Marginal Notes on Isaiah 52:11

“Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord.”

This text is most likely to be interpreted in a commentary to be about the return of the exiles from Babylon bearing the temple vessels. Such an interpretation is part and parcel of the Babylonian reading of much of Isaiah 40-55 common in older commentaries. In the last 10-15 years, this consensus has been changing. H. M. Barstad is one scholar who has offered new interpretation of texts that fits a non-Babylonian context.

In the case of this text, Barstad[1] gives the following reading: Isaiah 52:11 is a call to the armies of the Lord to go out from Jerusalem, “clean” and without foreign mercenaries, bearing the armaments of war. The proof of this reading is as follows:

1) Isaiah 52 is about Zion (v. 1), not Babylon. There is a need to put on “strength” (v. 1). She will no more be trodden down and “captive”, as she was in the time of Sennacherib’s siege.

2) “Awake, Awake” (v. 1), the double imperative, is echoed in “Depart, Depart” (v. 11) – the addressee is the same.

3) The “vessels of the Lord” (hwhy ylk) is not a reference to the “vessels of the house of the Lord” (hwhy tyb ylk, Jer 27:16, 28:3, 6). Isa 52:11 is the only Biblical text to have “vessels” without “house” and this is a key difference. Instead of “vessels” the Hebrew word’s semantic domain includes “weapons”. In fact, the verb in Isa 52:11 “bearing” (afn) when used with “vessels/weapons” denotes the bearing of arms. Only in 2 Sam 18:5 are the same Hebrew forms used and this text refers to the bearing of Joab’s armour. Elsewhere the Hebrew words for “bearing” and “vessels/weapons” in different forms are used for the bearing of arms (1 Sam 14:6, 7, 12, 31:4, 5, 2 Sam 23:37, 2 Kgs 23:4, 1 Chron 10:4-5). In Pss 7:14, ylk is used for the weapons of Yahweh.

Thus, Isa 52:11 is part of that theme in Isaiah 40-55 which exhorts the people to take up arms and go out from Jerusalem and retake Judah and bring deliverance to the cities of Judah.

[1] H. M. Barstad, The Babylonian Captivity and the Book of Isaiah (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 1997, 68-70.