Isaiah 17 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
~735-732 BC, when Damascus and the northern kingdom of Israel were allied against Judah and Assyria was closing in
Location
Damascus, capital of the kingdom of Aram in what is now Syria, together with the territory of Ephraim in the northern kingdom of Israel
Audience
the people of Judah, who were being pressured to join the Damascus and Israel alliance
Situation
Isaiah announces that Damascus will cease to be a city and that its ally Ephraim will lose its fortifications too. He then compares what is left to the few olives missed by the harvesters, and ends with the roar of many nations rushing in and being scattered like chaff.
Key Background
Damascus and the northern kingdom had joined forces to force Judah into an anti-Assyrian coalition, and Assyria destroyed Damascus in 732 BC, which is the event this oracle anticipates. Israelite harvest law required farmers to leave the last grain and the highest olives for the poor, so the image of gleanings is a legal custom used to picture a small surviving remnant. The reference to planting pleasant gardens that fail points to fertility rites for a dying and rising deity, a Syrian religious practice involving forced quick growing plants that withered within days.
An about Damascus: Look — Damascus will stop being a city. It will become a heap of
The towns around will be abandoned — they'll become places for to lie down, with no one to disturb them.
The fortified city will vanish from Ephraim, and royal power from Damascus. What's left of Aram will be like the fading glory of Israel's people — this is the of Yahweh, of
On that day, Jacob's will waste away and the richness of his body will grow thin.
It will be like a gathering standing grain, his arm reaping the heads of wheat — like someone gleaning ears of grain in the of
But will be left over — like shaking an tree: two or three olives at the very top, four or five on the fruitful branches — this is the declaration of Yahweh, the God of Israel.
On that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will turn toward the No Other in
They will not look to the their own hands built, or turn toward what their fingers shaped — not the not the
On that day, their will be like the abandoned places in the forests and hilltops that were deserted when the Israelites came — and it will all be
Because you forgot the God who you and didn't remember the who shelters you — that's why you plant beautiful gardens and set out
On the day you plant them, you fence them in; in the morning you coax your seedlings to bloom — but the will vanish on a day of sickness and
Oh! The of many peoples — they roar like the roaring of the sea! The crashing of nations — they crash like the crashing of
The nations crash like the crashing of many waters — but he them and they flee far away, chased like on the hills before the wind, like before a storm.
At evening — sudden terror. Before morning — they are gone. This is what happens to those who us, the of those who loot us.