Isaiah 28:12

Chapter 28 opens with a woe on “the crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim” (Isaiah 28:1), the northern kingdom, which fell to Assyria in 722 BC. Verse 7 begins “But they also”, and turns to leaders who share Ephraim’s sin, the priests and prophets of Judah in Jerusalem. Isaiah prophesied in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah (about 740–687 BC), when Judah lived under the same Assyrian threat and was tempted to look for safety in alliances with foreign powers.

The priest, kôhên, stood between God and the people, offering sacrifices and teaching the law. The prophet, nâbîyʼ, received visions and spoke God’s word. Both offices called for clear minds and clean lives, and these are the very men who are drunk. The LORD had told the priests to drink no wine or strong drink when they went into the tabernacle, so that they could put a difference between holy and common and between unclean and clean (Leviticus 10:9–10). Proverbs warns kings that strong drink will make them forget the law and pervert the rights of the afflicted (Proverbs 31:4–5), and Paul requires that an overseer in the church be blameless as the steward of God and “not given to wine” (Titus 1:7). Isaiah had already charged Jerusalem’s rulers with rebellion and with loving bribes (Isaiah 1:23).

The verse piles up its phrases. They “have erred through wine”, they “are out of the way” through strong drink, they “are swallowed up of wine”. The verb for “erred”, shâgâh, means to stray or to make a mistake, and so to transgress, and from the idea of drunkenness it also means to reel. Both senses are at work here, because these men stagger on their feet and have wandered off God’s path. Strong drink, shêkâr, is the word for an intoxicant, named beside wine and probably made from grain or dates. In “swallowed up of wine” the drinkers are themselves consumed by what they drink, and the wine has the mastery of them.

Verse 8 gives the scene at its ugliest: “For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean.” The table, shulchân, is literally something spread out, a flat surface on which food is laid, and these are the tables of the drinkers’ feasts. Vomit, qêʼ, is the plain word for what a drunk man brings up. Filthiness, tsôwʼâh, means excrement or filth, and by extension pollution. Put together, the two words are as revolting as Isaiah can make them. “All tables” and “no place clean” make the filth total, an overstatement for force whose point is that the corruption has reached everywhere.

Israel lived under laws of clean and unclean, and its shared meals often carried covenant meaning, so a feast fouled in this way would have shocked the first hearers deeply. Many take the tables to stand also for the places where these men taught, judged and offered sacrifice, since the drunkards are priests and prophets. Either way, the uncleanness of the leaders has spread through every part of the life they were supposed to keep holy.

Isaiah had already pronounced woe on those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20), and the law spoke of a land so defiled that it vomited out its inhabitants (Leviticus 18:25). Jeremiah later says of his own day that both prophet and priest are profane (Jeremiah 23:11), and Malachi rebukes priests who had corrupted the covenant and caused many to stumble at the law (Malachi 2:8–9).

Verse 9 asks, “Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts.” The verb to teach, yârâh, has a range that runs from throwing and shooting to watering with rain, and it comes to mean pointing something out, and so teaching. Knowledge, dêʻâh, is simply knowledge, and “doctrine” is the message the teacher wants understood. To wean, gâmal, comes from a root meaning to deal with someone, well or ill, and to ripen, and so to wean a child. A child newly weaned has just moved from its mother’s milk to solid food, and that is the age the verse has in mind, small children at the very start of their learning.

Believers differ on who is speaking in verse 9.

• The scoffers speak. On this reading verses 9 and 10 are the drunken leaders talking about Isaiah. Whom does he think he is teaching, they ask, babies just off the breast? Verse 10 then mimics the way he talks to them, like a nursery lesson. This fits the way verse 11 takes up their words and turns them back on them.
• The prophet speaks. On this reading verse 9 is Isaiah’s own question, with God as the teacher. Who among this people is fit to be taught? Only those who have grown past milk, and these proud leaders, for all their age and office, are still infants in the things of God.

On either reading the leaders are shown to be unteachable. The picture of milk and weaning carries on into the New Testament. Paul could feed the Corinthians only with milk because they were still carnal (1 Corinthians 3:1–3), and Hebrews rebukes believers who need milk when by this time they ought to be teachers (Hebrews 5:12–14). The Psalms say plainly whom God does teach: “The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way” (Psalm 25:9).

Verse 11 gives God’s answer: “For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people.” Because they called his plain word baby talk, he will speak to them in a speech they cannot follow, the language of the Assyrian army. The word for stammering, lâʻêg, belongs to a root meaning to mock or to stammer, and it describes speech that is unclear or foreign, with a note of ridicule in it. “Another”, ʼachêr, means other, different or strange, so “another tongue” is a foreign language. The verb “speak”, dâbar, is the ordinary word for speaking, and the speaker is still God.

The mockers had imitated the prophet as a babbler, and now they will hear real babbling from foreign soldiers, and it will be God’s word to them. Moses had warned that if Israel broke the covenant, the LORD would bring against them a nation from far off, “a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand” (Deuteronomy 28:49), and Jeremiah gave Judah the same warning in his day (Jeremiah 5:15). Isaiah calls Assyria the rod of God’s anger, sent against a hypocritical nation (Isaiah 10:5–6), so the invasion was in God’s hands from first to last, and he used a pagan empire to carry out his judgment. For a people who had always heard the prophets in their own language, Assyrian voices in their streets would mean the loss of their land, their rule and God’s protection.

Between the threat and its fulfilment, verse 12 recalls what God had offered: “This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.” Rest, mᵉnûwchâh, means repose, a settled and quiet resting place. The weary, ʻâyêph, are the faint, the worn out and the thirsty. Refreshing, margêʻâh, is relief, the renewal of strength. God’s rest was for the leaders themselves and also something they could pass on, so that the weary of the land would be refreshed through them.

That rest lay in trusting the LORD and walking in his ways. Judah’s leaders looked for their security in politics and foreign alliances, and a few verses later they boast of having made a covenant with death (Isaiah 28:15). Directly after that boast, God promises a tried stone laid in Zion, a sure foundation (Isaiah 28:16).

“Yet they would not hear” names their failure. To hear, shâmaʻ, is to hear with attention, and often to obey. “Would” stands for ʼâbâh, to be willing, so the Hebrew says they were unwilling to hear. This was a refusal, made with open ears. Jeremiah says the same of his generation, who hearkened not but walked in the imagination of their evil heart (Jeremiah 7:24). He records God’s offer of rest for their souls if they would walk in the old paths, and their answer, “We will not walk therein” (Jeremiah 6:16). Psalm 95 recalls the generation in the wilderness who hardened their hearts and so never entered God’s rest (Psalm 95:7–11).

Rest is one of God’s great gifts all through Scripture. He rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2–3), and he promised Israel rest in the land (Deuteronomy 12:9–10). Hebrews takes up Psalm 95 and urges believers to labour to enter the rest that remains for God’s people, lest any fall after the same example of unbelief (Hebrews 4:1–11).

Verse 13 brings the scoffers’ own words back: “But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.” The noun “word”, dâbâr, means a word or speech, and in a separate sense a matter or thing. Here it is “the word of the LORD”, which settles what the lessons mocked in verse 10 really were. The repeated tsav and qav return, now spoken by God of his own word. It had come to them patiently, line upon line, and since they would hear it only as babble, babble is what it will become, in the mouths of the invaders of verse 11.

The end of the verse is a run of five verbs: go, fall backward, be broken, be snared, be taken. The verb behind “fall”, kâshal, means to totter, waver, stumble or fall, the picture of a man losing his footing. The drunkards of verse 7 reeled at their tables, and now the people they led will stumble on the road. They fall backward, the opposite of going forward. They are broken as a man who falls hard, snared as a bird in a trap, and taken as captives. The pictures move from losing their footing to defeat, entrapment and exile.

Where Jerusalem’s prophets erred in vision, Jesus is the Prophet who has seen the Father and made him known: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). He told Philip, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). Where the priests stumbled in judgment, the Father has given the Son authority to execute judgment (John 5:27). He is our great high priest, tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:14–15), who offered himself without spot to God (Hebrews 9:11–14). Paul sets the believer’s life against the drunkenness of this passage: “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).

For a people whose tables left “no place clean”, Christ is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). God made him to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). He cleanses his church to present it holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:27), under the new covenant God remembers his people’s sins no more (Hebrews 8:12), and at the end he makes all things new (Revelation 21:5).

The God who spoke patiently by his prophets has in these last days spoken by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1) and who was made flesh (John 1:14). Yet “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Jesus thanked his Father for hiding these things “from the wise and prudent” and revealing them “unto babes” (Matthew 11:25), so the little ones the scoffers of verse 9 despised are the very ones God teaches. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would teach his disciples all things (John 14:26), and in the new covenant God writes his law on his people’s hearts (Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10). He is the bread of life (John 6:35), he is made unto us wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30), and those who continue in his word know the truth that makes them free (John 8:31–32).

The tried stone of verse 16 is Christ. Peter applies it to him as precious to those who believe and, to the disobedient, “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence” (1 Peter 2:6–8), the same fate of stumbling that verse 13 describes. He is the chief corner stone of God’s household (Ephesians 2:20). And the rest Jerusalem refused, he offers again in his own voice: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

This passage shows that God holds those who lead his people to account. The priest’s sober mind and the prophet’s clear sight matter to him, because the people depend on them. It shows a God who speaks plainly and patiently, a little at a time, long before he judges, and who still says “This is the rest” between the mockery and the judgment. The word the scoffers tripped over is the same word that gives rest to those who hear it. The leaders of Jerusalem were too proud to be taught like children, and Jesus thanks his Father for revealing his truth to babes. The rest they refused is offered in Christ to the weary who come to him.