Why should you be stricken again?
You will revolt more and more.
The whole head is sick,
And the whole heart faints.
Should ye be stricken – this word means smitten, or punished. It refers to the manner in which they had been punished, which he specifies in Isa. 1:7-8 and which we will discuss more full there. Jerome says, that the sense is,
‘…there is no medicine which I can administer to your wounds. All your members are full of wounds; and there is no part of your body which has not been smitten before. The more you are afflicted, the more will your impiety and iniquity increase.’
It is applied to the infliction of punishment on an individual; or to the judgments of God by the plague, pestilence, or sickness. It is frequently used of God “smiting enemy troops with some horrific pestilence in a battle situation. For instance, in Gen. 19:2: ‘And they smote the men that were at the door with blindness.’; in Num. 14:12: ‘And I will smite them with the pestilence.’; in Exo. 7:25: ‘After that the Lord had smitten the river,’ that is, had changed it into blood; and compare that to Isa. 1:20; Zech. 10:2). Here it refers to the judgments inflicted on the nation as the punishment of their crimes.
We must note that this refers to a large number of these “chastenings”, hence a large number of crimes. This is not referring to single beating for a single crime. God is not viewing Israel’s disobedience as a single problem here. It is true that the underlying cause of the disobedience may be their rebellion, but the crimes for which he has chastened them are several and are not viewed as a singled crime. This is an important matter that we must understand. Israel is in this condition because God has given her repeated; many, many, many, yes, many opportunities to obey Him and Israel, nationally, had failed on every occasion and had fallen under His chastening hand. Though Isaiah is looking “down the corridors of time”, so to speak, and seeing Israel as a unit as far as her history goes and seeing Israel as if she were a single life, it is important to note that this is not the case.
Isaiah is giving a summary case against Israel in preparation for his presentation of the prophecies of the coming Messiah, the rescuer, the solution of the seemingly insoluble problem that Israel has run up against all of the centuries time and again that has resulted in her being chastened over and over and ending up in the condition that she stands in at the time of Isaiah’s prophecy, punished nearly to the point of destruction!
Isaiah will make the case that this coming Messiah will do what Israel has been unable and, more properly, unwilling to do over the centuries. He will give them a willing and pliable heart before God that will submit willingly before the Lord and obey His command to finally and fully leave their idols and their disobedience and follow after Him with their whole hearts! But first, Isaiah must first fully paint the full picture of their depravity; for that is the real problem at hand and that is the true problem that the Lord Jesus, the Messiah will come to solve.
Ye will revolt – The Hebrew here is actually a series of three words: The verb To Add, Still, and the noun Apostasy or Revolt. The sense then of the phrase is that they will add defection, or revolt to the crimes they have already committed. The effect of calamity, and punishment, will be only to increase rebellion. This is the opposite of the intended what was the expected result of chastening and it demonstrates just what the true state of the heart of the average Israelite truly was.
The idea here is that this is response to God’s chastening hand. Rather than heed what God is saying to them by means of that chastening, they revolt and head in precisely the opposite direction. God intended for the chastening to reveal to them His displeasure, and thus, their sin and moral and spiritual lack. Rather it had the effect of stimulating more rebellion and more desire to fly in God’s face. God’s question to them, in that light then, is why should He chasten them at all then? The result would simply be more sin instead of the repentance and obedience that He desired.
Remember that we are not just speaking of the leadership here, we are speaking of the nation as a whole by this point and so this applied to all men, not just to the leaders. Where the heart is right with God, the tendency of affliction is to humble it, and lead it more and more to God. Where it is evil, the tendency is to make the sinner more obstinate and rebellious. This effect of punishment is seen everywhere. Sinners revolt more and more. They become sullen, and malignant, and fretful; they plunge into vice to seek temporary relief, and thus they become more and more alienated from God. We see this all over our world today. Men withdraw and dive into their small pleasures and pull away from the Lord rather allow the hand of God to guide them toward righteousness holiness.
“Still” carries and almost incredulous sense to it. After all that God has done to them. After all of the chastening, looking at the matter as whole, as it were, and as Isaiah has drawn the image for them, the “still” will refuse to repent and “still” will refuse to submit, choosing rather to continue in their own sinful wickedness rather than to submit to their God. Truly in this he stands as the polar opposite of Moses who, we are told,
… 25 choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, 26 esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.[1] (Hebrews 11:24-25)
The nation that followed in his footsteps chose the passing pleasures of sin for a season, and chose to embrace the reproach of Christ!
What Isaiah calls “revolt” here is one of the OT terms for apostasy. It can be simply defined as a state of hostility by being obstinate and stubborn to direction or commands by a superior, either active or passive resistance.[2] It is a noun form that can also be translated “crime”. The root meaning of the word is “to cease” or “to depart” and it is used that way, for instance in 1 Samuel 16:14 where the Spirit of the Lord is said to “depart” from Saul:
14 But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him.[3]
The Adjectival form can mean “sullen” and is used in 1 Kings 21:5:
5 But Jezebel his wife came to him, and said to him, “Why is your spirit so sullen that you eat no food?”[4]
The noun is used 8 times, 4 of them here in Isaiah, and twice in Jeremiah. The other two occurrences are in Deuteronomy. The occurrences in Deuteronomy speak of a false prophet seeking to turn Israel’s heart away from the Lord and of his punishment (Dt. 13:6) and of the crime of bearing false witness. (Dt. 19:16). In Jeremiah, (Jer. 28:16; 29:32) both occurrences speak of false prophets who teach rebellion against the Lord. In addition to this passage In Isaiah 1:5, the remaining 3 passages in Isaiah all use the words to speak of “hindering” (14:6), “deeply revolting” (31:6); and “departing” from God.
But this form of the word is not the more important form of the word. The primary meaning of the root is “to turn aside.” It appears to be a distinctively Northwest Semitic word, being attested particularly in Hebrew and Phoenician. Intransitive in the basic stem, it is accordingly frequently found with many prepositions, yielding such ideas as “turn aside from/into,” and “withdraw from.”
The verbal root occurs 191 times. In many cases it is a simple verb of motion, as in the act of turning aside. It is used, for instance by Moses of his great sighting of the burning bush in Exodusus 3:3-4:
3 Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” 4 So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!”[5]
Likewise it is used Jael as he went to meet Sisera in Judges 4:18:
18 And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said to him, “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me; do not fear.” And when he had turned aside with her into the tent, she covered him with a blanket. [6]
Boaz used the term in inviting a close relative to come aside and sit with him in Ruth 4:1:
Now Boaz went up to the gate and sat down there; and behold, the close relative of whom Boaz had spoken came by. So Boaz said, “Come aside, friend, sit down here.” So he came aside and sat down.[7]
In addition to turning aside, it can be translated “departing”, as in Numbers 12:10. When Aaron and Miriam rebelled against Moses’ authority, as a part of the judgment of God, when the glory of God “departed” from the Tabernacle, Miriam became leprous:
10 And when the cloud departed from above the tabernacle, suddenly Miriam became leprous, as white as snow. Then Aaron turned toward Miriam, and there she was, a leper.[8]
The idea of departing could also involve spiritual issues. Thus, Samson “knew not that the Lord had departed from him” (Jud 16:20). “The Lord departed from Saul” ( I Sam 16:14; 28:16). Tragically, it was said repeatedly of Israel and its leaders that they did not depart “from the sins of Jeroboam” (II Kgs 10:31; 13:2, 6, 11; 14:24; 15:9, 18, 24, 28; 17:22; cf. 3:3). God complained against Jerusalem that the heart of his people had departed from him (Ezk 6:9). Unfortunately, those who had “departed not from following the Lord” (II Kgs 18:6) were all too few.
The root is often used of Israel’s apostasy. In many cases it is translated “turn aside/away” Ex 32:8 uses it to speak of Israel “turning aside” out of the way God had commanded them to walk in the wilderness:
8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!’ ”[9]
See also Deut 9:12; 11:16 for other examples of this type of usage.
Conversely, “not to turn aside” was a way of affirming a man’s steadfastness before the Lord. In I Kgs 22:43 Jehoshaphat is said to have “not turned aside” from the ways of the Lord or from the ways of his father Asa:
43 And he walked in all the ways of his father Asa. He did not turn aside from them, doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Nevertheless the high places were not taken away, for the people offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places.[10]
Such a course of following strictly the will of God is frequently depicted by wedding the root to the familiar “right hand-left hand motif”. Thus, it was said of Josiah that he “did not turn aside to the right hand, nor to the left” (II Kgs 22:2; cf. Deut 2:27; 5:32 [H 29]; Josh 1:7).
In the Hiphil stem, the meaning “remove” is most common. Asa removes Maacah for her continued idolatry (II Chr 15:16). Hezekiah removes the places and cult objects of idolatry (II Kgs 18:4; II Chr 30:14). God’s people are urged to remove or “put away” those things that will do spiritual harm to them: strange gods (Gen 35:2), all evil (Isa 1:16), wine (I Sam 1:14), false ways (Ps 119:29), and false worship (Amos 5:21–23).
The root is also found frequently in the wisdom literature, being used of the most basic spiritual issues. Job (15:30) is reminded that the wicked will ultimately perish at God’s command. Godly wisdom and the fear of the Lord, however, turn one aside from the snares of death (Prov 13:14; 14:27). This is to be learned thoroughly in one’s youth so that it will become a pattern throughout life (Prov 22:6).
Rather than turning aside from God’s commands and will for the life, the wise course of action is ever to “fear the Lord and turn away from evil” (Prov 3:7, cf. 16:6, 17; Job 28:28; Ps 34:14 [H 15]; 37:27).[11]
And so this is a rich and full word, full of meaning for us. Israel had continual turned aside, they had turned aside again and again, and God, true to His covenant promises, had chastened them over and over, to the point where they looked as if they had been battered almost beyond bearing. The truth is that the chastening that God had done to them would really bear no real fruit for them. They would not respond and would, in fact only be driven to more revolt because of it. And so God asks,
“Why chasten you more? Why should you be stricken again?”
One of the purposes for the Book of Isaiah is to present the truth the redemption comes by means of the sovereign hand of God, not by means of human agency. We see here already. Israel is not redeemed, they do not respond because of their intelligent interpretation of the chastening they receive at the hand of God. They will, one day, be redeemed nationally because God will sovereignly move to bring life to them and will bring those “dry bones” back to life! (Ezekiel 37:1-14).
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[1] The New King James Version. 1982 (Heb 11:24-26). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
[2] Swanson, J. (1997). Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.) (DBLH 6240, #1). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
[3] Op Cit, 1 Sa 16:14.
[4] Ibid, 1 Ki 21:5.
[5] Ibid, Ex 3:3-4.
[6] Ibid, Jdg 4:18.
[7] Ibid, Ru 4:1.
[8] Ibid, Nu 12:10.
[9] Ibid, Ex 32:8.
[10] Ibid, 1 Ki 22:43.
[11] Harris, R. L., Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., & Waltke, B. K. (1999, c1980). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed.) (621). Chicago: Moody Press.
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