Isaiah 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel march against Jerusalem, and King Ahaz and his people are shaken by the news. The LORD sends Isaiah and his son to meet Ahaz with word that the plot against Judah will not succeed, and tells Ahaz to ask for a sign; when Ahaz refuses, the Lord gives the sign of a son named Immanuel, born before the two threatening kings are gone. The chapter ends with a warning that the LORD will bring the king of Assyria against Judah, leaving the land stripped, and the farmland overgrown with briers and thorns.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah, the events of this account took place.
   • Ahaz was the son of Jotham.
   • Jotham was the son of Uzziah.
   • Rezin was king of Aram.
   • Pekah son of Remaliah was king of Israel.
   • Rezin and Pekah went up to Jerusalem to make war against it.
   • They could not prevail in fighting against it.
2. 7:2
   • It was reported to the house of David that Aram had settled itself upon Ephraim.
   • The heart of Ahaz shook.
   • The heart of his people shook.
   • Their hearts shook as the trees of a forest shake before the wind.
3. 7:3
   • The LORD spoke to Isaiah.
   • The LORD told Isaiah to go out to meet Ahaz.
   • The LORD told Isaiah to bring his son Shear-jashub with him.
   • The meeting place was the end of the channel of the upper pool.
   • The meeting place was on the road to the launderer's field.
4. 7:4
   • The LORD told Isaiah to say to Ahaz: be on guard.
   • The LORD told Isaiah to say to Ahaz: be quiet.
   • The LORD told Isaiah to say to Ahaz: do not fear.
   • The LORD told Isaiah to say to Ahaz: do not let his heart grow faint.
   • Ahaz was not to fear because of two tails of smoking firebrands.
   • The two smoking firebrands stand for the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah.
5. 7:5
   • Aram had planned evil against Ahaz.
   • Ephraim and the son of Remaliah joined in that plan.
   • They spoke the following words.
6. 7:6
   • They said: let us go up against Judah.
   • They said: let us terrorize it.
   • They said: let us break it open for ourselves.
   • They said: let us set a king within it.
   • The king they intended to install was the son of Tabeal.
7. 7:7
   • The Lord GOD spoke the following.
   • The Lord GOD said the plan shall not stand.
   • The Lord GOD said it shall not come to pass.
8. 7:8
   • The head of Aram is Damascus.
   • The head of Damascus is Rezin.
   • Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered from being a people.
9. 7:9
   • The head of Ephraim is Samaria.
   • The head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah.
   • If they do not believe, they will not be established.
10. 7:10
    • The LORD spoke to Ahaz again.
11. 7:11
    • The LORD told Ahaz to ask for a sign from the LORD his God.
    • Ahaz was told to make the request deep as Sheol or high above.
12. 7:12
    • Ahaz said he would not ask.
    • Ahaz said he would not test the LORD.
13. 7:13
    • The speaker said: hear now, house of David.
    • The speaker asked whether it is too small a thing for them to weary men.
    • The speaker asked whether they will weary his God also.
    • The speaker calls God 'my God.'
14. 7:14
    • Therefore the Lord himself will give them a sign.
    • The woman spoken of is pregnant or is about to conceive.
    • The Hebrew word used for her means a young woman of marriageable age, and whether it asserts virginity is not settled by the word itself.
    • She will give birth to a son.
    • His name will be called Immanuel.
    • Whether the one who names him is the woman herself or the one addressed is not settled by the wording.
15. 7:15
    • He will eat curds and honey.
    • Whether he eats curds and honey in order that he may know to reject evil and choose good, or eats them by the time he knows to do so, is not settled by the wording.
16. 7:16
    • Before the boy knows to reject evil and choose good, something will happen.
    • The land that Ahaz dreads will be abandoned.
    • Whether the land is abandoned by its two kings or abandoned because of its two kings is not settled by the wording.
17. 7:17
    • The LORD will bring days upon Ahaz.
    • The LORD will bring those days upon Ahaz's people.
    • The LORD will bring those days upon Ahaz's father's house.
    • Such days have not come since the day Ephraim turned away from Judah.
    • What the LORD will bring is the king of Assyria.
18. 7:18
    • On that day the LORD will whistle for the fly.
    • That fly is at the far end of the streams of Egypt.
    • On that day the LORD will whistle for the bee.
    • That bee is in the land of Assyria.
19. 7:19
    • They will all come.
    • They will all settle in the steep ravines.
    • They will settle in the clefts of the rocks.
    • They will settle on all the thornbushes.
    • They will settle on all the watering places or pastures.
20. 7:20
    • On that day the Lord will shave with a hired razor.
    • The razor is those from beyond the River.
    • The razor is the king of Assyria.
    • He will shave the head.
    • He will shave the hair of the legs.
    • He will also sweep away the beard.
21. 7:21
    • On that day a man will keep alive one young cow and two animals of the flock.
22. 7:22
    • Because of the abundance of milk they produce, he will eat curds.
    • Everyone left in the land will eat curds and honey.
23. 7:23
    • On that day every place that held a thousand vines will change.
    • Those thousand vines were worth a thousand pieces of silver.
    • Such places will become briers and thorns.
24. 7:24
    • People will come there with arrows and with a bow.
    • All the land will become briers and thorns.
25. 7:25
    • There are hills that used to be hoed with a mattock.
    • Whether the meaning is that one will not go there for fear of briers and thorns, or that the fear of briers and thorns will not come there, is not settled by the wording.
    • That land will become a place for turning oxen loose.
    • That land will become a place trampled by sheep.

Words Worth Explaining

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

7:1

The setting is about 735–734 BC. Two neighboring kings (Rezin of Syria (Aram, whose capital was Damascus) and Pekah of Israel, the northern kingdom) had allied against the growing empire of Assyria and were trying to force Judah, the southern kingdom, to join them; when Ahaz refused, they attacked Jerusalem to replace him with a king of their own. Israel and Judah had been one kingdom under David and Solomon, then split in two about two hundred years earlier.

7:2

"Ephraim" was the largest tribe of the northern kingdom, and its name is used throughout these chapters as another name for that whole kingdom, the same state called Israel in verse 1. "The house of David" means the ruling dynasty descended from King David, of which Ahaz was the current holder.

7:3

"Shear-jashub" is a Hebrew sentence used as a name: "A remnant will return." Isaiah's children were given names that carried messages (compare chapter 8), so bringing the boy along was itself part of what the prophet was saying. The meeting place is the point where Jerusalem's water supply entered the city, the natural spot to inspect defenses under siege, beside the open ground where cloth was pounded and bleached.

7:4

A "firebrand" is a stick pulled from a fire. Two of them still smoking but no longer burning is a dismissive image: these two kings look alarming but are nearly burnt out.

7:6

Who the "son of Tabeal" was is unknown; the name is Aramean in form, so he was probably a candidate the two kings could control. The point of the plan was to end the line of David on Judah's throne and install a puppet ruler.

7:8

"The head of" here means the capital city, and then the man who rules it, the argument being that each of these enemies is only a man in a city, not more. The sixty-five years is difficult and has been explained in several ways; the northern kingdom fell to Assyria within about fifteen years, but deportations and the resettling of foreigners in its territory continued for decades afterwards.

7:9

The two verbs are forms of a single Hebrew root meaning "to be firm, reliable", the root behind the word "amen." The line plays on that: roughly, "if you will not hold firm, you will not be held firm." English cannot easily keep the pun.

7:11

"The depths below" translates a reference to Sheol, the underworld of the dead; "the heights above" is the sky. Together they mean the whole of reality: ask for any sign at all, anywhere.

7:12

Ahaz answers with the language of the law, which forbade putting God to the test: that is, demanding proof of him (Deuteronomy 6:16). The refusal is phrased as piety.

7:13

Family of David means King Ahaz and his royal family.

7:14

The Hebrew word here, *almah*, means a young woman of marriageable age; it does not by itself state whether she has had sexual relations, though it would normally be assumed of an unmarried girl. The ancient Greek translation of Isaiah made about two centuries before Christ rendered it *parthenos*, "virgin," and that is the reading the King James follows and the New Testament quotes. Hebrew also has the definite article, "the young woman", which may point to someone the hearers could identify. "Immanuel" is Hebrew for "God is with us."

7:15

"Curds" are the thick soured milk of a herding people, not butter in the modern sense. Knowing to refuse evil and choose good means reaching the age at which a child can tell one from the other, a few years old. What the diet signifies is left open by the wording: curds and honey can be the rich food of a good land, or, as verses 21–22 suggest, all that is left when the farms are gone and the country has reverted to pasture and wild growth.

7:16

The two kings Ahaz dreads are Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel, named in verse 1. Both were dead within a few years: Assyria took Damascus and killed Rezin in 732 BC, and Pekah was assassinated at about the same time.

7:17

Ephraim broke away from Judah after Solomon's death, around 930 BC, when the ten northern tribes rejected his son Rehoboam. That split was remembered as the worst disaster in the nation's history, the measure against which this coming trouble is set.

7:18

Whistling or hissing was how beekeepers were said to call a swarm out to settle. Egypt to the south, at the far branches of the Nile, and Assyria to the north-east are the two great powers that will be summoned onto Judah's land like insects.

7:20

Shaving a man's head, body and beard was a standard humiliation of prisoners and mourners; a full beard was a mark of adult dignity, and "the hair of the feet" is a polite Hebrew way of saying the hair of the lower body. "A razor he has hired" is pointed: Ahaz had in fact paid Assyria to come to his aid, stripping the temple and palace treasuries to do it (2 Kings 16:7–8). The river beyond which the razor is hired is the Euphrates, the far edge of the known world from Judah.

7:21

A household that once ran flocks and herds is reduced to a single heifer and two sheep, the picture is not of plenty but of a countryside emptied of people and stock.

7:23

The King James "silverling" stands for a shekel of silver, a weight of roughly two fifths of an ounce (about 11.5 grams); silver was weighed out rather than struck as coins in this period. A thousand vines at a shekel each was a first-class vineyard and a very large sum, such land now left to scrub.

7:24

Once fields go wild, they fill with brush and wild animals. People carry bows because they are hunting there now, not farming.

7:25

A mattock is a heavy hand hoe. Hillsides too steep for a plow were terraced and worked by hand, so these were the most carefully tended fields of all; letting them go back to grazing land marks a total collapse of settled farming. "Lesser cattle" in the King James means sheep and goats, as opposed to oxen.