The Axe Boasts and the Forest Falls

“Decree unrighteous decrees” is literally “engrave engravings of iniquity”, the verb for cutting letters into a surface. This woe continues the six woes of 5:8-22 and completes them as a seventh. The officials who write and the scribes who copy are both named, so the wrong runs from the drafting to the fair copy.

“Turn aside... from judgment” is the phrase for bending a lawsuit, forbidden in Exodus 23:6, “thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause”, and charged against the courts in Amos 5:12. God calls the poor “my people”, so the officials are robbing the people of the one who sends the woe.

“Visitation” is pequddah, an inspection by a superior who comes to settle accounts. “Glory” is kavod, literally weight, and it often means wealth, as when Laban’s sons say Jacob has “gotten all this glory” out of their father’s flocks (Genesis 31:1). A heavy purse is hard to carry while fleeing.

“Without me” renders an obscure Hebrew phrase, and a famous nineteenth century conjecture redivided the letters to read “Beltis crouches, Osiris is shattered”, two foreign gods falling. Few now accept it. The refrain sounds for the fourth and last time in the poem, and then the book leaves Israel and turns to Assyria.

“O” is the same Hebrew word, hoy, that was rendered “Woe” in verse 1. Assyria stands under a woe of its own from its first mention. Rod and staff are the pair already used of Israel’s oppressor in 9:4; the tools of the oppressor turn out to have been in someone else’s hand.

“To take the spoil, and to take the prey” is in Hebrew lishlol shalal velavoz baz, the very words that make up the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz (8:1). The boy’s name is spelled out as Assyria’s commission. “Hypocritical” is chaneph again, godless, the charge of 9:17, and treading like street mud is how a conqueror shows contempt.

The heart is named twice, once for what it does not think and once for what it holds. Assyria’s policy was to uproot conquered peoples and resettle them far away, which is exactly how the northern tribes vanished from their land (2 Kings 17:6). “Cut off nations” describes that policy in two words.

The boast may rest on a pun: the Hebrew sar, “prince”, sounds like the Assyrian sharru, “king”. The empire’s governors had often been kings of the lands they now administered. An Assyrian royal title was “king of kings”, and this line is that title turned into a rhetorical question.

Each pair names a newer conquest beside an older one, and the list runs from north to south toward Jerusalem. Carchemish fell to Sargon II in 717 BC, which dates the speech after then. Hamath and Arpad are paired again when the Rabshakeh boasts at Jerusalem’s wall (36:19, 37:13).

“Idols” is elilim, Isaiah’s contemptuous word that sounds like the Hebrew for god but means nothings (2:8, 2:18). The king’s reasoning is a sum: kingdoms with finer images than Jerusalem’s fell, so Jerusalem will too. The sentence breaks off unfinished, and the next verse starts it again.

Samaria is already in the past tense, conquered with her idols, which puts this speech after 722 BC. The taunt is only half false: under Ahaz, Jerusalem had copied a Damascus altar and shut the temple doors (2 Kings 16:10-18; 2 Chronicles 28:24), and Isaiah 2:8 had already said the land was “full of idols”.

“Performed his whole work” uses the weaver’s verb for cutting the finished cloth from the loom, the word Hezekiah uses in 38:12, “he will cut me off with pining sickness”. Assyria’s use ends when the weaving ends. “High looks” recalls 2:11, “the lofty looks of man shall be humbled.”

Six first person claims crowd two verses: my hand, my wisdom, I am prudent, I removed, I robbed, I put down. Moving a boundary stone was a curse in Deuteronomy 27:17; Assyria moved whole peoples. “Like a valiant man” can also be read “like a bull”, since the Hebrew abbir covers both.

Deuteronomy 22:6-7 lets a traveller take eggs from a nest only if he lets the mother bird go. The king takes the whole nest, and the mother does not even flap. He is pictured as a boy on a country walk robbing nests, with the world for his hedgerow.

“As if it were no wood” names the man who holds the tool as “not-wood”, the one thing in the scene that is not timber. The book returns to the same kind of question in 45:9, “Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?”, there aimed at Israel rather than an empire.

“Leanness” is a wasting sickness in the well-fed body of the army. The Hebrew sets a sound play under the glory: kavod and yeqod, glory and burning. The book records its own fulfilment in 37:36, where a hundred and eighty five thousand in the Assyrian camp are dead by morning.

“The light of Israel” occurs as a title only here; its partner, the Holy One of Israel, appears more often in Isaiah than in the rest of the Bible put together. The briers and thorns that fed the fire of 9:18 were Israel’s; these are Assyria’s, and the same fire takes them “in one day”.

“Both soul and body” is literally from soul to flesh, the tree’s life and its wood together. The last clause is obscure; the King James links noses to nes, a banner, but it more likely means a sick man wasting away, carrying on the leanness of verse 16.

A boy could write: in Judges 8:14 Gideon catches a young man of Succoth, and he writes down for him the names of seventy seven elders. Here the list a boy could keep is the number of trees left in Assyria’s forest, and the forest was the army.

“Stay upon” means to lean on. Ahaz had leaned on Assyria, sending Tiglath-pileser silver and gold with the message “I am thy servant and thy son” (2 Kings 16:7-8). The power he paid to rescue him became the one that struck the land. “In truth” is be’emet, faithfully, the root of amen.

The verse opens with the two Hebrew words of the boy’s name, she’ar yashuv, and then sets she’ar ya’aqov, “the remnant of Jacob”, beside it, a near rhyme. The sign child of 7:3, taken along to meet Ahaz, has become a sentence with a destination.

“As the sand of the sea” is the measure of the promise to Abraham in Genesis 22:17, turned here into a warning that numbers alone save no one. “Overflow” is the verb used of the Assyrian river in 8:8. What floods the land in the end is righteousness.

“A consumption, even determined” is a fixed pair of words that the book repeats in 28:22, “a consumption, even determined upon the whole earth”, and that Daniel 9:27 takes up. “Lord GOD” is how the King James prints Adonai followed by the divine name, using capitals for the name as it does with LORD.

“Be not afraid” is the command given to Ahaz at the conduit in 7:4, “Fear not”. “My people that dwellest in Zion” is one of the gentlest addresses in these chapters. “After the manner of Egypt” means the rod of the slave-driver, the treatment Israel knew in Exodus 5.

“A very little while” is the phrase the book uses again in 29:17, “a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field”. “Indignation” is za’am, the anger that curses. The same anger that burned against Israel is redirected, and its object becomes Assyria’s destruction.

Oreb, whose name means raven, was the Midianite prince killed at the rock that took his name (Judges 7:25). The rod upon the sea is Moses’ staff stretched over the waters (Exodus 14:16). The Assyrian lifted his staff “after the manner of Egypt” in verse 24; the LORD lifts his in the same manner.

Burden, shoulder and yoke come back verbatim from 9:4, and the book repeats them again in 14:25 of Assyria broken on the LORD’s mountains: “his yoke depart from off them, and his burden depart from off their shoulders.” The bar that pressed on Judah will lift in the same words each time.

Aiath is Ai, the town of Joshua 7-8, about ten miles north of Jerusalem. Michmash is where Jonathan and his armour-bearer climbed on hands and feet to rout a Philistine garrison (1 Samuel 14). The army sets down its heavy baggage there to move faster over the gorge ahead.

“The passage” is the gorge of Michmash, named with the same word in 1 Samuel 13:23. Geba lies on its south side. Ramah was Samuel’s town and Gibeah was Saul’s capital, so the line runs through the country of Israel’s first kingdom. Each verb comes closer: they cross, they camp, a town trembles, a town runs.

Gallim was home to Phalti, the man Saul gave Michal to (1 Samuel 25:44). Anathoth, three miles from Jerusalem, is Jeremiah’s town (Jeremiah 1:1), and “poor Anathoth”, aniyyah anathoth, is a sound play. Laish here is most likely a village near the city, not the northern Laish that became Dan.

Neither town has been located with certainty, and both names read like jokes: Madmenah means dung heap and Gebim means cisterns or pits. The verbs change from the army’s movement to the villagers’, the people packing up before the troops arrive.

Nob was the priests’ town where David took Goliath’s sword and Saul had eighty five priests killed (1 Samuel 21-22). It stood on a height north or east of the city with a clear view of the temple mount. A clenched fist shaken at a city is the gesture of a besieger sure of his prize.

“With terror” is ma’aratsah, a crashing force, from the same root as the “dread” of 8:13 that Judah was told to feel toward the LORD alone. “Lop the bough” uses a word for the leafy crown of a tree. The high and the haughty fall exactly as 2:12-13 said, beginning with the cedars.

Iron is the axe, the tool the Assyrian was in verse 15, now swung at him. In 37:24 Sennacherib boasts that he climbed Lebanon and cut down its tall cedars; the forest he felled becomes the forest he is. “A mighty one” is addir, the majestic one, a word used of the LORD in 33:21.