Today, I am reading and commenting on Isaiah 17-21.

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Isaiah continues his prophecies concerning the downfall of nations of the world.  I was really struggling with what to write about this when I noticed that in the first of the prophecies in today’s passage he prophesies the fall of both Syria and Israel (the Northern Kingdom) together.  It reads as if they are a single nation.  Interestingly, he says that Jacob will be brought low, but a small number will remain.  In this prophecy he seems to use “Jacob” to refer to just the Northern Kingdom.  He speaks about how the remnant will look to God and not to the idols they had been worshiping.  We see that fulfilled during both King Hezekiah’s and King Josiah’s reign when they restored worship of God throughout all of the land which had been controlled by the Israelites.

I want to address an idea of which many Christians speak.  Christians often refer to the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”.  When they do so, they are referring to the ten tribes which we perceive as rebelling against Rehoboam.  People think that they disappeared from history when Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom and took many of its people into captivity.  However, the biblical record indicates that many them had migrated from the Northern Kingdom to the Kingdom of Judah when Jeroboam implemented his religious practices.  Additionally, many of them responded to King Hezekiah’s religious reforms and many more responded to King Josiah’s religious reforms a few generations later.  So, we see that a significant number of the northern tribes were part of the Kingdom of Judah when Nebuchadnezzar took them into Exile.  The Ten Tribes were never lost.  Isaiah’s prophecy here speaks of this fact.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.