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September 11, 2026 |
| Isaiah 3 | ||
In this prophecy, Isaiah talks about 3 particular problems in Jewish society that offend God and will lead them to have bigger problems in the future.
These were certainly not their only problems, but God chose these for his own reasons.
He presents various worthy ideas to his people. One is that the things that you do will come back on you. In line with this, God says their society is upside-down now, but it will be even more upside-down if they don't return to God. They will be conquered and made slaves.
The style of Isaiah 3 is typical of most prophecies, not only Isaiah's, in that a big part of the prophecy, sometimes all of it, is written in a poetic form. Some Bible translations don't preserve that, but some do. The NASB series, including the LSB used here, keeps that structure.
Isaiah 3 has a significant deviation from that form, so I'm going to show the poetic parts in the poetic form, which shows each line in the poem as a line in this study.
When we think of a poem, we think of rhyme and rhythm, but we can't translate them, and they are always lost.
All we can retain is the poetic line structure, but that will let us know when it changes to poetic form, and when it changes back.
Another thing I want you to see is that there are places where you might think that Isaiah is the person speaking; he's not. It's always God speaking. God uses many literary devices, and one of them is God speaking of himself in the third person tense. I'll point those out as we hit them.
Many people misunderstand this. They think that the prophet is the one choosing the words we are reading. He is not. The prophecy is a block of text given by God and dumped into the mind of the prophet, and the prophet writes it down.
We start in the poetic form.
For behold, the Lord, Yahweh of hosts, is going to remove from Jerusalem and Judah
Both supply and support, the whole supply of bread
And the whole supply of water, (Isaiah 3:1)
Here's the first place where God refers to himself in the third person as Lord Yahweh. That is like someone called Bob saying, "Bob did that." Especially at the start of a chapter written by Isaiah, you could think the speaker is Isaiah, but notice that the poetic form is being used. Also, in the fourth verse we'll see that God has changed back to using first person.
Having pointed that out, I'm going to start from verse 1 again.
For behold, the Lord, Yahweh of hosts, is going to remove from Jerusalem and Judah
Both supply and support, the whole supply of bread
And the whole supply of water,
2The mighty man and the man of war,
The judge and the prophet,
The diviner and the elder,
3The commander of fifty and the highly respected man,
The counselor and the wise craftsman,
And the experienced enchanter. (Isaiah 3:1-3)
Through Isaiah, God says he's going to remove from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support. At this time, Jerusalem and Judah are all that is left of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Northern Tribes were taken away by the Assyrians 100 years before, and they were assimilated into the world. All that's left is Jerusalem and Judah, and Bethlehem is part of Judah.
There are those two categories that are going to be removed.
God is saying that he is going to remove almost everything from Jerusalem that they need to survive, certainly everything that makes life safe and enjoyable. From history, we know what happens. All of these classes of people were dragged off to Babylon. In the process of capturing Jerusalem, the invaders ate all the crops and animals they could find.
There were a few people left in Jerusalem, but it was very difficult to make a life there. Those people who were left in Israel mostly lived outside of Jerusalem because they were farmers who grew the crops. They were growing their own food, and they didn't really have a reason to go into Jerusalem. Every reason they might have had for going there was gone.
And I will make young men their princes,
And capricious children will rule over them,
5And the people will be oppressed,
Each one by another, and each one by his neighbor;
The youth will overwhelm the elder
And the dishonorable [against] the honorable. (Isaiah 3:4-5)
God now speaks about the lives of the people who will be taken away to become slaves.
The verse says "and I will", so it's continuing with that same thought, but now it says "I", so we know this is God speaking, not Isaiah. Then we also know that the previous third-person verses were also God speaking.
God will not be uninvolved in their torment. He says he will make sure they experience it. He lists two things that don't seem so bad to us.
Jewish society had great respect for its aged members, for their wisdom. Therefore they were the ones with authority. It was unthinkable that young men would order old men around. That would be an upside-down world for them.
This is a theme we'll see again. Both the upside-downness of their destiny and the upside-downness of their current lives. Being in both, there seems to be a message that one leads to the other.
A family farm or family business would consist of many generations. The father of the family would control it.
God also says that capricious children, that's mischievous children, will order them around. When you're a slave, even the child of the slave-owner's family can tell a slave what to do. A mischievous child might assign frivolous tasks to abuse the slave. A mischievous child could be the bane of your existence as a slave.
That's even more upside down than young men, but it is probably still worse than you think. Who is "them?" It's probably the young men mentioned in the previous sentence. So the mischievous child is ordering around the young Jewish men who are implementing those orders by ordering around the Old Jewish men - a complete disgrace. Completely upside-down. God's point is that there is a way you can avoid that.
God also says the people will be oppressed, each one by another, and each one by his neighbor. The youth will overwhelm the elder, and the dishonorable against the honorable. Because they're going to be living hard lives, they're going to be oppressed by their masters and by their own people. The Jews will be making life harder for each other.
God provides examples, saying young people will abuse the elders and the dishonorable will abuse those who are honorable. Again we see that upside-down society. That wouldn't happen in a Jewish society. God is telling the people what is in their future if they don't change.
Isaiah is going to jump back and forth in time a little bit, from speaking about Israel's present and Israel's future.
When a man grasps his brother in his father’s house, saying,< p>The meaning of these verses is difficult for us to understand because their lives were so different from our lives.
“You have a cloak, you shall be our ruler,
And these ruins will be under your hand,”
7He will protest on that day, saying,
“I will not be your healer,
For in my house there is neither bread nor cloak;
You should not appoint me ruler of the people.” (Isaiah 3:6-7)
God changes focus to the lives of the people who would be left in Israel and makes these points:
God says that they're going to want to choose a king of Jerusalem from among your own people. That would be a natural thing any people would want to do. The royal family and the elite were taken to Babylon, so how would they choose? They would look for the wealthiest person among them. That would be the father of the greatest house, so they would look for the signs of wealth. When they find him, they would say, "You should be king."
But God says they will be so poor that a sign of wealth they would use would be whether a man had a cloak or not. Just having a jacket he can wear would entitle a man to become king. But God says that man would be “king of the ruins” if he took the job ("these ruins will be under your hand,” your control. He would be in charge of fixing up these ruins.
There is more to the verses. You might not have understood the phrase "a man grasps his brother in his father’s house." If you were choosing a king from among the people in a house, that would fall to the father. One brother would not tell another brother that he should be king. That would also be an upside-down thing.
God says a man who received such an offer would think, "No, no, I'm not having anything to do with that." He will say, "No, I have no cloak, and I have no bread. I have nothing, just like the rest of you."
God uses an imagined discourse between people to show the people of Israel how bad things will be in Jerusalem. We know from history that this is what happens. Jeremiah describes Jerusalem after it's destroyed and most of the people have been removed. The Babylonians chose a ruler from among the people, but a bunch of bad people got together, and they murdered that person, and then they ran away so the Babylonians wouldn't kill them. Then all the other people saw them run away, and decided they better get out of there too, and they all head off to Egypt, leaving Jerusalem with even less than it had before.
God begins speaking in the present tense, but this is a prophecy about a time in Isaiah's future. Therefore the intended audience is that future audience, but the people of Isaiah's time can still learn from it.
For Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen,
Because their tongue and their deeds are against Yahweh,
To rebel against His glorious presence.
9The expression of their faces answers against them,
And they declare their sin like Sodom;
They do not even conceal it.
Woe to their soul!
For they have dealt out evil on themselves. (Isaiah 3:8-9)
God is talking about the spiritually stumbled and fallen character of the people of Judah and Jerusalem.
God says that you show that you have rebelled against me by what you say and what you do. There is nothing new in that for us. If a man has two masters, he will hate one and love the other. The things that we love are the things that we chase after and spend our time on. So God sees what a person's heart wants, but that person also shows it to everyone by what he does, what he chases after, and how he speaks about things. So God's message here is that even you can see this in another person.
He continues by saying that, even if they deny it, their faces shout out their sins. He adds that they don't even try to hide it from their faces. They don't care who knows.
Then God says this key phrase that we're going to see again - the evil they have done will come back on them. God is not so much punishing them, but simply allowing the consequences of what they've done to fall back on them. They will experience the disaster that they've created by what they've done.
This is a general statement about the universe. There are consequences for what you say and do. When I was a young boy, homosexuals used to "hide in closets," meaning they would hide what they did so others wouldn't see it. People talked about "coming out of closet," and that it was a risky thing to do because it might mean you'd lose your job or there could be social consequences. Now though, they loudly demand normalization, that they are normal people and should be treated like everyone else, and there's nothing wrong with them.
So that's where we are, and that's where Jerusalem was at the time. We don't know all of the sins going on in Jerusalem, but we know the patterns, and adultery and then homosexuality are in the early stages of it.
Another part of that pattern is the justice system, which used to have places for justice, becomes joyfully used to persecute people and to deny justice to those who deserve it.
Say to the righteous that it will go well with them,
For they will eat the fruit of their deeds.
11Woe to the wicked! It will go badly with him,
For what he has dealt out will be done to him. (Isaiah 3:10-11)
Isaiah jumps back to speaking about the future again. He's going to make the point that God will be just in the consequences that fall on Israel. There are still some righteous people in Israel. Why should they suffer everything that the wicked should suffer?
God says the righteous will still do well throughout all of this collapse and being conquered; the wicked … not so much. We know that God does protect the righteous, from the examples of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and also Daniel. They avoid slaughter, but though they are still made captives and are taken to a foreign land, they live pretty good lives in captivity. God intervenes.
I want to point out something you might have seen, but maybe you didn't. We see plurality in "righteous" and "them," but that becomes "him" and "him." It looks like some things are being contrasted: a plurality versus a singularity. God does subtle things like this. If there is a contrast here, what is the point to that contrast?
To dig into it, I went back to the Hebrew to see what's going on, and the plurality / singularity difference is not real. It is an artifact of a characteristic of Hebrew in verse 10, and the translators are trying to deal with it in a way that will produce readable English.
The highlighted "them" should actually be singular, as "him." The word "righteous" is plural or singular in Hebrew but usually plural in English. So a direct translation would have "the righteous" referred to as "him," which is poor grammar.
The translators fixed this by using "them." That isn't the best solution because it results in an apparent contrast with the "him" and "him" in the next sentence, but that is the least disruptive change. The better way to fix it would be to add a word, as in "say to the righteous person …" The NASB / LSB translations add lots of words in other places, which they mark with italics. I don't know why they didn't do that here.
In summary, these should all be singular. Therefore there is no plural-to-singular contrast.
We do see the repetition here of something we saw in the previous verse - the idea that the things the evil people have done are going to come back on them. We can expand that to "the things that everyone has done will come back on them." Each person will eat the fruit of their deeds. The good things that the righteous have done are going to come back as good things to them.
Next we're going to see the first of three problems mentioned by Isaiah, who is God speaking, of course.
O My people! Their taskmasters are infants,
And women rule over them.
O My people! Those who guide you lead you astray
And swallow up the way of your paths. (Isaiah 3:12)
God has just been saying that the things you do will come back on you. He had previously said they would be ruled over by children and youths. Now he says that already they are ruled over by children and women. Which takes us back to the upside-down world.
Jeremiah speaks more specifically about what God is saying here. After they are conquered, discussions with the people who are left in Jerusalem show that the women were leading the idolatry that was going on in Jerusalem. With that, they were driving the whole family to do the same thing. They were baking cakes and making other offerings to false gods, and they had enlisted their children and husbands to help them in doing that and to do the same things.
They are so upside-down that, in that time, when Jeremiah will say to them, you were destroyed because you did these evil things, the women are going to say, no, we were destroyed because we couldn't sacrifice to our gods because the Babylonians besieged the city, and we no longer had enough food that we could spare any to give to our gods.
That's what God is referring to here. The men are ruled by infants and women. God says that these guides are leading you astray, off the path.
The verse says something strange - your guides swallow up the way of your paths. If you think about it, it's not that hard to figure out. It means that these false guides not only lead you astray, but they destroy the path you should be on. They make it impossible for you to even find what is right.
Yahweh takes His stand to contend,
And stands to judge the peoples.
14Yahweh enters into judgment with the elders of His people and His princes,
“It is you who have consumed the vineyard;
The plunder robbed of the afflicted is in your houses.
15What do you mean by crushing My people
And grinding the face of the afflicted?”
Declares Lord Yahweh of hosts. (Isaiah 3:13-15)
Again, we see Lord Yahweh spoken of in the third person, as though it might be Isaiah speaking from himself, but this is God speaking.
This problem begins differently than the others. The reason appears to be that God needs to emphasize his authority over the group that is being addressed. They are the elders of the people, which would be the heads of tribes by genealogy, and the people that God has put in power, which would be the priests and Levites.
The verse says they have consumed the vineyard. Jesus also used the metaphor of a vineyard, which represented the people, and those in charge of it, who represented the elders and priests. The message here is that those in charge of the vineyard have eaten the entire crop.
God adds, "the plunder is in your houses." It's easy to miss the meaning here. God allocated certain things to the priests from the people. Everything else was to go into God's house. The implication then is that they have used God's authority to plunder (take everything they could) the people, and none of it went into God's house.
The "afflicted" would be the people who have problems that the elders and priests are supposed to adjudicate. So this is also targeted at their justice system. Unjust judgments have drained the people. There are many places in the Bible where God finds that he must address corruption in the justice system. Favoritism and bribes are often mentioned, though nothing specific is described here.
Now it also says "crushing my people," which makes two points. First, God is saying they are my people, not your people. What message are you sending me by doing this? There is an implied threat that God will rise up against the priests and elders to protect his people.
Second, the phrase "Crushing the people" is a cultural reference that anyone would understand at that time, but we don't. It's a reference to crushing grapes. What it means is squeezing everything out of them, in this case squeezing everything out of the people.
At the end of the grape-growing season, they would collect all the grapes and put them in a large stone dish. People would come and stomp on the grapes to get all of the juice out of them. That's the allusion here.
The phrase "grinding the face" is an idiom. It's an expression that no one would understand without help. A grindstone was a spinning stone that was used to grind things. That could be grains, but it could also be a tool for sharpening metal tools. It would never be used on a person's face.
The idea here is that, once a person has given all he has, the priests and elders would keep digging for more they could take. There was no mercy or forgiveness, which are important aspects of the faith.
So the leaders and the elders, especially in their roles as judges, were all taking advantage of the ordinary people, and God rises to defend them.
Moreover, Yahweh said, “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty
And walk with outstretched necks and seductive eyes,
And go along with mincing steps
And tinkle the bangles on their feet,
17Therefore the Lord will smite the skull of the daughters of Zion with scabs,
And Yahweh will make their foreheads bare.” (Isaiah 3:16-17)
The first line of verse 16 is not in poetic form, but the rest of it is. For whatever reason, God has chosen to do it that way.
God talks about these "mincing steps" that the women are taking. That isn't a word or phrase that we use now, and it might not be obvious what's happening or what the problem is. The women have put bangles on their feet that make a tinkling sound when they walk. If they take small (mincing) quick steps, the bangles tinkle more. They are doing this to attract attention to themselves.
The problem here isn't so much the bangles. It's the arrogant (haughty) attitude of the women. We see that God is very offended by this attitude, by what he says he is going to do about it.
The modern church tells its women not to overdo these adornments. It doesn't understand that the problem is deeper than that.
God now transitions from what I've been calling the present-ish tense to the future tense, to what God will do to put an end to this.
God says he's going to give them scabs on their skulls and make their foreheads bare. This needs to be understood in context. The bangles aren't the only thing the women are using to attract attention to themselves. They have decorated their faces and hair. God is saying, try that when your skull is bruised, and your hair is shaved, which will be the consequences of their capture by the Babylonians.
This is just the beginning of what he says is going to happen. He goes into more detail in the next verses.
In that day the Lord will remove the beauty of their anklets, headbands, crescent ornaments, 19 dangling earrings, bracelets, veils, 20 headdresses, ankle chains, sashes, perfume boxes, enchanted charms, 21 finger rings, nose rings, 22 festal robes, outer tunics, cloaks, money purses, 23 hand mirrors, undergarments, turbans, and shawls. (Isaiah 3:18-23)
These verses are not in poetic form at all.
God says through Isaiah that this is what I'm going to do about these women. Remember he's mainly speaking to people one hundred years from his time, but it's a present warning. He wants them to think about what they're doing and why.
Again, these things are not the real problem. They are the things that arrogant women do and want to have. God says he's going to take it all away. When they are captives trudging on dusty roads to a far-away land, they will consider the fancy dresses and other things that were torn off their bodies (speaking of plunder).
The question comes up: how do you "remove the beauty" of something? Isn't a thing just naturally beautiful? Isn't a beautiful sunset just naturally beautiful? No, it isn't. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If beauty is removed from the beholder, then the thing no longer has that beauty.
God is saying he's going to put them in circumstances where they will no longer see these things as beautiful, and they will not be arrogant anymore. They'll be trying to get enough food to feed their families. Their priorities are going to be refocused. All of these things that they currently see as beautiful, they will say, "What a waste of time that was. I shouldn't have done that." In time, they will refocus on God.
God uses an unnecessarily long list here to make a point: the women love these things and themselves, but they don't love me at all.
Oh, wait, God isn't done with his list.
Now it will be that instead of sweet perfume there will be the smell of rot;
Instead of a belt, a rope;
Instead of well-set hair, a plucked-out scalp;
Instead of fine clothes, a donning of sackcloth;
And branding instead of beauty.
25Your men will fall by the sword
And your mighty ones in battle.
26And her gates will lament and mourn,
And deserted she will sit on the ground. (Isaiah 3:24-26)
God does something quite clever here … clever by human standards, I suppose. The first verse is clearly speaking about the women, but the next verse is speaking about both the women and the city of Jerusalem, and the last verse is only about Jerusalem, which is how this prophecy started. Remember God talked about Jerusalem losing both supply and support. So, God has segued from women to the city.
God speaks to the people of Jerusalem specifically and also all the people of Judah. He says that they are already in an upside-down, unnatural order and that will lead to an even worse upside-down, unnatural order. He lists three problems that they currently have.
God says that, if this continues, Jerusalem and Judah will lose all their supporting people and all their supply lines. They will be conquered and slaughtered, and the remnant will be taken captive, where they will be in a worse upside-down, unnatural order.
This is part of an idea that we saw echoed in the verses. The things you do will come back on you. The righteous will prosper; the wicked will suffer.
Instead of the elders being the ones who teach the young men, who help the children, in this order, the children of their owners will give the Jewish youths their orders, and the Jewish youths will give their elders their orders.
The big message here is that turning away from God results in a civilization that begins to crumble and cannot stop itself from crumbling further. Society shows these signs of disorder as the natural order is turned upside-down. The powerful and wealthy begin preying on the powerless and poor. The women begin focusing on themselves.
These signs are part of a pattern that appears in all civilizations that are in decline.
Judah had collapsed before the Babylonians arrived to push its empty hulk into the ditch. So, we're going to start with the question: are civilizations similar when they get to that empty hulk stage?
Previously we've looked back at civilizations from recent times that were once powerful, but are now nothing special. We saw that there are big differences in how they get there, but there is a pattern. One pattern you see is increasing moral decay. The Roman Empire is the best-known example. They started as a moral people but were very corrupt at the end.
When we say "moral" here, we don't mean that they were followers of God. They were, at least, followers of "Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff." Fairness and justice and a sense of the Golden Rule were their standards.
But as a civilization becomes successful, it becomes more and more wealthy, and it becomes more and more morally bankrupt. Wealth gives them the time and ability to explore all deviancy. Any kind of pleasure is up for grabs, and everyone chases after that.
In these morally decaying societies, another thing that is seen is a change in the focus of what's important and what's unimportant. Especially in government, they begin to focus on things that are unimportant, and they ignore the things that are important, like keeping up the society by maintaining bridges and roads. Instead of doing those things that need to be done to maintain their society, they waste their resources on foolish things, make short-sighted laws that cripple the country, and make bad deals with other countries.
Many people have likened American society to Roman society. At the end of the Roman period, the Roman government was focused on keeping the people happy by providing them with free bread and free circuses, as they called them. Circuses came in different forms, from the ordinary theatre to blood sports to horse racing. The government kept the people occupied with these to distract them from problems such as insufficient food, unmaintained infrastructure, and so on. They understood that unhappy people sometimes rise up and kill their leaders.
But they couldn't afford to keep doing that. They eventually overspent themselves to the point where they devalued their currency, which caused price inflation, which meant they couldn't afford as much as before, and couldn't afford their militaries, whose strength had brought valuables into the country and made it rich.
That's the general pattern. Near the end, there's a small wealthy elite and a large number of poor people. Each society deals with the effects differently, but it doesn't really matter. The society has lost its moral compass and cannot make the decisions it needs to make to get out of the situation.
I want to touch on a little bit of fiction, something called The Hunger Games. Their society is in this pattern. There is a small group in the country who are the wealthy, who live in The Capitol. They have the money, the technology, the medicines, lots of food, and everything else. All of the other areas have none of those things. The poor had revolted in the past, but had been crushed, which resulted in even harsher treatment.
I want to point out the change in what's important and unimportant to the people in The Capitol. The people are superficial; they dress exotically, waste what they have, and their focus is on pleasure.
For this movie, these outfits were intentionally meant to be garish, so that the viewers would recognize them as way overdone. I don't think real people would ever really dress like that. But nonetheless, that shows that the author of the series and the director of the movies knew what a collapsing society looks like, which makes our point for us.
Our excessive fashions are not so different from theirs. I didn't pair these pictures together. Someone else has noticed that there's a similarity between the movie and our society.
When a society begins to focus on these kinds of things, instead of on managing society wisely, it’s in trouble. The Judean society of Isaiah 3 didn't have the ability to make such clothing, but clothing isn't the problem. They have lost track of what's important, in their case God, and they are chasing after other things.
We can think of it as: they turned away from God, so God caused things to smash them. But we're going to see in this study that that's not exactly the right way to look at it. When people turn away from God, they are turning into this pattern of collapse, where they start to live stupid lives and do stupid things. Ultimately, somebody sees them as weak and attacks them, smashes them, and they're done. So the consequences of your actions coming back on you is a better way to think of it.
I think you'll see that our society is showing all these signs of decay.