Isaiah56chapter 56

Isaiah 56:1-2

Keep ye judgment, and do justice states a plain fact without any explanation offered for it beyond a horizon already lit, for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed. The blessing that follows falls on the son of man that layeth hold on it, the sabbath named first among the works that keep a man from evil, his hand kept from doing any evil. Henry reads the pairing of judgment done and sabbath kept as the whole law compressed into worship and neighbor love held together, while Barnes places the chapter at the return from exile, when the temple's doors were reopening to more than the old assembly.

Isaiah 56:3-5

The son of the stranger and the eunuch are named together as two classes the old order excluded, the one by descent and the other by Deuteronomy 23:1's plain bar from the assembly. Both are answered directly: the eunuch who keeps the sabbaths and takes hold of the covenant is given in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters, an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. Gill and Wesley both note the reversal, that what the eunuch cannot leave behind in a son of his own body the Lord supplies in a name no line of descent could equal. The dry tree of verse 3 becomes, by verse 5, a name planted forever.

Isaiah 56:6

The promise widens from the individual eunuch to the sons of the stranger at large, everyone who joins himself to the Lord to serve him and to love the name of the Lord. Four marks describe this company: they serve, they love his name, they keep the sabbath from polluting it, and they take hold of the covenant, the same covenant grip named of the eunuch in verse 4. Delitzsch reads the accumulation of verbs as deliberate, admission resting not on birth but on a love and a keeping that any stranger can offer. Barnes places the promise beside Solomon's prayer at 1 Kings 8:41-43 for the stranger who comes to this house, the same widening voiced centuries earlier at the temple's dedication.

Isaiah 56:7

Even them will I bring to my holy mountain: the strangers of verse 6 are not merely tolerated but brought in, their burnt offerings and their sacrifices accepted upon mine altar, the sacrificial system itself opened to them. The chapter's most quoted line follows: mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people, the clause the Lord took up in the temple courts when he drove out the money changers. Matthew 21:13 and Luke 19:46 record him quoting the house of prayer alone, but Mark 11:17 keeps the wider reach, of all nations, the same inclusion this verse names as for all people, though the two turns of phrase are not identical. Barnes and Delitzsch both read the verse as Isaiah's clearest statement that the house built for Israel was never meant to stop at Israel's fence.

Isaiah 56:8

The Lord God which gathereth the outcasts of Israel speaks the promise that has stood behind the whole chapter: Israel's own scattered are gathered first, and the strangers admitted in verses 3 through 7 are named yet others, gathered besides those already gathered unto him. Henry reads the verse as the hinge of the chapter, the ingathering of Israel and the ingathering of the nations named in one breath and neither erasing the other. Delitzsch notes the present participle, gathereth, casting the promise as an ongoing work rather than a single completed act.

Isaiah 56:9-12

The tone breaks without warning: all ye beasts of the field, come to devour, an invitation to plunder aimed at a people whose own watchmen have failed them. His watchmen are blind, all of them ignorant, all of them dumb dogs that cannot bark, sleeping and lying down and loving to slumber, and the greedy dogs that follow can never have enough, shepherds who look every one to his own gain from his own quarter. Henry and Barnes both read the indictment as aimed at the nation's own leaders rather than its outsiders, an ironic pivot from the strangers welcomed in the chapter's first half to the insiders who fail their post in its second. The drunkards' boast that closes the chapter, I will fetch wine, and tomorrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant, is left to answer for itself.