Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Isaiah · About this commentary
The Lofty Looks of Man Shall Be Brought Low
Isaiah 2:6-22
6 For you have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob, because they are filled from the east, with those who practice divination like the Philistines, and they clasp hands with the children of foreigners. · WEB
Everything tall is listed and leveled, and men hide in holes from the glory of the God they had been ignoring.
Their land is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures. Their land also is full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots. Their land also is full of idols Isaiah 2:7–8.
Three times full, and the sequence is the diagnosis. Money, then military hardware, then gods — and the third follows the first two rather than causing them. A nation that has done well acquires an army and then acquires deities to match, and the last line names what they are: they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made.
The idols are not being credited with power here. They are described as products.
Enter into the rock, and hide in the dust, from before the terror of Yahweh, and from the glory of his majesty Isaiah 2:10.
What people hide from is the glory, which is worth pausing on. It is not wrath that drives them into the rocks in this chapter but splendor, arriving in a place that had been furnished with manufactured gods.
The lofty looks of man will be brought low, the arrogance of men will be bowed down, and Yahweh alone will be exalted in that day Isaiah 2:11.
The refrain, and it returns almost identically at verse seventeen. The chapter is built around it.
For there will be a day of Yahweh of Armies for all that is proud and arrogant, and for all that is lifted up Isaiah 2:12.
Then a list, and its progression is the chapter's argument. The cedars of Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan — the tallest trees in the region. The high mountains and the lifted-up hills. Every lofty tower and every fortified wall. All the ships of Tarshish, which were the largest vessels afloat, and all pleasant imagery Isaiah 2:13–16.
The list runs from what God made to what men built to what men bought, and it does not distinguish between them. Height is the only criterion. A mountain has done nothing wrong, and it appears on the list because the day in question is against everything elevated as such — which tells the reader what the real subject is, since the trees and hills are there to make the point about the men.
In that day, men shall cast away their idols of silver and their idols of gold, which have been made for themselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats Isaiah 2:20.
The image is exact and faintly comic. Men fleeing into caves throw away the gods they are carrying, because the gods are heavy and slowing them down — and the creatures who inherit them are the two that live in the dark.
Stop trusting in man, whose breath is in his nostrils; for of what account is he? Isaiah 2:22.
The chapter's conclusion, and the reason given is borrowed from Genesis 2:7. What makes a human being alive is on loan and is currently in his nose. It is not an insult; it is a measurement, and it is offered as the reason to stop relying on the measured.
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