The Servants' Future Is Not the Rebels' Future

The verbs are tolerative: “I let myself be sought, I let myself be found”, God making himself available to people who never asked. “Behold me” is hinneni, said twice. “A nation that was not called by my name” picks up the prayer’s own words in 63:19, “they were not called by thy name”; the Greek reads “did not call on my name”.

Spreading out the hands was the posture of prayer; in 1:15 God refused to look when the people “spread forth your hands”. Now God stands with open hands before them, like a petitioner. “Rebellious” is sorer, the word for the stubborn son of Deuteronomy 21:18. “Their own thoughts” recalls 55:8, “my thoughts are not your thoughts”.

“To my face” is al panai, the phrase of the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). The Law allowed altars only of earth or unhewn stone (Exodus 20:24–25); altars of fired brick break that rule, and brick was Babel’s building material (Genesis 11:3). The gardens are the sacred groves of 1:29.

Sitting among graves and spending nights in “the monuments”, hidden places or tombs, points to seeking oracles from the dead through dreams, the practice warned against in 8:19. Pork was forbidden in Leviticus 11:7. “Abominable things” is piggul, the Law’s term for sacrificial meat kept past its time (Leviticus 7:18).

The English phrase “holier than thou” comes from this verse. The Hebrew likely means “I would make you holy”, holiness treated as a charge that passes by touch, the way Ezekiel 44:19 has priests change garments “they shall not sanctify the people with their garments”. These worshippers think their rites make them untouchable. A “smoke in my nose” is the reverse of a sweet savour.

“It is written before me” pictures a record kept in the king’s presence, like the chronicles read to Ahasuerus on his sleepless night, where Mordecai’s deed was found (Esther 6:1–2). The “bosom” is the fold of a robe above the belt, used as a pocket; payment is poured into it as grain was measured into Ruth’s veil (Ruth 3:15).

The hilltop shrines are the ones Hosea 4:13 describes: “They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills.” “Measure” is the grain dealer’s verb, and “work” is pe’ullah, the word for wages that 61:8 promised to pay faithfully; these wages too are paid, measured out into the bosom of verse 6.

“Destroy it not”, al tashchitehu, is almost the phrase in the headings of Psalms 57, 58, 59 and 75, “Al-taschith”, which may name a tune. Many commentators think the saying about the cluster was a line from a vintage song. “New wine” is tirosh, the fresh juice still in the grape, visible in a single good bunch among spoilt ones.

After chapter 53 the singular Servant disappears, and from 54:17 onward the book speaks of “servants” in the plural; this chapter uses the word seven times. “My mountains” means the whole hill country of Israel, as in 14:25, not only the temple mount. The inheritor comes “out of Judah”, the tribe of the kings.

Sharon is the coastal plain on the west, and the valley of Achor lies near Jericho on the east, so the promise spans the land from sea to Jordan. Achor, “trouble”, was where Achan was stoned (Joshua 7:24–26), and Hosea 2:15 had already promised it would become “a door of hope”.

A god named Gad survives in the place name Baal-gad under Mount Hermon (Joshua 11:17), and Leah’s cry at a son’s birth, “A troop cometh”, puns on the same word, good fortune (Genesis 30:11). Meni is found only here. Spreading a table for a god was a known rite; Jeremiah 7:18 has families baking cakes for the queen of heaven.

The charge “when I called, ye did not answer; when I spake, ye did not hear” returns word for word in 66:4, and Jeremiah uses it of the temple crowd (Jeremiah 7:13). “That wherein I delighted not” uses chaphets, the verb of delight that ran through chapter 58. They will kneel, not in worship but for the sword.

Three times “behold” splits a sentence down the middle, servants on one side and rebels on the other, and verse 14 adds a fourth. The pairs reverse Deuteronomy 28:47–48, where Israel, having not served the LORD “with joyfulness”, serves its enemies “in hunger, and in thirst”. Eating and drinking pick up the harvest oath of 62:8–9.

“Vexation of spirit” is literally “a breaking of spirit”. “Howl” is yalal, the wailing the Book of Isaiah assigned to foreign nations under judgment: Babylon (13:6), Moab (15:2), the ships of Tarshish (23:1). The rebels inside Israel are handed the lament of Israel’s enemies.

A name left “for a curse” becomes a formula other people swear with. Jeremiah records one: “The LORD make thee like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire” (Jeremiah 29:22). The pronouns switch from “ye” to a singular “thee”, as though the rebels are addressed as one man.

“The God of truth” is literally “the God of Amen”, a title found only here, twice over. Amen is the word said to confirm what is true, and Revelation 3:14 names Christ “the Amen, the faithful and true witness”. “Blesseth himself” is the form of Genesis 22:18, where the nations bless themselves by Abraham’s seed.

“Create” is bara, the verb of Genesis 1:1, and it comes three times in these two verses; the pair heaven and earth comes straight from that first verse as well. “The former shall not be remembered” extends 43:18–19: “Remember ye not the former things... Behold, I will do a new thing.”

“A rejoicing” and “a joy” are abstract nouns, gilah and masos: the city is not merely made glad, it is made out of gladness. The command “be ye glad” comes before the thing to be glad about is described, so the joy is ordered in advance. Bara, the verb of creating the cosmos, is here used of making a city.

“The voice of weeping” is the sound Jeremiah would hear in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31:15), and “crying” is the outcry of the wronged that God heard from Sodom and from Egypt. Both sounds are named precisely so they can be said never to be heard again. God’s own joy comes first in the verse.

“An infant of days” is a baby who lives only days. “Filled his days” recalls the covenant promise of Exodus 23:26, “the number of thy days I will fulfil”. The ordinary span in Psalm 90:10 is “threescore years and ten”; the “child” who dies at a hundred is na’ar, the word for a lad.

The promise undoes a named covenant curse: “thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes” (Deuteronomy 28:30). The Law also sent home from battle any man who had planted a vineyard and not yet eaten from it (Deuteronomy 20:6).

Olive trees and terebinths in the land live for centuries, and the Greek translation made the link explicit: “as the days of the tree of life”. “Long enjoy” is the verb for wearing something out, used of the clothes that “waxed not old” in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 8:4): the elect will use their work until it is worn through.

“In vain” is lariq, for emptiness, the complaint of the servant in 49:4: “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought.” “Bring forth for trouble” means bearing children only to lose them to sudden disaster; the word is behalah, sudden terror. Both labour and childbirth, the two sorrows of Genesis 3:16–17, are touched.

In 58:9 the order was call, then answer: “Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer.” Here the answer overtakes the call. Daniel later records exactly this timing: “At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth” (Daniel 9:23), the reply dispatched before the prayer was finished.

The verse compresses 11:6–9 and quotes two of its lines word for word: the lion eating straw like the ox, and “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain”. What changes is the ending. Chapter 11 closed with the earth full of the knowledge of the LORD; this one sets the serpent and its dust in that place.