Isaiah 17
The chapter is headed the burden of Damascus (v. 1) - an oracle of judgment against the proud capital of Aram, Israel's old northern rival. But the word does not stay on foreign soil. By the third verse the fortress has fallen from Ephraim too, the northern kingdom of Israel itself, so that Damascus and Samaria go down together, two allies bound in one ruin. Isaiah's images are agricultural and unsparing: the great kingdom taken away from being a city and left a ruinous heap (v. 1), its glory made thin like a body wasting to leanness (v. 4), the whole land reaped like a harvest field with only a few gleanings left behind - two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough (v. 6).3
At the chapter's heart is a turning of the eyes. At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel (v. 7) - and away from the altars, the work of his hands… the groves, or the images (v. 8). When the props of human strength are knocked away, the gaze that had been fixed on what people make is forced back to the One who made them. And Isaiah names the disease beneath all the ruin in a single sentence: Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength (v. 10). It was not that Israel had never known God; it was that He had slipped from memory, and a forgotten God leaves a vacuum that idols and alliances rush in to fill.2
The chapter closes by widening to the nations at large and then collapsing them in an instant. The peoples roar in like the noise of the seas… like the rushing of mighty waters (v. 12) - an unstoppable flood, to all appearances. But God shall rebuke them, and the flood becomes chaff and tumbleweed before the wind (v. 13). The last verse fixes the whole truth in one unforgettable line: And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not (v. 14). Terror at sunset, gone by sunrise. Every power that forgets the God of its salvation looks invincible in the evening and is simply not by morning - while the Maker the eyes turn back to remains.
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Isaiah 17:1-6The Glory of Jacob Shall Be Made Thin
1The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap. 2The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid. 3The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the LORD of hosts. 4And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean. 5And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, and reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the valley of Rephaim. 6Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the LORD God of Israel.
The chapter opens with a heading and a thunderclap: The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap (v. 1). A burden is a weighty oracle, a load of judgment the prophet must carry and deliver; here it lands on Damascus, the ancient capital of Aram and one of the proudest cities of the region. The sentence is total. Damascus is not merely defeated but taken away from being a city - unmade as a city, reduced to a ruinous heap of rubble where streets and palaces had been. The outlying towns share the fall: The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid (v. 2). It is an image of eerie reversal - where soldiers once stood guard, sheep now lie down undisturbed, the silence of pasture settling over the seat of power. The grandeur of empire ends not with a roar but with grazing flocks among the stones.3
The oracle widens, and the surprise is who else it names: The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the LORD of hosts (v. 3). Ephraim is the northern kingdom of Israel itself, and it falls in the same breath as Damascus because the two had bound themselves together - allies leaning on each other against a common threat. So their ruin is shared: the fortress ceases from the one and the kingdom from the other, and what is left of Syria will be reduced to the same diminished state as the glory of Israel. The lesson is quiet but pointed. Ephraim had sought security in an alliance with Damascus rather than in the LORD, and now the partner it trusted drags it down into the same grave. When a nation, or a person, props itself on something other than God, it does not gain that thing's strength - it inherits that thing's fate.
Now the prophet reaches for the image that gives the section its title: And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean (v. 4). The picture is a body wasting away. A nation that had been full and heavy with prosperity - fatness of flesh - will be drawn down to leanness, the way illness hollows a once-robust frame. The point worth catching is the pace of it. Glory does not vanish in an instant; it is made thin. It wastes. It withers gradually, visibly, undeniably, until the bulk that looked so solid has melted to almost nothing. There is a sober realism here that Scripture returns to often: the decline of pride is rarely a single catastrophe. It is a slow thinning, and by the time the leanness is obvious the wasting has been long underway. What looks substantial today can be hollowed out before anyone admits what is happening.
The harvest images make the thinning concrete: it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, and reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the valley of Rephaim. Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof (vv. 5-6). The harvestman comes through and takes nearly everything; what remains is only what a gleaner could scavenge after - a few grapes missed on the vine, a stray olive or two left when the tree was beaten, two or three berries at the very top, four or five on the outermost branches. It is a precise picture of a remnant: not nothing, but very nearly nothing. And yet the word turns on that yet. Yet gleaning grapes shall be left. Even in a judgment that strips the field bare, the harvest is not absolutely total. A few are left clinging to the highest bough - and Scripture will make much of those few. The thinning is real and severe; but it is a thinning, not an erasing, and the gleanings left behind are the seed of every promise of return.
Isaiah 17:7-11A Man Shall Look to His Maker
7At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. 8And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the groves, or the images. 9In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and there shall be desolation. 10Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: 11In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.
At the dead center of the chapter the eyes move: At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the groves, or the images (vv. 7-8). The two verses are built as a deliberate contrast of where a person looks. On one side stands his Maker, the Holy One of Israel; on the other, the work of his hands… that which his fingers have made… the groves… the images. The whole tragedy of idolatry is caught in that phrase - people bowing to the work of their own hands, looking up to things they themselves looked down to make. And the turning is forced by collapse. It is precisely when the props of human strength are knocked away that the gaze lifts. Stripped of altars and alliances, a person finally looks past what he made to the One who made him. The verb is one of reliance, not just glance - the eyes that have respect to the Holy One are eyes that have given up trusting anything else.
The picture of ruin sharpens with a strange and haunting verse: In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and there shall be desolation (v. 9). The strong cities - the very fortresses a nation counts on - will be as abandoned as a branch left bare after the pickers have passed, the same image of the stripped tree the chapter used in verse 6, now turned on the strongholds themselves. What once stood impregnable becomes a deserted thing, a forsaken bough, given over to desolation. The lesson presses the point of the whole oracle: the things people build to keep themselves safe cannot in the end keep themselves. Walls, weapons, the works of human hands - all of it ends as an empty branch in an emptied land. The only security that does not become a forsaken bough is the One the eyes have just turned back to in verse 7.
Now Isaiah names the disease beneath every symptom, and it is quieter and more searching than we expect: Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips (v. 10). The root sin is not first idolatry, or pride, or rebellion - it is forgetting. Israel had not denounced God; she had simply stopped being mindful of Him, let Him slip out of the daily reckoning until He was, in practice, gone. And notice the two names Isaiah uses for the One forgotten: the God of thy salvation - the One who had actually rescued her - and the rock of thy strength - the One who had actually held her up. She forgot the very God to whom she owed her deliverance and her standing. What rushed into the vacuum was substitute religion: pleasant plants and strange slips, exotic cuttings - foreign worship, imported security, cultivated with care. A forgotten God is never simply absent; the empty place fills fast with whatever promises to do His job.2
The verse about the strange slips runs straight on into the harvest that comes of them: In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow (v. 11). The picture is of feverish, hopeful cultivation - planting in the morning, coaxing the seed, watching for it to flourish. There is energy here, effort, even early promise. But the yield is named in advance, and it is bitter: the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow. What was sown with such hope comes up only as a pile of loss. This is the hard logic the whole chapter has been tracing. A life cultivated apart from the God of thy salvation may grow fast and green for a season, but its harvest is grief. The plants are pleasant, the slips are carefully set, the morning looks bright - and the end is a heap in a day of desperate sorrow. Effort poured into the wrong soil does not redeem the soil; it only multiplies the eventual ache.
Isaiah 17:12-14At Eveningtide Trouble
12Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters! 13The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind. 14And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us.
The chapter lifts its eyes from Damascus and Ephraim to the nations at large, and the sound is overwhelming: Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters! The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters (vv. 12-13). The repetition is deliberate - rushing… rushing… rushing - piling up to make us feel the surge of it. This is the roar of massed armies and surging peoples, a sound like breakers crashing, like a flood in spate. To anyone standing in its path it would seem irresistible, the kind of force that sweeps everything before it. Isaiah lets that impression build to its full height on purpose. He wants the reader to feel exactly how unstoppable the powers of the world appear - the noise, the mass, the momentum of the seas - so that the single word in the middle of verse 13 lands with all its weight.
That word is but. The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind (v. 13). The whole flood is undone by a single divine word. God does not muster an answering army; He rebukes - a word of command - and the roaring waters become weightless. The images of force invert completely: the unstoppable sea turns into chaff of the mountains before the wind, the dry husk that blows away at a breath, and a rolling thing before the whirlwind, a tumbleweed driven helplessly along. What looked like an ocean turns out to weigh nothing once God speaks against it. This is the settled confidence the chapter has been building toward: the powers that seem most overwhelming are not heavy at all in the hand of God. He has only to rebuke, and the flood scatters like dust.
The chapter ends on one of the most memorable lines in all of Isaiah: And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us (v. 14). The compression is the point. In the evening, terror - an enemy at the gate, trouble crashing in like the night. By morning, he is not. Simply gone. The threat that filled the whole horizon at dusk has, by sunrise, ceased to exist. It is the swiftest possible picture of how the powers that rise against God come to nothing, and it is offered as a settled rule: this is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us. Those who plunder and rob God's people are not promised a long reckoning - their lot is to be there in the evening and gone by morning. The line steadies the heart of anyone living under a threat that looks permanent. What rages at eveningtide may be nothing by dawn. The Maker the chapter sent every eye back to is the One who outlasts the night.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Isaiah 17 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the participle oseh (v. 7, “his Maker,” the One who makes), for dalal (v. 4, the glory “made thin”), and for the gleaning imagery of verse 6, where a stripped harvest leaves only a few berries on the topmost bough.
- Isaiah 17 ↔ Deuteronomy 32 · 1 Corinthians 10 · John 1Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Isaiah 17 to the rest of Scripture - the forgotten God of thy salvation and rock of thy strength (v. 10) read against the song of Moses, where the LORD is the Rock Israel forgat (Deut. 32:4, 18), and the Maker of verse 7 read beside the One by whom all things were made (John 1:3) and the Rock that was Christ (1 Cor. 10:4).
- Isaiah 17 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Isaiah 17 - the historical setting of the burden of Damascus and Ephraim, the harvest and gleaning imagery of verses 4-6, the catalog of altars and groves in verse 8, and the flood-and-chaff picture of the nations rebuked in verses 12-14.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Glory of Jacob Shall Be Made Thin
- Isaiah 7:8For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin... Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people.The same alliance of Damascus and Ephraim (v. 3) - bound together, broken together.
- Isaiah 10:21-22The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God... yet a remnant of them shall return.The gleanings left in verse 6 named outright - the remnant of Jacob that survives the stripping.
- Amos 3:12As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children of Israel be taken out.The same picture as verse 6 - almost nothing rescued, yet that little is real.
- Romans 11:5Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace.The two or three berries of verse 6 carried into the Gospel - a remnant kept by grace.
- James 1:11the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways.The glory made thin of verse 4 - abundance that quietly wastes and fades.
A Man Shall Look to His Maker
- Deuteronomy 32:18Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.The exact charge of verse 10 - forgetting the Rock, unmindful of the God who made them.
- Psalm 95:6O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.The Maker of verse 7 - the One the eyes are meant to look to and bow before.
- 1 Corinthians 10:4they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.The rock of thy strength (v. 10) named - the Rock that was Christ.
- Isaiah 2:8Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made.The very phrasing of verse 8 - bowing to the work of one’s own hands.
- Jeremiah 2:32Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? yet my people have forgotten me days without number.The forgetting of verse 10 - the strange, unnatural amnesia of God’s own people.
At Eveningtide Trouble
- Psalm 46:6The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.The roaring nations of verses 12-13 - rebuked and undone by the voice of God.
- Psalm 30:5weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.The very movement of verse 14 - trouble at evening giving way to the morning.
- Isaiah 37:36the angel of the LORD went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians... when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.Verse 14 fulfilled in history - a besieging army present at evening and gone by morning.
- Psalm 1:4The ungodly... are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.The chaff before the wind of verse 13 - the weightless end of every power that opposes God.
- Revelation 1:18I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore... and have the keys of hell and of death.The deepest reach of verse 14 - the evening of death itself turned to morning in the risen Christ.