Deforestation

Yahweh threatens to lop down the high boughs and tall trees of Israel (Isaiah 10:33-34). This could be simply the tree of Israel, or the self-exalted elites who oppress the weak. But a number of the terms have more or less direct connections with the temple.

The trees that are “lifted up in stature,” and “stature translates a word that is mostly used to describe the “height” of various objects in the tabernacle and temple. These trees will be “cut down,” and that is precisely what Israel was supposed to do to the images and idols that filled the land (Deuteronomy 7:5; 12:3). In hewing down these tall trees the Lord is hewing down idols, or an idolatrous temple. “Haughty ones” uses the root gabah , the root also of gibeah , high place. That these trees are in “Lebanon” strengthens the connection, since most of the temple wood was cedar.

Isaiah 10:33-34 seems to envisage the same sort of temple devastation – by axe! – found in Psalm 74. Note “thicket” in Psalm 74:5 and Isaiah 10:34. And, as for good measure, note the “ram caught in the thicket” in Genesis 22:13 – caught in a thicket on Moriah, the temple mount.

Isaiah is talking about the devastation of the land by the Assyrians, but the land is a temple-land, and the devastation of the thickets of the land foreshadows Babylon’s later destruction of the thicket of the temple.