- Isaiah 31 BSB ↗
Nearly every extended family has one relative everyone rings when trouble comes: the uncle with a contact in the district office, the cousin who knows someone at the police station. Call him and the problem might disappear. Often it does not — the contact gets transferred, or the favour costs more than the problem. Judah's leaders had their powerful relative too. It was Egypt, famous for its horses and chariots, the heavy armour of the ancient world. Isaiah 31 is only nine verses long, and it makes one point with great force: the Egyptians are human, and not God.
Where it sits in the story: This woe in chapters 28–33 is the bluntest statement of Isaiah's case against the Egyptian alliance. It also holds the other half of his message: Jerusalem will not be saved by Egypt, but it will be saved. The chapter looks ahead to the Assyrian retreat of 701 BC told in Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 19 — a rescue the text credits to God, 'a sword not of man.'
What this chapter is doing: To set the visible power of horses and chariots against the invisible power of God, to call Judah to turn back from its idols, and to promise that Assyria will fall without a human hand.
- 31:1–3 — Woe to those who go down to Egypt, who trust in horses and count on chariots and horsemen but do not look to the Holy One of Israel. God is wise too, and will act; the Egyptians are human, their horses flesh and not spirit, and helper and helped will fall together.
- 31:4–5 — Two pictures of God defending Zion: a lion growling over its prey, unafraid of the band of shepherds shouting at it; and birds hovering over their nest. So the LORD of hosts will shield, deliver and spare Jerusalem.
- 31:6–9 — Turn back to the one you have so deeply betrayed; in that day each will throw away the silver and gold idols their own hands made. Assyria will fall by a sword not of man, its young men put to forced labour, its officers fleeing in terror from the LORD whose fire is in Zion.
Key verse: Isaiah 31:1 · So what: Isaiah is not against horses; he is against making them into a god. The question he presses is what we count on when we are afraid — and whether we asked God before we asked anyone else. Most people's 'Egypt' is something quite respectable: savings, a network, a strong institution. The chapter asks only that we remember they too are flesh.