Bible Commentaries
Isaiah 26

Verses 1-21

“Thy Dead Shall Live” (26:1-21)

Chapter 26 is a psalm of trust, praise, and meditation, in all probability with elements drawn from older material. In the great age to come the people of Judah can rest confident in their city of Jerusalem, knowing that the Lord will “keep him in per feet peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusts in thee” (vs. 3).

Verses 7-16 are a combination of prayer and meditation on the ways of the Lord with the peoples of the earth. In God’s world it simply cannot be that his adversaries will triumph. “For when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness” (vs. 9). In verses 16-19 the conversation in prayer with God continues. The people of Judah are like a woman in childbirth, in pain but bringing forth nothing. At this point the sudden joyful exclamation appears in verse 19, concerning the resurrection of the dead. The conception is both social in that the restoration of the nation is probably in view (compare Ezekiel 37), but also individual in that men of the past are to rise to share in the joys of the new earth. This is a conception which is rare in the Old Testament and flowers most vividly in the Intertestament period (see Daniel 12:2). Finally, in verses 20-21 the people living at the time of the psalmist are addressed directly. This picture of God’s future means that in the coming days of terror God’s people should hide themselves and be patient until the purification of the earth is accomplished. This is the type of theme that appears in the postexilic age after the destruction of Jerusalem. At that time it was realized that what prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had announced about the punishment of the Covenant nation had come about at the hands of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies. Now they are to wait until God’s punishment of the whole world is complete, for only after that revolution will God bring in the new day.