Isaiah16chapter 16

Isaiah 16:1-2

The burden of Moab continues from chapter 15 with an appeal for royal favor: send ye the lamb to the ruler of the land, the tribute Moab's kings owed Judah's throne, the same toll of lambs and wool 2 Kings 3:4 later names, sent from Sela, the rock fortress later called Petra, toward the mount of the daughter of Zion. Moab's own daughters are left at the fords of Arnon like a bird startled out of its nest, homeless on a border her own land no longer shelters.

Isaiah 16:3-5

Moab is counseled to do what her own gods cannot: shelter Judah's outcasts, hide the fugitives, and refuse to betray the wanderer, while the oppressor's own end draws near. Verse 5 answers with a throne established in mercy, seated in truth in the tabernacle of David, judging and seeking judgment and hasting righteousness, terms no king of Moab's line ever met. Matthew Henry and Franz Delitzsch both read the verse toward the throne of the Messiah, David's greater son who alone joins mercy to truth, named as their reading rather than the oracle's plain historical subject.

Isaiah 16:6-9

The oracle turns from appeal to a report already circulating: we have heard of the pride of Moab, his haughtiness and his lies, and that pride is exactly what draws the mourning that follows. Kir-hareseth's foundations are struck and every voice in Moab howls, and the vine of Sibmah, famous enough that foreign lords broke its branches for their own vineyards, becomes the prophet's own image of grief, wept over as far as Jazer with tears mingled into Heshbon's summer harvest that never comes. John Gill and Albert Barnes both note the turn from Moab's boast to Moab's weeping as the oracle's whole argument compressed into four verses.

Isaiah 16:10-12

Every mark of harvest joy is stripped away: no singing in the vineyards, no shouting, the treaders' feet silenced in the presses that should be bearing Sibmah's fruit. The prophet's own grief sounds again, his bowels like a harp for Moab, mourning without holding himself apart from the nation under judgment. When Moab is seen weary on her high place and comes to her sanctuary to pray, she shall not prevail, which Adam Clarke reads as the verse's verdict on the whole cult of Chemosh she trusted.

Isaiah 16:13-14

Verse 13 marks a seam in the oracle: this is the word the Lord had spoken concerning Moab since that time, an earlier utterance now brought forward. But now the Lord hath spoken a fresh word with a fixed terminus, within three years, as the years of an hireling, the exact reckoning of a hired servant's contract, and Moab's glory, for all its great multitude, shall be contemned, the remnant left very small and feeble. Barnes and Delitzsch both connect the three-year term to the Assyrian campaigns of this period, giving the oracle a datable horizon rather than an open one.