Burdens of the Nations — Isaiah 15–20
Moab, Damascus, Ethiopia, Egypt — Judah’s enemies and false friends. Isaiah was sent with doom for all of them. He wept over the first, and ended the last with a blessing no one in Jerusalem expected to hear.
Ten Burdens Lifted over the Nations
Chapters 13–23 hang on one repeated heading: “The burden of…” The Hebrew is massa, from nasa, “to lift.” It is a load carried on the back, and it is an utterance lifted up over someone, so the prophet carries it first and the nation carries it after him.
1 Babylon (13:1)
2 Philistia — “In the year that king Ahaz died” (14:28)
3 Moab (15:1)
4 Damascus (17:1)
· “Woe to the land shadowing with wings” — no burden title (18:1)
5 Egypt (19:1)
· A sign: Isaiah naked and barefoot (20:2)
6–8 The desert of the sea; Dumah; Arabia (21:1, 11, 13)
9 The valley of vision — Jerusalem (22:1)
10 Tyre (23:1)
Our arrangement. Ten burdens; the ninth falls on Jerusalem. This page takes 3–5 and the two interludes.
What does the list teach? That the God of Israel is no local god, and not even the city of His temple is exempt. The surprises are in the middle.
A Prophet Who Weeps for Moab
Moab was family, descended from Lot, and an old enemy. So when its cities are “laid waste, and brought to silence” in one night (15:1), a reader in Jerusalem expects a victory song. Instead: “My heart shall cry out for Moab” (15:5).
“I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh… I have made their vintage shouting to cease. Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kir-haresh.”
Who is speaking? The one who waters Moab with tears is the one who made its vintage shouting cease. The judge and the mourner speak with one mouth. Isaiah speaks for the Lord, and the line between their grief runs thin. Jeremiah echoed it: “mine heart shall sound for Moab like pipes” (Jeremiah 48:36). The student manual says it plainly: “Although Moab was Israel’s bitter enemy, Isaiah still wept over the great tragedy of her sin and resulting destruction” (OT Student Manual, 14-21). And we have seen that face before: “he beheld the city, and wept over it” (Luke 19:41).
“Let Mine Outcasts Dwell with Thee, Moab”
In the middle of the ruin comes a strange request. God asks Moab to hide His refugees: “Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler” (16:3–4). Why ask shelter of a nation under judgment? Because Moab had given it before. When Saul hunted David, David brought his father and mother to the king of Moab, “and they dwelt with him all the while that David was in the hold” (1 Samuel 22:3–4).
Then the King: “in mercy shall the throne be established: and he shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David” (16:5) — the Child’s throne of 9:7. And Moab is tied to it by blood. David’s great-grandmother was Ruth the Moabitess (Ruth 4:17, below), and Matthew keeps her in the Savior’s line (Matthew 1:5). The law said “An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 23:3). Yet she entered by covenant — “thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16) — and the King of 16:5 carries her in His genealogy. Moab is judged in these chapters, but it is not written off.
Damascus, a Ruinous Heap — and Still Standing
“Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap” (17:1). Damascus is standing today, counted among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. So was Isaiah wrong? There are three honest answers.
It happened in Isaiah’s day. Chapter 17 pairs Damascus with Ephraim, the two kings who marched on Jerusalem in chapter 7, and Isaiah had put a clock on both: before his son could say “My father,” “the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria” (8:4). “The king of Assyria went up against Damascus, and took it, and carried the people of it captive to Kir, and slew Rezin” (2 Kings 16:9). “The kingdom from Damascus” ceased (17:3). And 17:1 never says the heap stays a heap. Compare Babylon: “It shall never be inhabited” (13:20). The difference is in the text.
Prophecy has conditions. God says so Himself: “If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them” (Jeremiah 18:7–10). Jonah cried, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4) — no exception, no call to repent. Nineveh repented, and God “did it not” (3:10). Was Jonah then a false prophet? Of course not, and he knew it all along. The Lord says the same in our day: “I, the Lord, command and revoke, as it seemeth me good” (D&C 56:3–4). That verse speaks of commandments, not oracles over nations, but it is the same God, who is not bound by a sentence He spoke to turn people. The drying Nile of 19:5–7 belongs here too: a judgment spoken over a people He heals in the same chapter.
It may be fulfilled twice. Isaiah often speaks to his own day and the last days in one breath; the manual calls it “prophetic dualism” (14-28). Some readers still expect a latter-day fulfillment of 17:1. That is a reading, and it should be held as one. Must we choose among the three? No — the first shows that the burden landed, and the second shows why a burden is spoken at all.
And what survives? “Gleaning grapes… as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough” (17:6–7) — the olives the harvester could not reach. Those few do what the nation would not: “At that day shall a man look to his Maker.” What was the whole problem? “Thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation” (17:10). A remnant is a people who remembered.
A Land Shadowing with Wings
Chapter 18 opens not with a burden but with hoy — “woe” here, but “Ho” in “Ho, every one that thirsteth” (55:1). “Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia,” that sends “swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled” (18:1–2). Woe or greeting? It has been read two ways.
In Isaiah’s day it is Cush, the Ethiopia of the upper Nile, sending envoys in “vessels of bulrushes.” The world is told to watch “when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains” (18:3). Then the turn: from that far people “shall the present be brought unto the LORD of hosts… the mount Zion” (18:7). Zephaniah repeats it: “From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants… shall bring mine offering” (Zephaniah 3:10). And Luke records an Ethiopian who “had come to Jerusalem for to worship” (Acts 8:27, below).
Latter-day Saints have heard another voice in it. President Joseph Fielding Smith read the opening as “Hail to the land in the shape of wings” and asked, “Does not this hemisphere take the shape of wings; the spread out wings of a bird?” (Signs of the Times, 51, in the OT Student Manual, 14-24). Modern revelation names “Mount Zion, which shall be the city of New Jerusalem” (D&C 84:2). Both readings end where Isaiah always ends: a far-off people bringing a gift to Zion under the ensign.
“Blessed Be Egypt My People”
The burden of Egypt opens like the Exodus: “the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence” (19:1). Egypt, the “shadow” Judah kept running to (30:2), cannot save itself.
Then, six times, “in that day,” and the chapter turns over. There is “an altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt,” and “they shall cry unto the LORD because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one” (19:19–20). Where have we heard that? At the burning bush: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters” (Exodus 3:7). Once Israel cried out of Egypt, and now Egypt cries, and God sends Egypt a deliverer of its own. Egypt gets an Exodus! And the pattern is set in one verse: “the LORD shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it: and they shall return even to the LORD… and shall heal them” (19:22).
“In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.”
This is the great surprise of the burdens. Egypt enslaved Israel, Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom, and Israel lay squeezed on the road between the two. Now the road becomes “a highway out of Egypt to Assyria” (19:23), and Israel stands in the middle as “a blessing in the midst of the land” — Abraham’s promise, “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). And each title belonged to Israel first.
Egypt “my people” — God’s word for Israel in bondage: “the affliction of my people” (Exodus 3:7)
Assyria “the work of my hands” — Israel’s name in Isaiah 60:21
Israel “mine inheritance” — “thy people and thine inheritance” (Deuteronomy 9:29)
Our arrangement. The covenant names are shared out to Israel’s two worst enemies. Israel keeps the one that means belonging.
Keil and Delitzsch, quoted in the manual: “Egypt and Assyria become one in Jehovah, and Israel the third in the covenant” (14-30). Israel loses nothing in the exchange; it gains brothers.
Naked and Barefoot for Three Years
Chapter 20 is a sermon preached with a body. When Assyria took Ashdod, the Lord told Isaiah to loose the sackcloth from his loins and put off his shoes, “And he did so, walking naked and barefoot” (20:2–4) — three years, a sign that Assyria would lead Egypt and Ethiopia away captive. “Naked” does not mean what a modern reader assumes. In Keil and Delitzsch’s words, “a person was looked upon as stripped and naked if he had only taken off his upper garment” (14-32). He went in a tunic, barefoot, like a captive.
Who was it for? Not Egypt, but Judah. “Behold, such is our expectation, whither we flee for help… and how shall we escape?” (20:6). Later the Assyrian himself would mock them: “thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt” (36:6). Three years of bare feet on the streets of Jerusalem said it louder than any oracle could. The help you are counting on will be walking away in chains.
Key References — Isaiah 15–20
- Jeremiah 18:7–10 — when a nation turns, the prophecy over it turns too.
- Ruth 4:13–17 — the Moabitess in David’s line.
- Acts 8:26–39 — an Ethiopian reads Isaiah on the road home.
The Nations We Would Rather See Fall
Everyone has a Moab — a nation or a neighbor whose trouble we would read about with a small satisfaction. Isaiah was sent to pronounce doom on exactly those people. And what did he find when he carried the burden? A God whose inward parts sound like a harp over Moab. A God who puts a Moabitess in the line of His King, strikes Egypt in order to heal it, and then calls Egypt “my people.”
Jonah could not bear that. “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city?” (Jonah 4:11). The book ends on the question, and it is put to us. The Savior answered: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you” (Matthew 5:44). Why? Because the Father already does. The judgments are real, and they land on the nations just as Isaiah said they would. But the last word over the nations in Isaiah 19 is “Blessed.” If God grieves over the people we call enemies and plans to heal them, we can wish them nothing less.
← Two Falls and a Nail — Isaiah 14 and 22 · The Words of Isaiah — Study Guide · The Earth Mourns and the Vineyard Sings — Isaiah 24 and 27 →