Isaiah 17

Isaiah saw doom coming for everyone in the ancient Middle East. The Jewish people weren’t different from their neighbors who worshipped other gods. All had rebelled against God. All would suffer the same fate. He would use Assyria to clear out the whole region.

Syria was one of the first to fall. Israel was right behind them. The two had been linked ever since forming an alliance to invade Judah and install a puppet king in 727 BC.

It was a shocking betrayal of a fellow Jewish kingdom. The original kingdom of Israel had split in half after the death of King Solomon in 931 BC. The northern one kept the name and 10 of the 12 tribes, while the southern kingdom of Judah, where Isaiah lived, had only two.

The prophet didn't hold his tongue when their invasion failed. Israel stood with Syria so they would fall with them too:

“The fortified city will disappear from Ephraim [Israel], and royal power from Damascus; the remnant of Aram [Syria] will be like the glory of the Israelites,” declares the Lord Almighty.  

- Isaiah 17:3 

He was proven right when Israel was conquered by Assyria in 721 BC. The survivors went down in history as the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” after they were resettled across the Assyrian Empire and assimilated. All kinds of groups from all over the world have claimed to be their descendants. The Mormons even think they wound up in North America.

But Isaiah did offer them some consolation. God still had a plan for their people:

"In that day the glory of Jacob will fade; the fat of his body will waste away. It will be as when reapers harvest the standing grain, gathering the grain in their arms — as when someone gleans heads of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.  

Yet some gleanings will remain, as when an olive tree is beaten, leaving two or three olives on the topmost branches, four or five on the fruitful boughs,” declares the Lord, the God of Israel.  

- Isaiah 17:4-6 

There would be a few survivors from Israel who would make their way into Judah, just as there would be a few from Judah who would survive the Babylonian exile a century later. And from that tiny remnant, God would rebuild Jewish culture, send them a Messiah, and change the world.

It would be like when an olive tree was harvested. Olives were one of the pillars of the Jewish economy in those days. They were a symbol of God’s relationship with His people. It took a long time for an olive tree to bloom. The land had to be cultivated for years before they would yield a crop. Only a few olives would be left after the harvest was finished. The rest would be taken away.

In this analogy, God was not pleased with what the trees had produced. He had given His people a land to call their own and they had produced a society that was just as corrupt and unjust as everyone else around them.

The only thing left to do was start over:

So the Lord will cut off from Israel both head and tail, both palm branch and reed in a single day; the elders and dignitaries are the head, the prophets who teach lies are the tail. Those who guide this people mislead them, and those who are guided are led astray.  

— Isaiah 9:14-16 

Most Biblical scholars believe that Judaism as we know it began during the Babylonian Exile. They view the adoption of monotheism as a gradual process that took hundreds of years and only became complete when the Jews came into contact with those ideas in Babylon.

The Old Testament becomes revisionist history in their view, turning a far more complicated story of religious evolution into one of good and evil that the vast majority of Jews at the time it was written would not have recognized. But here's the key point: Just because they wouldn't have recognized it doesn't mean that it's not true.

It's all a matter of interpretation. The kings of Israel and Judah who worshipped gods besides God saw themselves as acknowledging spiritual realities and uniting nations that included many people of non-Jewish descent. They saw prophets like Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah as dangerous zealots who represented the beliefs of only a small minority of people.

And they were right. Eljiah even complains to God that he is the only prophet left in all of Israel at one point. In that sense, the modern scholars and the writers of the Old Testament are saying the exact same thing.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that most of the Jewish people between the exodus from Egypt (around 1300 BC) and the Babylonian exile (around 600 BC) didn't actually worship God. Who wants to bother with following all the laws in the Old Testament when you could pick and choose from the religious practices of your neighbors and find a belief system that flatters your ego and doesn’t ask you to make personal sacrifices? Why wander through the desert for 40 years when there were get rich quick schemes all around you?

It was only when they were stripped of their land and forced into poverty in Babylon that they took God’s demands seriously. This is how historian Paul Johnson describes the process in his landmark work A History of The Jews:

Thus scattered, leaderless, without a state or any of the normal supportive apparatus provided by their own government, the Jews were forced to find alternative means to preserve their special identity. 

Hence it was during the Exile that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion. Circumcision, which distinguished them ineffaceably from the surrounding pagans, was insisted upon rigorously and the act became a ceremony and so part of the Jewish life-cycle and liturgy.  

It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet. The laws were now studied, read aloud, and memorized.  

The Exile was short in the sense that it lasted only a half century after the final fall of Judah. Yet its creative force was overwhelming. 

Or, to put it another way:

At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. 

- Isaiah 17:7 

The Book of Isaiah is essentially the DVD commentary from the director of the movie. God said what He would do and why He was doing it. Read it closely and you will see that not only were most of the criticisms of Biblical scholars anticipated, God was making them, too.

And long after modern scholarship is forgotten, people will still be reading Isaiah and learning those lessons from him.

Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.  

- Psalm 2:1-4