indignation” translates zaʻam, a word for fury whose root pictures foaming at the mouth. It is God’s strong anger against sin, and here it means a time when he judges the earth for its wickedness, as Isaiah 24 describes. His people hide “as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.” The anger is fierce, and it has an end that God has set. For his people it is short, and when it is over they will come out into peace. A psalm says the same: “For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). God’s wrath is always just and always has a purpose, and for his covenant people it ends in their restoring.

Christ is the refuge this verse looks toward. The full weight of God’s indignation against sin fell on him at the cross: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). So those who trust him are kept safe from the wrath to come. “Your life is hid with Christ in God,” Paul writes (Colossians 3:3), and “being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9). The God who says “Come, my people” here gives rest and safety to all who come to Jesus: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

It is a way of speaking about God in human terms. A man leaves his house to go and do something, and the LORD is pictured leaving his dwelling to act in judgment. God is present everywhere, so the words describe a change in what he does: after long patience he steps openly into human affairs to judge. His coming is personal, direct and certain.

“To punish” is pâqad, a verb that means to attend to, visit, inspect, muster or appoint, and also to punish. God can visit people in kindness, and here he visits the inhabitants of the earth to call them to account. The KJV often renders this verb “visit”, and the reason for this visit is “their iniquity”, ʻâvôn, a word for wrongdoing and the guilt it brings. The judgment reaches all “the inhabitants of the earth”, every nation, because God holds all people accountable for their sin.

The earth is pictured as a witness that has kept quiet about what was done on it. “Her blood” is the blood shed on the ground by murder, violence and oppression, which has soaked into the soil. Now “the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.” The verb gâlâh means to uncover, lay bare or reveal. The ground will give up what it has hidden, and those who were killed will be seen. In verse 19 the earth gives up the LORD’s dead to life, and here it gives up the slain as witnesses against those who killed them.

The picture rests on what Scripture says about blood and the land. After Cain killed his brother, the LORD said, “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). The law taught that “blood it defileth the land” (Numbers 35:33). In heaven the souls of those slain for the word of God cry, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:9–10). Jesus said, “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2). Crimes that human courts left unpunished, and victims whose cries went unheard, will all come before God.

The New Testament shows who comes to judge. The Father “hath committed all judgment unto the Son” (John 5:22), and Paul speaks of “the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:1). When he comes he “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness” (1 Corinthians 4:5), just as the earth here gives up its secrets. The iniquity for which the earth is punished is the sin Christ bore on the cross, when God “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Beside the blood the earth discloses stands the blood of Jesus, “the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24). Abel’s blood cried out for justice, and Christ’s blood speaks forgiveness, mercy and peace with God, so that those who trust him escape the judgment of this verse. The judgment itself clears the way for his reign. There God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (Revelation 21:4), and, as Isaiah promised, the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4) and “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:9).