Isaiah 26 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
Late 700s BC in origin, framed as a song to be sung on a future day of deliverance
Location
The land of Judah, with Jerusalem pictured as a strong walled city
Audience
The people of Judah, and later the community that used these poems in worship
Situation
A hymn celebrates a strong city whose gates open for a nation that keeps faith, contrasting the steady trust of the righteous with the ruin of the proud. It moves into prayer through a night of distress and closes with a call to hide for a little while until God's anger passes.
Key Background
The song reads like a liturgy, a text sung responsively in worship, which is why it shifts between community praise and individual pleading. Comparing national distress to a woman in labor who delivers only wind was a stock image for effort that produces nothing. The line about the dead rising and the earth giving birth to the departed is among the earliest hints in the Hebrew scriptures of hope beyond the grave, at a time when Israelite belief usually pictured the dead in Sheol, a shadowy underworld, rather than restored to life.
On that day, this song will be sung in the land of Judah: We have a strong city — he sets up as its and
Open the gates! Let the upright nation enter — the one that
The mind that is on you — you keep in peace, because it in you.
Trust in Yahweh forever, for in Yahweh, is the of
For he has brought down those who live in the heights — the city, he levels it, levels it to the ground, brings it down to the dust.
Feet trample it — the feet of the poor, the steps of those who have
The path of the is level — you, the make smooth the road the walk on.
Yes, in the path of your Yahweh, we wait for you. Your and your — that is what our whole being longs for.
With my whole being I for you in the night — yes, with my deep inside me I search for you. Because when your judgments come to earth, the people of the world learn what is right.
Even when shown kindness, the wicked never learn what is right. In a land of uprightness they still deal in wrong and refuse to see Yahweh's
Yahweh, hand is raised high, but they do not see it. Let them see for — and be put to shame. Yes, let the fire reserved for enemies consume them.
Yahweh, you will establish for us, because everything we have accomplished — you have actually done it for us.
Yahweh our God, other besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone is the one we honor.
The dead do not live, the do not rise. For this reason you punished and destroyed them and wiped out every memory of them.
You have the nation, Yahweh, you have the nation — you are honored! You have pushed out all the borders of the land.
Yahweh, in distress they sought you. They out a prayer when your was on them.
Like a pregnant woman about to give birth who writhes and cries out in her labor pains — that is what we were like before you, Yahweh.
We were pregnant, we writhed in pain — but what we gave birth to was wind. We accomplished no for the earth, and no one was born into the world.
Your dead will live! Their bodies will rise! Wake up and shout for joy, you who lie in the dust — because your is a of light, and the earth will give birth to the
Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you. Hide for just a little while until the passes.
Because look — Yahweh is coming out from his place to the inhabitants of the earth for their wrongdoing. The earth will uncover the spilled on it and will no longer hide its slain.