‘Woe to Ariel, Ariel,
The city where David encamped.
Add for yourselves year to year.
Let the feasts come round.
Then will I distress Ariel,
And there will be mourning and lamentation,
And she will be to me as Ariel.'
Having declared His woe on Israel (Isaiah 28:1) God now declares His woe on Jerusalem under the name of Ariel. It is to be distressed with mourning and lamentation because it has become superficial in its response to Yahweh. It is to be besieged. This occurred around 701 BC at the hand of Sennacherib, and we must not in the wonder of the deliverance overlook the awfulness of the siege and what led up to it. Judah paid a heavy price for not trusting Yahweh earlier.
‘Ariel.' The Akkadian arallu can mean either the ‘mountain of the gods' or ‘underworld of the gods', both places where gods were thought to dwell, and thus the dwellingplaces of the gods. Here Isaiah's purpose might well be, by a play on the word, to draw attention to the fact that while Jerusalem prided itself on having within it Mount Zion, the mountain of God, the mysterious mountain which was seen as joining heaven and earth and was the dwellingplace of God, by their manner of living they were debasing the fact and were making it rather ‘an Ariel', a pagan dwelling place of the gods, no longer the ‘holy city' even though they called themselves by that title (Isaiah 48:2). The reference to David encamping there might be seen as backing up the idea of seeing it as a dwellingplace.
But the ‘ariel' was also the name used for the altar hearth near the top of Ezekiel's high altar (Ezekiel 43:15), the place where the sacrificial fires continually burned. This was probably a technical term which had lost much of its original meaning but was originally associated with the above idea of the mountain of God, the stepped altar being seen as typifying a mountain (compare the stepped ziggurats). It was also used in this sense of altar hearths on the Moabite Stone demonstrating the probable wide use of it as a technical term for this outside Israel. Perhaps there is therefore also contained in the use the idea that Jerusalem is God's altar hearth, ready for sacrifice.
It is described here as ‘the city where David encamped', confirming that this is indeed referring to Jerusalem. Isaiah is indicating that once in the time of David it had been true to Yahweh. It had had an honourable and noble past. Then it had been filled with genuine worship and praise, led by the king himself. It had become the earthly dwellingplace of God in His Temple. What a contrast with the present. Now things just carried on year by year, with a round of meaningless festivals. It is no longer Mount Zion but Ariel (see Isaiah 29:7-8 where it reverts). Well let them continue. They are simply leading up to a time of mourning and lamentation. The use of ‘encamped' might be seen as indicating that even David only had a right to camp there and had no right to a permanent dwelling on the holy mountain.
Thus this mountain of God/the gods is to be downgraded. ‘She will be to me as Ariel'. It is to be treated as an Ariel, as a mountain of the gods and not as containing the Mountain of God at all. God is on the point of disowning it, at least temporarily. (Ezekiel later demonstrates in Chapter s 40 onwards that He has by then disowned it completely).