Isaiah 27:10 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Isaiah 27:10
Yet the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken, and left like a wilderness: there shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down, and consume the branches thereof.
to loosen · conjunction + verb, niphal active participle, masculine singular absolute
wilderness
כַּמִּדְבָּ֑רka.mid.Bar
H4057
a pasture (i.e. open field · preposition with the article + noun, common masculine singular absolute
calf
עֵ֛גֶל'E.gel
H5695
a (male) calf (as frisking round) · noun, common masculine singular absolute
feed
יִרְעֶ֥הyir.'Eh
H7462
to tend a flock · verb, qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
down
יִרְבָּ֖ץyir.Batz
H7257
to crouch (on all four legs folded · verb, qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
consume
וְכִלָּ֥הve.khi.Lah
H3615
to end · conjunction + verb, piel sequential perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
branches
סְעִפֶֽיהָse.'i.Fei.ha
H5585
a fissure (of rocks) · noun, common masculine plural construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person feminine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Isaiah 17:2 The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.
Isaiah 17:9 In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and…
Isaiah 32:13-14 Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city:
Jeremiah 26:6 Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.
Jeremiah 26:18 Micah the Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and spake to all the people of Judah, saying, Thus saith the LORD of…
Micah 3:12 Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places…
Isaiah 5:9-10 In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.
Isaiah 6:11-12 Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utt…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Isaiah 27:7–end
Here is the prophet again singing of mercy and judgment, not, as before, judgment to the enemies and mercy to the church, but judgment to the church and mercy mixed with that judgment.
I. Here is judgment threatened even to Jacob and Israel. They shall blossom and bud (Isa 27:6), but, 1. They shall be smitten and slain (Isa 27:7), some of them shall. If God find any thing amiss among them, he will lay them under the tokens of his displeasure for it. Judgment shall begin at the house of God, and those whom God has known of all the families of the earth he will punish in the first place. 2. Jerusalem, their defenced city, shall be desolate, Isa 27:10, Isa 27:11. "God having tried a variety of…
city--Jerusalem; the beating asunder of whose altars and images was mentioned in Isa 27:9 (compare Isa 24:10-12).
calf feed-- (Isa 17:2); it shall be a vast wild pasture.
branches--resuming the image of the vine (Isa 27:2, Isa 27:6).
John Gill on Isaiah 27:10
Yet the defenced city shall be desolate,.... Or "but", or "notwithstanding" (b); though the Lord deals mercifully with his own people, and mixes mercy with their afflictions, and causes them to issue well, and for their good; yet he does not deal so with others, his and their enemies: for by the "defenced city" is not meant Jerusalem, as many interpret it, so Kimchi; nor Samaria, as Aben Ezra; nor literal Babylon, as others; but mystical Babylon, the city of Rome, and the whole Roman or antichristian jurisdiction, called the "great" and "mighty" city, Revelation 18:10 which will be destroyed, become desolate, or "alone" (c), without inhabitants:
and the habitation forsaken and left like a w…
Yet the defenced city shall be desolate Here the copulative v (vau) is generally supposed to mean for, and some take it for otherwise. There will thus be a twofold interpretation; for if we translate it because, the Prophet will assign a reason for the former statement, but that exposition is rejected by the context, and is altogether absurd. With greater plausibility it is taken for otherwise; for this threatening might be appropriately introduced, "If you do not repent, you see what awaits you, the defenced city shall be like a wilderness." But I consider that exposition to be a departure from the natural meaning, and therefore I choose rather to take it as signifying nevertheless or yet…
The Church Fathers
(Verse 10) The fortified city will be deserted; the beautiful city will be abandoned and left like a wilderness. There the calf will graze, and there it will lie down and consume its branches. Their idols will be cut down like groves, and the flock that dwells far away will be left like a deserted flock, and it will be a long time in the pasture, and there the flocks will rest, and after a long time there will be no green in it, for it is dried up. Jerusalem, once a strong and fortified city, because it did not receive its masters but said: Come, let us kill him, for this is the heir and our inheritance (Matthew 21:38), will be deserted. And that which was once beautiful, of which it is said in Ezekiel: You ate fine flour, honey, and oil, and you became exceedingly beautiful (Ezek. 16:13), and in which dwells He of whom it is written: You are fairer than the sons of men (Ps. 45:3), will be left and abandoned like a desert, as the Lord says to the Apostles: Arise, let us go from here (John 14:31). There the calf, the Roman army, will graze, of which it is also said in another place under the name of boar: The boar from the forest will ravage it, and the singular wild beast has grazed on it (Ps. 80:14). And there he will lie down and consume its branches under the metaphor of a vine and its shoots, so that nothing green remains in it, nothing of the branches, but the enemy consumes everything. According to the Septuagint, because they did not receive a good shepherd: therefore they will be like a forsaken flock, and will be open to the bites of beasts; and nothing green will remain in them, because drought will possess everything.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Desert — (1.) Heb. midbar, “pasture-ground;” an open tract for pasturage; a common (Joel 2:22). The “backside of the desert” (Ex. 3:1) is the west of the desert, the region behind a man, as the east is the…
Calf, The · Fed on: Branches of trees, &c — Fed on: Branches of trees, &c
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
The prophet said this from out of the midst of the state of punishment, and was therefore able still further to confirm the fact, that the punishment would cease with the sin, by the punishment which followed the sin. "For the strong city is solitary, a dwelling given up and forsaken like the steppe: there calves feed, and there they lie down, and eat off its branches. When its branches become withered, they are broken: women come, make fires with them; for it is not a people of intelligence: therefore its Creator has no pity upon it, and its Former does not pardon it." The nation without any intelligence (Isa 1:3), of which Jehovah was the Creator and Former (Isa 22:11), is Israel; and ther…
Places previously associated with human power and accomplishment would be ruined to the extent that animals would graze in them.
Rashi on Isaiah 27:10
For a fortified city is solitary For, when they do this, a fortified city of Ishmael (ms. Esau) will be solitary and the dwelling will be forsaken by its inhabitants and abandoned like a pasture.
there a calf shall graze Ephraim shall inherit it, for he is called a calf, as it is said (Jer. 31:17): “Like an untamed calf.”
and shall consume its branches (סְעִיפֶיהָ) its branches.
