Isaiah 10:29-34

29-34. The towns or villages lay within from two to twelve miles (English) north-northeast from Jerusalem.

“He comes from Ayyath; (Ai, probably ten to twelve miles from Jerusalem;) passes through Migron, (a place not now identified.) In Michmash (two miles south of Ai) he leaves his baggage; (hills and gorges here are impassable to carriages:) they go through a pass. Let Geba be our quarters for the night. (This is a command to the army.) Ramah trembles; Gibeah of Saul flees; (both places are three or four miles bearing north.) Scream aloud, O daughter of Gallim; (twice mentioned in the Old Testament, but site unknown.) Only listen, O Laish. (The course is now doubtless zigzag.) Poor Anathoth! (Jeremiah’s home, a priestly city quite near to Jerusalem.) Madmenah hurries away. The inhabitants of Gebim rescued! He (the Assyrian) still halts at Nob today, (close upon Jerusalem;) swings his hand over the mountain of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem. (Almighty providence now interferes.) Behold, the Lord Jehovah of hosts lops down the branches with terrible force, and those of towering growth are hewn down, and the lofty are humbled.” Branches… lofty… towering growth. (These terms imply the leaders of the army. Some crushing blow is seen to strike down the forest of leaders, nobles, commanders.) And he fells the thickets of the forest with iron. (The “thickets” are the serried battalions, cut down as by the sword of an unseen or unnamed army.) And Lebanon, it falls by a majestic one. (Assyria is the towering cedar, collectively named Lebanon, the mount in the north on which it grows.) Thus the fate of the imperial power of the world is given in this short, quick, and awful description. For geographical names the reader will be instructed by Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible. It is quite the habit of commentators to apply the above picture to Sennacherib, the great Assyrian king. Even those who claim this prophetic section, from chap. 7-12 inclusive, as belonging to and as having been delivered during the period of Ahaz, find it convenient to see Sennacherib as the foremost character in that scene. It may be so. But if so, the prophet overleaps dates and defined periods in the pictures he draws, and makes anachronisms of small account. And this is easy to believe. He sees things perspectively in juxtaposition, yet in some sort of succession, indeed; and some things may loom up and brighten on his vision, though beyond and out of range with the particular period about which in specific detail he may be treating. Sennacherib was in the last years of his troubling Syria and Egypt, and king Hezekiah; according to the canon of Ptolemy, in the last seven years, according to 2 Kings 18:13 and Isaiah 36:1, in the last fifteen years, of Hezekiah’s reign. But it matters little. The chief object of the above picture was not to place Sennacherib as a great figure in it, though the prophet, for aught we know, may have seen him there according to laws of prophetic vision. The great object was illustrative instruction to Israel and Judah to the latter, certainly, to Ahaz and those around him and the remnant, the better few to trust in Jehovah and not to trust in nor fear the Assyrian, who, after his aid to Judah in quelling Syria and Ephraim, had turned to subject Judah to himself.