“So the Light of Israel will be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame; It will burn and devour [Assyria’s] thorns and his briers in one day. And it will consume the glory of his forest and of his fruitful field, both soul and body; and they will be as when a sick man wastes away.” (Isaiah 10:17-18 NKJV)
I had the perfect image for this post, until I couldn’t use it. It would have been a map showing an arrow cutting south through a line of cities in the tribe of Benjamin, part of the nation of Judah, following the order scripted in Isaiah 10:28-32. An arrow would point from the town of Migron in the north to the town of Nob in the south, just outside Jerusalem. This would show the advance of an invading army, as detailed by Isaiah step by step, stopping with the siege of Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah.
Then I found out that this map didn’t happen. Historically, the Assyrian invasion didn’t come from the north, as everyone had expected given that they were located, you know, north of Jerusalem. Extra-Biblical sources say it came from the south. (p.132, 137, Isaiah NIB Comm.) So much for that image.
I had blithely assumed that the invasion shown in Isaiah 10 would match the historical invasion, and I was going to ask whether Isaiah wrote it down before as a predictive prophecy, or wrote it down after as a prophetic interpretation of events. But the prophecy doesn’t match history, leaving two options.
The first is the reasonable option, the road more traveled by, which assumes this text consists of fragments edited together at a later date. It’s reasonable to assume that this north-to-south sequence was edited in from a description of another invasion, an earlier Assyrian invasion or the invasion of Israel and Syria trying to oust King Ahaz. There are “fault lines” in the text that give evidence of later editors, and I can believe God works through all such messy processes to speak through Isaiah today.
But these “fault lines” aren’t on a surface reading of the text, so they must be read in to it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I wonder if there’s a way to read this text without distancing myself from it or placing myself over it.
The second is less reasonable. At least, I can’t find any reasonable folks online who post this option, although I’d love to find some. What if the sequence of events was wrong because the prophecy was indeed written down beforehand, expecting the most logical path of invasion, but then the main event actually happened, just from the south? What if the prophecy was wrong in the details but right in its results, warning of invasion and strengthening Judah’s will to resist it?
The point of Isaiah’s prophecy was THAT the Assyrians would invade, and would come a hairsbreadth from Jerusalem, not exactly HOW they would invade, after all. If Isaiah was giving actionable military prediction, then the logical response would be to fortify the towns along the invasion route. Of course, if they did that, then Assyria would just detour around the fortifications like Germany did around the Maginot Line. So, no, Isaiah’s prophecy wasn’t a map of history.
I find the mismatch between Isaiah and extra-biblical historical sources to be fascinating. Either it was pasted in, out of place, much later, when everyone had forgotten the details — or it was written down before, and preserved that way because the prediction was wrong geographically but correct in what mattered. The crucial part is that the army will be defeated by sickness, in one day (10:18). That’s what King Hezekiah needed to believe to withstand the horrible siege.
I’ve also always noticed a tiny mismatch between details in Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple and history. Luke 20:21 says Jerusalem will be “surrounded by armies,” while history says there were three Roman camps to the northwest and one to the northeast – not exactly “surrounded.” Matthew 24:20 says “Pray that your flight will not take place in winter” when it happened in the summer. If these were written down or edited after the fact, wouldn’t the editors include knowledge of these details? (You can read about the history at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-fall-of-jerusalem-in-70-ce-a-story-of-roman-revenge/)
But that’s my point, that Isaiah didn’t care about the military details. Isaiah isn’t scrying on a set future and plotting out the exact path of the Assyrians. Isaiah’s purpose is not to tell Israel HOW to stop the Assyrians, but to tell Israel THAT God would stop them. And God’s purpose is to prepare and preserve a chosen people for Himself, to show us how to stand firm today, in the present tense. Immanuel, “God-With-Us,” means that as we read the text God is active at work in our souls.
Isaiah would make a terrible spy. For one thing, his loyalty would always be to YHWH rather than the king. He’d always be advising them to get out of the war as quickly as possible, and not to ally with the big empires like Assyria or Egypt. I’m a strategy-minded guy myself, and I’m sure Isaiah would drive me up the wall. Reading Isaiah drives me up the wall sometimes even today!
The historical method is a tool I’m happy to use to analyze and prioritize a text. But I’ve noticed about myself that sometimes I’m spending more time debating WHEN something was written than I’m spending mulling over WHAT it says, and what it means to HOW I should live. At that point, I have made my historical method more important than the meaning of the text, and congratulations, Ben, you’ve constructed a little idol out of the method. God can choose to let His meaning shine though an analytical method, or He can choose to let it shine through reading the text, straight through. It depends on how He chooses to fill the text with meaning that day.
When I read through this text today, I’m hearing that I should let God work, however He chooses. God chose to work through even the murderous Empire of Assyria, for a time. But then the Empire took credit for what God had done, and God turned to them, saying “Woe to Assyria.” They weren’t as special as they thought they were.
The last straw comes when Assyria assumes that YHWH is just another god, just another idol, that his Temple just another big building, and his altar just another fire. (Isaiah 10:11). In the next verse, God speaks in justifiable wrath. He says, “I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria. … Shall the ax boast itself against him who chops with it?” (Isaiah 10:12, 15) Assyria is just a tool, and they will be thrown away like a blunted axe.
This is when the light of Israel kindles into a flame, and the flame burns the Empire down. (Isaiah 10:17-18) As painful as the fires in yesterday’s post were, it’s much easier to see why these fires burn, when the proud, violent bullies are humbled, as Mary sang.
The rest of the story of Hezekiah’s siege is told in other places in the Bible, including in the book of Isaiah, chapters 36-37, and in the image for this post. There we see some psychological warfare by the Assyrians, a prayer by Hezekiah, and God’s answer through Isaiah. The end of the story (already spoiled by Isaiah 10) is not a victory in battle, but with something like a lightning-fast plague:
“Then the angel of the Lord went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went away, returned home, and remained at Nineveh. Now it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, that his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword.” (Isaiah 37:36-38 NKJV)
It’s particularly ironic (to him) that the king of Assyria was killed in the house of his idol. YHWH has the last word, and the power to destroy both body and soul. Assyria will wane from this point, until it is a shadow of its former self. (Hezekiah will make the same mistake his father did, however, by getting too close to a new Empire, Babylon. But that too is another story.)
The proud trees are cut down: “Behold, the Lord, the GOD of hosts, will lop off the boughs with a terrible crash.” (Isaiah 10:33 NASB) Among the stumps, life remains. Isaiah writes of an unnamed child, the fourth one out of five children mentioned in Isaiah 6-12: “Then the rest of the trees of his forest will be so few in number that a child may write them.” (10:19) The child outlasts the Empire. May it ever be so.
(Image credit: Neil Holmes, The destruction of the Assyrian army as told in Isaiah 36-37 Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, England, UK https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2PN89D6/stained-glass-window-king-hezekiah-and-the-assyrians-by-william-wailes-mid-19th-century-ely-cathedral-cambridgeshire-england-2PN89D6.jpg)