Isaiah 35: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Isaiah 35 describes a desert that blooms and a people who are healed and brought home. Weak hands and shaky knees are told to grow strong, because God is coming with payback for enemies and rescue for his people. Water breaks out in dry ground, the blind and deaf and lame and mute are restored, and a road called the Way of Holiness runs through the land. On that road, safe from lions and wild animals, the people the LORD has bought back return to Zion with singing.

Claim by Claim

1. 35:1
   • The wilderness and the dry land will be glad because of them.
   • The desert plain will rejoice.
   • The desert plain will blossom like a crocus (a bulb flower; the exact plant named is uncertain).
2. 35:2
   • It will blossom abundantly.
   • It will rejoice with joy and singing.
   • The glory of Lebanon will be given to it.
   • The splendor of Carmel and Sharon will be given to it.
   • They will see the glory of the LORD.
   • They will see the splendor of our God.
3. 35:3
   • Strengthen the weak hands.
   • Make firm the stumbling knees.
4. 35:4
   • Say to those whose hearts are anxious: Be strong.
   • Say to them: Do not fear.
   • Your God will come with vengeance.
   • God will come with recompense.
   • He will come and save you.
5. 35:5
   • Then the eyes of the blind will be opened.
   • Then the ears of the deaf will be unstopped.
6. 35:6
   • Then the lame man will leap like a deer.
   • The tongue of the mute will sing for joy.
   • Waters will break out in the wilderness.
   • Streams will break out in the desert plain.
7. 35:7
   • The parched ground will become a pool.
   • The thirsty ground will become springs of water.
   • In the dwelling place of jackals, where they lay, there will be grass with reeds and rushes.
8. 35:8
   • A highway and a road will be there.
   • It will be called the Way of Holiness.
   • The unclean will not pass over it.
   • It will belong to those who walk that way.
   • Fools traveling it will not go astray.
9. 35:9
   • No lion will be there.
   • No ravenous beast will go up on it.
   • Such a beast will not be found there.
   • The redeemed will walk there.
10. 35:10
    • The ransomed of the LORD will return.
    • They will come to Zion with singing.
    • Everlasting joy will be upon their heads.
    • They will obtain joy and gladness.
    • Sorrow and sighing will flee away.

Words Worth Explaining

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

35:1

"Glad for them" translates the King James reading of a difficult line; who "them" refers to is not stated, and many translators take the Hebrew word instead as part of the next phrase, giving simply "the wilderness will be glad." The ambiguity is in the text itself. The flower behind "rose" is not the rose known today. The Hebrew word appears only twice in the Bible and probably names a bulb flower of the coastal plain (a crocus, an asphodel or a narcissus) the kind of bloom that appears suddenly after rain in country that looks dead.

35:2

Lebanon, Carmel and Sharon were the three most fertile, best-watered districts known to Isaiah's hearers. Lebanon meant its famous cedar forests; Carmel was a wooded coastal ridge whose name means "garden land"; Sharon was the flowering coastal plain. Naming them together is a way of saying the desert will get the landscape of the richest places in the country.

35:3

Slack hands and buckling knees were the standard Hebrew physical description of someone paralyzed by fear or despair, much as English says "weak at the knees." The instruction is addressed to whoever is listening, about other people.

35:4

"Vengeance" and "recompence" here are legal words rather than emotional ones. The Hebrew terms describe redress imposed by a rightful authority (accounts settled, damages paid by those who caused them), not private spite. The same sentence ends with rescue, because in Hebrew usage punishing the oppressor and freeing the oppressed are two sides of one act.

35:5

The King James says deaf ears will be "unstopped". It is like pulling a plug out of your ear.

35:6

A "hart" is an old word for a male deer, a stag. "Dumb" in the King James means unable to speak. It never means stupid.

35:7

The Hebrew word behind "the parched ground" can also mean the shimmering heat-haze of the desert, the mirage that looks like water. On that reading the line says the mirage itself turns into a real pool. Jackals (the King James translators guessed "dragons") were scavenging wild dogs that lived in ruins and empty country; naming them is a way of saying the place was desolate. Reeds and papyrus, by contrast, only grow in standing water that never dries up, so their presence marks permanent marshland where there had been none.

35:8

A "highway" in this period was a road built up on a bank of packed earth or stone above the surrounding ground, so it stayed passable and could be followed without local knowledge, quite unlike an ordinary desert track. "Unclean" is a ritual term, not a comment on dirt or morals. Under Israel's law a person could become unclean through contact with a corpse, through certain illnesses, or through other ordinary events, and until the prescribed waiting and washing were done they were barred from sacred places and gatherings. The middle of this verse is one of the most damaged sentences in Isaiah. The King James "but it shall be for those" translates the Hebrew word for word, and its sense is genuinely unclear; other readings give "it is for the one who walks the way" or attach the phrase to the fools who follow. Translations differ because the text does, not because one has smoothed it over.

35:9

"Redeemed" is a commercial and family word before it is a religious one. To redeem was to buy something back that had been lost or sold, land, an ox, or a relative sold into slavery for debt. In Israel that duty fell to the nearest male kinsman, who was obliged to pay the price and restore the person or property to the family.

35:10

"Ransomed" translates a different Hebrew verb from "redeemed" in the previous verse, though the two overlap: this one is specifically about paying a price to release someone held captive or under a claim. Zion was the fortified hill in Jerusalem, and by extension the city itself. To hearers who had been carried off to Babylon, coming to Zion meant the end of exile. "Joy upon their heads" is a Hebrew idiom drawn from festivals, where guests wore garlands and were anointed with perfumed oil on the head; the joy is pictured as something worn, not merely felt.