The word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem
Heading to a small collection
(chaps.
2-4), the contents of which are-- Isaiah 2:1-4) All nations shall yet acknowledge the God of Israel. Isaiah 2:5-22; Isaiah 3:1-26; Isaiah 4:1) Through great judgments shall both Israel and thenations be brought to the knowledge of Jehovah Isaiah 4:2-6) When these judgments are overpast, all Zion’s citizens shall be holy. (A. B. Davidson, LL. D.)
A general view of the chapter
The Isaiah 2:2-4, it should be premised, recur with slight variations in the fourth chapter of Micah, and are supposed by many to have been borrowed by both writers from some older source. The prophet appears before an assembly of the people, perhaps on a Sabbath, and recites this passage, depicting in beautiful and effective imagery the spiritual preeminence to be accorded in the future to the religion of Zion He would dwell upon the subject further; but scarcely has he begun to speak when the disheartening spectacle meets his eye of a crowd of soothsayers, of gold and silver ornaments and finery, of horses and idols; his tone immediately changes, and he bursts into a diatribe against the foreign and idolatrous fashions, the devotion to wealth and glitter, which he sees about him, and which extorts from him in the end the terrible wish, “Therefore forgive them not” (verses 5-9). And then, in one of his stateliest periods, Isaiah declares the judgment about to fall upon all that is “tall and lofty,” upon Uzziah’s towers and fortified walls, upon the great merchant ships at Elath, upon every object of human satisfaction and pride, when wealth and rank will be impotent to save, when idols will be cast despairingly aside, and when all classes alike will be glad to find a hiding place, as in the old days of Midianite invasion or Philistine oppression (Judges 6:2; 1 Samuel 13:6), in the clefts and caves of the rocks. (Prof. S. R. Driver, D. D.)
Isaiah’s citizenship in Jerusalem
Isaiah’s citizenship in Jerusalem colours all his prophecy. More than Athens to Demosthenes, Rome to Juvenal, Florence to Dante, is Jerusalem to Isaiah. She is his immediate and ultimate regard, the centre and return of all his thoughts, the hinge of the history of his time, the one thing worth preserving amidst its disasters, the summit of those brilliant hopes with which he fills the future. He has traced for us the main features of her position and some of the lines of her construction, many of the great figures of her streets, the fashions of her women, the arrival of embassies, the effect of rumours. He has painted her aspect in triumph, in siege, in famine, and in earthquake; war filling her valleys with chariots, and again nature rolling tides of fruitfulness up to her gates; her moods of worship and panic and profligacy--till we see them all as clearly as the shadow following the sunshine and the breeze across the cornfields of our own summers. (Prof. G. A. Smith, D. D.)
Judah and Jerusalem
There is little about Judah in these Chapter s: the country forms but a fringe to the capital. (Prof. G. A. Smith, D. D.)
The Word of the Lord “seen”
Though the spirit of man has neither eyes nor ears, yet when enabled to perceive the supersensuous, it is altogether eye. (F. Delitzsch.)