Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Isaiah · About this commentary
In That Day Man Will Look to His Maker
Isaiah 17:1-14
1 The burden of Damascus. “Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap. · WEB
Damascus and Samaria fall together, and what is left is compared to the olives too high to reach.
The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap Isaiah 17:1.
The oracle is addressed to Syria, whose capital was Damascus and immediately includes Israel, because the two were allied — the coalition that had frightened Ahaz in chapter seven. They are judged together: the fortress shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus Isaiah 17:3. A nation that chooses its company is given its company's outcome.
The glory of Jacob will be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh will become lean Isaiah 17:4.
It will be like when the harvester gathers the wheat, and his arm reaps the grain Isaiah 17:5.
The image is of a field being cleared completely. And then the exception.
Yet gleanings will be left there, like the shaking of an olive tree, two or three olives in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outermost branches Isaiah 17:6.
The remnant described with a farmer's precision. Olives are harvested by beating the branches, and what survives is what nobody could reach — a few fruit at the very top and on the thin outer branches that will not take a ladder. The survivors are not the strong; they are the ones the process happened to miss.
In that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will have respect for the Holy One of Israel Isaiah 17:7.
The verb is the ordinary one for turning the head. What produces it is the stripping of everything else.
They will not look to the altars, the work of their hands; neither shall they respect that which their fingers have made Isaiah 17:8.
The same phrasing as Isaiah 2:8, and the same argument: what a man made cannot be what a man looks to.
For you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the rock of your strength. Therefore you plant pleasant plants, and set out foreign seedlings Isaiah 17:10.
The diagnosis, and the symptom named is imported religion — foreign cuttings planted with care. In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away Isaiah 17:11. It grows fast, which is the trouble with it, and it produces nothing on the day it is needed.
Ah, the uproar of many peoples who roar like the roaring of the seas Isaiah 17:12.
The closing image, and it is the psalms' picture of the nations as surf. He will rebuke them, and they will flee far off, and will be chased like the chaff of the mountains before the wind Isaiah 17:13.
At evening, behold, terror! Before the morning, they are no more Isaiah 17:14.
One night. The verse describes what happened outside Jerusalem in 701 Isaiah 37:36, and the book will report it as history twenty chapters later.
settled What this mark means