The Second Chastisement. The Removal of the Leadership (Isaiah 9:13-17).
Analysis.
a Yet the people have not turned to Him who smote them, nor have they sought Yahweh of hosts (Isaiah 9:13).
b Therefore Yahweh will cut off from Israel head and tail, palm branch and rush, in one day (Isaiah 9:14).
c The elder and the honourable man, he is the head. And the prophet who teaches lies, he is the tail (Isaiah 9:15).
c For those who lead these people cause them to err, and those who are led by them are destroyed (Isaiah 9:16).
b Therefore the Lord will not rejoice over their young men, nor will he have compassion on their fatherless and widows (Isaiah 9:17 a).
a For every one is profane (ungodly) and an evildoer, and every mouth speaks folly. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still (Isaiah 9:17 b).
In ‘a' the people have not turned to Him nor have they sought Yahweh, and in the parallel they have continued in their evil and experienced His anger. In ‘b they have cut off from them both head and tail, and in the parallel their young men and weak ones will also not be protected. In ‘c' the head and tail are defined as their leaders and prophets, and in the parallel such leaders cause the people to err, and thus destroy those whom they lead (‘c' leads into the contrast between ‘b' and ‘b').
‘Yet the people have not turned to him who smote them,
Nor have they sought Yahweh of hosts.
Therefore Yahweh will cut off from Israel head and tail,
Palm branch and rush, in one day.
The elder and the honourable man, he is the head.
And the prophet who teaches lies, he is the tail.
For those who lead these people cause them to err,
And those who are led by them are destroyed.'
Although God sought to win them back by chastisement the whole people of Israel (‘people' is emphatic) spurned His plea, they refused to turn back to Him, or seek Him. So Yahweh will remove their leadership; elder (an officially appointed leader from among the people and theoretically popularly accepted), honourable man (influential but not official) and prophet. This is depicted as cutting off head and tail, palm branch and rush. The prophets who teach falsehood are here dismissed summarily as the tail, and as mere rushes in contrast with the tall palms. They may think that they are important but they are not. They are a disaster for Israel, as false teachers always are for all.
‘In one day'. This may have indicated a sudden purge of the leadership when one dynasty replaced another, and the old leadership was rooted out, for they were troubled times, or it may be referring to the collapse of Samaria to the Assyrians. If we see the chastisements as chronological the former is the more probable (see Isaiah 10:3).
But the sad result of all this is then declared. The leaders have led the people astray, and the people have followed them, thereby the people are destroyed. The next verse suggests that their destruction initially lay in the fact that they became morally corrupt. But they did not, of course, need to obey the leaders when they went against Yahweh's Law so that they had no excuse for rejecting Yahweh. They were like sheep determined on having their own way, and thus went astray (Isaiah 53:6).
‘Therefore the Lord will not rejoice over their young men,
Nor will he have compassion on their fatherless and widows,
For every one is profane (ungodly) and an evildoer,
And every mouth speaks folly.
For all this his anger is not turned away,
But his hand is stretched out still.'
All the people, almost without exception, are in fact guilty, even their young men, the fatherless and the widows, those who were led and guided by others. All had become profane and spurned Yahweh, all did what was evil, all spoke foolishness and rejected the covenant (compare Psalms 14:1). So the Lord will turn away from His usual stance of ‘rejoicing in' the young men and having compassion on the weak and helpless. This will be because of the evil that they have allowed to develop within themselves, and because of their profanity against Him. ‘Rejoicing in' is probably to be seen as including the idea that He will watch over them and protect them. Thus the negative indicates that His protection is to be removed and they also will suffer in the situations that result.
As already mentioned, the removal of the leadership may have taken place at the many purges when one dynastic house replaced another, as happened regularly in Israel. Their monarchy was not stable. Or it may have been seen as taking place in 722 BC when the cream of the nation were taken into exile. But either way the people who remained also suffered, and yet they still did not change but continued in their rejection of Yahweh. Thus God did not remove His anger from them, and continued to stretch out His hand against them.