This chapter is not a shelf text in Jewish practice. A haftarah is a short reading from the Prophets that follows the Torah reading in the synagogue service, chosen long ago to match the day; and the passage beginning “Seek the LORD while He may be found” (Isaiah 55:6–56:8) is the haftarah appointed for the afternoon of public fast days in the Ashkenazi rite. A public fast day is a day the whole community goes without food to turn back to God together, the way Nineveh fasted in Jonah. So for centuries, these are the words a congregation hears at precisely the moment it is repenting.

In the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Ta’anit, compiled by about the sixth century AD), the chapter’s water is Torah, God’s teaching. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (55:1) is expounded in Ta’anit 7a: as water leaves high ground and gathers low, the words of Torah endure only in the humble. The rain of verses 10–11, which “does not return empty,” stands in the same discussions (Ta’anit 6b–7a): rain that makes the earth bear becomes the sages’ picture of a word from heaven that accomplishes what it was sent to do.

What the individual commentators add on this verse, in their own words, follows below.