Isaiah 61: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

A speaker announces that God's Spirit is on him and that God has sent him with good news: to heal the brokenhearted, free prisoners, announce the year of the LORD's favor and the day of God's vengeance, and comfort those who mourn. Those who mourn in Zion will be given beauty, joy, and praise in place of ashes, grief, and despair, and they will rebuild cities that have lain in ruins for generations. The people will be called priests of the LORD, will receive a double portion in place of their shame, and God promises them an everlasting covenant. The chapter ends with rejoicing, and a picture of righteousness and praise springing up like plants in a garden.

Claim by Claim

1. 61:1
   • The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon the speaker.
   • The LORD has anointed the speaker.
   • The speaker was anointed to bring good news to the afflicted and lowly.
   • The LORD has sent the speaker to bind up the brokenhearted.
   • The speaker was sent to proclaim liberty to captives.
   • The speaker was sent to proclaim to those who are bound an opening, which may mean the opening of their eyes or their release from confinement.
2. 61:2
   • The speaker was sent to proclaim a year of favor belonging to the LORD.
   • The speaker was sent to proclaim a day of vengeance belonging to our God.
   • The speaker was sent to comfort all who mourn.
3. 61:3
   • The speaker was sent to provide for those who mourn in Zion.
   • They are to be given a headdress instead of ashes.
   • They are to be given oil of gladness instead of mourning.
   • They are to be given a garment of praise instead of a faint spirit.
   • They will be called oaks of righteousness.
   • They will be called the planting of the LORD.
   • The purpose is that he may be glorified.
4. 61:4
   • They will build up the ancient ruins.
   • They will raise up the desolations of former times.
   • They will renew the ruined cities.
   • Those ruined places have been desolate for generation after generation.
5. 61:5
   • Strangers will stand and shepherd your flocks.
   • Foreigners will be your plowmen.
   • Foreigners will be your vinedressers.
6. 61:6
   • You will be called the priests of the LORD.
   • It will be said of you that you are ministers of our God.
   • You will consume the wealth of the nations.
   • You will boast in the glory of the nations.
7. 61:7
   • Instead of your shame you will have double.
   • Instead of humiliation they will shout for joy over their portion.
   • Therefore in their land they will possess a double portion.
   • Everlasting joy will be theirs.
8. 61:8
   • The LORD loves justice.
   • The LORD hates robbery, which is either robbery in a burnt offering or robbery joined with wrongdoing.
   • The LORD will give them their recompense in truth.
   • The LORD will make an everlasting covenant with them.
9. 61:9
   • Their seed will be known among the nations.
   • Their offspring will be known among the peoples.
   • All who see them will recognize them.
   • They are the seed that the LORD has blessed.
10. 61:10
    • The speaker will greatly rejoice in the LORD.
    • The speaker's soul will exult in his God.
    • God has clothed the speaker with garments of salvation.
    • God has wrapped the speaker in a robe of righteousness.
    • The clothing is like a bridegroom who puts on a headdress.
    • The clothing is like a bride who adorns herself with her ornaments.
11. 61:11
    • The earth brings forth its growth.
    • A garden makes what is sown in it sprout up.
    • In the same way the Lord GOD will make righteousness and praise sprout up before all the nations.

Words Worth Explaining

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

61:1

"LORD" in small capitals stands for the personal name of God in Hebrew, four consonants usually written YHWH, which readers did not say aloud; "Lord GOD" renders the doubled Hebrew phrase "my Lord YHWH." "Anointed" means to have olive oil poured over the head, the ceremony that publicly marked out a king, a priest, or occasionally a prophet as chosen for a task; the Hebrew noun formed from this verb is "messiah," and the Greek equivalent is "christ." The word behind "meek" (KJV) covers both material poverty and low social standing, the people at the bottom, with no power and no one to speak for them. "Proclaim liberty" is the exact legal phrase used in Israel's law for the release of slaves and the canceling of debts (see the note on verse 2).

61:2

"The acceptable year of the LORD", literally the year of the LORD's favor or goodwill. It echoes the jubilee described in Israel's law: every fiftieth year, debts were canceled, Israelites sold into slavery went free, and land that families had been forced to sell reverted to them. "Vengeance" translates a Hebrew word closer to legal redress than to personal spite: the settling of accounts on behalf of people who have been wronged. Note the contrast of scale, a whole year of favor against a single day of reckoning.

61:3

Mourners in this culture sat in ashes and threw dust or ashes over their heads; ashes are therefore a visible uniform of grief. Scented oil rubbed on the head and skin was the opposite signal, what you did for a feast, and what you stopped doing while in mourning. In Hebrew the phrase is also a pun: pe'er (a decorated headdress) in place of 'epher (ashes), two words that sound almost identical. "Zion" is the hill in Jerusalem on which the temple stood, and by extension the city itself and the people who belong to it. "Oaks" (KJV "trees") are long-lived, deep-rooted hardwoods, a standard image for something that stands for generations rather than a season.

61:4

The ruins in view are the towns of Judah left wrecked and emptied after the Babylonian armies destroyed Jerusalem and deported its population in 587 BC. "Desolations of many generations" points to sites that have lain abandoned so long that no one alive remembers them inhabited.

61:5

"Strangers" and "the sons of the alien" in the King James simply mean foreigners, people from other countries. A vinedresser trimmed and cared for grapevines so they would grow good grapes.

61:6

"Gentiles" (KJV) simply translates the Hebrew word for "the nations", everyone who is not Israel. Priests in Israel were given no farmland of their own; they lived on portions of the offerings and produce that other people brought to the sanctuary. That is the point of "you will eat the riches of the nations": the whole people is pictured as occupying the priests' position, supported by what others bring in.

61:7

A "double share" carries two legal echoes. Under inheritance law the firstborn son received twice the portion of any other son, so a double share means the status of the favored heir. Under the law on theft and damages, an offender had to repay the victim double, so it also means compensation paid for a wrong suffered. Both senses are active here.

61:8

"Judgment" in the KJV means justice (the right settling of cases, not condemnation. The second phrase is genuinely difficult in Hebrew. The same consonants can be read as "wrongdoing" or "iniquity" (as most modern versions take it) or as "burnt offering," which gives the KJV's "robbery for burnt offering") that is, stolen goods presented to God as sacrifice. A burnt offering was an animal placed on the altar and burned up entirely, with no portion kept back for the worshiper or the priest. A "covenant" is a formal binding agreement, sworn and publicly witnessed, of the kind made between a king and his people or between two states.

61:9

"Seed" in the King James means a person's children, grandchildren, and the family line that keeps going after them.

61:10

"My soul" in Hebrew means the whole living person, the self, not an inner part of it. The verb translated "decketh himself" (KJV) comes from the same root as the word for a priest's turban, so the bridegroom is pictured putting on an ornamented headdress like a priest's; a bridegroom on his wedding day was dressed with something of the ceremony of a priest at the sanctuary.