Isaiah 17: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter is a message of judgment against Damascus, the capital of Syria, and against Ephraim, the northern kingdom of Israel. Both are said to lose their fortified cities and their power, with only a small remnant left, like a few olives after a tree is beaten. In that day, the text says, people will look to their Maker instead of to altars and objects they made themselves, because they had forgotten the God who saved them. The chapter ends with roaring nations that God rebukes: by evening there is terror, and by morning they are gone.

Claim by Claim

1. 17:1
   • This is a pronouncement of judgment concerning Damascus.
   • Damascus is being removed from being a city.
   • Damascus will become a heap of ruins.
2. 17:2
   • The cities of Aroer are abandoned.
   • Those cities will belong to flocks.
   • The flocks will lie down there.
   • No one will frighten the flocks.
3. 17:3
   • The fortified city will cease from Ephraim.
   • The kingdom will cease from Damascus.
   • The remnant of Aram will also cease.
   • The remnant of Aram will be like the glory of the children of Israel.
   • The LORD of hosts declares this.
4. 17:4
   • In that day the glory of Jacob will be brought low.
   • The fatness of Jacob's flesh will grow lean.
5. 17:5
   • It will be like a reaper gathering standing grain.
   • It will be like a reaper harvesting ears of grain with his arm.
   • It will be like someone gleaning ears of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.
6. 17:6
   • Gleanings will be left in it.
   • This will be like the beating of an olive tree.
   • Two or three berries will be left at the top of the highest branch.
   • Four or five will be left on the fruitful branches of the tree.
   • The LORD, the God of Israel, declares this.
7. 17:7
   • In that day a man will look to his Maker.
   • His eyes will look to the Holy One of Israel.
8. 17:8
   • He will not look to the altars.
   • The altars are the work of his own hands.
   • He will not look at what his own fingers have made.
   • He will not look at the sacred poles of Asherah.
   • He will not look at the incense altars.
9. 17:9
   • In that day his fortified cities will be like an abandoned place.
   • It is unclear whether the abandoned thing they resemble is a forsaken woodland thicket or a forsaken topmost bough.
   • That place was abandoned before the children of Israel.
   • It is unclear whether it was abandoned because of the children of Israel or left to them.
   • There will be desolation.
10. 17:10
    • You have forgotten the God of your salvation.
    • You have not remembered the rock of your refuge.
    • Therefore you plant pleasant plantings.
    • You sow it with the cuttings of a foreign vine.
11. 17:11
    • On the day you plant, you make your planting grow.
    • In the morning you make your seed blossom.
    • The harvest comes to a heap in a day of sickness and incurable pain.
    • It is unclear whether the harvest is piled into a heap or flees away.
12. 17:12
    • Woe to the tumult of many peoples.
    • They roar like the roaring of the seas.
    • Woe to the uproar of nations.
    • They rumble like the rumbling of mighty waters.
13. 17:13
    • The nations rumble like the rumbling of many waters.
    • God rebukes them.
    • They flee far away.
    • They are chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind.
    • They are chased like whirling dust before a windstorm.
14. 17:14
    • At evening time there is terror.
    • Before morning they are gone.
    • This is the portion of those who plunder us.
    • This is the lot of those who rob us.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

17:1

"Burden" in the King James renders a Hebrew word (massa) used as a technical label for a prophetic pronouncement, usually one announcing doom against a nation; the same word elsewhere means a load carried on the back. Damascus was the capital of Aram (Syria), the kingdom immediately north-east of Israel. Around 735–732 BC Damascus and the northern kingdom of Israel were allied against Assyria, which is why the two are addressed together throughout this chapter.

17:2

The location of Aroer here is uncertain. Two known towns of that name lie in Moab and Gilead, far south of Damascus, so some take the reference to be to otherwise unrecorded villages in Aramean territory; a few ancient versions read the line differently altogether ("forsaken for ever"). Flocks lying down undisturbed is a standing image for land emptied of people: pasture where houses used to be.

17:3

"Ephraim" was the largest tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel, and its name is regularly used for that whole kingdom, as distinct from Judah in the south. "Syria" translates Aram, the Aramean kingdom centered on Damascus. "The LORD of hosts" (rendered "LORD of Armies") translates a title meaning commander of armies (either Israel's armies or the heavenly ones. LORD in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, which Jewish tradition did not pronounce aloud. The last line is barbed: Syria's survivors will be as glorious as Israel's glory) which, as the next verse says, is about to fade to nothing.

17:4

"Jacob" is the ancestor whose twelve sons gave their names to the tribes, so his name is used for the nation descended from him, here the northern kingdom. Fat on the body is an ancient image of wealth and strength, not of overeating; the reverse, a body wasting thin, pictures a nation stripped of resources.

17:5

The Valley of Rephaim is a fertile plain just south-west of Jerusalem, known for its grain. Gleaning is the practice of going over a harvested field to pick up the stalks the reapers missed; Israelite law reserved these leftovers for the poor. The picture is of a field after the reapers have passed: almost nothing remains standing.

17:6

Olives were harvested by beating the branches with long poles, which left a few fruits clinging out of reach at the top and on the outer twigs. Those few were what the poor were entitled to collect. The numbers are deliberately small, a survival, but a meager one.

17:7

"The Holy One of Israel" is Isaiah's characteristic title for God, used far more in this book than anywhere else in the Hebrew scriptures. "Holy" here carries the sense of set apart and utterly other, not simply morally good.

17:8

Asherah poles were wooden objects, carved poles or living trees, set up beside altars, associated with the goddess Asherah; the King James calls them "groves" because early translators took the Hebrew to mean a stand of trees. The other objects (King James "images") were probably incense stands or small pillars used in worship. The point of the wording is that the worshiper is looking at something he built himself.

17:9

The Hebrew of this verse is difficult and ancient readers disagreed about it. The Hebrew text as preserved speaks of abandoned woodland and hilltops; the ancient Greek translation read instead "like the abandoned cities of the Amorites and the Hivites, which they abandoned before the Israelites": that is, the cities emptied when Israel first entered the land. The rendering keeps the Hebrew, but the comparison could be to either.

17:10

"Rock" as a title for God is a standing metaphor for a place of refuge, a crag or cliff you retreat into when attacked, not a description of hardness. The "pleasant plants" and cuttings from foreign vines are imported stock planted in a carefully tended plot; many take this as a reference to a foreign fertility cult whose rites involved forcing plants to sprout quickly in shallow soil, but the words themselves describe ordinary horticulture, and the point is that the crop is not native.

17:11

The picture is of plants that shoot up unnaturally fast, planted and sprouting the same day, and then yield nothing when harvest comes. "A heap" is the same word used of the ruined heap Damascus becomes in verse 1.

17:12

The Hebrew opens with a cry (hoy) that can be a shout of grief over the dead, a warning, or simply a call for attention, "Ah!" or "Listen!" The King James renders it "Woe," but here the speaker is not necessarily lamenting the nations' fate. Massed armies compared to the roar of the sea is a stock image for an invading horde.

17:13

Chaff is the light husk separated from grain by tossing the threshed crop into the wind on an exposed hilltop; it blows away and is worthless. The "rolling thing" is a dried thistle or similar plant that breaks loose and tumbles before a gale, what English calls tumbleweed. Both images are of something with no weight of its own, moved entirely by the wind.

17:14

"Portion" and "lot" are both terms from the division of land: the share a family received, and the drawing of lots by which those shares were assigned. Used figuratively, they mean the fate allotted to someone. The speaker shifts to "us" here, the prophet speaking for his own people against the invaders.