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Isaiah, Prophet of Salvation, Book 7, part 20

Jerusalem was “sold for nothing,” that is, for no cost (Isaiah 52:3). This idea is repeated in the next verses, although this is obscured by the NASB rendering of Isaiah 52:4, 5,

⁴ For thus says the Lord God, “My people went down at the first into Egypt to reside there; then the Assyrian oppressed them without cause [ehfes, “end”]. ⁵ Now therefore, what do I have here,” declares the Lord, “seeing that My people have been taken away without cause [chinnam, “for nothing, without cost, or without cause”]?…”

God is the One who sold Jerusalem into slavery to Babylon. He did not do so “without cause.” The “cause” was the idolatry and continual disobedience of the city. In fact, when Isaiah 52:3 says, “You were sold for nothing,” the Hebrew word used is chinnam, the same word that the prophet used two verses later in Isaiah 52:5, where the NASB rendered it “without cause.”

The word chinnam has a broad meaning. In some contexts it can indeed mean “without cause,” but here it means “for nothing, without cost.” How do we know? Because the prophet has issued one call after another for the people to repent throughout the entire book of Isaiah. Neither would God send them unjustly into captivity. The people themselves may have thought that God was treating them unjustly, but I, for one, will never side with them against the verdict of God.

Speaking of Israel’s captivity, verse 4 in the NASB reads, “the Assyrian oppressed them without cause.” The prophet used a different word here to convey a different idea. The word ehfes means “end, finality.” We ought to read this to mean that “the Assyrian oppressed them endlessly,” or continually. In other words, they remained slaves without a Jubilee to end their oppression.

The Unredeemable Slave

In the law, all sin is reckoned as a debt. The judge was to calculate the debt owed, according to the principles of restitution in Exodus 22:1-4. The greater the sin, the greater the debt. If the debtor did not have enough assets to pay his debt, he was to be sold to the highest bidder. The bidders, in legal terminology, were potential redeemers. The one who won the bid agreed to pay the debt of the debtor in exchange for the debtor’s labor as a slave for a specified time.

Isaiah’s scenario is of a judge giving an unwanted slave to a slave master free of charge. In other words, no one had the assets to take on himself the responsibility to pay this slave’s debt. The slave’s debt was beyond the means of any earthly redeemer.

In this case, Israel was the debtor being sold at auction. Her sin-debt was unpayable. No prospective buyer had sufficient funds to redeem her. When the Judge asked, “Who will buy this slave for 10,000 talents of gold?” there was dead silence in the court. She was simply not worth it, nor could anyone in the world afford to assume her debt.

The Judge in the divine court then sold Israel to Assyria without money at no cost. The Judge could do this, because the Judge Himself was Israel’s creditor. God was the victim of Israel’s crimes. That gave God the rights due to any victim of crime. The Law of Victim’s Rights gave the victim the right to collect on a debt or to forgive any portion of it. In this case, God sold Israel to Assyria without cost, essentially agreeing to suffer the loss Himself. This suggests that Christ would pay Israel’s debt by His own blood. And since His blood was worth far more than Israel’s debt, He took the occasion to pay the debt for the sin of the whole world (1 John 2:2).

Israel’s Time of Slavery

Because Assyria paid nothing to obtain its Israelite slave, the situation was quite unusual. The legal question arises: How long should a slave serve if the new slave master paid nothing for the slave? Technically, if the Judge agreed to take the loss upon Himself, the debt was written off, and hence, there was no way to calculate the time that the slave should serve.

Yet the Law of Victim’s Rights gave the Judge the right to decide how much of the debt to forgive and to what extent the sinner should be held accountable. The actual outworking of Israel’s sentence can be seen in history and by studying the law.

Israel was sentenced to serve “seven times,” according to the law (Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24). Daniel 7:25 shows us that 3½ “times” was a specific period of time. John clarifies this in Revelation 13:5 as “forty two months,” the equivalent of 1,260 “days.” The Hebrew word yom can mean either a “day” or a “year.” In this case the captivity is measured in years.

Hence, the full “seven times” judgment was 2,520 years.

Israel’s tribulation, then, was not a mere seven years. The key to understanding the time of tribulation is to understand the laws of tribulation in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 and to interpret these laws in the way the prophets reveal.

The point is that Israel’s time of slavery was no longer tied to the normal application of the law of Jubilee. History shows that Israel was not set free from Assyrian bondage after just 49 years. The main cycle would last 2,520 years, and this time frame was set through the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem. God determined that the “seven times” of tribulation would apply both to Israel and to Judah, each in its own unique way.

How this actually worked out in history is a study too long for us here. Those who are interested in those details should read Secrets of Time or my three books on Daniel: Prophet of the Ages.

Judah and Jerusalem also provided the “seventy week” prophetic timeline for the solution to these captivities (Daniel 9:24). These seventy weeks are calculated in weeks of years, that is, seventy sabbath years, or 490 years.

After the Babylonian captivity of Judah, when the nation was revived from its legal state of death, the Edict of Cyrus freed the people in 534 B.C. to return and rebuild. But before Judah’s prophetic calendar could be re-established, the nation had to undergo 76 years of cleansing. Hence, a second decree was required at the end of 76 years to jump start Judah’s calendar. That occurred with the Edict of Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:11) in 458 B.C.

This was when Daniel’s “seventy weeks” began the countdown, culminating when Jesus died on the cross in 33 A.D. His death provided the solution to the entire problem, as it satisfied the law’s demands by paying the debt of the whole world. This was how God applied the law of Jubilee (10 x 49). Though it was given to Judah, the cycle applied also to Israel and to the world.