Isaiah 3:12-15

The Failure Of The Leaders of the People (Isaiah 3:12).

Isaiah 3:12

‘As for my people, children are their oppressors (taskmasters),

And women rule over them.

O my people, those who should set you right cause you to err,

And swallow up the way of your paths.

Yahweh stands up to plead,

And stands to judge the peoples.

Yahweh will enter into judgment,

With the elders of his people, and its princes.

“It is you who have eaten up the vineyard.

The spoil of the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean that you crush my people,

And grind the face of the poor?”,

Says the Lord, Yahweh of hosts.'

Isaiah now bemoans the lack of leadership that will have brought God's people to their situation, continuing the theme that the people have no one to rely on. They are oppressed by ‘children' and ruled by ‘women', people who are immature and callous and weak. That is why the people are in their present state, because those who should set them right have rather caused them to err. The ‘ways of their paths' have been swallowed up. This may mean that the course they have taken has led to their judgment, or alternately that the signposts they should have been given have instead been taken away.

It is open to question whether ‘women' should be taken figuratively or literally. If the former it is the derogatory ‘they are a lot of women', if the latter it refers to women manipulating their menfolk. Compare the parallel in Isaiah 3:4.

But Yahweh has now taken up His stance to judge the peoples, He will therefore enter into judgment with these elders and princes who have led them astray. The elders are the civic leaders, the princes, the executive. He will point out to them that they have ‘eaten up the vineyard' (literally ‘burned' and therefore ‘laid bare') which is Israel, have fleeced the poor and made themselves rich at their expense, and have thus crushed them and ‘ground' their faces so as to produce benefits for themselves. It is a disgraceful thing when politicians are corrupt and greedy, and especially when the leaders of God's people utilise their position to make themselves rich at the expense of others.

Note that Israel is here God's vineyard. Compare Isaiah 5:1. Jesus had people such as this in mind when He spoke of the wicked husbandmen over the vineyard in Mark 12:1.

‘Yahweh stands up to plead, and stands to judge the peoples.' For a similar picture of Yahweh calling the whole earth together so that He may judge His people see Psalms 50.