Isaiah57chapter 57

The practices listed are documented Canaanite and Judean folk religion, and the detail is uncomfortably specific. Inflaming yourselves among the oaks and under every green tree — sacred groves at the local shrine. Slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks — child sacrifice, practiced in the ravines outside Jerusalem, and known archaeologically at Carthage, where a Phoenician burial ground of infant urns has been excavated.

The smooth stones of the stream given as a portion is another real rite. Water-worn stones were set up as standing markers and received drink offerings and grain offerings. Isaiah's pun is that their portion, their inheritance, is a handful of pebbles from a creek bed.

The bed on a high mountain is the shrine bed used in fertility rites, and the memorial set up behind the doors and the doorposts is a household marker put in the place where the Law had said to write God's commandments. The image is of a wife who has replaced her husband's letters with a lover's token at her own front door.

The diplomacy image is the sharpest line in the chapter: you sent your messengers far off, and debased yourself even to Sheol. Judah's habit of sending envoys to buy the protection of larger powers is described as a nation whose ambassadors go down to the grave to negotiate.

Against all of it, a two-address God: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who has a contrite and humble spirit. Those are the only two addresses given.