Woes on Y’hudah and Ashur ~ Part 2 ~ Yesha’yahu 10:5-11

In my last post, we learned about The Woes of Y’hudah in Yesha’yahu 10:1-4. In this post, we move on to The Woes of Ashur ~ Part 2 in Yesha’yahu 10:5-11.

The Woes of Ashur (Assyria)

⁵ “Oh Ashur, the rod expressing my anger! The club in their hands is my fury!

The prophecy opens with a woe against Ashur. We have become quite accustomed to hearing woes as we have study Yesha’yahu. This woe is directed toward the enemy rather than toward God’s people. Ashur is the tool God will use to bring punishment against Isra’el and Y’hudah. The reference to a rod brings to mind the extensive teaching in Proverbs about using a rod to drive the folly out of a child (Proverbs 10:13; 22:15) and how a rod is applied to one’s son to encourage him to travel the right path (Proverbs 13:24; 23:13-14).

⁶ I am sending him [Ashur] against a hypocritical nation, ordering him to march against a people who enrage me, to take the spoil and the plunder and trample them down like mud in the street.

The godless nation is ironically not Ashur but Isra’el. They will become the object of God’s anger. The phrase to take spoils, to plunder is reminiscent of the name we learned in Yesha’yahu 8:1: Maher Shalal, Hash Baz [the spoil hurries, the prey speeds along].

Ashur was to have been an instrument of discipline, but they became an instrument of destruction.

 ⁷ That is not what Ashur intends, that is not what they think; rather, they mean to destroy, to cut down nation after nation.  

There was a difference between the divine intention and the intention of Ashur. This difference was no obstacle to God’s use of Ashur for His purposes, but it did bode poorly for the tool of God’s anger. While God intended to promote His glory by punishing His sinful people, Ashur was interested only in imperialistic expansion.

⁸ For [their king] says, ‘Aren’t all my commanders kings? ⁹ Hasn’t Kalno [suffered] like Kark’mish, Hamat like Arpad, Shomron like Dammesek?  

These three pairs of cities each begin with the southernmost of the two. Thus, Kalno was south of Kark’mish, Hamat was south of Arpad, and Shomron was south of Dammesek. These cities were paired and listed for geographical and not chronological reasons since Kark’mish was conquered by the Assyrians in 717, Kalno in 738, Hamat in 738 and 720, and Arpad in 740 BCE. The claim of the King of Ashur was an imperialistic one, again demonstrating that his intention was different from God’s.

¹⁰ Just as My hand reached the kingdoms of non-gods, with more images than in Yerushalayim and Shomron;

There is no distinction made in this speech between the religious practices of Isra’el and Y’hudah on the one hand and the other cities of the west. They were all worshipping false gods and idols.

¹¹ so won’t I do to Yerushalayim and her non-gods what I did to Shomron and her idols?’”  ~ Yesha’yahu 10:5-11 (CJB)

The comparisons of southern cities to northern ones culminate in a final contrast between Shomron in the north and Yerushalayim in the south: both were practicing idolatry as the cities of Ashur had.

In my next post, we will move on in Yesha’yahu 10 to continue to learn about The Woes of Ashur ~ Part 3 in Yesha’yahu 10:12-19.

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