Isaiah 6:12

And the LORD have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(12) And the Lord have removed men far away.—The words point to the policy of deportation adopted by the Assyrian kings. From the first hour of Isaiah’s call the thought of an exile and a return from exile was the key-note of his teaching, and of that thought thus given in germ, his whole after-work was but a development, the horizon of his vision expanding and taking in the form of another empire than the Assyrian as the instrument of punishment.

And there be a great forsaking.—Better, great shall be the deserted space. (Comp. Isaiah 5:9; Isaiah 7:22-23.) The words may have connected themselves in Isaiah’s thoughts with what he had heard before from the lips of Micah (Jeremiah 26:18; Micah 3:12).

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

6:9-13 God sends Isaiah to foretell the ruin of his people. Many hear the sound of God's word, but do not feel the power of it. God sometimes, in righteous judgment, gives men up to blindness of mind, because they will not receive the truth in the love of it. But no humble inquirer after Christ, need to fear this awful doom, which is a spiritual judgment on those who will still hold fast their sins. Let every one pray for the enlightening of the Holy Spirit, that he may perceive how precious are the Divine mercies, by which alone we are secured against this dreadful danger. Yet the Lord would preserve a remnant, like the tenth, holy to him. And blessed be God, he still preserves his church; however professors or visible churches may be lopped off as unfruitful, the holy seed will shoot forth, from whom all the numerous branches of righteousness shall arise.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

And the Lord have removed ... - The land shall be given up to desolation. The men - the strength of the nation - shall be taken to a distant land.

And there be a great forsaking - A great desolation; the cities and dwellings shall be abandoned by the inhabitants; compare Isaiah 17:2; Jeremiah 4:29; Zephaniah 2:4.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

12. (2Ki 25:21).

forsaking—abandonment of dwellings by their inhabitants (Jer 4:29).

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Have removed men far away; have caused this people to be carried away captive into far countries.

And there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land; till houses and lands be generally forsaken of their owners, either because fled away from the sword into strange lands, or because they went into captivity.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And the Lord have removed men far away,.... Not to Babylon, but to the ends of the earth, into the most distant countries, by means of the Romans; for they were but instruments of carrying the Jews captive out of their own land, and dispersing them among the several nations of the world; it was the Lord's doing, and a judgment which he inflicted upon them for their sins:

and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land; not that there should be many left in the land, and multiply and increase in it; which is the sense of the Septuagint, Vulgate Latin, and Arabic versions; but that the land should be greatly forsaken of men; there should be many places in the midst of the land destitute of them; and this should continue a long time, as Kimchi observes, which therefore cannot be understood of the Babylonish captivity, but of their present one.

Geneva Study Bible

And the LORD have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

12. and there be a great forsaking … land] Better, and great be the vacancy in the midst of the land. The word “vacancy” (deserted place) is used in Isaiah 17:9 : for the thought cf. ch. Isaiah 5:9, Isaiah 7:16 ff.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 12. - And the Lord have removed men far away. The Assyrian and Babylonian policy of deportation is pointed at. Pul had attacked the kingdom of Israel ten or twelve years before Uzziah's death, and had perhaps made the Assyrian policy known, though he had allowed himself to be bought off (2 Kings 15:19, 20). And there be a great forsaking; rather, and the desolation be great; i.e. till a great portion of Judah be depopulated. Isaiah 6:12

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

Isaiah heard with sighing, and yet with obedience, in what the mission to which he had so cheerfully offered himself was to consist. Isaiah 6:11. "Then said I, Lord, how long?" He inquired how long this service of hardening and this state of hardness were to continue - a question forced from him by his sympathy with the nation to which he himself belonged (cf., Exodus 32:9-14), and one which was warranted by the certainty that God, who is ever true to His promises, could not cast off Israel as a people for ever. The answer follows in Isaiah 6:11-13 : "Until towns are wasted without inhabitant, and houses are without man, and the ground shall be laid waste, a wilderness, and Jehovah shall put men far away, and there shall be many forsaken places within the land. And is there still a tenth therein, this also again is given up to destruction, like the terebinth and like the oak, of which, when they are felled, only a root-stump remains: such a root-stump is a holy seed." The answer is intentionally commenced, not with עד־כּי, but with אם אשׁר עד (the expression only occurs again in Genesis 28:15 and Numbers 32:17), which, even without dropping the conditional force of אם, signified that the hardening judgment would only come to an end when the condition had been fulfilled, that towns, houses, and the soil of the land of Israel and its environs had been made desolate, in fact, utterly and universally desolate, as the three definitions (without inhabitant, without man, wilderness) affirm. The expression richak (put far away) is a general and enigmatical description of exile or captivity (cf., Joel 4:6, Jeremiah 27:10); the literal term gâlâh has been already used in Isaiah 5:13. Instead of a national term being used, we find here simply the general expression "men" (eth-hâēâdâm; the consequence of depopulation, viz., the entire absence of men, being expressed in connection with the depopulation itself. The participial noun hâ azubâh (the forsaken) is a collective term for places once full of life, that had afterwards died out and fallen into ruins (Isaiah 17:2, Isaiah 17:9). This judgment would be followed by a second, which would expose the still remaining tenth of the nation to a sifting. והיה שׁב, to become again (Ges. 142, 3); לבער היה, not as in Isaiah 5:5, but as in Isaiah 4:4, after Numbers 24:22 : the feminine does not refer to the land of Israel (Luzzatto), but to the tenth. Up to the words "given up to destruction," the announcement is a threatening one; but from this point to "remains" a consolatory prospect begins to dawn; and in the last three words this brighter prospect, like a distant streak of light, bounds the horizon of the gloomy prophecy. It shall happen as with the terebinth and oak. These trees were selected as illustrations, not only because they were so near akin to evergreens, and produced a similar impression, or because there were so many associations connected with them in the olden times of Israel's history; but also because they formed such fitting symbols of Israel, on account of their peculiar facility for springing up again from the root (like the beech and nut, for example), even when they had been completely felled. As the forms yabbesheth (dryness), dalleketh (fever), ‛avvereth (blindness), shachepheth (consumption), are used to denote certain qualities or states, and those for the most part faulty ones (Concord. p. 1350); so shalleceth here does not refer to the act itself of felling or casting away, but rather to the condition of a tree that has been hewn or thrown down; though not to the condition of the trunk as it lies prostrate upon the ground, but to that of the root, which is still left in the earth. Of this tree, that had been deprived of its trunk and crown, there was still a mazzebeth kindred form of mazzebâh), i.e., a root-stump (truncus) fast in the ground. The tree was not yet entirely destroyed; the root-stump could shoot out and put forth branches again. And this would take place: the root-stump of the oak or terebinth, which was a symbol of Israel, was "a holy seed." The root-stump was the remnant that had survived the judgment, and this remnant would become a seed, out of which a new Israel would spring up after the old had been destroyed. Thus in a few weighty words is the way sketched out, which God would henceforth take with His people. The passage contains an outline of the history of Israel to the end of time. Israel as a nation was indestructible, by virtue of the promise of God; but the mass of the people were doomed to destruction through the judicial sentence of God, and only a remnant, which would be converted, would perpetuate the nationality of Israel, and inherit the glorious future. This law of a blessing sunk in the depths of the curse actually inflicted, still prevails in the history of the Jews. The way of salvation is open to all. Individuals find it, and give us a presentiment of what might be and is to be; but the great mass are hopelessly lost, and only when they have been swept away will a holy seed, saved by the covenant-keeping God, grow up into a new and holy Israel, which, according to Isaiah 27:6, will fill the earth with its fruits, or, as the apostle expresses it in Romans 11:12, become "the riches of the Gentiles."

Now, if the impression which we have received from Isaiah 6:1-13 is not a false one - namely, that the prophet is here relating his first call to the prophetic office, and not, as Seb. Schmidt observes, his call to one particular duty (ad unum specialem actum officii) - this impression may be easily verified, inasmuch as the addresses in chapters 1-5 will be sure to contain the elements which are here handed to the prophet by revelation, and the result of these addresses will correspond to the sentence judicially pronounced here. And the conclusion to which we have come will stand this test. For the prophet, in the very first address, after pointing out to the nation as a whole the gracious pathway of justification and sanctification, takes the turn indicated in Isaiah 6:11-13, in full consciousness that all is in vain. And the theme of the second address is, that it will be only after the overthrow of the false glory of Israel that the true glory promised can possibly be realized, and that after the destruction of the great body of the people only a small remnant will live to see this realization. The parable with which the third begins, rests upon the supposition that the measure of the nation's iniquity is full; and the threatening of judgment introduced by this parable agrees substantially, and in part verbally, with the divine answer received by the prophet to his question "How long?" On every side, therefore, the opinion is confirmed, that in Isaiah 6:1-13 he describes his own consecration to the prophetic office. The addresses in chapters 2-4 and 5, which belong to the time of Uzziah and Jotham, do not fall earlier than the year of Uzziah's death, from which point the whole of Jotham's sixteen years' reign lay open before them. Now, as Micah commenced his ministry in Jotham's reign, though his book was written in the form of a complete and chronologically indivisible summary, by the working up of the prophecies which he delivered under Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, and was then read or published in the time of Hezekiah, as we may infer from Jeremiah 26:18, it is quite possible that Isaiah may have taken from Micah's own lips (though not from Micah's book) the words of promise in Isaiah 2:1-4, which he certainly borrowed from some quarter. The notion that this word of promise originated with a third prophet (who must have been Joel, if he were one of the prophets known to us), is rendered very improbable by the many marks of Micah's prophetic peculiarities, and by its natural position in the context in which it there occurs (vid., Caspari, Micha, pp. 444-5).

Again, the situation of Isaiah 6:1-13 is not inexplicable. As Hvernick has observed, the prophet evidently intended to vindicate in Isaiah 6:1-13 the style and method of his previous prophecies, on the ground of the divine commission that he had received. but this only serves to explain the reason why Isaiah has not placed Isaiah 6:1-13 at the commencement of the collection, and not why he inserts it in this particular place. He has done this, no doubt, for the purpose of bringing close together the prophecy and its fulfilment; for whilst on the one hand the judgment of hardening suspended over the Jewish nation is brought distinctly out in the person of king Ahaz, on the other hand we find ourselves in the midst of the Syro-Ephraimitish war, which formed the introduction to the judgments of extermination predicted in Isaiah 6:11-13. It is only the position of chapter 1 which still remains in obscurity. If Isaiah 1:7-9 is to be understood in a historically literally sense, then chapter 1 must have been composed after the dangers of the Syro-Ephraimitish war had been averted from Jerusalem, though the land of Judah was still bleeding with the open wounds which this war, designed as it was to destroy it altogether, had inflicted upon it. Chapter 1 would therefore be of more recent origin than chapters 2-5, and still more recent than the connected chapters 7-12. It is only the comparatively more general and indefinite character of chapter 1 which seems at variance with this. But this difficulty is removed at once, if we assume that chapter 1, though not indeed the first of the prophet's addresses, was yet in one sense the first - namely, the first that was committed to writing, though not the first that he delivered, and that it was primarily intended to form the preface to the addresses and historical accounts in chapters 2-12, the contents of which were regulated by it. For chapters 2-5 and 7-12 form two prophetic cycles, chapter 1 being the portal which leads into them, and Isaiah 6:1-13 the band which connects them together. The prophetic cycle in chapters 2-5 may be called the Book of hardening, as it is by Caspari, and chapters 7-12 the Book of Immanuel, as Chr. Aug. Crusius suggests, because in all the stages through which the proclamation in chapters 7-12 passes, the coming Immanuel is the banner of consolation, which it lifts up even in the midst of the judgments already breaking upon the people, in accordance with the doom pronounced upon them in Isaiah 6:1-13.