Isaiah 5:13

Therefore judgment would overtake them in this blind, dull, and stupid animal condition. "Therefore my people go into banishment without knowing; and their glory will become starving men, and their tumult men dried up with thirst." As the word "therefore" (lâcēn, as in Isa 1:24) introduces the threat of punishment, gâlâh (go into captivity) is a prophetic preterite. Israel would go into exile, and that "without knowing" (mibb'li-da'ath). The meaning of this expression cannot be "from want of knowledge," since the min which is fused into one word with b'li is not causal, but negative, and mibb'li, as a preposition, always signifies "without" (absque). But are we to render it "without knowing it" (as in Hos 4:6, where hadda'ath has the article), or "unawares?" There is no necessity for any dispute on this point, since the two renderings are fundamentally one and the same. The knowledge, of which Isa 5:12 pronounces them destitute, was more especially a knowledge of the judgment of God that was hanging over them; so that, as the captivity would come upon them without knowledge, it would necessarily come upon them unawares. "Their glory" (Cebōdō) and "their tumult" (hamono) are therefore to be understood, as the predicates show, as collective nouns used in a personal sense, the former signifying the more select portion of the nation (cf., Mic 1:15), the latter the mass of the people, who were living in rioting and tumult. The former would become "men of famine" (mĕthē rââb: מתי, like אנשׁי in other places, viz., Sa2 19:29, or בּני, Sa1 26:16); the latter "men dried up with thirst" (tsichēh tsâmâh: the same number as the subject). There is no necessity to read מתי (dead men) instead of מתי, as the lxx and Vulgate do, or מזי (מזה) according to Deu 32:24, as Hitzi…

In this chapter the prophet, in God's name, shows the people of God their transgressions, even the house of Jacob their sins, and the judgments which were likely to be brought upon them for their sins, I. By a parable, under the similitude of an unfruitful vineyard, representing the great favours God had bestowed upon them, their disappointing his expectations from them, and the ruin they had thereby deserved (Isa 5:1-7). II. By an enumeration of the sins that did abound among them, with a threatening of punishments that should answer to the sins. 1. Covetousness, and greediness of worldly wealth, which shall be punished with famine (Isa 5:8-10) 2. Rioting, revelling, and drunkenness (Isa 5:11, Isa 5:12, Isa 5:22, Isa 5:23), which shall be punished with captivity and all the miseries that attend it (Isa 5:13-17). 3. Presumption in sin, and defying the justice of God (Isa 5:18, Isa 5:19). 4. Confounding the distinctions between virtue and vice, and so undermining the principles of religion (Isa 5:20). 5. Self-conceit (Isa 5:21). 6. Perverting justice, for which, and the other instances of reigning wickedness among them, a great and general desolation in threatened, which should lay all waste (Isa 5:24, Isa 5:25), and which should be effected by a foreign invasion (Isa 5:26-30), referring perhaps to the havoc made not long after by Sennacherib's army.

5:13 Israel and Judah would go into exile to Assyria (722 BC) and Babylon (586 BC). • The people did not respond to the Lord because they did not know him (see 1:3). They likely knew about him, but their behavior showed that they did not know him in any intimate way.