Isaiah 3

The Book of Isaiah tells the story of the beginning of the end of ancient Israel. It is set between 742-688 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the northern Jewish kingdom and came this close to destroying the Jewish people entirely. Things went from bad to worse over the next century. The Babylonians finished the job in 597 BC, conquering the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah, and deporting the survivors to their homeland in modern-day Iraq.

Those defeats represented an existential threat to the Jewish belief system. Warfare in the ancient Middle East was seen as a proxy for spiritual battle. Each tribe was fighting for its gods so a god who could not help his people win a war was one who could hardly be worthy of worship. If the Jewish people were fighting on behalf of the almighty Creator of the universe, why were they being defeated and killed by pagans?

Isaiah gave them an answer, one that went back to the founding texts of their religion. God was punishing them:

Jerusalem staggers, Judah is falling; their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves.

- Isaiah 3:8-9 

In Isaiah’s telling, Jewish society had not lived up to its principles. The issue wasn’t outward belief. Judah was still nominally religious. The massive temple in the heart of Jerusalem was at the heart of their cultural and political life. Jews living abroad still made pilgrimages home, and priests still made daily and annual sacrifices for the sins of the people.

The issue was that few actually believed any of it. Their customs were more about tradition than any real desire to follow and serve God. They followed the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.

The proof was in the way Jewish society functioned:

The Lord takes his place in court; he rises to judge the people. The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: “It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?”

- Isaiah 3:13-15 

Isaiah began preaching after the death of Uzziah, whose reign (782-743 BC) was a time of widespread and prosperity. A lot of money came into Jewish society, and that money corrupted the people at the top. The rich got richer and grew more powerful to the point where they were no longer accountable to everyone else. It probably didn’t look too different from modern-day America. When Isaiah curses those “who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left” (5:8) and declares that “the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants” (5:10), he sounds like Bernie Sanders.

Judah, instead of being different than its pagan neighbors, was as unjust and corrupt as everyone around them. Even worse, Jewish society was supposed to be a reflection of the character of God. They were using His name to justify the way they mistreated the less fortunate and crushed the poor under their feet. He could not allow that to continue. The answer for why their armies were being crushed despite fighting for God is that they weren't actually fighting for Him. They were fighting for themselves.

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood!

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.

- Isaiah 1:15-17

Isaiah, like the other Old Testament prophets, warned his people about what would happen if they didn’t repent and change their ways. The relationship between God and His people wasn’t a one-way street. It was a covenant. God had promised them that He would help them defeat their enemies and establish their own kingdom -- but the price of that help was obedience. The same power that had lifted them up could just as easily bring them down.

Isaiah wasn’t saying anything that Moses hadn’t said hundreds of years before as the Jews were leaving Egypt:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.

-- Deuteronomy 30:15-18

For Isaiah, the Assyrian army marching towards Jerusalem was the representation of the warnings that Moses had given so many years ago. The Jewish people had stopped listening to God. Now they were getting a harsh lesson in the consequences.

These types of lessons are uncomfortable. The God of the Old Testament didn’t turn the other cheek. He was a God of blood and iron who marshaled armies and fought wars to the death. A lot of Christians over the years have tried to separate the actions of God in the Old Testament with the more peaceful teachings of Jesus. Marcion, an early heretic who lived between 85-160 AD, formalized the distinction, creating an edited Bible that wrote most of the Old Testament out of the picture.

The origin story of the Jewish people is fairly problematic. God had promised them a land of their own even though there were already a lot of people living there. The solution was simple, if not exactly appealing to modern sensibilities: God told the Jews to drive those inhabitants out of their land. Driving people out of their land is a harsh and ugly business. Another word for it is ethnic cleansing.

For many Americans, the founding of ancient Israel is an ugly reminder of the founding of our own country. You aren’t going to find many people these days who will defend the Trail of Tears. And they want nothing to do with a God who would tell people to kill their neighbors in His name.

The reality is more complicated. While Americans may be ashamed of what our ancestors did to the Indians, there is plenty of violence and bloodshed from our history that we can still get behind.

Look at William Sherman’s March to the Sea, which many historians believe was the beginning of the modern concept of “total warfare”. Sherman conquered and destroyed Atlanta, the economic center of the Confederacy, in 1864. From there, he marched his army almost 300 miles to the Atlantic Ocean port of Savannah, destroying everything in its path. The goal was to end the Civil War by teaching the South a harsh lesson in the consequences of rebellion. The days of the North treating them like gentlemen were over. The gloves were coming off.

“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hand of war.”

- William Sherman 

Innocent people die all the time in war, even when the military is doing everything in its power to save lives. It can get really ugly really fast when those same troops believe they are punishing guilty people.

 
The problem is that collective punishment means punishing individual people who were completely innocent of the crimes of their countrymen. The South was fighting a war for slavery, but every person in the South wasn't a slave owner. Did some poor 10-year old boy in rural Georgia deserve to die because of the decisions of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee? War always comes with ugly consequences. Yet the vast majority of Americans would agree that the deaths of the people who stood in the way of Sherman’s March to the Sea were for the greater good.

The firebombing of Dresden in World War II is another example. Dresden was a major German city that the Allied armies burned to the ground in 1945. Over the course of a few days, more than 1,000 U.S. and British bombers dropped more than 2,000 tons of incendiaries on Dresden. The destruction was so total that there is no real way to estimate the dead. Historians have pegged the number at somewhere between 25,000-135,000.

The bombing was immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war in Dresden, wrote about what he saw in the aftermath:

Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire-storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 

It's hard to believe that all of those people deserved to die for the crimes of Adolf Hitler. Yet few modern Americans would call World War II, and all that we had to do to win such a titanic conflict, unjust.

The same logic applies in the days of the Old Testament. The Canaanites whom the Jews drove out of the Promised Land didn’t have clean hands. Their most shocking crime was the worship of Molech, a bull-shaped idol with a massive furnace in its chest. They placed their own children in its hands and burned them alive in order to gain the favor of their god.

This was not just propaganda. Historians have found a lot of extra-Biblical evidence for the worship of Molech:

Oxford Professor John Day wrote that “We have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey.”

If they were willing to do that to their own kids to earn the favor of Molech, imagine what they were doing to people who weren’t related to them!

It wasn’t that God gave the Jews land of their own because he didn’t care about the people already living there. They were an instrument that He was using to punish the Canaanites for their crimes.

The same thing was happening again hundreds of years later, except the shoe was on the other foot. Now it was the Jews who had sinned against God, forcing him to raise up another people (the Assyrians) to strip them of their land. The God of the Old Testament was harsh, but He was also fair.

The most important thing for modern readers to remember is that there is a massive difference between the way God acted in BC and the way that He acts in AD. Something vitally important happened in between that split human history in half, changing not only the way that God related to His people, but all of mankind. Over the course of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet reveals how that process will occur.

Isaiah 2

The Book of Isaiah is set in the shadow of a looming apocalypse. The Assyrians had conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms, in 721 B.C., and looked set to conquer Judah twenty years later. The impact of those defeats on the Jewish psyche was huge. If their God really was the Creator of the Universe, why were His people always losing to the followers of other gods?

The Assyrians worshiped Ashur, who started as the local god of their capital city of Assur and seemed to grow more powerful as his followers conquered all of their neighbors. The kings of Assyria traditionally wrote reports back to Ashur after their military campaigns ended. If Yahweh was more powerful than Ashur, why could He not defeat him?

Military conflicts in the ancient Middle East had spiritual undertones. Conquered people usually worshipped the gods of those who conquered them. After all, what was the point of worshiping their gods if they had fought for those gods and lost? The people of Judah could already see this happening to their relatives in Israel, who began worshiping Ashur after their defeat and were eventually assimilated into the greater Assyrian Empire. The same thing would have happened if Judah had been conquered.

With the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people around the corner, the prophecy that Isaiah makes in Chapter 2 must have seemed ridiculous:

In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

Isaiah 2:2-3

Just imagine what the Assyrians would have thought if they had heard that. Your God will be exalted above all the nations? People from every tribe will come to worship Him? Then how come we are about to conquer you and erase his name from history?

This is the message that Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, sent to Hezekiah, the king of Judah, when his armies were massed outside of Jerusalem:

“Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely.

And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them -- the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah?”

Isaiah 37:10-13

It would have been hard to argue Sennacherib in that moment. The Assyrians had conquered a lot of nations, and heard a lot of nonsense about how those gods would stop them. They had even conquered a Jewish kingdom! Surely, the people of Judah didn’t think things would end any differently. What made their god so different than any of the other gods that Sennacherib had already destroyed and sent back to the temples of Assur as tribute?

Here is one thing we can know for sure. If Sennacherib had conquered Jerusalem in 701 B.C., no one would be talking about the Book of Isaiah almost 3,000 years later.

In What If?, an anthology book where leading military historians speculate about the paths that human history could have taken, William H. McNeill imagines a world where Sennacherib conquered Jerusalem:

This may be an odd thing to say about an engagement that never took place; yet Jerusalem’s preservation from attack by Sennacherib’s army shaped the subsequent history of the world far more profoundly than any other military action I know of.

None of [modern history] could have come to pass if the kingdom of Judah had disappeared in 701 B.C. as the kingdom of Israel had done a mere twenty-one years earlier in 722 B.C. On that occasion, the exiles from Israel soon lost their separate identity. By accepting common sense views about the limits of divine power, they abandoned the worship of Yahweh, who had failed to protect them, and became the “Ten Lost Tribes” of biblical history. In all probability, the people of Judah would have met the same fate if the Assyrian army had attacked and captured Jerusalem in 701 B.C. and treated its inhabitants as they had treated those of Samaria and other conquered places before. If so, Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not possibly have come into existence. In short, our world would be profoundly different in ways we cannot really imagine. 

The odds of Judah surviving the Assyrian invasion were minuscule. They were a tiny country down to its capital city facing the greatest military machine the world had ever known.

So how did they do it? No one really knows. Here's what Isaiah says:

Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning -- there were all dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew.

- Isaiah 37:36-37

We know that something happened to the Assyrian army. Archeologists have found a series of monuments that Sennacherib built near the end of his reign to commemorate his military victories. Jerusalem is on a list of all of the cities that he besieged, but it is the only one of those cities that isn't also on a list of the ones that he conquered. Many historians, including McNeill, believe that a plague devastated his army as they were camped out Jerusalem. That explanation is more satisfying to a secular audience, but wouldn't a plague be the perfect way for an angel of the Lord to kill people?

It would be an awfully big coincidence otherwise. Maybe Hezekiah, Isaiah, and the people of Judah just got lucky. Maybe the course of world history was completely changed for no reason other than blind chance.

Or maybe the plague was a miracle. And maybe there is something (or someone) guiding the course of world history.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Barack Obama loved to quote this saying when he was President. If it's true, the question isn't whether or not the moral arc of the universe bends, or what direction that bend might take. It’s why there is a moral arc in the first place. MLK was a preacher. His confidence didn't come out of belief in the goodness of man. It came from something else entirely.

Isaiah prophesied a lot more than just the Assyrian withdrawal from Jerusalem. He also talked about a coming Messiah who would reshape the Jewish religion and spread the worship of their God to the rest of mankind:

And now the Lord says -- he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength -- he says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

- Isaiah 49:6

Now imagine if Sennacherib had heard that prophecy when his armies were outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Here's one more Biblical prophecy that would have sounded insane at the time it was made. This one is from Jesus in the days before of his crucifixion:

 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

- Luke 21:33

Jesus was killed by an empire (Rome) who made the Assyrians look like amateurs. The Romans lasted much longer than any of their imperial predecessors. Rome was sacked more than 400 years after the crucifixion, and New Rome (Byzantium) wasn't conquered for another 1,000 years after that. But even that prolonged lifespan wasn't enough to outlast the words of an obscure preacher who died in a backwater province with only a few followers to his name.

There are a million possible explanations as to why all these different prophecies came true. Here's the simplest. The reason that Isaiah could accurately predict what would happen thousands of years after his death is because he really was relaying the word of God.

The best way to know the future is to study the past. If two people in 2019 predict two vastly different futures in 2029, it would be hard for us to know who is right. The most helpful thing we could do is see what they said in 2009 about what would happen in 2019. If someone has been right before, there is reason to believe they will be right again.

"Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods."

- Isaiah 41:22

"This is what the Lord says -- Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.

Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come -- yes, let them foretell what will come.

Do not tremble, do not be afraid. Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one."

- Isaiah 44:6-8

Believing in the God of the Bible isn’t just about blind faith. The proof is right there if you look for it.

Isaiah 1

The Book of Isaiah opens with a dateline:

The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.  

- Isaiah 1:1 

Isaiah received his initial call from God (Isaiah 6:1-13) in 742 B.C., the year Uzziah died. He spent the rest of his life prophesying and preaching in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, the southern of the two Jewish kingdoms. His ministry ended soon after the death of Hezekiah, Uzziah’s great-grandson, in 688 B.C. The New Testament mentions an Old Testament prophet who was sawed in half (Hebrews 11:37), which many scholars believe is a reference to Isaiah’s death at the hands of Hezekiah’s son Manasseh.

Of course, saying that Isaiah’s ministry went from 742-688 B.C. would have meant nothing to him or his contemporaries. They were not keeping time by the life of someone born almost seven hundred years after their death. The people of Judah, like most people in the ancient Middle East, used the reign of their own kings as historical milestones.

The reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were a difficult period in their history. Judah had known peace and prosperity under Uzziah, but was slowly suffocated by the armies of Assyria in the years after his death. The Assyrians, whose homeland was located in the north of modern-day Iraq, were a fiercely militaristic people who carved out the largest empire in human history at that point in time. They were Alexander the Great and the Romans rolled into one, long before either.

Assyria’s rise was fueled by military and technological innovation. They had one of the first professional standing armies -- it wasn't a bunch of farmers going to war in between growing crops. The Assyrians had tens of thousands troops who drilled year-round and were divided into highly specialized units. They had cavalry and armed chariots in numbers that no one ever had before, as well as teams of engineers who built massive siege engines that could crack even the most fortified walls. They were also one of the first people to use iron instead of bronze in their weapons. When you imagine what these professional killers would do to smaller groups of amateurs with inferior weapons and tactics, it's easy to see how they could have swept through the ancient Middle East.

They were also masters of psychological warfare. The Assyrian armies used fear to win battles before they even happened. This inscription gives a taste of the way they ruled:

I built a pillar at the city gate and I flayed all the chief men who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up inside the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes.  

- King Ashurbipinal (668-622 B.C.)

Assyria conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms, in 721 B.C., and began applying pressure along the new frontiers of their empire. Their ultimate goal was to conquer Egypt, the original superpower in the region. Any smaller nation that had the misfortune to be in their way, like Judah, was in a lot of trouble. The Assyrians forced Hezekiah to strip his palaces of gold and pay a massive tribute to them (2 Kings 18:13-16) after their conquest of Israel, and responded with overwhelming force when he stopped.

The climax of the Book of Isaiah is the seemingly unstoppable march of the Assyrian army towards Jerusalem in 701 B.C. The distance between Jerusalem and Samaria, the former capital of Israel, was only 42 miles. The Assyrians carved out a swath of death and destruction in their wake, sacking 46 Jewish cities in the process:

Why should you be beaten anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? Your whole head is injured, your whole heart afflicted.  

From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness -- only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with olive oil.  

Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers.  

Daughter Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege.  

- Isaiah 1:5-8 

Isaiah is one of the most apocalyptic books in the Bible. It is set in a specific time and place, but uses that setting to tell a far broader story -- the evil of man, the redemption of God, and the ultimate climax of history. The Book of Revelations only fills in the blanks of the rough outline given by Isaiah.

People have always been obsessed with the apocalypse. Every generation of human history has thought the world would come to an end within their lifetime. But it was more than a theoretical exercise for Isaiah and the people of Judah. They were watching the apocalypse move ever closer toward them, as they sat uneasily behind the walls of Jerusalem.

The stakes of the war with the Assyrians could not have been higher: They burned Israel to the ground in an orgy of violence and marched the survivors hundreds of miles through the desert to resettle near the capital of Tigris.

Those survivors are known to history as the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. The Jewish people were originally organized into 12 tribes, each descended from one of the 12 sons of Jacob, one of legendary patriarchs in the Book of Genesis. When they were divided after the death of King Solomon hundreds of years before the events of the Book of Isaiah, 10 of the 12 settled in the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving only two (Judah and Benjamin) in the southern kingdom of Judah. Those 10 tribes were assimilated into the Assyrian Empire and ceased to exist in the years following their conquest. Modern-day Jews are descended from the remaining two tribes.

The Assyrian Empire was the original melting pot. They didn’t have to kill all of the Jews they conquered. The survivors forget who they were and slowly lost their identity. They worshiped Assyrian gods and inter-married over the course of enough generations that it no longer became possible to tell them apart from the average Assyrian. The 10 tribes were erased from history as if they had never existed at all.

Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have become like Gomorrah.

- Isaiah 1:9

The Jewish people should not have survived the Assyrian invasion. They couldn’t field an army that would defeat the Assyrians outside the walls of Jerusalem, and even their walls offered only so much protection against a military machine that practically invented siege warfare. The Jews were to the Assyrians what the Dutch were to the Nazis in World War II.

Americans are still obsessed with the Nazis almost a century after we defeated them. Imagine how afraid of them we would be if they had gone into WWII with an almost unbroken string of military victories that stretched back hundreds of years, conquered Europe, massacred the British people and resettled the survivors into German cities, and then landed armies in North America and marched them to the outskirts of Washington D.C.

We have never had to fear military conquest. But there may be a different kind of Judgment Day in our future. When Al Gore talks about the threat of global warming and how we need to fundamentally change the structure of our society to survive, he is putting a modern spin on what Isaiah was saying 28 centuries earlier. (He even started growing an Old Testament beard at one point).

This is the key parallel. It’s not just that Isaiah was telling his people that their world was coming to an end. They could see that for themselves. He was also telling them that it was their fault:

Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”  

Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the Lord; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.  

- Isaiah 1:2-4 

Isaiah claimed to speak for God himself, and traced his authority back to the very beginning of Jewish society, when God spoke through Moses after the exodus from Egypt. Over the next 700 years, the Jewish people had stopped listening. Now they had no choice but to pay attention.

The threat of the apocalypse has a way of focusing the mind.