Isaiah 22:1-25--An Oracle Concerning Jerusalem

Isaiah 22
English Standard Version

An Oracle Concerning Jerusalem
22 The oracle concerning the valley of vision.

What do you mean that you have gone up,
    all of you, to the housetops,
2 you who are full of shoutings,
    tumultuous city, exultant town?
Your slain are not slain with the sword
    or dead in battle.
3 All your leaders have fled together;
    without the bow they were captured.
All of you who were found were captured,
    though they had fled far away.
4 Therefore I said:
“Look away from me;
    let me weep bitter tears;
do not labor to comfort me
    concerning the destruction of the daughter of my people.”

5 For the Lord God of hosts has a day
    of tumult and trampling and confusion
    in the valley of vision,
a battering down of walls
    and a shouting to the mountains.
6 And Elam bore the quiver
    with chariots and horsemen,
    and Kir uncovered the shield.
7 Your choicest valleys were full of chariots,
    and the horsemen took their stand at the gates.
8 He has taken away the covering of Judah.

In that day you looked to the weapons of the House of the Forest, 9 and you saw that the breaches of the city of David were many. You collected the waters of the lower pool, 10 and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall. 11 You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to him who did it, or see him who planned it long ago.

12 In that day the Lord God of hosts
    called for weeping and mourning,
    for baldness and wearing sackcloth;
13 and behold, joy and gladness,
    killing oxen and slaughtering sheep,
    eating flesh and drinking wine.
“Let us eat and drink,
    for tomorrow we die.”
14 The LORD of hosts has revealed himself in my ears:
“Surely this iniquity will not be atoned for you until you die,”
    says the Lord God of hosts.

15 Thus says the Lord God of hosts, “Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: 16 What have you to do here, and whom have you here, that you have cut out here a tomb for yourself, you who cut out a tomb on the height and carve a dwelling for yourself in the rock? 17 Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you 18 and whirl you around and around, and throw you like a ball into a wide land. There you shall die, and there shall be your glorious chariots, you shame of your master's house. 19 I will thrust you from your office, and you will be pulled down from your station. 20 In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, 21 and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your sash on him, and will commit your authority to his hand. And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. 22 And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. 23 And I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father's house. 24 And they will hang on him the whole honor of his father's house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons. 25 In that day, declares the LORD of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a secure place will give way, and it will be cut down and fall, and the load that was on it will be cut off, for the LORD has spoken.”

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The people of Jerusalem seem to be rejoicing in the news that their enemies are going to be defeated and forgetting that their time of judgment is near.  Someone is going to capture them without making war with them.  They would flee and be captured, and their fortified cities would not save them.  Even Jerusalem, The City of the Great King, would fall.

The people would try to run to Solomon's House of the Forest (the palace where he stored the shields and weapons of war), but they would not help.  They also tried emptying their reservoirs to make a moat to defend Jerusalem, but that didn't help.  They even tore down some houses to patch up the wall, but their attempts were futile because they were depending on their own strength and wit to save them.  They did not cry out to the LORD for help, so Isaiah knew their attempts were doomed to fail and he said he would weep bitterly for them.

God had set a time of weeping and mourning and trouble and trial and tribulation for his people.  This is not only what it was like before their time of Exile, but during the time of the Tribulation in the future called The Time of Jacob's Trouble.  It will not last forever and its purpose is to make the LORD's people calll out to Him for the salvation that He wants to provide.

The end this passage switches to some specific prophecies against a specific person.  There was a wicked steward that Isaiah is supposed to confront, for he had the grave of a rich man prepared for himself that the LORD wanted him to know that he would never lay in.  The LORD would cause him to flee, and he would be killed out in the wilderness, and there he would lay forever.  His descendants would not inherit the throne as he had planned and imagined, but the LORD would choose another to inherit the covenant promises made to David.  That man and his family would have descendants on the throne until such a time as these events came to pass and then even that "secure peg" would be cut down and there would be no kings in Isreal and Judah for a time.  Even the renewal of the covenant with a different branch of David's family should not be a sign to the people that they would escape judgment  They imagined since they were "the LORD's people" that they had a special covering protecting them, but that covering was now removed, and the LORD was going to allow the Gentiles to conquer them and take them into Exile.