Darkness Awaits Those Who Turn From Yahweh But In The Latter Times Will Come Light in Galilee (Isaiah 8:21 to Isaiah 9:1).
The offer having been made of light or darkness most of the people will choose darkness. A bleak future awaits them. But all is not despair. For there is the promise of Immanuel yet to come. And in the latter times light will come to Galilee, (and it will lead up to the triumph of the great coming King - Isaiah 9:6-7).
Analysis.
a And they will pass through it hardly pressed and hungry, and it will be that when they are hungry they will fret themselves and curse by their king and their God, and turn their faces upward (Isaiah 8:21).
b And they will look to the earth, and behold distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and into thick darkness they will be driven away (Isaiah 8:22).
b But there will be no gloom to her who was in anguish (Isaiah 9:1 a).
a In the former time He brought into contempt the land of Zebulun, and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time He has made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations (Isaiah 9:1 b).
In ‘a' they will pass through it hardly pressed and hungry, and it will be that when they are hungry they will fret themselves and curse by their king and their God, and turn their faces upward and in the parallel this turning upward in their despair will finally result in Galilee of the nations being made glorious (filled with His glory). In ‘b' they will look to the earth, and behold distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and into thick darkness they will be driven away, and in the parallel there will be no gloom to her who was in anguish (those who suffered first will be blessed first).
‘And they will pass through it hardly pressed and hungry, and it will be that when they are hungry they will fret themselves and curse by their king and their God, and turn their faces upward, and they will look to the earth, and behold distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and into thick darkness they will be driven away.'
The significance of ‘no morning' is now explained. There is great stress on continuing darkness. They will be in despair and in great need, they will have nowhere to look, their king and God will be merely swear words, names by which to curse, whether they look upwards or to the earth they will be in desolation and thick darkness. Because for those who turn from God's word there is only darkness.
‘They will pass through it.' The ‘it' is not defined. It could refer to their time of hopelessness, to the land through which they will pass into exile, or to the time of darkness which will never turn into morning. The verbs are in the singular. We could therefore translate, ‘each of them will --', emphasising the personal effect for all.
The picture is one of total hopelessness and despair. They will be hard pressed and hungry. They will be under stress and fret themselves. The king, whom they at present see as the anointed of Yahweh, will be simply a name to curse by, or even curse at. God too will be the same. But then, in despair, some will turn their faces upwards.
But all most will see when they look to the earth (or the land) will be distress and darkness, gloom and anguish. And finally they will be driven away into thick darkness. The future without God must in the end be harsh.
(Isa 8:23 in the Hebrew text) ‘But there will be no gloom to her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun, and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations.'
For those who turn their face upwards there will be hope (Isaiah 8:2). Most of the verbs in this and the following verses are in the perfect tense. In Hebrew the perfect tense does not necessarily indicate the past, it indicates something which is completed. Thus the prophets used the tense to indicate that which, while future, was certain. Because God was going to do it, it was already seen as completed.
For, for one part of Israel and Judah, Galilee of the nations, there will be no such gloom. That will be because having already passed through their gloom in the earlier invasion they are under the Assyrian heel. They are not therefore in a position to make any choice with respect to present circumstances. They will not be involved in the present disobedience. Thus they need not fear, for when Immanuel comes he will bring them light in their darkness (see Isaiah 60:1-2). The next thing therefore that they await is for the light which will come to Galilee. But that will only be once they have passed through their ‘gloom of anguish' (Isaiah 8:22). It is to them, walking as they are in darkness, that great light will come, so that their gloom will vanish.
Galilee were the first to suffer in any invasion from the north and had been seized in about 733 BC during the initial invasions (2 Kings 15:29). So while their leaders were exiled in accordance with Assyrian policy (leaderless people were more easily controlled) it is probable that they escaped the worst kind of treatment, for at that stage of their capture there would still be hope in Assyria's mind that Israel would submit and escape the final vengeance, which in fact under Hoshea they did, although being left that much smaller.
Thus when Hoshea later rebelled and Samaria was finally taken Galilee had already long since been in submission as part of Megiddo, one of the three Assyrian provinces which had been set up, and was therefore probably not settled by the foreigners brought into Israel by Esarhaddon (2 Kings 17:24). Indeed being a land of mixture, with many ‘Gentiles' settled there and surrounding it, something which brought them into contempt in Israel, they may well have been seen by Assyria as not fully Israel at all but as a subject people (there were no maps and no boundaries permanently laid down). It should be noted in this regard that they were never seen as part of the mixture who arose from the settling of foreign nations in Israel.
This prophecy may have first arisen at the time of their separation, which would explain why Galilee is selected out for mention, as an assurance to them not to despair in their plight because there was hope for their future in the latter times in the coming king. Or it may simply be pointing out that in their case they had no choice whether to obey or disobey, and did not therefore share the guilt of Israel and Judah. But God clearly had a greater purpose in this in that it was in Galilee that the King when He came would grow to mature years, and it was in Galilee where He would first widely proclaim the Kingly Rule of God as at hand () and adopted into the new covenant, becoming fellow-citizens with the true remnant of the old Israel - ‘the saints' (Romans 9:6; Ephesians 2:19), and becoming the new seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:7-9; Galatians 3:29), thus themselves becoming the new Israel, the true people of God (Galatians 6:16), made near by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:12-13).
That was God's greater vision. It was regularly in one way or another portrayed by the prophets. In Abraham's seed all the nations of the world were to be blessed (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 18:18; Genesis 22:18; Genesis 26:4; Genesis 28:14), Israel were to be a kingdom of priests to the world in a world which all belonged to Yahweh (Exodus 19:5-6), His servant Israel (the inner Israel who were to seek to restore the whole) were to be the servant to the nations to bring them salvation and the true worship of God (Isaiah 49:3-7), all nations would finally flock to a new Jerusalem to worship in a new heaven and a new earth (Isaiah 66:23; Isaiah 65:17; Zechariah 14:16-17), and so on. But that would first depend on Israel in the person of their Prince coming before God to receive the everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13-14; Daniel 7:27).
Thus having depicted the new Paradise Ezekiel will now portray the new sharing of the land among the people of God, the establishment of their prince, and the founding of a new city named ‘Yahweh is there' (Ezekiel 48:35). This is his picture of the final fulfilment of God's purposes and of His final triumph, presented to those who would be its earthly source (it was from them that the Gospel would go out to the world - Acts 1:8). It was given to them when they were at their lowest ebb, in order to lift them up and press them on towards full obedience. His people are to be redeemed and restored, in order to enter the everlasting kingdom. God's triumph is put into words that may seem to us an anticlimax, but to the people of Israel it was their vision and their living hope. It would finally be fulfilled in a way better than he ever envisioned.
So as we look at these last two Chapter s from Ezekiel 47:13 onwards, we must not be tied down to the detail. We must see them rather as God's promise, put in terms of the day, that all the dreams that He had given to His true people would come to fruition.
In fact even when they ‘returned to the land' Israel did not seek to fulfil this vision literally. It was a vision from the past, a dream, not something that they wanted to carry into actuality. Instead of gathering together in twelve tribes, the divisions between the tribes became blurred and almost overlooked, although many did still proudly see themselves as of a particular important tribe (compare Philippians 3:5), but without trying to gather that tribe into a particular section of the land. (Jesus, Who was of Judah, happily lived in Nazareth and was ‘a Nazarene').
Most of those who belonged to the tribes remained in foreign countries. Intermarriage blurred the distinctions. There were no longer literally ‘twelve' tribes, and apart from in the earliest days never strictly were (the contents fluctuated, although not in a major way), and this is constantly recognised in that when the twelve tribes are listed the lists tend to differ slightly depending on their purpose (Genesis 29; Genesis 49:3-27; (the original twelve sons of Jacob) Numbers 1:5-15; Numbers 1:20-43 (here, and regularly, Joseph is divided into Ephraim and Manasseh, and Levi omitted - note 47:47); 2; 7; 13; 26; Deuteronomy 27:12-13 (the original twelve); Ezekiel 33:6-25 (Simeon omitted); Joshua 15-21; 1 Chronicles 2:1 (the original twelve); Ezekiel 27:16 (Gad and Asher omitted); Revelation 7:5-8 (Dan omitted, Ephraim called Joseph) compare the part lists in Judges 1; Judges 5:14-18). It is the ideal that matters, that the full tribal confederacy made up of ‘twelve tribes' was sharing God's inheritance, not the detail. The ‘twelve tribes' simply represent all the people of God.