Isaiah20chapter 20

Isaiah 20:1-3

The chapter opens with a precise anchor date, the year the Assyrian general Tartan captured Ashdod under Sargon's order, a campaign confirmed by Sargon's own annals, which fixes the sign to a real and datable moment rather than a vague future. At that same time the Lord commands Isaiah to loose the sackcloth from his body and walk naked and barefoot, and the prophet obeys, though the walking is not a single act but a state kept up three full years as a sign and wonder against Egypt and Ethiopia. Clarke and Barnes take naked in its ordinary Hebrew range as stripped of the outer garment and reduced to the plainest under-tunic, the dress of a captive, rather than complete nakedness, though the shame the sign pictures is the same either way.

Isaiah 20:4-6

The three years of Isaiah's own body become Assyria's forecast: the king of Assyria will lead Egyptian prisoners and Ethiopian captives away naked and barefoot with their buttocks uncovered, the exact humiliation the prophet had already worn in public. Verse 6 lets the sign land on its intended audience, the inhabitants of the coastland, who had looked to Egypt and Ethiopia as their expectation and their glory against Assyria and now ask how they themselves shall escape. Henry and Gill read the sign's cost, three years of a prophet's daily shame carried as a walking sermon, as itself part of the point, the message lived before it was ever fulfilled in history.