Isaiah 1:8 - A Besieged City
ISAIAH 2:7-8 - Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. There is perhaps deeper layers of meaning suggesting this both a spiritual fulfillment and a temporal fulfillment of this passage, the spiritual coming before the temporal as it commonly does, such as in the creation of the world, “For I, the Lord God, created all things of which I have spoken spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth” (Genesis 2:5 [Moses 3:5]). Viewing firsth the spiritual imagery of this passage, remember that the gardens represent the worship or holy places of the people. Condemning the house of Israel for its idol worship, Isaiah says, “ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen” and “as a garden that hath no water” (Isaia...