For thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength; therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plantations, and shalt set them with foreign slips
Isaiah 17 opens with a message of judgment against Damascus. The prophet soon turns to Israel and gives the reason their land lies waste: they forgot the God who saved them. Forgetting is the cause. The next line shows the effect — the people fall back on their own planting.
The chapter opens with a foreign city but does not stay there. Damascus and Israel had joined forces, so judgment falls on both.
In the days of Isaiah, Damascus had been allied with the ten tribes. Its message of judgment fills the three verses that open Isaiah 17. But the prophecy soon passes from Damascus to the children of Israel. Disaster was to come on both, since both had joined in alliance against Judah.
The verse opens with "For" — the ruin has a moral cause, not a political one. Forgetting God does more than offend Him. It changes what a people can survive.
God chastises His people till they cease to rest on their own strength, instead of relying on God alone... When God's people are faithless, they can still act with the shrewdness and wisdom of the natural man. But when they do not rest on God, they are weaker than the world. And when God hands them over to chastening, they break to pieces at once.
Any nation could forget God. This one He had kept alive in the desert and given a land as a gift. That history makes the charge heavier.
Israel's turning her back on God was an especially wicked act. No other nation stood in the relationship to God that they did. His keeping them alive in the desert for forty years was a miracle of the first order. Their possession of Canaan was an act of grace on God's part. Again and again He sought to teach them the lesson that departure from God is a grievous thing.
The song of Moses uses the name Jeshurun for God's upright, beloved people. There it is good times, not hard times, that pull them away from the Rock.
Jeshurun grew fat and kicked. God's loved, upright one turned rebellious when times were good — a strange yet common case. He gave up his Maker and thought little of the Rock of his salvation. Then the heart that had drifted from Him turned to His opposites. Foreign gods came in, with all their detestable practices. Newly invented gods replaced the One who had brought them into being.
(Older translations read "the Rock of your strength" where the ESV has "the Rock of your refuge.")
Commentators read the planting in the next line as Jews back in their own land, still not trusting God. The farming works; the harvest does not.
In Isaiah 17:10-11 we find them there, still forgetting the God of their salvation and not remembering the Rock of their strength. They plant pleasant plants and set them with foreign cuttings. But here is how their farming ends: "though you make them grow on the day that you plant them, and make them blossom in the morning that you sow, yet the harvest will flee away in a day of grief and incurable pain."
Before foreign vine-branches could be set in that ground, the land itself had to change. Commentators describe two steps.
The land had first to be emptied of people, and second to become barren. Titus scattered the Jews, and that did the first. God withheld the latter rain, and that did the second. Without that rain in May, when the land badly needed it, the country turned barren and was overrun with thorns.
But the failed harvest is not God's last word. The same writer looks ahead to what God intends by it.
Their hopes, however, will be dashed to the ground when the day of the great tribulation bursts upon them... It must come, for only that way will the Jew be humbled at last and blessed. Israel can enter the land of her possession only through purification, repentance, and acknowledging their Messiah, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
- Forgetting — the ruin has a stated cause. God carried them through the desert and gave them their land. They turned their backs on Him.
- Weakening — people who stop resting on God grow weaker than the world, and break to pieces when chastening comes.
- Substituting — with the Rock out of mind, the hands get busy. Pleasant plants and foreign cuttings replace the strength they forgot.
- Flourishing — the planting really does grow, and hopes rise with it. Growth is not the same as blessing.
- Harvest — what grows without God flees away in a day of grief. Only repentance and acknowledging their Messiah bring the true blessing.
in the day of thy planting wilt thou make [them] to grow, and on the morrow wilt thou make thy seed to flourish; [but] the harvest will flee in the day of taking possession, and the sorrow will be incurable.
This verse ends a warning that began with forgetting God: the planting shoots up fast, then the harvest vanishes in a day of grief. Commentators read it as history Isaiah's hearers would live through, and as a picture of Israel's future.
Chapter 17 opens against Damascus. One writer names the king who destroyed it, and notes that the prophecy does not stop there.
It is worth remembering that it was not Sennacherib but Tiglath-Pileser who destroyed Damascus. That ruin followed the alliance of Pekah and Rezin, who set out to remove the house of David from the throne in Judah — unworthy and false as Ahaz was. Isaiah had predicted this in chapter 7, and our chapter speaks of Damascus becoming a heap of ruins. But the prophecy clearly goes on to its reappearance and overthrow in the latter day.
Another writer finds the same double reach in the farming language of verses 10 and 11.
All this found a fulfilment in the days immediately ahead, yet will have a fuller fulfilment in the last days still to come. Writers often link the prediction about the "pleasant plants," or "plantations," and the "strange slips" to what Jewish immigrants have recently been doing in Palestine. They have been busy with plantations in their farming colonies. They have imported vast quantities of vine cuttings from other lands to restart vineyards.
The failure is not bad weather or bad soil. Verse 10 gives the reason. One writer sees in these verses a people back in their own land, but back there in unbelief.
It is clear, from several passages, that many of the Jews will return to their own land in unbelief. In Isaiah 17:10-11 we find them there, still forgetting the God of their salvation and not mindful of the Rock of their strength, planting pleasant plants and setting it with strange slips. Verse 11 then describes the outcome of their farming. It is clearly the time of trouble we have already been hearing about.
The ESV calls the pain of that day "incurable." Older translations read "desperate sorrow." One writer compares how older translators handled the same Hebrew word elsewhere in the Old Testament.
The word here translated "desperately wicked" is, in the authorised version of Isaiah 17:11, rendered "desperate," and in Jeremiah 17:16, "woeful." Everywhere else our Bible translates it "incurable" — as in Job 34:6, Jeremiah 15:18 and Micah 1:9. The one exception is 2 Samuel 12:15, where a different form occurs and our Bible gives "and it was very sick."
The grief of that day is not a passing disappointment. It is a wound no human remedy reaches.
One writer recounts a conversation at a wine merchant's window, and what the labels on the bottles proved.
God drove the Jews out of their land and withdrew the latter rain, reducing the country to barrenness, because they refused their Messiah… A Christian friend told an unbeliever he would show him striking proof that Scripture is true. He took him to a wine merchant's window and pointed to a row of bottles. Their labels said the wine came from grapes grown in Palestine, from slips imported from Spain. These labels proved four things. (1) Foreign slips would not have been needed unless barrenness had overtaken the land. (2) Foreign slips would not have been imported unless the rainfall had improved and the sterility had been overcome. (3) The wonderful inspiration of God's word, that could prophesy this 2,500 years ago. (4) God's present ordering and arranging. Man could not arrange a return of the latter rain. God alone could do that.
The same writer holds that part of this prophecy is still future, and that the sorrow has a purpose beyond itself.
Part of the prophecy still has to be fulfilled. It speaks of the prosperity of the country at the beginning, and of the glad hopes of the settlers, who settle in the land promised to Abraham without Abraham's faith. Their hopes, however, will be dashed to the ground when the day of the great tribulation bursts upon them. That is the time of "Jacob's trouble," or, as our verse phrases it, "the day of grief and of desperate sorrow." … Come it must, for only in that way will the Jew be finally humbled and blessed. Israel can only come into the land of her possession through purification, repentance, and acknowledging their Messiah, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
- Forgot. The harvest fails for a moral reason, not a farming one. They forgot the God of their salvation and the Rock of their strength.
- Planted. Hard work follows the forgetting: plantations laid out, foreign vine cuttings brought in, a land once barren made to produce again.
- Flourished. Growth comes fast, and it is real. Writers point to modern colonies, imported slips and returning rain as proof that God's word holds good.
- Failed. The harvest day brings grief beyond any human fix. The ESV calls that pain "incurable"; it is the time of Jacob's trouble.
- Saved. The sorrow is the road, not the end. Only through that humbling does Israel come to repentance and to their Messiah.