Isaiah29chapter 29

Isaiah 29:1-2

the city where David dwelt: Ariel names Jerusalem by a word the older writers read two ways, the lion of God or the hearth of the altar, the city David pitched his camp against and then made his own. The Lord addresses her by the feast calendar itself, add ye year to year, let them kill sacrifices, the round of worship going on as usual while the threat gathers. Yet I will distress Ariel turns the city's own name against her: the altar hearth will now burn with grief, and Jerusalem shall be to the Lord as her own name describes.

Isaiah 29:3-4

will lay siege against thee: The Lord takes the besieger's own part, camping against the city, raising forts, laying siege as though he were the enemy at the gate. Brought down into the dust, the city's speech is described as a voice out of the ground, low and whispering, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, the image of a necromancer's client calling up a ghostly answer from below. Gill and Delitzsch both note the irony, Jerusalem reduced to the very kind of hollow, forbidden voice her own law condemned in a medium.

Isaiah 29:5-6

as chaff that passeth away: The siege that has just been raised is suddenly reversed: the multitude of strangers and terrible ones besieging the city become small dust and chaff, gone at an instant suddenly. The Lord of hosts himself visits with thunder, earthquake, great noise, storm and devouring fire, the same catalogue of direct intervention the history books will record when Sennacherib's army falls in one night. Barnes and Clarke read the whole scene as a preview of that deliverance, the siege dissolved not by Judah's strength but by the Lord's sudden hand.

Isaiah 29:7-8

as a dream of a night vision: The nations warring against Ariel and mount Zion are likened to a dream, the whole host vanishing at waking the way a night vision does. A hungry man dreams he eats and wakes still empty, a thirsty man dreams he drinks and wakes still faint, and Henry reads the double picture as the appetite of conquest promising a satisfaction it can never deliver against the city the Lord defends. The multitude's hunger for Zion ends the same way, all their strength proving to be nothing more than a dream.

Isaiah 29:9-10

they are drunken, but not with wine: The people are called to stand still and wonder at a stupor that is not the wine's doing but the Lord's own judgment, a spirit of deep sleep poured out that closes their eyes. The prophets and rulers, the seers themselves, are covered by the same blindness, so that the very men appointed to see for the nation cannot see. Calvin reads this as judicial rather than natural, a hardening sent because the light already given had been refused.

Isaiah 29:11-12

as the words of a book that is sealed: The vision becomes a sealed book handed first to one that is learned, who cannot read it because it is sealed, and then to one that is not learned, who cannot read it because he never learned his letters. Neither man reaches the message, the learned stopped by the seal and the unlearned stopped by his own untaught mind. Delitzsch and Alexander read the double failure as the whole nation's condition, wisdom and ignorance arriving at the same blindness by different roads.

Isaiah 29:13-14

draw near me with their mouth: The Lord names the root of the blindness, a people who draw near with their mouth and honour him with their lips while their heart has been removed far from him, their worship reduced to a fear taught by the precept of men rather than to him directly. This is the verse the Lord himself quotes of the Pharisees at Matt 15:8-9, the same charge of a mouth-and-lip religion carried without alteration into his own preaching. Against that hollow worship he answers with a marvellous work and a wonder, one that will make the wisdom of the wise perish and hide the understanding of the prudent.

Isaiah 29:15-16

seek deep to hide their counsel: A woe falls on those who seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, working in the dark and asking who seeth us, as though a plotter's secrecy could reach beyond his sight. Isaiah answers with the potter's clay: the thing framed has no standing to say of him that framed it, he had no understanding, the creature's objection to its maker turned upside down and shown to be exactly that. Gill and Delitzsch both trace the same figure forward into Paul's argument at Romans 9:20, the potter's right over the clay stated first here.

Isaiah 29:17-19

Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field: A very little while reverses the order of things, Lebanon's forest becoming farmland and farmland thickening into forest, the figure of a world remade. In that day the deaf hear the words of the very book that had been sealed, and the blind see out of obscurity and darkness, the closed vision of verse 11 now opened. The meek increase their joy in the Lord and the poor among men rejoice in the Holy One of Israel, Smith and Henry both reading the turn as reaching furthest toward those the earlier chapters left with least.

Isaiah 29:20-21

the terrible one is brought to nought: The terrible one is brought to nought, the scorner consumed, and all that watch for iniquity cut off, the reversal reaching the specific abusers of justice named next. These make a man an offender for a word, lay a snare for the one who reproves at the gate, and turn aside the just for a thing of nought, the courtroom itself corrupted by men waiting to trap an honest witness. Wesley and Clarke both read the gate here as the place of judgment, so that the woe falls precisely on judicial cruelty rather than on wrongdoing in general.

Isaiah 29:22-24

Jacob shall not now be ashamed: The Lord who redeemed Abraham speaks now of the house of Jacob, and the shame that has run through the chapter's siege and blindness is lifted: Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face wax pale. The turn comes when Jacob sees his children, the work of the Lord's own hands, in his midst, and the family sanctifies the Holy One of Jacob and fears the God of Israel together. Those who erred in spirit come to understanding and the murmurers learn doctrine, Barnes and Delitzsch both reading the closing verses as the direct answer to the stupor and sealed book that opened the chapter.