Isaiah 27
Lost souls come home to Jerusalem
God kills the dragon
1When that big day comes,
the LORD will pull his sword
and kill Leviathan, [1] dragon of the sea.
It’ll twist and try to escape.
But it’s a dead dragon.
You’ll sing about a wonderful vineyard. [2]
God’s watching over Israel
3I’m the LORD.
I’m the vineyard’s guard and gardener.
I keep it watered.
I keep it safe.
But I’ll tell you this.
If you come at me with thorns and briers, [3]
I’m bringing fire to the fight,
And I’ll burn you.
5But if you want to join me
And you want me to protect you,
Make a peace treaty with me,
Promise to live peacefully with me.
6There’s coming a day
When Jacob’s descendants [4] will sink their roots.
They’ll blossom, pop out shoots,
And fill the world with fruit.
7Did God kill Israelites
Like he killed his enemies?
Did he treat Israel that way?
Did he kill them
Like he killed their killers?
8You deported the Israelites.
You fought them and exiled them.
Then you blew them away
With the powerful blast of an eastbound wind. [5]
Israel paid its debt in punishment
9This punishment fits the crime.
And it pays the price in full.
Israel is forgiven,
Back on good terms with God.
That’s if they destroy
All the pagan altars and shrines.
Ghost towns now.
Abandoned throughout the land.
Cattle graze there
And strip lower branches bare.
11When the branches die,
Snap off, and fall,
Women use them as firewood.
They don’t know how to take care of plants.
So, God will stop taking care of them, for a time.
He created them,
But he’s not going to cut them slack. 12When that great day comes, the LORD is going to harvest his Israelite crops. Some are planted alongside the Euphrates River. Others alongside Egypt Creek. [6] The LORD is going to bring them home. 13That day, they’ll hear a horn—a signal to leave Assyria and Egypt. Exiles and lost souls [7] among them will come home to Jerusalem and worship the LORD on his holy mountain.
Footnotes
Leviathan was a sea monster and a symbol of chaos in ancient Canaanite stories about the creation of the world. Sea monsters were killed in these stories, making the world safer for other creatures and humans. Bible writers seemed to pick up on these stories and use the Big Daddy of the sea monsters, Leviathan, to symbolize Israel’s enemies. So, many scholars say Isaiah wasn’t predicting that God would become a dragon slayer. Instead, God was going to kill the nations that were hurting his Chose People, the Israelites.
The vineyard is Israel, every grape an Israelite. They were the ancestors of today’s Jewish people.
Scholars interpret the thorns and briers in different ways. Some scholars say the thorns and briers mean if Israel returns to its bad habit of behaving badly, he’ll punish them. Bad thorns. Others say thorns represent enemies of Israel. Some scholars offer theories incredibly vague: the thorns and briers represent the void left in Israel after Assyrians exiled the Israelites to what is now Iraq. Which leaves some Bible students saying, “Huh?”
Israelites, ancestors of Jewish people.
Assyrians exiled Israelites in the northern Jewish nation of Israel to what is now Iraq. That was in 722 BC. Babylonians exiled Israelites in the southern Jewish nation of Judah to Iraq a century and a half later, in 586 BC.
Literally “Wadi of Egypt.” A wadi is a riverbed that is often dry, but that can turn into a stream or a river after a rain. The Wadi of Egypt mentioned in the Bible is probably the one located about 30 miles (48 km) south of Israel’s border. That’s about a third of the way to the fertile Nile River Delta, where the Nile River fans out into streams that drain into the Mediterranean Sea. Some Israelites escaped getting deported by Assyrian into what is now Iraq, along the Euphrates River. Some stayed in what was left of Israel, and many others withdrew southward into Egypt.
Israelites exiled from their homeland had no way of worshiping God as their tradition and sacred writings said they should. Jews were allowed to worship God with animal and grain sacrificial offerings in Jerusalem only. They weren’t allowed to build their own altars and shrines. “The LORD your God will choose one worship center for the entire nation of Israel. That’s where all your tribes will come to worship,” (See Deuteronomy 12:5).
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