Chapter 22
Prophecy of the valley of vision, meaning Jerusalem.
2023 - Perhaps this is some kind of contrast between the "wilderness of the sea" that started the last chapter about Babylon, and now the "valley of vision". All the commentaries agree that this is about Jerusalem, and on a larger scale, about Judah.
The leaders won't fight in battle, won't try to make a stand, but instead will flee from invaders. They will flee but they will still be captured. Cowards? Many specifics are here, but obscure to me. Elam and Kir are both mentioned. I'm staring to think Kir must have been a reference to a specific place, even if not the name of a specific city. It just comes up too often.
2022 - Doesn't that final King in Jerusalem escape from the walls and run for the hills but gets captured by Babylon anyway? And isn't it interesting that Isaiah started to prophesy even before the northern kingdom fell, and includes prophecy about the southern kingdom also falling.
2023 - The King was Zedekiah, in 2Kgs 25. These verses: 4 Then a breach was made in the city, and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, by the king's garden, and the Chaldeans were around the city. And they went in the direction of the Arabah. ... 6 Then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, and they passed sentence on him. 7 They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon. [2Ki 25:4, 6-7 ESV]
Walls broken and then rebuilt out of destroyed houses, water sources protected... Sounds like Isaiah foresaw the siege of Jerusalem by Babylon, still far in the future. Or even further to the return under Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the entire wall?
2022 - Babylon laid siege to the city. They would have been "shelling" the walls, battering them with rams and so on. To try and repair the breaches as quickly as possible, before they could be exploited, they tore down nearby houses and used the material to shore up the breaches.
2022 - These verses:
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." [Isa 22:12-13 ESV].
As the day of Jerusalem's fall gets closer, God wants them to mourn and decry their sins that led to this awful consequence. Surely the city would be somber and reserved and repentant. But no! They took the position that if they were going to die tomorrow, they ought to just party hardy today! What complete insolence. What further proof that God's judgment on them was appropriate. Could any horror that Babylon might perpetrate on them be more than such people deserved? Hard for us to even imagine. They had truly grown worse than the Canaanite heathens they'd displaced.
A long prophecy about Shebna, the Kings second, being deposed. Hilkiah to take his place. He will open and no one will close and he will close and none will open. I have seen this phrase elsewhere. In the Revelation I think. Per MSB Jesus says this of himself in Revelation 3. So...you have to believe there was a Shebna and a Hilkiah in Isaiah's day. Shebna was either unwise or disloyal and was depending much on the chariots and/or other means he had collected to fend off the Babylonian invasion. Whatever he's doing, he's doing it wrong, and is working against God's plans, and Isaiah says that he will be deposed and Hilkiah will take his place.
But someone, this also looks all the way to Revelation 3. Reading vss 22-25, you get some sense that these are about Jesus stepping up to the throne of David, but then in vs 25 it says "the peg in a secure place will give way". This is certainly not a reference to Jesus.
MSB has many notes on the story of Shebna and Hilkiah. As it reads, these most certainly were both real people in Isaiah's time. Shebna had a very high opinion of himself, and went around looking after Shebna with no real regard for his duties to the people. Eventually, he is demoted, and then ends up dying in a foreign country, never to be buried in the "kingly tomb" he had dug for himself. There is mention that Shebna may have been from Egypt - so the bigger the tomb the bigger the man would have been how he saw things. (2022 - If from Egypt, this man in high position likely worshiped Egyptian gods and practiced all kinds of divining as part of his decision making. He would not have been a man of God in any sense. My guess is that Eliakim was a man of God. Even so, his rise only forestalls the fall, it does not prevent it. Why? Because Jerusalem has already passed the tipping point. God was done with them. And for good reason when you read vss 12-15. There was no "fixing them". They had to die.) Hilkiah is the peg, and much of the responsibility for the kingdom "hangs on him" once Shebna is deposed. He controls access to the king in Isaiah's time, as Jesus will control access to his kingdom in the Millennial. This is as far as that analogy goes. In the end, Hilkiah also falters, makes mistakes, and as he goes so go the people. Far as I know, we have not yet seen either of these people, but MSB indicates that we know the details of how this prophecy played out from other scriptures. One to watch for.