A Child's Name and a Flood at the Neck

The “great roll” is gillayon, a flat writing surface, and the same word appears in 3:23 among the fine ladies’ “glasses”, their polished mirrors. A “man’s pen” means an ordinary stylus and common lettering, so any passer-by could read it. The Hebrew writes “for Maher-shalal-hash-baz”, the form used to label property.

Two witnesses satisfy the rule of Deuteronomy 19:15. Uriah the priest is most likely the Urijah of 2 Kings 16:10-16, who copied a Damascus altar for Ahaz on the king’s order. “Faithful” here means credible in court, not devout, and a royal favourite made an unimpeachable signature.

Isaiah’s wife is called “the prophetess”, whether for a gift of her own or for her marriage the text does not say. The name was written in verse 1 before the child existed; only after the birth is the tablet’s label put on a living boy. Isaiah already had one son with a sign name, Shear-jashub (7:3).

“My father” and “my mother” are among the first words a child says, around the end of the first year. The timetable held: Tiglath-pileser III took Damascus in 732 BC and stripped the northern kingdom of Galilee and Gilead in the same campaign, a decade before Samaria itself fell.

A brief hinge, but it marks the passage as first person. From 6:1 to 8:18 Isaiah speaks as “I” and “me”, a memoir of the Ahaz years set inside a book that elsewhere speaks of him in the third person, and the word “again” links this oracle to the one just recorded.

Shiloah was the channel carrying water from the Gihon spring along the slope of the city of David, before Hezekiah cut his tunnel; John 9:7 knows the pool as Siloam. Pekah is again denied his own name and called only “Remaliah’s son”, as in 7:4, 7:5 and 7:9.

In Hebrew prose “the river” with no other name means the Euphrates, Assyria’s own river. Isaiah removes any doubt by naming the king outright. Assyrian royal inscriptions liked to compare their armies to a flood that sweeps a land flat, so the image turns Assyria’s own boast against Judah.

The water stops at the neck, which leaves the head, Jerusalem, above it. That is how 701 BC went: Sennacherib claims forty six walled towns of Judah, but not the capital. The picture then turns from river to bird, “wings” spread across the whole country, and the land is addressed as Immanuel’s own.

“Broken in pieces” is the verb already used of Ephraim in 7:8, now turned on every nation that gathers against Judah. It sounds three times. The doubled “gird yourselves” reads like a taunt, inviting the armies to arm themselves and telling them in the same breath what the arming will earn.

“God is with us” is the Hebrew immanu el, the child’s name of 7:14 now spoken as a plain sentence. “It shall not stand” echoes what was said of Aram’s plot against Judah in 7:7. Counsel and word, the two things verse 10 names, are exactly what the nations cannot make hold.

“With a strong hand” is the language Ezekiel uses of the prophetic grip, when “the hand of the LORD was strong upon me” (Ezekiel 3:14). Isaiah is not persuaded out of the crowd’s path; he is taken hold of. The plural “ye” in the next verse shows that the instruction includes his followers.

“Confederacy” is qesher, the word for a treasonous plot, as when Athaliah tears her clothes and cries “Treason, Treason” (2 Kings 11:14). Either Judah was calling the Aram-Israel alliance a conspiracy or it was calling Isaiah’s opposition treason. Some scholars read qodesh, “holy thing”, to match the next verse.

“Sanctify” means to treat as holy, carrying on the seraphim’s threefold “Holy” of 6:3. “Dread” is ma’arits, the one who makes you tremble. First Peter 3:14-15 quotes the verse almost whole, “be not afraid of their terror... but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts”, to Christians facing hostility.

A “gin” in 1611 English was a trap, short for engine, and has nothing to do with the drink. “Both the houses of Israel”, the northern kingdom and Judah together, is an unusual phrase for this date. The sanctuary, a place to run to, sits in the same sentence as the stone that trips.

Five verbs follow one another like a man falling down a stair. The book repeats the chain almost word for word in 28:13, where the rulers of Jerusalem “fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken”. “Many”, not all: the verse leaves room for the ones who do not stumble.

A scroll was tied with cord and sealed with clay to keep its text unaltered until it was opened. “My disciples” is limmudai, “my taught ones”, a word the book comes back to in 50:4, “the tongue of the learned”, and 54:13, “all thy children shall be taught of the LORD”.

“Hideth his face” is the threat of Deuteronomy 31:17-18, where God warns that he will hide his face from a people who turn to other gods. The last verb, qiwwah, “look for”, is the one in 40:31, “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength”. Isaiah practises the waiting before he preaches it.

Every name in the house is a message. Isaiah means “the LORD saves”, Shear-jashub “a remnant shall return”, Maher-shalal-hash-baz “swift spoil, speedy prey”. “Dwelleth” is shakan, the verb of the tabernacle, from which the later word Shekinah was formed for God’s settled presence.

“Peep” is the chirping of a bird, the same verb as in 10:14, “none... opened the mouth, or peeped”. Isaiah hears the séance as twittering. In 29:4 the voice of humiliated Jerusalem will “whisper out of the dust” in the same thin way, “as of one that hath a familiar spirit”.

“The law and the testimony” picks up the two things bound and sealed in verse 16. “No light” is literally “no dawn”, shachar, the first grey of morning. Those who consult the dead will not see day break, which prepares the “great light” of 9:2.

“Hardly bestead” is 1611 English for hard pressed, badly placed; bestead means situated. Cursing king and God together is exactly what Exodus 22:28 forbids. The Hebrew could also mean swearing “by their king and by their God”, and some hear in “their king”, malkam, the god Milcom.

“Dimness” translates me’uph, and the next verse answers with its twin, mu’aph: “the dimness shall not be such”. In Hebrew Bibles that next verse is still 8:23, so the chapter break falls one line later there. The eye looked up in verse 21 and down here, and meets darkness both ways.