Biblion Bible Commentary
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Your Dead Shall Live
Isaiah 26:12-21
12 Yahweh, you will ordain peace for us, for you have also done all our work for us. · WEB
A nation admits it accomplished nothing, and is answered with a resurrection.
Yahweh, you will ordain peace for us, for you have also done all our work for us Isaiah 26:12.
The admission that governs the rest of the chapter. Whatever has been achieved was done for them, and the next verses will say what they managed on their own.
Other lords besides you have had dominion over us, but we will only acknowledge your name Isaiah 26:13.
The dead shall not live. The departed spirits shall not rise. Therefore you have visited and destroyed them, and caused all memory of them to perish Isaiah 26:14.
The verse is about the other lords of the line before — the foreign rulers and the gods behind them. They are dead and they are not coming back, and the memory of them has been erased. It is a statement about the finality of their end, and it stands in deliberate contrast to what is said six verses later about a different set of dead.
Just as a woman with child, who draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain and cries out in her pangs, so we have been before you Isaiah 26:17.
We have been with child. We have been in pain. We gave birth, it seems, only to wind. We have not worked any deliverance on the earth Isaiah 26:18.
The bleakest self-assessment in the book, and it is honest. All the agony of a delivery and nothing born — the word is wind, which is what a false pregnancy produces. The nation states plainly that it has accomplished no deliverance for anybody, itself included.
Your dead shall live. Their dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust; for your dew is like the dew of herbs, and the earth will cast out the departed spirits Isaiah 26:19.
The answer to the failed labor, and it is one of the clearest statements of bodily resurrection in the Old Testament. Three things in it are exact.
It is dead bodies that arise — the noun is corpses, and what is promised is not the survival of something that never died but the raising of what did.
Those addressed dwell in the dust, which is where Genesis says the body returns Genesis 3:19 and where this book's picture of death consistently puts it. They are asleep, and the instruction is to awake, which is the same verb Daniel uses of those who sleep in the dust of the earth Daniel 12:2.
And the agent is dew. Not a trumpet or a hand reaching down, but the moisture that comes overnight on ground that looked dead and brings it up green.
Set against verse fourteen, the chapter has said both things without contradicting itself. The oppressors are dead and stay dead; God's people are dead and are raised — and the difference is not in the condition of the dead but in whose they are.
Come, my people, enter into your rooms, and shut your doors behind you. Hide yourself for a little moment, until the indignation is past Isaiah 26:20.
The instruction is the Passover night Exodus 12:22, repeated. Go inside, shut the door, wait — and the duration given is a little moment.
The earth also will disclose her blood, and will no longer cover her slain Isaiah 26:21. What the ground has absorbed for centuries is given back, and the murdered are visible at last.
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