Isaiah 7:23

23. Where there were, etc. Where there were abundant and flourishing vineyards, and one vineyard had a thousand vines, worth each a silverling, or silver shekel, (about fifty-five or sixty cents.) Vineyards were estimated by the number of the vines and the quality of wine they produced. All these vineyards shall be overrun with briers, etc. a wild waste for the fierce animals. And because of this fact hunters shall flock here with their weapons; or, perhaps the better meaning is, that men the few men that are left cannot go out into the fields in safety without their bows and arrows. Isaiah 7:25 adds the hilltops, hitherto fully cultivated with the hoe, (inaccessible to the plough,) as also to be neglected and going to briers and thorns in the coming time of depopulation, and only cattle shall venture upon them in search of pasturage; and lesser cattle, that is, sheep and goats, shall join them.

The threat to Ahaz is ideally fulfilled. The desolation, when it comes, shall be wrought in a short time; in just as short a time as the striking down of Rezin and Pekah is to be done a time measured by the morally unconscious years of the typical child-life in Isaiah 7:15-16; a picture, too, in anticipation of the poverty-struck condition as to means of subsistence, in that coming awful final time of Jewish nationality, A.D. 70.