Isaiah17chapter 17

Isaiah 17:1-3

The burden of Damascus opens the ninth oracle and folds a second nation into it before the first verse is finished: Damascus taken away from being a city and made a ruinous heap, its dependent towns of Aroer left to grazing flocks. By verse 3 the oracle has moved from Syria to Ephraim, the fortress ceasing from Ephraim and the kingdom from Damascus together, because the northern kingdom had bound itself to Syria's throne in the alliance against Judah that 2 Kings 16:5 records. Matthew Henry and Albert Barnes both read the pairing as judgment on that alliance rather than on two unrelated nations.

Isaiah 17:4-6

Jacob's glory is made thin and his fatness wastes away, the harvest figure turning at once to reaping: the corn gathered, the ears stripped by the reaper's arm in the valley of Rephaim near Jerusalem. Yet the oracle does not end in bare ground; gleaning grapes are left, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost branches, the same remnant figure Isaiah keeps returning to through the burdens against the nations. John Gill and Franz Delitzsch both note the deliberate smallness of the count names a remnant preserved, not erased.

Isaiah 17:7-9

The judgment turns the survivors' eyes: in that day a man shall look to his Maker and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel, a title Isaiah carries through the whole book, rather than to the altars, groves and images his own hands made. Verse 9 returns to the forsaken-bough image of the gleaning harvest, the strong cities left desolate like the uppermost branch abandoned because of the children of Israel. Adam Clarke and Matthew Henry both read the sequence, idols named first and then the Holy One, as the oracle's own account of what the judgment is meant to accomplish.

Isaiah 17:10-11

The charge behind the judgment is named directly: thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, so thou plantest pleasant plants and settest it with strange slips, garden cults substituted for the God who planted Israel. Whatever grows overnight from that planting comes to nothing but a heap in the day of grief and desperate sorrow, the fast growth and the fast collapse bound together in one image. Barnes and Delitzsch both read the strange slips as the foreign cults Ahaz's court had imported, the very alliance the oracle opened by naming.

Isaiah 17:12-14

The oracle closes by widening its lens from Damascus and Ephraim to every nation that rushes against Zion: woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas, and to the rushing of nations like the rushing of mighty waters. But God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind and a rolling thing before the whirlwind, trouble at evening and by morning he is not. Matthew Henry and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both read the sudden reversal as the pattern Isaiah repeats at Sennacherib's later siege, an army that seems unstoppable at nightfall and is gone by dawn.