Isaiah24chapter 24

Isaiah 24:1-3

Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty: The burdens against single nations end at chapter 23 and the horizon opens to the whole earth, maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof, language too large for any one historical invasion the book has named so far. Delitzsch and Alexander both read chapters 24 through 27 as Isaiah's own apocalypse, a final judgment glimpsed through the near judgments the book has already described, without abandoning the nearer horizons those judgments carried. No class escapes the leveling, as with the people, so with the priest, as with the servant, so with his master, and the same list runs through buyer and seller, lender and borrower. The chapter states its own ground for the sentence in its final clause, for the Lord hath spoken this word, judgment resting on his word rather than on the size of the crime committed by any one class.

Isaiah 24:4-9

The earth mourneth and fadeth away: The mourning spreads from land to vine to wine to harp, every ordinary joy fading in step with the earth itself, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. The covenant named here is read two ways by the bench: Henry and Gill take it as the covenant of nature made with Noah and every living creature in Genesis 9, broken by mankind at large rather than by Israel under Sinai, while Delitzsch reads it as the moral law written into the constitution of humanity itself. Either reading explains why the judgment falls on the earth and not on one nation, a universal covenant answered by a universal curse, the inhabitants burned and few men left. Even the small pleasures die last, the new wine mourns and the harp falls silent, and strong drink turns bitter to the very men who once sang over it.

Isaiah 24:10-13

The city of confusion is broken down: An unnamed city stands for the doomed world order, every house shut up that no man may come in, the gate smitten with destruction, a crying for wine in streets that have nothing left to celebrate. The commentators do not agree on one referent, Barnes and Delitzsch weigh Babylon against a symbolic city standing for organized human rebellion generally, and the text itself never names it, which the bench takes as deliberate. Verse 13 supplies the chapter's one note of mercy inside the ruin, a shaking of an olive tree and gleaning grapes when the vintage is done, the sparse fruit left on branches after the main harvest, a remnant surviving the general collapse. Judgment this wide still leaves gleanings, and the gleanings are the seed of what the next verses sing about.

Isaiah 24:14-16

They shall lift up their voice: The gleaned remnant does not merely survive, it sings, lifting its voice for the majesty of the Lord and crying aloud from the sea, glorifying him in the fires and in the isles of the sea, worship reaching the ends of the earth precisely where the judgment reached. From the uttermost part of the earth we have heard songs, even glory to the righteous, the remnant's praise carried back to the prophet himself. Then the vision breaks and Isaiah's own voice cuts across the song, but I said, my leanness, my leanness, woe unto me, the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously, his grief at the ongoing betrayal around him refusing to be silenced by the praise he has just reported hearing. The prophet who sings the remnant's song is the same man still grieving over the deceit still working in his own day.

Isaiah 24:17-20

Fear, and the pit, and the snare: The three-fold trap, fear, and the pit, and the snare, upon every inhabitant of the earth, is close to the formula Jeremiah later applies to Moab, a shared oracle of inescapable judgment, one danger leading straight into the next with no path around it. He that fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit, and he that cometh up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare, judgment layered so that escaping one stage only delivers a man to the next. The windows from on high are open and the foundations of the earth shake, cosmic language matching the scope already named at the chapter's opening, the earth reeling to and fro like a drunkard and removed like a cottage. It shall fall, and not rise again, the chapter's flattest sentence, judgment total enough that the bench reads no recovery written into these particular verses.

Isaiah 24:21-23

the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones: The judgment falls on two ranks at once, the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth, a heavenly tier and an earthly tier punished together in one sentence. Henry and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the host of the high ones as the proud princes set over the nations, language they connect to the angelic princes named in Daniel 10 without pressing further, while modern readings of the unseen world, Michael Heiser among them, take the phrase as the rebellious spiritual powers standing behind those same kings, cite-only as his own contribution to a debated text. Both readings hold that the prisoners gathered in the pit and shut up in the prison are visited after many days, a delayed reckoning rather than an immediate one. The apocalyptic sweep lands on a throne at last, the moon confounded and the sun ashamed when the Lord of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously.