Biblion Bible Commentary
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Three Years Barefoot
Isaiah 20:1-6
1 In the year that Tartan came to Ashdod, when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him, and he fought against Ashdod and took it; · WEB
A prophet is told to undress and stay that way for three years, and the sermon is his own body.
In the year that Tartan came to Ashdod, when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him, and he fought against Ashdod and took it Isaiah 20:1.
The only place in Scripture where Sargon is named, and the campaign is dated to 711. Tartan is a rank rather than a name — the commander-in-chief.
Go, and loosen the sackcloth from off your waist, and take your sandals from off your feet Isaiah 20:2.
The instruction is given in one verse and obeyed in the same one: he did so, walking naked and barefoot. The word need not mean entirely unclothed — it is used of a man stripped to his undergarment — but it means publicly indecent, and the prophet was a man of standing in Jerusalem.
As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder concerning Egypt and concerning Ethiopia Isaiah 20:3.
Three years. The sign is not a single dramatic act but a sustained humiliation, carried out in the streets of his own city, in front of people who knew him, for a message about somebody else's foreign policy.
The prophets are asked to do this repeatedly — a marriage, a broken pot, a shaved head, a wife's death unmourned — and this is among the costliest. What the assignment says about the message is that it mattered more than the messenger's dignity, and the account does not record him objecting.
So the king of Assyria will lead away the captives of Egypt and the exiles of Ethiopia, young and old, naked and barefoot, and with buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt Isaiah 20:4.
The explanation. Prisoners of war were driven stripped, and the prophet has been walking around Jerusalem dressed as a future deportee.
They will be dismayed and confounded, because of Ethiopia their expectation, and of Egypt their glory Isaiah 20:5.
The target was never Egypt. It was the party in Jerusalem arguing for an Egyptian alliance, and the sign was aimed at people who had to walk past it.
The inhabitants of this coast land will say in that day, "Behold, this is our expectation, where we fled for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria. And we, how will we escape?" Isaiah 20:6.
The question at the end is the one the whole exercise was designed to provoke, and it is asked too late by people looking at a column of naked prisoners who were supposed to be their protection.
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