Commentary on Isaiah 35:1-10

The Old Testament reading for this third Sunday in Advent continues the book of Isaiah’s Edenic imagery. On the first Sunday in Advent, Isaiah 2 depicted the ideal world as one where the heavenly temple reconfigures the global political landscape. Isaiah 11, read during the second Sunday of Advent, used peace between natural enemies in the animal world to symbolize the rectitude of a world ruled by an ideal human leader. This week’s material from Isaiah 35 uses water imagery to represent the road to this perfect world, which still lies far off in the distance. 

Water was a precious commodity in the ancient world, especially in Judah, and still is today. Because the ancient audience relied primarily on an agriculturally based economy, the demand for fresh water loomed large. The creation story in Genesis 1 reflects this reality, when, in one of the first acts of creation, God separates salt water from fresh water so that plants, animals, and humans can survive. 

Israel had few sources of fresh water outside of rainfall coming in off the Mediterranean Sea. While the northern kingdom did have some fresh water sources, such as the Sea of Galilee, Judah in the south was more arid. In fact, the primary inland body of water, the Dead Sea, was saltier than the ocean. When people started settling in this relatively inhospitable environment, they spent most of their labor first building cisterns to catch as much rainfall as possible. The city of Jerusalem did have some springs around it, but the surrounding countryside, especially to the south, could not sustain the agricultural output needed for crops. 

This is why migratory groups, including the modern Bedouins, have survived by herding animals that needed less water, rather than settling into towns dependent on nearby produce.

Verses 1–3 and 6b–7 in this reading bathe the people’s fear of imminent death with images of healing waters, while the center of this first section (verses 4–6a) uses the language of physical disability to represent collective trauma. This imagery functions within their own cultural assumptions about the causes for physical deformity, creating stigmas for differently abled people that still exist today. So how do we read this text without reinforcing this way of thinking?

The poem clearly reflects the experience of a group that is in exile. This is evident in verses 8–10, where the imagery changes from that of water bubbling up in the desert to safe and traversable highways appearing in that same terrain. Why do these people need a road? (Or in our parlance, a car and a full tank of gas?) Because they are returning to their homeland after decades of living in servitude in a foreign land, brought there as war captives when their city walls were breached.

These verses are essential for understanding the imagery of the first half of the chapter. On the one hand, these images spring from the fate of literal bodies. The populations of captured cities were physically mutilated by the victorious armies. Some of the damage occurred on the battlefield, leaving combatants lame. Some, like King Zedekiah, had their eyes plucked out when they were captured. The sounds of the battlefield kept the survivors from singing God’s praises, as Psalm 137 attests, especially since the site of that singing, the temple, no longer stood.

On another level, though, the metaphoric function of people who are blind, deaf, lame, et cetera represents the personified city as a collective group. That city had been damaged—its temple, palace, and infrastructure destroyed to such a degree that it could not sustain this returning population. It metaphorically had lost its capacity to see, hear, conduct business, or even praise God. The city as a collective body had been deformed by the wars that ravaged it.

If the poem reflects the return of people to Jerusalem in the Persian period, it would have been written by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those whose bodies bore the scars of war. But the poem gives witness to the reality of intergenerational trauma. These intervening generations who lived in exile grew up outside their ancestral homes, in lands where they did not have full rights of citizenship, leaving them vulnerable to those in power. The dream of being able to return to their homeland easily and safely felt like a fresh pool in the desert.

The poem ends at the exact geographic spot where the national trauma began: in the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. Although the reality of the repopulation of Jerusalem did not match the glory of this poetry, this author is not trying to write a historical account of return. In a verbal painting, the scribe attempts to represent how the ability to perform sacrifices in an ancient sacred space that had been defiled by their worst enemies felt to those who went there on the holy days. 

Archaeology has shown that the rebuilt Jerusalem was small and sparsely populated; the temple area was correspondingly meager compared to the descriptions of the first temple. But the fact that, once again, the people could sing songs to praise God in their own sacred space meant far more to their collective identity than the quality, urban setting, or size of the building. 

The imagery of the final verses captures this emotional impact. There is no need for lions to graze with young bovines here, because there are no lions—in other words, no enemies waiting to devour them (verse 9). Instead, the “redeemed” and “ransomed,” those who had been enslaved by their conquerors, have been freed to reclaim their identities as landowners in Judah and servants to God alone. As a result, the poet depicts Zion as a place for unending songs of praise, entered via a highway through the desert and fed by floods of fresh water.