Isaiah32chapter 32

Isaiah 32:1-2

a king shall reign in righteousness: The king who reigns in righteousness is read two ways by the older commentators: some apply the verse first to Hezekiah's own reign following Ahaz, and most read past Hezekiah to a greater King whose righteous reign has no historical exhaustion. The man who becomes an hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land is described as a person distinct from the princes who merely rule in judgment, the four images together painting shelter given by someone rather than a policy enacted. Matthew Henry and John Wesley both press the man of verse 2 toward Christ while noting that Hezekiah's own reign supplies the chapter its nearest occasion.

Isaiah 32:3-4

the eyes of them that see shall not be dim: Under this reign the senses and speech of the people themselves are mended: eyes that see are no longer dim, ears that hear actually hearken, the heart of the rash comes to understand knowledge, and the stammering tongue learns to speak plainly. The older commentators read this both literally and figuratively, the reversal of the hardening commission given at Isaiah 6:9-10 now running backward as sight and hearing are restored under righteous rule. Barnes traces the same vocabulary forward into the later chapters of the book, where blindness and deafness are repeatedly undone as marks of the coming kingdom.

Isaiah 32:5-8

The vile person shall be no more called liberal: Verse 5 promises a moral clarification under the righteous king: the vile person will no longer be flattered with the name liberal, nor the churl called bountiful. Verses 6 through 8 draw the two portraits out in full, the vile person working iniquity and hypocrisy while starving the hungry and cutting off the thirsty, and the churl using lying words to destroy the poor, set against the liberal man who devises liberal things and stands by them. Matthew Henry reads the passage as Isaiah correcting popular speech itself, the world's flattering names for greed and stinginess exposed once true righteousness sets the standard by which they are named.

Isaiah 32:9-11

Rise up, ye women that are at ease: The prophet turns from the coming king to the present complacency of Jerusalem's women, addressed three times in as many verses as at ease and careless, and told to rise, tremble, and strip off fine clothing for sackcloth. The warning is near in its horizon and economic in its shape: many days and years of trouble are coming because the vintage will fail and the harvest not come, language the older commentators tie to the Assyrian devastation of Judah's countryside. Gill and Henry both note the address to women specifically marks the security and comfort of a class the earlier warnings to the nation's leaders had not yet reached.

Isaiah 32:12-14

lament for the teats: The lament runs from pleasant fields and the fruitful vine given up to mourning, to the land itself overrun with thorns and briers, to the city's own houses of joy standing forsaken. The devastation reaches the fortifications themselves, the forts and towers left for dens forever, language the older writers read as total abandonment rather than temporary siege, wild asses and grazing flocks replacing the city's defenders. Barnes locates the language within the Assyrian crisis under Sennacherib, when Judah's countryside and outlying towns suffered exactly this kind of ruin.

Isaiah 32:15

the spirit be poured upon us from on high: The desolation just described is reversed by a single act, the spirit poured upon us from on high, the same pouring vocabulary the bench sets beside Joel's prophecy of the Spirit poured out upon all flesh, later read at Pentecost in Acts 2. Once poured, the wilderness becomes a fruitful field and the fruitful field is accounted a forest, the wording deliberately inverting the desolation named point for point in the verses just before it. Delitzsch treats the verse as the chapter's hinge, the outpoured Spirit supplying what neither reformed speech nor moral correction alone could produce.

Isaiah 32:16-18

judgment shall dwell in the wilderness: Judgment and righteousness now inhabit the very ground that had been wilderness, and their fruit is defined precisely: the work of righteousness is peace, and its effect is quietness and assurance forever. The chain from spiritual outpouring to social peace to the peaceable habitation of verse 18 is read by the older writers as the settled order that follows conversion, applied nearest to a restored Judah and, more fully, to the reign of Christ. Henry draws out the causal order the text itself gives, righteousness producing peace and peace producing the quiet, sure dwelling places the nation had just been warned it would lose.

Isaiah 32:19-20

it shall hail, coming down on the forest: The hail that comes down on the forest and brings the city low even as this new order is announced reads to the older commentators as a last aftershock of judgment before the settled peace fully arrives, a note of realism rather than a reversal of the promise. The chapter's closing beatitude, blessed are ye that sow beside all waters and send forth the feet of the ox and the ass, pictures abundant, undefended farming, cattle at work in fields where soldiers had stood. Gill reads the image as peace so complete that beasts of burden labor without fear of raid, the exact opposite of the trampled vineyards lamented earlier in the chapter.