Discovery BoxIsaiah 1:4-5 
Context1:4 1 The sinful nation is as good as dead, 2
the people weighed down by evil deeds.
They are offspring who do wrong,
children 3 who do wicked things.
They have abandoned the Lord,
and rejected the Holy One of Israel. 4
They are alienated from him. 5
1:5 6 Why do you insist on being battered?
Why do you continue to rebel? 7
Your head has a massive wound, 8
your whole body is weak. 9
Isaiah 1:21-24
Context1:21 How tragic that the once-faithful city
has become a prostitute! 10
She was once a center of 11 justice,
fairness resided in her,
but now only murderers. 12
1:22 Your 13 silver has become scum, 14
your beer is diluted with water. 15
1:23 Your officials are rebels, 16
they associate with 17 thieves.
All of them love bribery,
They do not take up the cause of the orphan, 20
or defend the rights of the widow. 21
1:24 Therefore, the sovereign Lord who commands armies, 22
the powerful ruler of Israel, 23 says this:
“Ah, I will seek vengeance 24 against my adversaries,
I will take revenge against my enemies. 25
1 sn Having summoned the witnesses and announced the Lord’s accusation against Israel, Isaiah mourns the nation’s impending doom. The third person references to the Lord in the second half of the verse suggest that the quotation from the Lord (cf. vv. 2-3) has concluded.
2 tn Heb “Woe [to the] sinful nation.” The Hebrew term הוֹי, (hoy, “woe, ah”) was used in funeral laments (see 1 Kgs 13:30; Jer 22:18; 34:5) and carries the connotation of death. In highly dramatic fashion the prophet acts out Israel’s funeral in advance, emphasizing that their demise is inevitable if they do not repent soon.
3 tn Or “sons” (NASB). The prophet contrasts four terms of privilege – nation, people, offspring, children – with four terms that depict Israel’s sinful condition in Isaiah’s day – sinful, evil, wrong, wicked (see J. A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 43).
4 sn Holy One of Israel is one of Isaiah’s favorite divine titles for God. It pictures the Lord as the sovereign king who rules over his covenant people and exercises moral authority over them.
5 tn Heb “they are estranged backward.” The LXX omits this statement, which presents syntactical problems and seems to be outside the synonymous parallelistic structure of the verse.
6 sn In vv. 5-9 Isaiah addresses the battered nation (5-8) and speaks as their representative (9).
7 tn Heb “Why are you still beaten? [Why] do you continue rebellion?” The rhetorical questions express the prophet’s disbelief over Israel’s apparent masochism and obsession with sin. The interrogative construction in the first line does double duty in the parallelism. H. Wildberger (Isaiah, 1:18) offers another alternative by translating the two statements with one question: “Why do you still wish to be struck that you persist in revolt?”
8 tn Heb “all the head is ill”; NRSV “the whole head is sick”; CEV “Your head is badly bruised.”
9 tn Heb “and all the heart is faint.” The “heart” here stands for bodily strength and energy, as suggested by the context and usage elsewhere (see Jer 8:18; Lam 1:22).
10 tn Heb “How she has become a prostitute, the faithful city!” The exclamatory אֵיכָה (’ekhah, “how!”) is used several times as the beginning of a lament (see Lam 1:1; 2;1; 4:1-2). Unlike a number of other OT passages that link references to Israel’s harlotry to idolatry, Isaiah here makes the connection with social and moral violations.
11 tn Heb “filled with.”
12 tn Or “assassins.” This refers to the oppressive rich and/or their henchmen. R. Ortlund (Whoredom, 78) posits that it serves as a synecdoche for all varieties of criminals, the worst being mentioned to imply all lesser ones. Since Isaiah often addressed his strongest rebuke to the rulers and leaders of Israel, he may have in mind the officials who bore the responsibility to uphold justice and righteousness.
13 tn The pronoun is feminine singular; personified Jerusalem (see v. 21) is addressed.
14 tn Or “dross.” The word refers to the scum or impurites floating on the top of melted metal.
15 sn The metaphors of silver becoming impure and beer being watered down picture the moral and ethical degeneration that had occurred in Jerusalem.
16 tn Or “stubborn”; CEV “have rejected me.”
17 tn Heb “and companions of” (so KJV, NASB); CEV “friends of crooks.”
18 tn Heb “pursue”; NIV “chase after gifts.”
19 sn Isaiah may have chosen the word for gifts (שַׁלְמוֹנִים, shalmonim; a hapax legomena here), as a sarcastic pun on what these rulers should have been doing. Instead of attending to peace and wholeness (שָׁלוֹם, shalom), they sought after payoffs (שַׁלְמוֹנִים).
21 sn The rich oppressors referred to in Isaiah and the other eighth century prophets were not rich capitalists in the modern sense of the word. They were members of the royal military and judicial bureaucracies in Israel and Judah. As these bureaucracies grew, they acquired more and more land and gradually commandeered the economy and legal system. At various administrative levels bribery and graft become commonplace. The common people outside the urban administrative centers were vulnerable to exploitation in such a system, especially those, like widows and orphans, who had lost their family provider through death. Through confiscatory taxation, conscription, excessive interest rates, and other oppressive governmental measures and policies, they were gradually disenfranchised and lost their landed property, and with it, their rights as citizens. The socio-economic equilibrium envisioned in the law of Moses was radically disturbed.
22 tn Heb “the master, the Lord who commands armies [traditionally, the Lord of hosts].” On the title “the Lord who commands armies,” see the note at v. 9.
23 tn Heb “the powerful [one] of Israel.”
24 tn Heb “console myself” (i.e., by getting revenge); NRSV “pour out my wrath on.”
25 sn The Lord here identifies with the oppressed and comes as their defender and vindicator.
