People and Hosts

In Isaiah 34:1, the prophet summons the nations to draw near. It seems to be a call to Gentiles, but several things suggest that it is a call to Israel and the Gentiles together.

goyim , which begins the verse, is clearly the Gentile nations, but the word translated as “people” ( leom ) in the NASB has a more varied use. In Genesis 25:23, its first use, it is used of Jacob and Esau as two leumim in the womb of Rachel. Jacob, then, is the father of a leom . Psalm 2;1 asks why the goyim rage and the leumim imagine a vain thing. We typically take that as a strict parallelism, but it is possible, even likely, that the two lines of the verse has what John Breck calls a “what’s more” relation: Why do the Gentiles rage, and, what’s more, why do Israel’s tribes imagine vanity (i.e., worship idols). The apostles were not “reading into” the Psalm when they saw it fulfilled in the combined Roman and Jewish attack on Jesus (Acts 4:23-31). That seems to be precisely what the Psalm is talking about. leom refers to Israel in a number of other Psalms as well (7:7; 9:8).

If this is how Isaiah is using the words, then his summons extends to both Israel and the nations, in chiastic order:

A. Draw near, goyim (Gentiles)

B. Hear, leumim (Israel)

B’. Let the eretz hear (Israel)

A’. And the tebel (Gentile world)

Other phrasing also suggests that Israel is included in the slaughter, even preeminently. Yahweh’s fury is against all the “hosts” of the nations ( goyim , v. 2), but He also takes aim at the “host of heaven,” which will be dissolved ( maqaq ; perhaps a parallel with the dissolving elements of 2 Peter 3). Hosts of heaven are stars or angels, and that’s what Israel is, a starry and angelic host. According to Isaiah, the hosts fall like leaves from the vine and figs from the tree – vine and fig tree being fruits of the land and particularly signs of the prosperity of Israel under Solomon (“everyone under his vine and fig tree”). Perhaps the image of a heavenly scroll rolling up also has a specific reference to Israel. As the heavenly people, Israel is given a heavenly book, the Torah and the prophets, and the Torah forms a kind of firmament over Israel. Or, the Torah and the heavenly vision of prophets is the basis for the tabernacle and temple; the temple is an architectural scroll, God’s word translated into stone and gold and wood.

Since the heavenly host of verse 4 is Israel, the reference to a sword in “heaven” in verse 5 refers to the Lord’s sacrificial slaughter of His people. Isaiah 34 thus gives us the typical biblical pattern: Everything is Jew first, then Gentile. And that is preeminently true of sacrifice. Yahweh slaughters Israel first, then makes a holocaust of the nations. First Jesus the true Israelite is sacrificed; then the apostles go out with the sword of the Spirit to offer the nations to God.