Isaiah33chapter 33

The opening line describes something that actually happened. Hezekiah had submitted and paid an enormous indemnity — the Bible records three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, and Sennacherib's own prism account gives figures in the same range — and the Assyrians came on anyway. So the woe is aimed at the destroyer who was not destroyed and the traitor who was not betrayed. Isaiah says he has broken the covenant, he despises the cities, he regards no man.

The roads tell the story of the countryside. The highways lie waste, the traveler has stopped, the land mourns, Lebanon is ashamed and withers, Sharon is like a desert, and Bashan and Carmel shake off their leaves. Those were the four most fertile regions anyone could name.

The taunt in the middle names Assyrian officials by their jobs. Where is the scribe? Where is the one who weighed out the tribute? Where is the one who counted the towers? Every conquered city was visited by a team like that: a scribe recording what was owed, a weigher checking the silver, and a surveyor tallying the defenses for the report home. Isaiah says a day is coming when you will look for those men and not find them.

The closing picture of Zion answers the whole book's anxiety about walls. She is called the city of our appointed feasts, a quiet home, a tent that is never taken down, whose stakes are never pulled up and whose ropes never break. And then the strangest line: the LORD will be to us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars goes and no mighty ship passes. Jerusalem has no river. Great cities — Nineveh, Babylon, Memphis, Tyre — all had water access, and water access is how a navy arrives. Jerusalem gets the benefit of a river with none of its danger.