Yesaya 1:4

1:4 ¹ The sinful nation is as good as dead, ² 

the people weighed down by evil deeds.

They are offspring who do wrong,

children ³  who do wicked things.

They have abandoned the Lord,

and rejected the Holy One of Israel. ⁴ 

They are alienated from him. ⁵ 

Yesaya 1:23

1:23 Your officials are rebels, ⁶ 

they associate with ⁷  thieves.

All of them love bribery,

and look for ⁸  payoffs. ⁹ 

They do not take up the cause of the orphan, ¹⁰ 

or defend the rights of the widow. ¹¹ 

Yesaya 24:5

24:5 The earth is defiled by ¹²  its inhabitants, ¹³ 

for they have violated laws,

disregarded the regulation, ¹⁴ 

and broken the permanent treaty. ¹⁵ 

Yesaya 24:20

24:20 The earth will stagger around ¹⁶  like a drunk;

it will sway back and forth like a hut in a windstorm. ¹⁷ 

Its sin will weigh it down,

and it will fall and never get up again.

[1:4]  ¹ sn Having summoned the witnesses and announced the Lord’s accusation against Israel, Isaiah mourns the nation’s impending doom. The third person references to the Lord in the second half of the verse suggest that the quotation from the Lord (cf. vv. 2-3) has concluded.

[1:4]  ² tn Heb “Woe [to the] sinful nation.” The Hebrew term הוֹי, (hoy, “woe, ah”) was used in funeral laments (see 1 Kgs 13:30; Jer 22:18; 34:5) and carries the connotation of death. In highly dramatic fashion the prophet acts out Israel’s funeral in advance, emphasizing that their demise is inevitable if they do not repent soon.

[1:4]  ³ tn Or “sons” (NASB). The prophet contrasts four terms of privilege – nation, people, offspring, children – with four terms that depict Israel’s sinful condition in Isaiah’s day – sinful, evil, wrong, wicked (see J. A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 43).

[1:4]  ⁴ sn Holy One of Israel is one of Isaiah’s favorite divine titles for God. It pictures the Lord as the sovereign king who rules over his covenant people and exercises moral authority over them.

[1:4]  ⁵ tn Heb “they are estranged backward.” The LXX omits this statement, which presents syntactical problems and seems to be outside the synonymous parallelistic structure of the verse.

[1:23]  ⁶ tn Or “stubborn”; CEV “have rejected me.”

[1:23]  ⁷ tn Heb “and companions of” (so KJV, NASB); CEV “friends of crooks.”

[1:23]  ⁸ tn Heb “pursue”; NIV “chase after gifts.”

[1:23]  ⁹ sn Isaiah may have chosen the word for gifts (שַׁלְמוֹנִים, shalmonim; a hapax legomena here), as a sarcastic pun on what these rulers should have been doing. Instead of attending to peace and wholeness (שָׁלוֹם, shalom), they sought after payoffs (שַׁלְמוֹנִים).

[1:23]  ¹⁰ sn See the note at v. 17.

[1:23]  ¹¹ sn The rich oppressors referred to in Isaiah and the other eighth century prophets were not rich capitalists in the modern sense of the word. They were members of the royal military and judicial bureaucracies in Israel and Judah. As these bureaucracies grew, they acquired more and more land and gradually commandeered the economy and legal system. At various administrative levels bribery and graft become commonplace. The common people outside the urban administrative centers were vulnerable to exploitation in such a system, especially those, like widows and orphans, who had lost their family provider through death. Through confiscatory taxation, conscription, excessive interest rates, and other oppressive governmental measures and policies, they were gradually disenfranchised and lost their landed property, and with it, their rights as citizens. The socio-economic equilibrium envisioned in the law of Moses was radically disturbed.

[24:5]  ¹² tn Heb “beneath”; cf. KJV, ASV, NRSV “under”; NAB “because of.”

[24:5]  ¹³ sn Isa 26:21 suggests that the earth’s inhabitants defiled the earth by shedding the blood of their fellow human beings. See also Num 35:33-34, which assumes that bloodshed defiles a land.

[24:5]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “moved past [the?] regulation.”

[24:5]  ¹⁵ tn Or “everlasting covenant” (KJV, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT); NAB “the ancient covenant”; CEV “their agreement that was to last forever.”

[24:5]  sn For a lengthy discussion of the identity of this covenant/treaty, see R. Chisholm, “The ‘Everlasting Covenant’ and the ‘City of Chaos’: Intentional Ambiguity and Irony in Isaiah 24,” CTR 6 (1993): 237-53. In this context, where judgment comes upon both the pagan nations and God’s covenant community, the phrase “permanent treaty” is intentionally ambiguous. For the nations this treaty is the Noahic mandate of Gen 9:1-7 with its specific stipulations and central regulation (Gen 9:7). By shedding blood, the warlike nations violated this treaty, which promotes population growth and prohibits murder. For Israel, which was also guilty of bloodshed (see Isa 1:15, 21; 4:4), this “permanent treaty” would refer more specifically to the Mosaic Law and its regulations prohibiting murder (Exod 20:13; Num 35:6-34), which are an extension of the Noahic mandate.

[24:20]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “staggering, staggers.” The Hebrew text uses the infinitive absolute before the finite verb for emphasis and sound play.

[24:20]  ¹⁷ tn The words “in a windstorm” are supplied in the translation to clarify the metaphor.