Isaiah 27: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Isaiah describes a coming day when the LORD kills Leviathan, the serpent and dragon of the sea, and calls for a song to be sung to his vineyard, which he waters and guards day and night. He says he is not angry, and he invites anyone who would oppose him to take hold of him and make peace instead of being burned up like thorns. Jacob's guilt will be removed when the altar stones are smashed and the idol poles and incense altars are pulled down, while the fortified city is left deserted and stripped bare. The chapter closes with a great trumpet sounding and the scattered people of Israel gathered one by one from Assyria and Egypt to worship on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.

Claim by Claim

1. 27:1
   • In that day the LORD will bring punishment with his sword.
   • The LORD's sword is hard, great, and strong.
   • The LORD will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent.
   • The LORD will punish Leviathan, the twisting serpent.
   • The LORD will kill the sea monster that is in the sea.
2. 27:2
   • In that day people are told to sing to the vineyard.
   • The vineyard is a delightful, desirable one; the King James calls it a vineyard of red wine.
3. 27:3
   • The LORD says he himself keeps the vineyard.
   • The LORD says he waters it every moment.
   • The LORD says he guards it night and day so that no one will harm it.
4. 27:4
   • The LORD says there is no fury in him.
   • The LORD speaks of briers and thorns being set against him in battle.
   • The LORD says he would march against them.
   • The LORD says he would burn them all together.
5. 27:5
   • Alternatively, let a person take hold of the LORD's stronghold, which the King James calls his strength.
   • Taking hold of the LORD's stronghold is so that the person may make peace with the LORD.
   • The person shall make peace with the LORD.
6. 27:6
   • Jacob will take root.
   • Israel will bud and blossom.
   • The face of the world will be filled with fruit.
   • It is ambiguous whether the ones spoken of are days that are coming or the descendants of Jacob who come.
7. 27:7
   • It is asked whether he struck him as he struck the one who struck him.
   • It is asked whether he was killed as those killed by him were killed.
8. 27:8
   • The contending with her is by measure.
   • The contending with her is done by sending her away.
   • He removed her with his harsh wind on the day of the east wind; the King James says he stays his rough wind in the day of the east wind.
9. 27:9
   • By this the iniquity of Jacob will be atoned for.
   • This is the whole fruit of the removal of his sin.
   • The condition is that he makes all the stones of the altar like chalkstones smashed to pieces.
   • When that happens, no Asherah poles will remain standing.
   • When that happens, no incense altars will remain standing.
10. 27:10
    • The fortified city is left alone and desolate.
    • The dwelling place is abandoned and forsaken like the wilderness.
    • A calf will graze there.
    • A calf will lie down there.
    • The calf will consume the branches of that place.
11. 27:11
    • When its boughs are dry, they are broken off.
    • Women come and set the boughs on fire.
    • This is a people without understanding.
    • Therefore the one who made them will not have mercy on them.
    • The one who formed them will show them no favor.
12. 27:12
    • In that day the LORD will beat out grain from the flowing stream of the River to the brook of Egypt.
    • The children of Israel will be gathered one by one.
13. 27:13
    • In that day a great trumpet will be blown.
    • Those perishing in the land of Assyria will come.
    • Those driven out into the land of Egypt will come.
    • They will worship the LORD on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.

Words Worth Explaining

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

27:1

"In that day" is a recurring marker in Isaiah for a future moment of reckoning or rescue; it does not point to a dated calendar day. Leviathan is a monstrous sea creature of ancient Near Eastern poetry, also known from Canaanite texts found at Ugarit, where a many-headed sea serpent is called by the same name and described with the same two words used here. The Hebrew adjectives are uncertain: the first suggests either "fleeing/darting" or "gliding, bar-like"; the second means "twisting" or "coiling." "Dragon" translates Hebrew *tannin*, a general word for a large sea monster or serpent.

27:2

The vineyard is a standing image for Israel in Isaiah. The same image opened a song in chapter 5, where the vineyard yielded bad grapes and was abandoned; this verse deliberately echoes and reverses it. The Hebrew wording is uncertain here: the letters behind "red wine" (as in the King James) differ by one from a word meaning "delightful" or "pleasant," and ancient copies split between the two readings.

27:4

Briers and thorns are what take over a vineyard nobody tends; in Isaiah 5 they were the sign of the vineyard's ruin. Burning off thorn scrub was ordinary vineyard work, so the picture is of clearing, not of destroying the vineyard itself.

27:5

"Take hold of my strength" translates a Hebrew word meaning a stronghold or place of refuge. The picture is of someone seizing hold of a fortress, or of a fugitive gripping something for sanctuary, and so claiming protection from the one who owns it.

27:6

Jacob and Israel are the same man: Jacob, grandson of Abraham, was renamed Israel, and his descendants were called by both names. Here, as often in Hebrew poetry, the two names are paired as parallel terms for the same people.

27:7

The Hebrew of this verse uses unnamed pronouns throughout ("he," "him," "them") without saying who is who. The usual reading is that God punished his own people far more lightly than he punished the nations who attacked them, but the wording itself leaves the parties unspecified.

27:8

The word behind "in measure" and "when it shooteth forth" occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and this is one of the most disputed lines in Isaiah; suggested senses range from "measure by measure" (a limited, weighed-out punishment) to "by driving her away" (exile). The east wind is the sirocco, the scorching wind off the desert that withers crops in a day; it is a standard image for a sudden, drying blow.

27:9

The altar in view is not the one in Jerusalem but the local altars used for other gods. Grinding their limestone blocks to powder made them unusable rather than merely unattended. "Groves" in the King James translates *asherim*: wooden poles or stylised trees set up beside altars for the goddess Asherah. The "images" are incense stands or small altars for burning incense to other gods.

27:10

The city is not named, and readers have argued since antiquity over whether it means a foreign capital or Jerusalem itself. "Defenced" is older English for fortified, a city with walls. Cattle grazing and bedding down inside the walls is the standard picture of a place so long abandoned that livestock use it as pasture.

27:11

KJV "shew" is just an old spelling of "show," and "favour" here means kindness.

27:12

"Beat off" describes threshing, or beating an olive tree or grain stalks with a stick to knock the fruit loose so it can be picked up piece by piece, hence "gathered one by one." The two limits named, the Euphrates in the northeast and the wadi at Egypt's border in the southwest (a seasonal desert streambed, not the Nile), were the traditional outer bounds of the land promised to Israel.

27:13

The trumpet is the *shofar*, a ram's horn. It was blown to muster an army, sound an alarm, or call people together for a festival, so the sound signals a summons rather than music. Assyria and Egypt were the two great powers between which Israel and Judah sat, and the two places where scattered survivors ended up. The "holy mountain" is the temple hill in Jerusalem, also called Zion.